i look forward to tonight’s inevitable displays of illegal fireworks throughout the city — of which i should have a grand view (on the west and south sides, at least — sadly, it seems the Sears Tower will prevent me from watching the guys up in my old ‘hood get their boom on). my camera is ready!

dear white sox:

WHAT THE FUCK.

i am not happy.

no love,
–sabrina.

so, over the past several years i’ve been gradually getting better and better at managing my finances, and consciously working towards becoming more and more mindful of my money. mostly that was because of the credit-card debt i was working to eliminate, and finally did at the end of last year, but i found, freakishly, once that was dealt with, i actually missed micromanaging my finances. i was, literally, sticking with my habit of getting up in the morning and going in to quicken and planning out what to do… only, i didn’t have anything interesting to do anymore. i mean, without having to scrimp out exactly what i could throw at the credit card debt, and how that would affect the bottom line in terms of total interest paid and time to payoff, all i had to do was, like, not spend all my money. but my savings was deposited automatically, and that’s no fun. it doesn’t require any work on my part; therefore, it is boring.

so every morning i got up and got a cup of coffee and stared forlornly at my quicken insights page, certain that if i just kept looking at it i’d find something to do, but i never really did. which left me to find a new challenge.

one of the tools that i learned to use in pursuit of debt-freedom was budgeting. quicken provides a pretty badass budgeting system, if you really get into it (which i have) — i categorize everything as accurately as i can, down to splitting up department store receipts into different amounts for clothing, books, household, etc. and i’ve had several years of refining my budget so by now i’ve got it pretty well laid out, so i know exactly when things like auto insurance are about to hit me, and i know how much i’m willing to spend on groceries, etc. — for example, i have $27 left for groceries for the month of june. (of course, i’m also over budget on charity by like $400 because i went all willy-nilly with the plastic, what with all this exciting flooding going on lately, so it all works out.) so having the budget in place (and super-micromanaging it; you should have seen my sexxxy spreadsheets from when i was considering moving and trying to figure out what my budget was) allows me to move forward on my next two major goals: (1) save a pile of cash, and (2) donate a pile of cash. (granted, (1)’s pile is significantly larger than (2)’s, but that’s only because i’m a selfish pig.) i’m trying to save substantially for retirement, to make up for the time lost when i was trying to pay off my debts, and i’m also trying to save up a substantial emergency fund in case of disaster (3 months salary). i’m actually saving something like 21% of my gross income (except for the part where 3/4 of that is pre-tax and the rest is post-tax, so it works out to something more like 24% really), and am bringing home substantially less cash than i was last year. and as last year i donated the value of roughly 2.3% of my taxable income to charity (that counts in-kind donations; my never-ending crap-to-the-Brown-Elephant trips), my goal for this year is 3%. so far, i’m at about 1.2%, so i have a little ways to go on that.

the end result of all this saving and donating is, amusingly, being dead broke again. because i decided to adopt the philosophy advocated for by a number of personal finance flaks, that every dollar should be assigned to something and none should go just wandering about (because that way lies unchecked spending), i wind up allocating my entire monthly income (absent about $15-25/mo for ’slop’) in my quicken budget. on the upside, i know exactly when my phone bill just came in $3 higher than usual (usually because of CTAAlerts text messages); on the downside, this does still cause some stress, especially at the end of the month (i need to go grocery shopping tomorrow; are you kidding me, $27 for groceries???). but, evidently without financial stress, i get bored and annoyed, and just go stir some up anyways, so i might as well plan for it.

but even doing it deliberately because you want to and not because you have to, being extremely neurotic about budgeting gets old. so i’ve started to branch out a little bit. my latest PF project is the quote-unquote grocery game — thegrocerygame.com — basically, coupon clipping + careful watching of store sales + strategic buying, to result in the cheapest possible grocery bill. like, families of 2 adults and 2 teens spending $40/week on groceries — that sort of craziness. i’m not really doing it yet; the common advice seems to be that before you sign on for the 4 week free trial of the matchup service (about $5/mo thereafter; in combination with the Sunday Tribune, this “game” costs $12/mo to play), you should save up 4 weeks’ worth of coupons, so you have an adequate selection to work with. so tomorrow will be my third Sunday paper, and i already have a pretty respectable coupon stash at this point. neither jewel nor dominick’s offer double- or triple-coupon promotions (i checked!), which is unfortunate, but i have high hopes for being able to score good prices anyways, and thereby reduce my out-of-pocket expenses even further. the cleverest thing is, i think, that if you get good enough at this, you can start pulling in stuff for free on a somewhat regular basis — and so my plan here is to not just shop for stuff i will actually use myself, but also shop for free/dirt cheap stuff, with the express intent of donating it to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. apparently a lot of the stuff you can get for free is personal care stuff like toothpaste and soap, which the food bank also takes — i don’t go through much toothpaste living by myself, and obviously i don’t need soap from anyone :-) but if it’s free, hell yes i’ll take it and promptly go donate it. that is an awesome game. so i’m really sort of champing at the bit to get all my coupons in order and get to play the grocery game. TWO WHOLE WEEKS LONGER!! WAAAAH.

anyways, the net result of all this fussing about should be that, at the end of this year, i will have roughly 60% more in retirement savings than i had at the beginning of the year (all in contributions, given the way this $^%&*^%$#$%^& market is going — my existing retirement funds have been stagnant all year, and boy is it making me cranky), and hopefully i will be at least halfway, if not more, to achieving my 3-months-salary goal.

and then i wonder what my goals will be on 43Things?

so i had occasion earlier this afternoon to watch a brief but enthusiastic rainstorm pound the hell out of chicago. it was actually pretty awesome — the storm was coming in from the west, so i could literally watch it move in. and then my normal visibility of 15+ miles was cut to, say… a couple hundred yards, as the rain came forth with a fury. i sat just watching it for a while — realizing that it would have been nice if i had locked my screen door, as the winds pushed it alternatingly open and closed; i finally gave in and opened the door to lock the screen door, and then had to mop up my floor once i got done, oh well — and then thought it would be neat if i took a picture.

so i did.

if you look closely enough, you can actually see the splashback from the individual droplets. <3 my new camera! (hey, 5 months old is still new. especially in my world!)

okay, i wish to be done unpacking now. i finally got around to putting books up on shelves, and i just a few minutes ago managed to drop a short stack of about 5 hardbacks from a height of about 4 feet, squarely on my big toe.

wow, did that hurt.

on the bright side, i feel fully justified that i can have a cookie to soothe my angst and pain. and not just any cookie… a peanut butter cup!

i made these yesterday, trying to recreate a fond childhood memory of a cookie sold by a bakery that we occasionally went to. it isn’t quite like i remembered it, but it’s good enough for now (and for some ideas for attempt #2, not least of which will be “don’t use premade milk chocolate icing unless you really do intend for your teeth to die of sugar as you are still eating”).

i had a dream last night about doing laundry.

now, don’t get me wrong. i am LOOOOOOOVING my shiny, shiny swanky beautiful marvelous washer and dryer. they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. in fact, a load in the dryer just finished up right now (BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!) as i was typing this. i am totally loving having the easy access to clean laundry without any effort at all. so this is not some irrational fear of the washer, here.

but i dreamed that i opened up the dryer door — which is at eye level — and looked inside and, instead of clothes, i found my poor little pink phone, with the display all wonky, but apparently still functional. and i was all up in arms because i hadn’t been planning on replacing my (two years old but perfectly usable) phone and i didn’t want to spend money on it, but on the other hand, this is a perfect excuse for me to finally get an iphone like all the other sheep^Wcool kids! but…but…3G iphones aren’t out yet!! i can’t go get a soon-to-be-obsoleted phone! OH NOES!!! angst, angst, wail, gnash teeth, WOE!

…and then i woke up and looked at my phone and it was just fine, The End. Hooray!

so, the other day, i was running in to osco to pick up tiger’s syringes, and on my way to the door, i spotted someone’s credit card on the sidewalk.

by the time i realized what it had been, i was already halfway past it to the door, and i thought it would look weird if i went back and picked it up. and what would i do with it anyways? but, what if someone else picked it up and used it to steal the person’s identity, or something? i could have prevented that possibility, if only through not personally being an identity thief (or ordinary sort of thief). i dithered over the dilemma all the way up to the pharmacy and, as i ponied up the $33 for my cat, i decided that if it was still there on the way out i would pick it up.

it was, so i did.

it’s someone’s debit card, in fact. losing a debit card is worse than losing a credit card — for one thing, you’re on the hook for more cash; for another, if someone does use your debit card you lose *real* money immediately, you don’t get the luxury of sitting on hold with your credit card bank waiting for them to straighten it out, when the bill won’t come for another 20 days. so, i’m glad i picked it up. i hope it was not too late for the person, that he had just dropped it and no one else had used it and discarded it in the meantime.

but then i realized: i have no idea what to do with it. i thought about turning it in at the jewel customer service desk, but then — *they* might steal it. (yes, i’m a suspicious sort of girl.) and besides, they’re probably not going to go back to jewel looking for it anyways, just because they’re probably not going to know where they lost it. after that, my first instinct is to hand it in to the bank, but … i, quite frankly, do not want to have my name in any way associated with this card, because if it turns out it was stolen, they will need someone to blame, and i do not want to be blamed. so that’s out. i thought about anonymously mailing it back to the bank, but what are they going to do with it and with my statement that “i found this at 7PM on wednesday at jewel, please send the person a new card since they lost it”? they’re a giant bank, they’re going to (a) fuck it up, or (b) get hopefully confused and do nothing. so that option sucks. i can’t contact the actual person, obviously, and even if i could, that gets back again to not wanting to be associated with a lost card in case i get put on the hook for something. so, i guess, in the end, although i wish i could save this person the bother of having to order a new debit card from his bank (and save him the worry of, in the meantime, hoping desperately no one found it and stole his money), i guess that in order to protect myself, the best solution is actually just to stuff the card through my shredder and forget about it.

still, it seems like there ought to be a better way.

so, remember the part where i ordered dsl, and it was totally easy, and i was in disbelief that it was going to all come off without a fuss?

i was sorta right…

i finally managed to excavate enough boxes to get access to my desk today, and get the computer set up, and the wireless, and so forth. i plugged everything in and the computer happily rejoined my wireless network, and that’s the point where i went to go reconfigure the access point away from my old static ip ethernet configuration over to bog-standard PPPoE, and i realized that although my dsl seemed to be live, i had blinky lights and everything, but i’d forgotten to get my username and password from the sales agent on the phone. oops.

after sulking about it for a while, and trying all of the rather a lot of wireless networks i have within range all the way up here (seriously. there are like a dozen “linksysNNN” networks alone) and finding not one individual trusting enough to let me mooch bits from, i decided that… i would try the last username and password i had for sbc PPPoE dsl, and rely on basic ISP account maintenance incompetence to have prevented them from ever having purged that long-cancelled account from the authentication servers, and see if that worked. keep in mind, the last time i had sbc PPPoE dsl was when i lived in hyde park, which was before i lived in printer’s row last time, which puts it at about 4 years ago. it worked great! hooray for basic ISP account maintenance incompetence, the one thing that is universal through all providers everywhere!

i feel so flattered! somehow, a hillbot stumbled upon my little blog here and in response felt that i should “shut the fuck up.” i wonder why — was it the derision about hillary supporters’ inability to accurately wield allusions (again, ladies, racism uses ‘back of the bus’ to illustrate examples; sexism uses ‘get back in the kitchen.’ if you’re going to cliché, frankly, it’s the least you can do to cliché correctly), or was it the fact that i referred to the incessant whining of “baby boomer feminist clinton supporters” as “whining”?

hillary clinton’s candidacy has been a massive disappointment to me; starting from a point where i would have been just as pleased as punch if she were my democratic candidate, the campaign has done nothing more than progressively disillusion me. i posted in 2005 that “i think she’s a hell of a woman [and] i’d be happy to vote for her,” a sentiment which gradually shifted to “i think you kinda blew it”-style relative indifference as time and the primary campaign season passed, and has finally settled pretty firmly on “yeah, uh, no way.” the only mildly ironic part about it is that hillary’s campaign has done more to damage baby boomers, as a class (and especially classical Gloria Steinem-style feminists), in my eyes, than it actually has done to clinton herself. which just makes the hillbot comment more entertaining, considering she (i assume) (a) totally missed the point — OMG YOU DON’T HEART HILLARY, YOU ARE SUCH A MAN!!!!!!!!11!!1!1!!!!111!!!!! — and (b) was really, seriously, dude, just fucking whining. i mean, at the risk of being just another one of those latte-drinking intellectuals who don’t know what it’s like to be a real american (i guess my citizenship got downgraded when i went to college), what exactly makes you think one flavor of gender-bias is more acceptable than another? y’all people are messed up, and that’s why we’re not listening to you.

dear everybody,

if, in the course of reading this blog, you come away with no other, more helpful information, at least you should know this:

i really, really cannot recommend coming down with the evil death flu a day and a half before moving into a new apartment. it is a bad idea. it is no fun. it is going to make tomorrow suck.

(at least i had the good sense to hedge my bets, and leave out my painkillers and some sudafed, while packing up the rest of my bathroom. still: ow.)

:(,
–s.

dear baby boomer feminist clinton supporters:

Cynthia Ruccia, 55, a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Columbus, Ohio, is organizing a group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, of mostly women in swing states who plan to campaign against Mr. Obama in November. “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.

Grow up. I’m so fucking tired of reading how it’s the duty of all women everywhere to vote for Hillary because she’s got the same chromosomes. Yes, sexism is doubtlessly bad but it’s not the same as racism so quit making allusions to the back of the goddamn bus. Also, your candidate is losing because her platform sucks and she lies; get over it.

Geraldine Ferraro, you can bite my shiny metal GenX ass, but you won’t, because you’re too fucking busy whining.

no love, and just so you know, this is totally the sort of bullshit that drove me to quit supporting NOW,
–sabrina