2005-03-10 - 9:56 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Don't You Forget About Me", from "The Breakfast Club"

Sunday, March 6th, 2005

My husband is rearranging the living room.

Again.

*headdesk*

I thought we now had the optimal layout for the room with our existing furniture, but he needs to make sure before he decides what new TV stand to buy.

When we first moved in, he arranged it like this:

Not long after, he arranged it like this:

It's been like that ever since.

It's a difficult room, because the piano can only go where it is or on the half-wall, and you've got the fireplace, sliding doors, and the stairway making things complicated. He's taken the sectional apart into three pieces: a two-seater, three-seater, and the wedge, and is moving them around trying to find a separated configuration that works. He called me down to look at one of them and then we tried one of my ideas (it didn't work) and then another of his and it wasn't working out.

To add to the list of reasons my woman membership should be revoked (the others including a dislike of chocolate and not liking real diamonds), I hate rearranging furniture. I don't think I would ever bother to do it. It doesn't occur to me. He arranges it once, it works, I'm done. Why Poindexter is always moving things around I'll never know.

It's actually upsetting me a bit because I am not happy with the suggested configurations thus far, but I am unable to come up with any suggestions myself, so I finally excused myself and told him I trusted him to find a good arrangement. He's always come up with good ones before (he has done ALL the furniture arranging in every room of every house we've lived in) without having any input from me so now shouldn't be any exception.

Later:

He gave up for the time being and put it back the way it was. But during the process he also de-cluttered the room and vacuumed it, including under the couch cushions. Yay! All weekend off and on I've been decluttering other rooms in the house, so this was a nice surprise. Now he's cooking me hoisin chicken with broccoli with the fixins I prepped for him this morning. Now that the house is almost completely de-cluttered (I've been slacking since Christmas), I am going to go buy some flowers for the nook. I found this picture of it when I was looking for the others and realized I need to keep flowers in there more often.

Monday, March 7th, 2005

So, today is our sixth wedding anniversary, woo hoo. Our original plan was to stay in and eat takeout, and of course Poindexter has to watch his favorite show, "Fear Factor", which is on as I type this. Last I heard he was hooting over how some girl's butt was eating her bathing suit. I asked him just now what he was grinning about (I saw some sort of raw meat on the tee vee) and he said, "Oh, you don't wanna know. You really don't wanna know."

Anyway. As you may recall, my mom has been giving us a hard time about proper celebration. We got another card in the mail on Saturday, which was mushy and sweet and had the word "celebrate" in it, and she underlined that word. They also included a check for FIFTY BUCKS, plus six cents (one for each year of marriage). !!!!

Well, hey, free money, I guess we HAVE to celebrate. :) Plus it was 66 degrees today at quittin' time. So we went to Fork, and he had the pork chop and I had an absolutely incredible duck breast in a pomegranate-red wine sauce. Then we shared a lavender creme brulee that was absolutely PERFECT. Some places mess up creme brulee by making it too thick, or worse, solid. Not Fork. It was PERFECT.

I had eaten so much duck that I could only eat 3/4 of the creme brulee. I tried. I really did. But I couldn't do it, and could barely waddle out the door as it was. But there was no way I was going to waste it either.

The waiter came over and looked at the remaining creme brulee and said, "That's all?!" I said something about taking it home but he had moved on to Poindexter:

Waiter: What about you?
Poindexter: I couldn't possibly eat it or she won't have any to take home.
Waiter: Oh, but creme brulee doesn't travel very well.
Poindexter: [said something I didn't catch]
Waiter [turning to me]: You want me to wrap this up?
Me: YES! PUT IT IN A BOX!
Waiter: Rock on!

I asked Poindexter what he'd said, and it was, "I know, but she'll insist." HAHAHAHAHA!

When the waiter brought it back I said, "Thank you for humoring me."

I think my parents will be quite proud. Not only did we celebrate, but Poindexter had WINE on a SCHOOL NIGHT, which he almost never does. We're going to give them a call and thank them shortly. After yelling at them for spending so much on us. But it was fifty bucks well spent. :)

Also, I think I have room for the rest of the creme brulee now. Woo!

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

As you may have noticed (har), I am having trouble reconciling my new clothes hobby with the fact that I am miserly at heart. I am used to making do with very little, and I think this is a useful trait since it usually means I have more money than I know what to do with even when I am trying to make $2000 last 9 months the way I did in college (room and board was paid for; everything else was up to me). This new OMG I LOVE IT I WANT IT thing with clothes is very weird for me and I'm still adjusting to how to handle it.

Adding to the complication is my frustration that being fashionable is by its very nature a temporary thing. I like to buy things and keep them forever, but due to the fickle nature of fashion, in a few years I'm not going to want to wear some of the stuff I'm buying today. Some of it I probably will -- the suits I bought, my brown coat, maybe even some of my jeans if they don't fall apart -- but some of it I won't. This past weekend, I put away a bunch of pleated-front tapered-leg pants that I bought 8-10 years ago and are still wearable but hopelessly out of fashion. I can't bring myself to donate them anyway because I would *like* them if they were fashionable! Plus my MIL (who has been very fashion-conscious since she was a kid) tells me "Hold onto them; they will come back."

I thought it might be helpful for me to lay out exactly where my money is going, and then try to decide if the amount I'm spending on clothes is reasonable within those constraints.

We live well beneath our means compared to what seems to be the status quo these days. Let's see here:

- We have an investment property that currently brings in about $10K/year extra money post-tax post-expenses while somebody else pays the interest and equity. The current sale prices of similar properties in the area is already double what we paid for the house.

- I contribute the maximum to my 401K and my company matches it 100%.

- Both cars are paid for; Poindexter's is highly reliable and probably good for another five years if not ten. His commute is 5 miles round trip. Mine is strictly a pleasure car (and in the winter, a paperweight). My primary source of transportation is my feet, supplemented by buses ($2.60 round trip a couple days a week).

- We can live on just my salary and even save a little if we scale back to necessities-only (no traveling, no new clothes, no new dirt bikes, no expensive dinners out, etc.).

- We don't drink alcohol much and I have no interest in expensive jewelry.

- On average each month, barring unusual expenses or house projects, we put away savings that amount to about 33% of our net income (post-tax, post-401K, post-FSA). This is the money we are saving up to put into renovations in three years or so.

I found some guidelines on the 'net that suggest that you want to save a minimum of 10% of your take-home pay. Other sites say you need 3-6 months' take-home pay in your savings account. I dunno about that, but we do have enough money to live with no income at all -- an unlikely scenario really -- for three months and we keep adding to it. We also have an equity line of credit with a zero balance for emergencies.

So, given all that, my current budget (set rather arbitrarily based on how much I spent in December) is 10% of our average monthly savings. Which is, then, about 3.3% of our take-home pay, or about 6.6% of "my half" of it. Hm. Is that a lot? Especially when you consider that we don't spend much on entertainment -- the internet and the library take care of that, plus the occasional three-dollar movie rental. Over the last four months, I have hit the budget limit twice and been under it twice, so that I have a "free month"'s worth of budgeted money to spend. That's nice.

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I never got back to finishing the post because I was sick of myself. I guess I fretted about it until I was sick of it and then was fretted out for a while. Also, fewer styles are interesting to me now, and the stuff I am finding is deeply discounted -- I'm back to no more than $15 per item for the most part. That helps a lot. Yesterday I wore a shirt that I'm crazy about that was $13, marked down from $58.

I wrote this over a month ago, and then in this month's InStyle magazine, somebody says that "If you're spending more than 20% of your post-tax income on fashion, you're out of control." Is 20% reasonable, but 21% is not? What about 18%, or 15%? But it sounds like by those standards I could be spending twice as much and still be "within reason".

Thursday, March 10, 2005

GAH! I just finished up a two-day rush project for work. I'm a bit behind on the friends list and e-mails.

I dug up something really old to post -- I have little bits of post-pieces lying all over my hard drive. I had wanted to write more about my feelings about stairs so I never finished it. Too bad! Into the post it goes! And the timing is good since I just posted pictures of said stairs.

As many of you are aware, I live in a house with a lot of stairs. When you walk in the front door, the living room is half-level up. Then the kitchen is another half-level up. The office/guest floor is a full level up from the kitchen, and the master bedroom an additional full level up. I am going up and down stairs constantly. And I tend to run up the stairs, skipping steps. When we first moved here, going up more than one flight made me notice that I was a bit winded. Now, though, if I am not carrying anything heavy, I can run up three flights from the front door to the bedroom and not really feel it.

Unless, of course, I've been visiting my in-laws for two weeks, sitting on a couch all day in their RANCH house.

I got home last night and tried to run skipping-steps up the stairs from the kitchen to the office and toward the top I started to feel stiff and winded and like my legs could not stretch enough to skip steps. I was horrified. Two weeks away and you'd think I'd never lived in a house with stairs. Although I suppose it goes to show that having the stairs DOES make a difference in my physical condition. That's pretty cool. I worried that since my area of Philadelphia is flat as a pancake that I wasn't getting enough weight-resistent exercise in my knees (exercise I could get by walking uphill a lot living in in Art Museum or East Falls), but it would seem that the stairs are making up for at least some of it. I worry a little about my knees because the grandmother I am most like physically (my dad's mom) had really bad arthritis in hers. OTOH, my mother (age 61) shows no signs of arthritis, which is pretty amazing.

Aside from the physical benefits, I *like* stairs. The idea of living in a ranch house is icky to me, probably because it's sprawl on a small scale. Aside from that, I like how they look. I especially like OUR stairs, which are now illegal to build since they are open-riser.

Friday, March 11, 2005

One of the ridiculous side effects of my newfound interest in fashion and shopping is that I now have a closetfull of clothes I am really excited about. So instead of standing in front of it uttering the quintessential whine, "I have nothing to wear!", I stand in front of it and think, "Ooo! Should I wear this one? Or that one? Or the other one? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Often I have to choose a purse or a coat and build my outfit around that.

Today was no exception. I nattered on YM to Poindexter:

Evelynne: Should I leave yet?
Evelynne: I'm gonna primp, anyway.
Evelynne: Gotta decide on a coat! I get all excited about them all and can't pick!
Evelynne: I know, I'll wear pink and have you take a pic of it. It's the only one that hasn't appeared.
Evelynne: In my journal, to show people.
Evelynne: After this I'm gonna have to start flipping coins.

Or conducting LJ-polls, maybe. :) "Which coat should Evelynne wear tomorrow?"

The picture doesn't show the basketweave detail of the coat, which I really like:

Here's another of those not-finished journal entries that's getting thrown in prematurely. I need a name for these things. What do you call something that's not quite finished that you're throwing out there anyway?

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I am feeling much more patient this season as far as buying items.

In the past, finding clothes that I loved AND that fit me perfectly was really difficult. So whenever I found something I liked, I would pay full price for it if I had to and get several in different colors.

Last fall, however, I was finding SO many things I liked and had found stores where I had a really high fit-to-tryon ratio, and I was afraid of not being able to get what I wanted before they sold out of my size, so I paid full price for things when (I now realize) I could have gotten them at least 25% off, if not more.

My favorite stores -- Petite Sophisticate and Ann Taylor Loft -- have multiple local shops as well as web sites that have the same sales and coupons. So when things go on sale, if the store is out of my size, I can get it through the web or have the store call around until they find my size.

Besides that, I've been keeping track (in an Excel sheet, of course, because I am a geek) of when merchandise arrives, when various levels of sales happen, when coupons are available. This will help me know when I can be patient and when I should probably buy something before they really do run out of it in my size.

I've also been having a good time combing the clearance sales and outlets. February was a really good time to look for basics that stores had overstocked. Ann Taylor (the more-upscale sister of Ann Taylor Loft), a store that is too expensive for me to shop at ordinarily but has really well-made, pretty clothes, had a LOT of black work pants on sale and I found a pair that fits me PERFECTLY and is almost as comfortable as pajamas.

I also am checking out outlet stores -- I already found a full skirt that's white with a blue/purple tiny-florals pattern for $10 from last season. I am also hoping to find one of last year's spring suits at a discount, so I have something to wear to client meetings for work, and I'm still hoping for a pair of deeply discounted camel pants and shoes to go with my red tweed coat (it has threads of camel in it).

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