weekend pickthrough- flip turned upside down edition.

yeah, i know it’s pretty sad that i couldn’t squeeze out another post last week. weekend pickthroughs back to back is pretty shameful. but this week, things in my life got a little shaken up (no, i’m not moving to bel air). some kind of awesome stuff happened  (for example, i’m gonna be motherfucking clara in this year’s burlesque nutcracker!). and some less awesome stuff happened (we’ll talk later). but mostly, my brain pretty much exploded and oozed out my ears. i spent most of the weekend in a benadryl coma trying to regain some semblance of equilibrium.

so far, slowly surfacing. but you know that thing about best laid plans or whatever. we’ll try again tomorrow. in the meantime, all you can eat link buffet below.

p.s. remember when will smith was awesome and hilarious? it pains me deeply that he seems to have morphed into a humorless oscar hungry scientologist. boo.

weekend pickthrough- vacation is over edition.

i just had the worst vacation of my entire life. mostly i stayed home with my very sick dog just trying to get him by until his appointment with the specialist on friday. intermittently, i would cry or eat until i was sick. i basically had to be in the same room with him at all times, so all the things that were on my “TO DO” list (refinish my coffee table, make curtains, do all the laundry, go to the gym every day…) totally to didn’t get done. also, i come out of my week exhausted, cranky, and with a weird (and unattractive) stress rash on my neck. oh, and i gained 3 pounds. work would have been better.

ok, no more whining.

ok, maybe one last whine to punctuate my flamingly shitty week. vet specialst= $600. i was quoted $130 + pills or treatments. and thought, “how bad could it be?” SO BAD. $82 for prescription dog food. $72 for antibiotics! the specialist was actually awesome, and poor kazuki is already much improved from the massive bacterial infection & 2 ear infections that he was sporting this week.  he’ll be in the cone for a while, but a full recovery is in his immediate future. and shit, i would have spent $6,000 if i had to. i would take a bullet for that fucking dog (just look at him).

anyway, here are some awesome links to wash out the taste of badness:

top 10 reasons why i suck at gardening.

when i first started my garden about a month ago, i was on top of the world. things were growing! i was making life! i would eat salad like a boss all summer long!

almost like sex fantasies, i would imagine myself harvesting shining and plump red tomatoes and pornographically large cucumbers (ron jeremy grade produce). it would be glorious, and things were going so well!

and then, shit started to go wrong:

1. neighborhood cats started digging in my seed areas, killing whole squares of crops (i lost 3 squares of lettuce and one square of carrots).

2. my tomatoes won’t pollinate. the flowers just turn brown and die, and the bees never come. i only have the 4 tomatoes that were already pollinated when i got the plant.

3. my peppers are dying. the little pepper buds are just shriveling and falling off.

4. my cucumber is taking over everything. i find it’s spindly tendrils wrapped around every other plant in the bed- strangling them all slowly. although to its credit, it’s the only thing that’s actually producing any sort of vegetation.

5. my green beans have nothing to climb up, and they are OUT OF CONTROL.

6. my pumpkin just doesn’t look right. it has leaves rotting off and flowers dropping like crazy.

7. my butter lettuce keeps getting ass pounded by the rain and is looking very very sad.

8. i tried last weekend to install some barrier plants to try to keep the cats out (brussels sprouts, cauliflower, & iceberg lettuce), but i don’t think the brussels sprouts are supposed to be yellow.

9. maybe planting 5 heads of iceberg lettuce in one square was a mistake?

10. the basil seems fine, but i don’t eat that much basil.

basically my gardening euphoria has quickly descended into gardening shame and disappointment. maybe i should read a book or something, but i don’t even know where to start. i just feel very overwhelmed and very at sea. i could ask the lovely soul who helped me plant it in the first place, but i don’t want her to be disappointed in me! basically, i am castrated by my lack of knowledge and fear of failure.

i thought that gardening was supposed to be relaxing!  somebody please, FIX IT.

*no, that dead garden picture isn’t mine, but you can check out the “progress” of my garden on my flickr page. i haven’t taken any pictures of the really tragic stuff, but you can picture them in your mind’s eye (don’t forget to make ’em extra shriveled).

liquidation sales suck cock.

as you may have heard about town, borders is going out of business.

i don’t think anyone was surprised about it. it’s been on those “businesses about to go extinct” list for years with blockbuster and reader’s digest and all the other dinosaur brands. and so with the announcement of the closing, comes the immediate materialization of the telltale fluorescent signs flashing 40% off, and the kind of parking lot gridlock that makes a girl want to start slashing tires or throwing punches, or possibly both at the same time.

now the signs all say 40% OFF real big, but the fine print is always up to. opening weekend at borders, pretty much everything was a pitiful 10% off. yet for some reason, the line was out the fucking door.  10% off things that are full retail (and in some cases grossly inflated prices) is NOT A GOOD DEAL PEOPLE!  WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?

i’m not entirely sure what kind of crazy discount juju possesses people when it comes to liquidation sales, but although the signs are big and flashy, and EVERYTHING MUST GO…  a quick rule of thumb: if the store was still open and you saw 10% off sign, would you bother to buy something that you didn’t really need (and that you could likely get somewhere else for cheaper)? probably not. THEN BACK THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE BORDERS. EVERYTHING MUST NOT GO. (just try to dodge that crazy bitch slashing tires and throwing punches in the parking lot).

foolishly, i went back again today (with more promises of 40% off), and was doubly disappointed. 20% is still NOT 40%, and shit was pretty much cleaned out anyway. there were a lot of dvds on sale for 40% off, but it’s not exactly a bargain when the dvds in question are $20-$60 each. didn’t i just say that my cut off for new dvds was $3? again, i hit the bricks with nothing.

i try it!- danger in the kitchen laboratory.

if this blog post had a subheading, it would read: why leaving it to the professionals is sometimes the right thing to do.

so, during the SWAPmaine event a few weeks ago, the lovely keriann of mainely mara, turned me on to the starbucks black iced tea lemonade. HOLY CRAP. new heights of refreshing-ness! since that time, i think of drinking nothing else.

i’m not a coffee drinker, so the amount of time i spend at starbucks (which is inconveniently located multiple blocks from both my home & work) has always been fairly minimal. however, since SWAP day, i have been making any possible excuse to scoot my ass down to exchange street, all for the privilege of paying like $4 for something that tends to take me roughly 10 minutes to consume.

YET I CAN’T STOP.

the crack like pleasure that it affords me, appears to make the $4 surcharge fully worthwhile.

but $4 is expensive, and the $15 giftcard i had left over from xmas lasted almost about as long as it takes me to drink one of these fuckers. so in the spirit of practicality (starbucks is far) and frugality (starbucks is expensive), i decided that i would just gather the ingredients to make this mystical beverage, and assemble it myself in the kitchen lab. just think of all the dollars i would save!

HOW HARD COULD IT BE?

as it turns out, REAL HARD.

weekend pickthrough: a lesson in customer service edition.

today, something really lame happened. possibly my lamest retail run-in ever.

i was at the mall trying on dresses, and was feeling uncertain about a strapless number with somewhat poorly located pockets. still pretty cute, and at $19.99… definitely worth consideration.

so i threw a belt on it, walked out of the dressing room, and asked the nearest sales associate if she thought it was too poofy around the waist. as in: is the excess pocket fabric making it unflattering? (i may have even motioned to the bunchiness with my hand.)

apparently i wasn’t clear enough, because her response knocked me on my ass:

adrift: how C3PO totally ruined my day.

today has sucked from start to finish. and by start, i mean at around 1:30 am i threw up my hands in despair because the C3PO mask i had been attempting to make ALL NIGHT was officially and irreparably creepy and awful.

the last ditch puffy paint accents i had applied in delirium made my robot friend look like he had just participated in some elicit activities resulting in a face full of shiny golden robo-semen.

UNACCEPTABLE!

i don’t know why i thought that this task would be simple. C3PO masks are best left to vacuform machines and people with masters degrees in paper mache. i am neither of those. what i am is a person who needs a decent C3PO mask by friday and has run out of options.

this, and the lack of sleep caused by this would color my whole day.

i was cranky and emotional and punctuated my afternoon with occasional bathroom crying jags. sometimes things just go really wrong and you can’t seem to get out from under it.

i decided to drag my carcass around town on my lunch break in hopes that some fresh air might cure what ailed me. but half way across town, i realized that i had forgotten my debit card.

when i’m really bummed out, all i want to do is shop and eat. being unable to do either of those things crushed my spirit a little. it had never really occurred to me how much i placate myself with stuff. with consumption.

i imagined myself eating a big cookie and buying a new dress. i imagined myself feeling better. i didn’t. it was just me and my mood wandering the streets alone.

i still feel crappy. and my allergies are acting up. and one of my eyes is slowly puffing shut… but i’m strongly considering leaving my debit card at home more often. maybe i need to hang out with my sad sometimes- instead of trying to smother it with lattes and new lip gl0ss. maybe i would save some money and learn some new coping skills.

i don’t know.

on a related note, does anyone have a C3PO mask i can borrow for a few days?

the plastic files.

first and foremost, i would like to apologize for not posting yesterday. i am still getting the hang of the daily posting gig, and also drank one too many bourbons after a particularly rough day and ended up face down on the couch at 8:30 instead of  writing my post. i repent. also, i am hungover as hell today- so my body is repenting too. but on to the promised content!

so i am very proud to say that a year has come and gone, and i have not used my credit cards even once. i did have to borrow money from the boyfriend on a couple of occasions, and i did certainly have more than a few months of barely scraping by (including and especially this one), but it still feels like progress to me. am i delusional? is learning to control my finances a gradual evolution, or should i have figured my shit out by now? i worry that it’s like being an alcoholic, where i either need to quit cold turkey or never get better…

as usual, i still have dreams and hopes of getting a tighter grip on my money and finally making a bigger dent in my debt this year. i’m still way behind from xmas and more other random unexpected shit (burst pipe!), but i’ve started a new habit to help defray at least a little of any future emergency money madness: i have become a gift card hoarder.

usually after xmas, i take any gift cards i might have and rush my little ass to the mall and spend spend spend…  but this year i promised myself that i would hold on to them for a bit and see what happened.  i have also amassed a few more from rebates and online surveys (i’ve had great luck with these guys), and my cache is looking quite tidy (see above). here’s my master plan:

resolved.

i was lucky enough to come into a bit of an xmas windfall this year. nothing earth shattering (most of it went to bills and to my saving’s account), BUT i decided to give myself a small allowance to spend on whatever i wanted. DANGEROUS. it could have been anything, or everything… i have a bad habit of burning through cash without really paying attention to where it goes, or really caring too much when it’s gone. i’m all like “oh, that’s was fun”, instead of feeling the intense sense of guilt and shame that keeps most people from getting in financial trouble.

the last year has overall been a good one for my financial evolution. this was the first year in over a decade that i didn’t use my credit cards even once. i also managed to have a savings account with actual money in it for more than 15 minutes. on the other hand, i didn’t pay off my credit cards as much as i would have liked, i didn’t manage to keep the majority of the money in my savings account, and i still didn’t start an HSA.

so for 2011, i have only one resolution. it isn’t to save more, or spend less, pay off the credit cards, or even open an HSA… (although all of those things are certainly worth keeping in mind). my resolution this year is just to PAY ATTENTION. wherever my money travels should take me this year, i would like to be watchful and be thoughtful about every dollar i spend. i’m thinking about leaving my debit card at home, giving myself a cash allowance, being more careful about monitoring my mint account… but it doesn’t really matter what i do, as long as i’m being vigilant.

i decided to lube up my resolution and get started a little early with the aforementioned windfalll. instead of just throwing the money into my checking account and going apeshit on whatever i happened to find first, i sat down and really thought about things that i wanted, needed, and would generally be too cheap or too broke to afford the rest of the year. here is what i came up with:

happy boxing day!

today is boxing day in various nations around the world. today is also a different kind of boxing day right here in the USA. today is the day that people haul home their xmas loads, grab a big cardboard box, and start sorting out the shit that they’re going to drop off at the goodwill ASAP. (a friend of mine brings 2 bags to her in-law’s house- one for stuff to bring home, one to ditch at the goodwill on her way home).

for example, my boyfriend’s parents have a large extended family. and even though trying to celebrate everyone for xmas is expensive and extremely inconvenient, several family members refuse to give up the tradition. unfortunately, it’s not the family members with large disposable incomes or most intimate insights into their wants and interests doing the gift giving. mostly it’s distant and out of touch (often with reality) relatives without much to spare in the gift giving budget. now, as a person who writes a budget blog, i am certainly not one to poo poo an inexpensive gift. however, any gift not given with care is likely to end up discard bin, and the only thing you’ve really given your friends and relatives is the task of writing an awkward thank you note that won’t reveal the fact that your gift is already donation fodder.

so to you coworkers, extended family, in-laws, acquaintences… my gift to you this year is a cautionary tale of three ceramic polar bears: