Going green

I’m in the midst of various projects that will hopefully turn out to be money savers/good investments down the road. It’s been a ton of meetings for estimates and big decisions, with lots more to come. But for now, I have a permit for solar panels in the works (hopefully to be installed by the end of the year for a big fat tax break), concurrent with a rewiring of the entire house (hooray for grounded three-prong outlets, dimmers and updated lighting!), and at long last a hybrid car for me. 

The boyfriend is most likely going to buy my leased car - he qualified for a loan at the dealer - and I’m going to try to get into a lease of a Niro hybrid. I’ve promised myself for years now that my next car will be at least a hybrid; research tells me all-electric cars just don’t have the range I need yet, but may by the time this lease would be up. It’s hard to imagine that; or that by the time this potential lease is up at least one of my boys will be out of a car seat! 

So all of these things take a bit of money up front but will save me in the long run; by spring my electric bill will disappear, and my car gas bill cut at least in half. And I don’t have to worry about my house burning down due to ancient wiring. 

The boys have been exceptionally...shall we say...”energetic” lately, and it’s exhausting. They are so much more enjoyable when they’re not bouncing off the walls. It’s so much easier when kids are littler and you don’t need them to do things like homework and practice violin and be places on time...I feel like every sentence out of my mouth involves phrases like “hurry up!”, “this is taking wayyyyy too long”, or “we’re going to be late!” But I suppose this is the lament of all parents; not unique to me. I once saw an internet meme of two snails slowly moving across a floor which said “my kids getting ready in the morning.” Add to this a younger brother who still is iffy about eating in general, hasn’t really grasped consequences, and needs everything done for him still, and life can get pretty complicated. Yet still we make it to school more than on time every day, do all the “crazy hair day” stuff you’re expected to do, get all the homework done, brush the teeth, take the baths. Looking around I feel like I’m doing about average compared to the other parents (parenting over-achiever I am not, as I’m sure you’ve gleaned by now); better in some areas and worse in others. Bobby could read better and Theo could speak better and they could both be cleaner, but they are both kind, well-behaved boys who are gentle with babies and animals, so I guess I’m doing something right!

Pumpkins!

Pumpkins! Can I just say how much easier days like this are with a three-year-old and five-year-old than younger kids? All around us were hugely pregnant women managing their toddlers' complete meltdowns. I was like, grrrrl...been there! Here's to kids that use the potty, (mostly) eat their food, can play together, climb without falling, and (mostly) listen - hooray!

Taking care of business

In my quest to properly distribute this year's income, I'm starting to move forward with a few projects. The kitchen design is taking forever - the kitchen designer I enlisted said it would take two weeks for some rough plans; three weeks later he admitted to me he hadn't even started. Which, according to friends, is fairly typical. Coming up on the end of the fiscal year and the holidays, during which I'd rather not have my entire house torn apart, it just doesn't seem feasible to even attempt to start a kitchen remodel this year. However, I can probably do it early next year when my income starts up again in February.

In the meantime I still need to spend that money, so today I bought a new washer/dryer to replace my 20+ year-old stacker which leaks dryer exhaust all over the house every time I use it. I'm excited to see how my life changes with a large capacity high efficiency washer and dryer. It gets delivered in a week. 

I also got an estimate started for a complete house rewiring from a highly recommended female electrician (yay women). I shudder to imagine what that's going to cost me, but it really has to happen. We're dealing with dangerous knob and tube wiring over here. She can also get me a new solar-ready panel, which is the next big project I'm looking at.

In true mom fashion, I invested in $40 worth of Halloween decor at the dollar store. Since we don't get trick-or-treaters here, it never really occurred to me to decorate. But I knew the kids would get a kick out of it (they did) so it was fun for all of us. In this instance I added in some marquis lettering from Target for a bit of a political message:

Last week I started to feel myself slipping into a bit of a depression. Feeling overwhelmed by all the changes coming up, never feeling quite rested or recovered from the event, and various other things, sent me into a bit of a tailspin. I found myself lingering in bed too long and being generally impatient and ill-tempered, with the ever-present mantra of "I'm so depressed, I don't feel good" playing over and over in my head.

At a certain point I had to just take matters into my own hands and have a conversation with myself. "You can continue with this and make your kids miserable and ruin your relationship, or you can knock it off. But, you do you, boo." I realized that as much as I preferred to wallow that I had to pull myself out of it for the sake of the people around me. I'm not saying everything is so perfect now, but the intrusive thoughts have stopped and I feel hopeful about the future, which means the veil of depression has mostly lifted due to some concerted brain rewiring on my part over a couple of days. Let's hope I can keep this up. 

Espain

Guess what? I have no jet lag. It's a minor miracle, considering the fact that last time I came back from Spain I suffered for a couple of weeks after. I feel so normal, in fact, that Spain now seems like some weird dream I had. 

It was a good trip - I ate mountains of cheese and olives and bread, enjoyed good company (surprisingly we ended up having many friends at this event), and generally had a swell time. 

The event itself was not like anything we had done before - it was a competition of four different swing bands, in which one was voted the winner by the audience at the end of the weekend. We had to "battle" each band each night by playing songs back and forth on stage. At one point we had pulled out one of our "killer dillers", and the other band, which in my opinion was a bit of a wedding band, not knowing how to top us, decided to play Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk". Which of course got the crowd going, as any modern funk song will over rinky-tinky 1930s swing music. They basically brought a gun to a knife fight. My bandleader picked me to follow it, which at first had me kind of freaked out, but then I thought, "no, fuck that. We're the best at what we do, we don't have to pander, and we live and breathe this music." So I strode out there in my eighty-year-old dress and killed it.

The other band won the audience pick. But our band won all the musicianship awards which were voted by other musicians. In your FACE, crappy wedding band.

Hopefully this trip has put us on the European scene a bit - one friend there said he'd try to get us to play a big event in Budapest next year, and we made good friends with this Swedish band who felt the same way we did about the importance of playing authentic swing. My bandleader said he would not do this event again. But we both really enjoyed being in Madrid, and I'm glad I went. 

As usual the boys both looked taller, skinnier, and seemed more sophisticated when I got home. Nothing came of the potential bullying incident - I messaged his teacher about it, and she said she'd look into it, but I haven't heard anything since, and Bobby said the kids don't play the "name game" anymore and he says he plays with some of those boys. It's also anti-bullying month at school. Was this just some minor incident? Perhaps!

Today I saw a financial advisor. Learned a lot of good things and have a plan goin forward to handle what will hopefully be a new level of income in my life. Mainly, I have a lot of work ahead of me - I have to get my act together and do proper bookkeeping, payroll (for myself, anyway), change my LLC to an S corp, etc etc. New tax person, a whole new system. Pretty much everything I've been doing for two decades has to change. The word "daunting" comes to mind.

The good news is, he gave me the green light to renovate my kitchen. Or, you know, just hand the money over to Trump in April. I could do that. Not.