The One Where I Relate to AC/DC

You know...as in, one of two heavy metal bands proclaimed by the t-shirts of the two poorly animated, infamous-for-their-utter-lack-of-conventional-values characters of the 90's known as Beavis and Butt-head.

Yeah....the 80's have their fashion crimes of which to be ashamed.  The 90's?  We had Beavis and Butt-head and the dumbing down of humor to fart jokes for an entire generation.  *sigh*

Anyway....so, I do this thing where I associate moods, happenings, etc. with music, quotes, TV and all other things pop culture, right?

Today it was AC/DC's Back in Black playing in my little mental concert for one.  Because I am one Klassy Babe when it comes to my musical repertoire - thanks to one former step-father who never could break free of the hold of 80's metal bands, and Blondie as well come to think on it, had on him and that he saw to it that we, too, were appropriately indoctrinated uh, educated re: their cultural significance; usually such education occurred while he was drunk.  Fun times.


Why, you ask, did you have Back in Black playing in your head today, Heather?

Because quite simply,

...
I've been too long I'm glad to be back
Yes I'm, let loose
From the noose
That's kept me hanging about
... 

I'm coming back.  In ways that have been dormant for a good long time, I'm seeing glimpses of who I am and who God's teaching me to be along the way.

Kelsey and Colton started back to school Wednesday, and Heaven smiled down on me.  Writing that makes me feel like a bad mother, a bit.  Because I chose to be a SAHM in order to be more present with my kids and yet come July each year, I can't wait to be away from them for 40 hours a week.  Ok, so maybe that last part is hyperbole, but not by a huge amount.  To be fair, the kids were equally happy to leave me behind every day :)  I have been able to be productive and get my house in respectable shape again, there is a return of that blissfully quiet period, 2x/day!, known as NAPTIME, and routine, how I love thee.  School is good.

Colton was totally stoked that the new gym teacher (whom I foresee to be the object of many young girls' affections due to his youth and looks) was wearing the same Marvel comics t-shirt as he was.  2nd and 4th grades this year.

New School Shoes

While not going to school, little Chris was part of the obligatory 1st day photos.

Bus!!

I re-start my MPA studies, from which I took hiatus in 2008 and 2009.  I will only be taking one class this semester, but I'm excited.  I do keep cracking jokes about the class, as it is Leadership and Professional Ethics - joke being that there's a difference between personal ethics and professional ones?  Syllabus looks good and challenging, but not overly so.  Feels do-able.

As of today, we are caught up on our mortgage and all of our household bills - which is a place we haven't been since last November.  Medical stuff is still hanging out, but we've cut some serious fat out of our budget, finally saying goodbye to Directv, and hello to Hulu, Netflix, and a digital antenna, slashing our grocery bill with sites like CouponMom.com and GroceryGame.com, riding our bikes more than driving the vehicles, etc.  And, now that things are calmer at home, I'm really doing the free-lancing thing!  I got my first client this week - a local NPO seeking funding and yet lacking a grant writer.  Then, tonight I received an e-mail from a legitimate business in Denver asking me for my resume and references as they had a client in need of a funding researcher/grant writer. So, between the cutting of expenses and addition of some income, those medical debts are going bye-bye - no doubt about it.

A newer friend from church remarked how I was going to be superwoman this fall with 3 kids, going back to school, running high mileage, and starting a business.  Certainly, I'm not super woman, but for those of you who've known me since this blog's inception (or before) y'all know I like the busy, like the real busy and not the busy work.  I once worked FT, was in grad school, regularly volunteered in both the older kids' classrooms, took Kelsey to weekly OT appointments, cooked from scratch, etc. and did it fairly well.  Some situational things popped up occasionally, namely marital during that time period, that got me down.  And then I needed a break, so I slowed down and tried to follow God a little more closely.

The past 2 years have been huge in the growth department.  The latter part of 2008 being a preparatory season, 2009 being a sort of demolition/rebuilding year, and thus far 2010 has been further rebuilding with an unveiling starting to take shape.

I feel as if, structurally speaking, I have the same foundation, as in, I'm still the same stubborn, feisty, big-word loving kind of gal I've always been.  True, some parts of me have gotten those sort of whimsical face lifting reminiscent of HGTV's lower budget programs, such as the coupon clipping, cloth diapering, home-growing features that are new but not foreign to me.  But other parts of me have been completely gutted, refashioned, and repurposed...My kids are bearing the brunt of my stubbornness being channeled into my parenting.

So, Angus sings it for me in my mind...."I'm back.  In black".  Though usually not all black clothing, I can generally be found wearing black flip-flops on any given day.  
© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

Spontaneity is Overrated

So the other night me and some gal pals are sitting at my kitchen table, after a long day of me decluttering the house when I say," Ladies, I think it's time to go all Dave Ramsey and have me a garage sale.  I found a lot of unnecessaries today and we need the cash, right?  Anyone in with me?"

Friend #1 pipes up, "Oh yeah, I still have a stash in the basement from last year's To Be Garage Sold pile, count me in!"

I say, "Alright - well we should do it then.  Soon."

As in, give me a week or so and then we'll make it happen, when all of a sudden:

Enter Spontaneous Epiphany!!!


Friend #2 realizes that her swanky neighborhood is having their annual neighborhood garage sale This Saturday (as in some 8 1/2 hours from NOW)!  She won't be home, but her hubby will, so we could totally use their space, and it's already advertised, cool huh?

Friend #1 and I glance at each other, weighing the possibility.  She's gonna have her boy (nearly 2) since her hubby's got a golf date, and I'm gonna have my 3 as Seth has a date with his employer, but we shrug, yeah, we can do this!

Today after sorting, and tables and price tags, oh my! I'm thinking that spontaneity is highly overrated, if not the cause for some massive productivity, as our weather forecast is in the Garage Sale Pits right now.....

Praying fervently that all this work was not in vanity - that rain will go away (it can continue doing what it's doing tonight but move along in its merry way once we hit dawn, thankyouverymuch), and that we will have a successful sale tomorrow - I got me a lot of stuff to get rid of!

**Edited to add.... That forecast picture isn't accurate - it has changed every day to match the CURRENT forecast, which is now gorgeous, but last weekend was pouring buckets.  I made a whopping $4 and Friend #1 made $7.  Gonna try again this weekend.

© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

Because apparently Stephen King's been giving my electronics ideas

Some people might chalk it up to Murphy's Law.


Others might call it karma, or some other energy exchange fou-fou concept.


But I am starting to think my electronics are onto me, sorta á la Maximum Overdrive - you know, that freaky movie where the appliances and machines become homicidal freaks of nature, rather, man-made creation?


But in my parallel warp-time world, the items are going suicidal - as in they, themselves are going kaput.


Yes, I, who have no money with which to replace the following items, am now the proud owner of;

• one laptop which is resting in cyber peace.  At least the hard drive wasn't dead
• a 12 y/o crockpot (wedding gift) whose lid all of a sudden fissured and threatens to quit cooking my yummy meals of convenience with all of its steamy goodness Any. Day. Now!  Whatever will I do when I want to make shredded beef burritos without baking my roast in the oven on a stifling hot summer day?!?
• a 2 y/o printer that has irrevocably decided it shan't feed paper without jamming and/or shredding said paper (this is after discovering that my BIL was indeed correct in that something probably fell into the printer's crevices - hello, little memory card in a case!  Removal of said foreign object did not, however, alleviate the problem).

And perhaps the saddest of them all; 

• a 4 y/o digital camera whose LCD screen is giving me horizontal stripes of impending death anytime I power it on.  And it is SUMMER, when photo ops abound!

I know that to many people in our country, let alone the poor underdeveloped nations of the world, I sound like a spoiled brat, but these things matter to me.  They get/got regular use from me and now that use is dead/about to be dead and I have no way to replace them, let alone figure out how to balance my budget and meet all of our larger, more pressing obligations on a regular, consistent basis.

Money sucks....


It makes us greedy in its presence and needy in its absence.  


I hate being either.

© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

End of this week = beginning of summer

Hi!  I'm still here - returning from my little MIA experience known as The Last Week of School!

Today marks the last morning that I have to bark orders like a drill sergeant to my children, who clearly need routine yet somehow seem to forget each morning that every day for the past 9 mos we have eaten breakfast, dressed, packed lunches, combed hair, grabbed backpacks, etc.  Sort of like their after school routine: 

• Kids come home
• Kids throw coats, jackets backpacks on the floor
• I say, "Pick those up..." 
• I repeat, incrementally raising the volume each time
• I max out the volume with the final say-so, "NOW!"
• Kids scurry to finally put their stuff up where it belongs
• Kids snack, then say, "What can we DO???" which is code for "Can I play a video/computer game?"
• Mom says, "Uh, you can empty the dishwasher, as you do Every. Single. Day."
• Kids groan and moan, roll their eyes and occasionally throw in a tantrum or some other form of disrespect

EVERY.  DAY.  They have chores, and every day they magically seem to forget.  Do they even teach pattern recognition at the schools these days?  Really.

It's been a LONG week, an INSANE week full of tween emotions (After a week of being told I was SO MEAN, among other hateful things, I actually read Mir's letter to her daughter to Kelsey, after having read it while she was at school and bawling my eyes out in agreement, in conclusion asking her, "Hmmm, what kind of connections* are you making to that story?  To which she grumbled, "My attitude...") and end of the school year activities.  Oh, and, we're still treading water trying to keep our finances afloat.  Funny how that doesn't just abate when all other areas of life are crazy.

* this is a term they use in school re: reading comprehension and applications to similar life experiences they have had.

And I've been in a funk.  Once again, the ever pretty Mir had a parallel experience up in another poignantly written post, especially touching my already bruised psyche with these lines:

There is a certain arrogance in being unhappy when leading what is fundamentally a good and blessed and lucky life, isn’t there? I mean, that’s not to say that my (or your) problems aren’t real and challenging, just that the Right and Mature thing to do, after a while, is to say to yourself, “Self, time to suck it up and deal.” Lord knows I say this to my kids often enough; I should take my own advice.

Touché.

Part of my funk has been that now that I finally want "almost all the things I never wanted" (that is a reference to my sweet friend Huckdoll, who is also on the formerly WOHM now SAHM path that I'm on and discovering along the way how sweet our families really are), now it is threatened with financial insecurity.  While we are upside down in our budget with my medical expenses, we are still upside down without them.  Which is pretty hard to figure out seeing as when we decided to take the plunge to have Christopher and me stay at home, there was enough money.  But now there isn't.  So we need more income.

Which was bringing me to the conclusion that I needed to find a job - maybe not a daytime job as childcare would ruin us even if I was working.  But even a night job is time away from Seth and we've really fought to get to where we are in our relationship - in other words, this is not something I really wanted either.  I've been praying hard about this.

I tried lia sophia.  And thought it wasn't working out, so hadn't done much with it.

Yesterday at our final hurrah for our cub scout pack, one of the moms, also a bus-stop mom, asked me if I was still selling jewelry.

I told her it was slow and not so much.

Later she invited me to a Pampered Chef party.

I told her I could come but probably wouldn't be able to buy anything.

She approached me again later in the night, asking if I had inventory in my jewelry.  There was this one necklace.

I told her I was still active as an advisor, just not for long - that I had to have a show soon to remain active.  She says, "Well I'll do it!"

How's that for an answer?

Also, for my readers who are afar - I can totally do catalog/online shows.  Our jewelry is fabulous and June's special is buy any two items at regular price get up to four necklaces at half price!  Our necklaces are often our pricier items, so this is a great opportunity to stock up on affordable gifts for birthdays, Christmas, or just to enhance your own jewelry wardrobe.  E-mail me today if you're interested in helping me out!

© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

The One Where I Ask You All to Pray

Last month, we got caught up.

And we'd submitted an application for a loan modification through our mortgage company when it became all too clear that our expenses exceeded our income, and basically that Something[s].HAS.to.give. in order to KEEP up.

Last Monday, I called, after waiting a week longer than initially told it would take to process, and discovered that they'd denied our request for a loan modification.

Rationale?

"Your expenses exceed your income."

Well, uh, DUH!!!!!!!!  Isn't that kind of the point?  I mean, we were doing just fine and then BAM!  Here's $20k in medical debt you must pay NOW.  Additionally, looking at the criteria on both the lender's site and the government's, we went thru and went:

• occupy the property - check
• property less than [roughly]3/4 of a million - check, let's all say STARTER. HOME.
• having trouble paying mortgage - uh, triple check (by that I mean we reduced income with me staying home, increased expenses by adding a family member, AND then the medical stuff)
• still have verifiable income - check, hubby's been in the same place for just shy of 10 years

Clearly I missed something, as I'd expected something along the lines of them calling me, "Ding, Ding, Ding, You're a WINNER!  You loan has just been modified such that you will be paying on it FOR. EVER, BUT your payments will be teensy, tiny, hooray!"

So I began to question, in the same chilly but civil, bordering on badgering manner that used to make my mother always sigh in defeat, "You should be a lawyer when you grow up."

At that the Indian man on the phone, presumably in the wee hours of his morning, struggled and stammered in an accent I felt I had to cut through with a machete just to comprehend the words spoken, let alone their meaning.

"I, uh, see your medical expenses are verry high - ees eet posseeble that you can lower your premium to say, $300 a month?"

And that's when I knew for a fact that this dude was outsourced, because there isn't a health plan in America that will cover a couple with dependents for $300/month.  Also, need I say it again?  Duh!  Did these people even read my cover letter that explained the whole origination of our hardship?

The call went on, with Abu (seriously, I mean no disrespect for the Indian people - my beef is primarily with the corporations who outsource their customer service agents, disregarding the fact that they communicate OVER THE PHONE and thus comprehensible SPOKEN English is of utmost importance for efficiency and consumer satisfaction) speaking fast and furiously in that ridiculously thick accent, my head was spinning, only grasping about every third word when I heard him say, "Short sale."

Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

See, our neighborhood has DROPPED SIGNIFICANTLY in property values, and foreclosures abound in our subdivision.  An attempt to short sale our house is nothing but a guaranteed road to foreclosure, which, uh is precisely what we're trying to avoid.

So, I ended the call - as it was going nowhere.  And I called a man from our church who just happens to work for a credit counseling/debt negotiating type of company.  Yes, I know - we should have called him earlier, but pride and this desire to make this work on my own kept me from it for months.


We met last week and are meeting again tonight.

In paying bills today, I found a way to decrease our cell phone bill $45/month - so I did.  And was feeling pretty good about it.

When the doorbell rang.

And I was served with a summons from one of the collection companies that had been hired by the medical imaging group and ER doc's clinic who treated me last year.

What are we going to do???


And how much worse is it going to get?


I am trying not to freak out here and let my fears grab a hold of me.

I'm trying to keep perspective.

Dear friends, don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot do any more to you after that. But I’ll tell you whom to fear. Fear God, who has the power to kill you and then throw you into hell. Yes, he’s the one to fear.

After all, we're talking money here, not my actual life.  And even if it were that they're after, that's not the worst thing, is it?

So friends, I just ask that you'll pray - pray for us to really see what we need to give up and areas we need to sacrifice/be wiser about, and that God will continually work all things out for the good.

He has so far.

© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

Heavy Hearted

How do we see horrible things such as the African children who are dying, and within hours continue with our lives, complaining that we don't "enough," as defined by the American way of life?  It's only money and a ranking of creditworthiness, it's not like you are watching your children starve to death while you have nothing to combat it with.

How do we hear that a friend of our brother's was found by his wife with a bullet in his head, put there by himself, and within hours resume a marital spat that began earlier in the day?  At least you still have your husband, with whom to argue.

How do our children see someone else exclude another child and feel comfortable not saying anything to either party, within hours saying, "Well I didn't lock her out?"  No, but you didn't let her back in either.

How did two men, charged with doing God's work as their livelihoods, pass by one of their own, injured on a stranded highway?  How was it that an outsider was the one who did right?

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³²So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two silver coins^[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'

It's the human condition, I fear, to come back to self and attempt to preserve self, at the cost of others often.

Trying not to be that way....


© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved

Catch Up and Keep Up

When I worked for Neighboring City, my office had just had a Housing Needs Assessment done, particularly focusing on supply and demand of housing that was affordable to households earning 80% or less of the area median income.  One of the things the consultant who conducted the needs assessment created was a schedule to catch up the housing stock needed at certain price points (with which the city was to incent developers to create) as well as keep up with projected demands based on industries that were growing, etc.

It was scintillating reading.  Or maybe scintillating is in the eye of the beholder.

All of that to say I'm in need of a lot of catching up and keeping up myself.

Household chore wise - ha!  I've never gotten to where I feel "caught up" for very long, much less kept it up for any period of time.  Suffice to say with me being sick last week, and the kids having been out of school, that things are bit behind right now, and I'm slowly digging out.

Financially - this is the hard, gut-wrenching part for us. 

We've been in a constant struggle for just at a year now and it's wearing.  A year ago, I was just about to have Christopher and Seth's work had been through a slow spell which left us juggling a bit.  Then we had Chris, Seth took one week of unpaid leave, and two weeks later, I had my 12 day stint at the hospital.  Well, then we were REALLY strapped, and that was just with our regular bills. 

The medical debt hadn't started to hit yet.

Our church helped substantially, which helped us steady ourselves and gain some composure.  We submitted a claim to AFLAC for both the birth and my subsequent hospitalization.

But, as things trickled in, as it took several months for all of the medical bills to make themselves known, it became clear that it wasn't enough.  We called several of the first creditors we had and tried to make payment arrangements as best we could.  Some wanted their money in total by 4 months, others would spread it out a year, and so on.  But we didn't end up calling all of our creditors and making payment arrangements, because quite honestly, there was no more money in the month to give in the way of payment installments.

In October, we used Seth's annual bonus to catch things up, both domestic and medical.

By November, we needed help again, and we borrowed against Seth's 401k plan.  We paid my surgical bill off completely and once again caught up on the priority bills; mortgage, car, doctors, insurance.

We hadn't made a payment on our Home Depot account in quite some time, and those medical creditors with whom we'd never made payment arrangements sent us to collections.  But what could I tell them, "Gee, I know we owe you money, but we have to pay this stuff down before we can pay you because we just don't have it right now?"  Yeah, that's gonna go over well.  And, as soon as those things wound up in collections, we got a note from our auto insurance that basically said,

Since your credit now sucks balls, we're afraid you're not going to pay us 1.) in a timely fashion or 2.) ever again.  Therefore, your monthly payment is going UP $40/month because we believe in the tool known as the self-fulfilling prophecy.  Good day!

We attempted Christmas gifts for everyone - mostly on the cheap and homemade end - but perhaps we shouldn't have.

Because at this time, we got behind on our mortgage for the first time in all of this, and then everything has seemed to spiral out since. 

Our [sizable] tax refund came and went - going to tie up medical debts (paid off my OBGYN, paid off the hospital, paid off some other doctor's fees), a large payment to Home Depot (they'd made an offer to us of making a "matching payment" on our account if we could pay $x), two mortgage payments, utility catch up, etc.

I started talking to our mortgage lender about a modification and have been working on getting all of the documentation together for it. 

And putting numbers down on the paper, I now see why we haven't been able to stay afloat:  We have more expenses than income.  And by quite a lot.

It's hard, because now we're to the point of looking at another 401k loan, to catch up.  And the AFLAC claim hadn't paid out properly, so we're waiting on a copy of my surgical report to send to them, which will trigger an additional payment to us.

To keep up we're hoping the mortgage loan modification goes through and that we'll be able to allocate some of what was going to the mortgage amount to our medical debts and eventually pay them off. 

Our health insurance premium is going up another $100/month due to "increased costs in healthcare overall."

It just sucks. 

My husband works his tail off to provide for us, 50+ hours a week of physically and mentally demanding work - and he makes decent enough money.  I cut costs where ever possible, and we do not live an extravagant lifestyle.  I mean, I've taken to baking our breads (including hamburger buns) and making our own laundry detergent to pinch pennies!  And yet we struggle through.  We're not "poor" enough to be eligible for any kind of assistance (though I just discovered we may be eligible to get the kids on a state health care program, which could decrease our health premium - which is killing us, but you can't not have insurance these days) and yet we certainly aren't rich by any stretch of the word.

We have some toys, the motocross bikes and gear, that if worse came to worse, could probably be sold, though the "cost" of my kids and husband losing their main recreational outlet would be pretty large.  But really, there's not a lot to just liquidate of value around our house.  Our computer is old.  Our TV, though a flat screen and of decent size, is dated (it's 4 yrs old now I think) and not competitive with what is available at the big-box stores.

What do y'all do to cut costs?



© 2006-present Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-Child. All Rights Reserved