(no subject)

 I went on vacation, well more like staycation, with my mom a week ago.  It was fun, frustrating, exhausting and pretty much everything else that comes out of vacation with my mother.  She came up with my niece and two nephews and the kids all had a blast.  She rented a house by the lake and Finn abandoned us for the week to sleep over with his cousins.  My mom had us on the go from bright and early in the morning till well into the evening.  It think were all still recovering.

The Boy (aka my husband, not my son) started his new job three weeks back and it's working out very well for him.  They don't pay or have benefits kick in until you've been working there for 40 days, so we're riding on my pay and savings until then and on my benefits alone as well, but after that, his job's benefits are better than either mine or his previous job and he'll get paid more so that's good.  We are in a position we can absorb the wait time, but I wonder about those that couldn't.  I mean, we certainly could not earlier in our careers.

My garden's growing.  I might be able to harvest peas, but haven't really had much chance to get out there in the last couple of days.  The person that opens the library has been out, so I've been coming in early, then getting the kids fed and driving them to track in the evening.  Tomorrow I'm taking a half day to take my son to the eye doctor's so I'm hoping to get a chance to go out there soon

Oh! Also...

I have received my public librarian certificate!  I'm not certain yet if that's what I'd like to go into, but it does open up options.  Pay is stagnant at my new job, benefits aren't anything special and, more importantly, they've been making zero contributions to retirement for a year now and it was low before that.

I like the people here.  It's a pleasant, fairly flexible place to work.  They bill themselves, correctly, as child friendly.  But I've been feeling kinda stagnant here.  My indecision continues about staying or going but I'm trying to keep options open.

And since I'm posting again...

 

When the Gospel of Minimalism Collides With Daily Life

Some of you of you might remember my great ongoing downsizing/minimizing project.  And while I do think minimizing has value, it only does to a point.  Just like having too much stuff and buying just to buy is one extreme in the wrong direction, I feel like a lot of the minimizing blogs out there take it to the other, equally impractical or even harmful extreme.

"Throw out all your pens and keep only one!"  Yeah, but that's really wasteful and assumes you're in the financial situation that you could go out and buy yourself one pen every time you run out of ink. 

"Get rid of all your kid's toys!  They're have more fun playing with wooden spoons and thinks you have around the house." Trust me, they won't.  Plus randomly throwing away all a kid's possessions is more than a little traumatic (and you can explain minimalism all you want, from the kid's pov it's random).

Like most things, it's a balance.  Amelia had a birthday party recently (can you believe she's 2?) and got a shitload of toys.  This was followed by me donating a large bag full of toys she seldom or never plays with anymore.  I need to do the same for Finn soon (especially with his birthday coming up).  In general we do own too many things and I do want to downsize what we own, but to a sane level.  Because the truth is, this is awfully hard to live in: