A while back I asked my foxy Voxers for cheap ideas for two windows in my family room. I have an Interior Design degree and most of the things they teach for windows I just wouldn’t have in my home. It’s nothing for a custom window treatment to be $1000 a window. I’m sorry, life is just too short!
And as it turned out, with your help I came up with some fun window treatments for not much money at all. I found a board in the basement and with a little work it became a shelf for each window. Since I’m into making art glass, I thought it might be pretty cool to use some vases as part of the window treatment. So I didn’t have to lay out any cash for the board I snitched from hubby and the inexpensive brackets from the hardware store were $5 for both windows. I painted the brackets and now they fade away into the trim.
I walked around Big Lots looking for some way to make interesting curtain rods when I found these $6 candle sconces and decided to hang a curtain rod from the lower curl. It would have looked fine but the sheers weren’t giving me the privacy I wanted for windows facing the street. Plus, my sewing machine is in the cold part of the house and I didn’t feel like dragging it out and to sew up something. So I kept looking for other ideas.
I looked a number of places for the window film that some Voxers had suggested and I’ve gotten it before at Walmart but it’s not there anymore. I found some lovely film at Lowe’s that would have done just what I wanted and it was a static cling kind of thing which I thought was cool. It would have given privacy with a cool design that I would have loved. And there would have been no sticky glue to take off later. It was too expensive for me right now so I decided to pass on that. Bummer, it would have been cool. I also checked on some cool handmade paper but buying that online means buying way more than I needed, there isn’t any place to buy it locally and I was impatient to get the ghetto curtains off my windows. I have some cool handmade paper but not enough. Blast!
So I picked up two paper shades from Wally’s for a little less than $5 each. I may have to do something different later on but for now I love them. So I have two sort of funky, contemporary light friendly window treatments for about $40, plus I get to display some glass which revolves through my studio pretty quickly these days. It’s casual, it’s funky, it’s creative. I’m delighted.
Thanks for all the good ideas you shared with me!
Do you have any money? Can you make your bills this month or are things a little tight? Are you wealthy or poor? Does a bank think you are a good risk? Do you have good credit? What is your net worth? What are you worth? (Ok, so that one isn't a money question) The strange thing is that though these questions seem to all aim at the same thing, they are actually vastly different questions.
Net Worth is what you’d have left over if you sold everything you own. I don’t think anyone has asked for this information on a credit application and it’s not considered in coming up with my credit score. And it has little to do with how much money is in my purse (a buck two eighty) and really has little to do with anything… although it’s important information if you want Colombia to let you adopt their (poor, hungry, orphan) kids.
So here’s the process. On a spread sheet make a list of everything you own that is worth something. The house is usually at the top of the list unless you rent. The autos, the furniture, the other assets. The bead collection and the piano. All of it. Estimate the values of each item. How much is your house worth? (Easy if you are a renter.) And fill in figures for the autos - www.kbb.com is a good resource for that. You’ll have to know the year, make, model, miles and features of your ride. Add it all up. Add in the balance on each bank account you have, add in your investments (what’s left of them after the stock market quits tap dancin on the total today at 5 pm) Add that list up. Yeah, just remember this isn’t YOUR worth we’re looking at… this is about the junk you own. All that stuff that would be gone if Katrina visited in the night.
Start a new column and start listing the liabilities. How much do you owe to the bank who lets you live in their house? How much on the autos? Any credit card debt? Any revolving credit? Add it all up. Yeah, we are not makin any judgments here, just doin the math. If you are young and just bought your first house, ouch! Old and nearly paid off that sucker? Score!
So, which is bigger? The plus pile or the minus pile? Well, shuck my corn! My PLUS side is BIGGER! *Does a happy dance!* I CAN HAZ ADOPTION! Whooo Hoooo!
Here’s the irony… owning two houses would seem like a liability since I owe an astronomical amount of money to Janet the Banker. On the other hand, since I owe less than the appraised value on either house, it puts me in the black. (We got house B for considerably less than its appraised value!) And when I took house A off the spreadsheet, my net worth went DOWN. Ok, that seems really counter intuitive, right? Well to me at least. Owning two houses means it’s harder to make my commitments, but it makes my net worth higher. Is that some twisted mojo or what?!
And this is why this economic situation has been such a bitch to so many folks. My net worth hinges mostly on the estimated value of my home (which in recent years has departed to some degree from an appraised value since most of those lovely folk had a few years of collective insanity that we are all paying for now.) Now I’m not going to say this VERY loudly, for the purposes of my math, I’m using appraisal values from sometime this year, not today. (Markets have had a downward trend lately so the longer ago my appraisal - the better my math will look) So where this gets really tricky is when someone just buys a house and is just starting to pay the loan, unless they made a hefty down payment, there is little wiggle room in the net worth department. If the market shifts and that individual owes more than the house is actually worth, that creates a negative net worth… but it doesn’t mean they don’t have money in their pockets and it doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t pay their bills. It can mean that, but then again it might not.
Here’s where I think this gets really funny. Let’s say Joe the Plumber lives in the house he grew up in, so what if he shares the place with a six bear hunting dogs. His pappy paid $9,452 for that place back in the day and ol Joe inherited that baby when he turned 48 (along with the ancester to all these dogs running around here.) It needs a coat of paint and “Extreme Home Makeover” would certainly rip that crap to the landfill, but it’s a house with a warm fireplace and it’s paid for. And it’s got a few acres out back with some nice views of the valley where he played as a child. He’s paid off his five year old Ford F150 duely and doesn’t have much else but doesn’t care. He thinks the “Stock Market” is the place you’d go to buy a coupla cows for the pasture out back. And he pays his bar tab at the end of each month, so that’s not much of a liability depending on which day you do the math. And as long as he doesn’t hit the credit cards and doesn’t have a girl friend, well, his net worth looks pretty darn good.
On the other hand, Sarah the Soccer Mom may live in a big house in the ‘burbs. Let’s say she bought her McMansion a year or so ago at the height of the market, but now two homes in her neighborhood have been foreclosed on and so the value of all the houses in her neighborhood have gone through the floor. Even though Sarah and handsome husband make plenty of money and have a little left over at the end of the month to go to Neiman Marcus and shop for clothing… she could have a negative net worth. And if they experienced a medical meltdown, or one of them lost their job, or they wanted to borrow some money to buy matching snowmobiles, well… then it might start to matter. Appearances mean nothing, ability to earn money or borrow money is not the issue. Net worth is simply a way to estimate what would happen if Joe’s and Sarah’s assets sold at auction tomorrow, all the bills were paid up… what would the figure be on the check the auctioneer handed them or would have have his hand out? That’s net worth. And though Joe and Sarah may lead very different lives, you can't tell by looking which one has the higher net worth.
And I have come to the conclusion that net worth means very little to me. It says nothing of my character, or kindness or my relationship to the world I live in. And it has nothing to do with our ability to be parents. It has nothing to do with staring down two home mortgages when you only want one house. It’s deceptive because the numbers can change considerably based on many things beyond my control. And it really doesn’t have that much to do with whether or not I pay my bills on time. And yet it is the difference between being able to adopt, or not.
I’m happy! I can haz offspring! SCORE!
This photograph got me laughing, then thinking, then writing.
Grandma called and wanted to know if I've seen her potholders.
They were on the table when we had tea on Tuesday
But now she can't find them anywhere.
I'm wearing them on my derriere.
They look good there.
Well, it appears to be official. Our adoption agency has confirmed that yes, we do need a positive net worth in order to adopt from Colombia. And apparently when we filled out the first paperwork we had a positive net worth. That was more than a year ago before the economy tanked and things got tighter. A show of hands please, who has the same net worth that you did a year ago today? What? No hands? Why, I just don’t know how that could be! I am just so SHOCKED!
That was back when we lived in a tiny house that was worth considerably more than we paid for it because of all our renovation work. We had a truck that was paid for and a Civic that only had a few payments left. I don’t remember how I valued the worth of my business assets, I’ll just have to go back and look at that and see how those numbers even came together! LOL! To my knowledge there has been nothing in the material that said that a positive net worth would be a requirement. I haven’t taken the time to look through all the adoption material again and make sure, but I’m fairly confident of that.
So… in preparation for the adoption we bought a minivan knowing that our truck was terminal and we wanted to get as many of those van payments behind us as possible before we brought home/purchased our children.
And then there is the bigger house we purchased because of what our Social Worker said about our eligibility based on the space we didn’t have. Now we own TWO houses, though hopefully that won’t last forever. But seriously, there is no way around the math of THAT! (Though I'm guessing that in a wierd twisted way that could help? Must do math!)
Apparently everything we’ve done to prepare for this adoption is now the same stuff that currently makes it impossible. So I need to sit down with the numbers and figure out exactly what the damage is. If we had known, we could have waited on the van and not purchased the house… but then we would only qualify for adopting one or maybe two children of the same gender and not the three that we want and still be stuck in that tiny house. (Well, we are still stuck WITH that house, but not IN that house.) And adopting them separately is seriously more expensive than getting them all at once. It’s the difference between paying $30 for something or buying it for 3 payments of $25 each.
There is a way around this, we just need to figure it out. I’m thinking that we may need to find someone who will purchase our van from us and then sell it back to us soon. As far as I can tell the paper needs to be legally true the day we sign it, after that? Shaa! I don’t know where the adoption file is now, in a box somewhere. I need to (find it!) get it out and see those early numbers. And I need to run today’s numbers, I don’t even know how close we are but I don’t see it working from here. I don’t exactly know all the miracles are going to be required to make this work but I’m living in a house that is nothing short of a miracle anyway. What’s one (or a KaZillion) more?
It's for the kids... for the kids... (grumble grumble blasted adoption agency grumble grumble) it's for the kids... for the kids...
No seriously, this IS GOING to work! It's just a little demand of mine. That I'm deadly serious about! This adoption IS GOING to work!!!
And loved it!
That image of Jesse Jackson with the tears running down his face gets me every time!!! The election is over, the hubub has died down... but we are still living history. And it is goooooood!
My husband and I will celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary on December 15th. And for at least a decade of that time we used no birth control but never had children. And as long as we’ve been together, we’ve had “other” friends. That is, since we never had children we were never included in gatherings with the families who had small children unless it was our own family. If someone with a few kids was thinking about who to have for dinner, it wouldn’t be us because there would be no one for their kids to play with. Our friends have always been pre-kid couples, or adult-kid couples. And in most cases if we had pre-kid couples, we pretty much knew that once they started having children we’d drift away because they would want to hang out with people who had children to play with. There would come a time when we were left out. I have not minded this often in our ten years, after all, it is my “normal.” But there have been times along the way when I’ve found it to be one of the unintentional painful aspects of infertility.
On the flip side, there is a woman at church with at least a dozen children. It’s not really that many but it might as well be because they are unattended from the moment they get in the door till the time the family goes home. (Ok, that’s an overstatement, but not by much.) I’ve never had a conversation with her that she didn’t turn to something about her children. She has no concept of my life and I find spending time with her to be an exercise in annoyances. It wouldn’t occur to her to converse with me about something else, she may not have anything else to converse about. So I wouldn’t be real interested in having dinner with their family, unless I was up for an evening at the circus. Even then there would need to be an exit strategy for such an evening as loud projectile children cause me to seriously consider losing my pacifism.
Here’s the thing. We’re planning on adopting some children. Two, maybe even three. Nothing like an instant family. So I’m going to go from being the woman who doesn’t hang out with the young mothers to being one of them. Well, except for the young part because the people around me with young children are usually quite a bit younger than I am by now.
I happened to be standing in a hallway of church witnessing a conversation between two young mothers. There was some talk of whose kid would marry who and I was surprised to find that the children were jokingly paired off. And at least one of the little ones was talking to her parents about who she would marry. It was a surprise to me, I don’t live in the world of young children. I don’t know what happens there. Then one mother turned to me and said that they were waiting to find out about my adopted children and to see how that changed the mix. That struck me as very strange, and VERY funny! No one in that group is into arranged marriages, but I am certain that none of them would mind if their children ended up together just because they knew and loved the other families so much. Ok, that is a strange new thought in my head, but why not? I was standing on the edge of that conversation joking with those women, knowing that I was on the outside getting a glimpse into a strange world. I felt a little alien at that moment. It made me curious about what else I may be missing.
I know that I’m going to need to do something to cross over before my children come home. No doubt it will be a bit of a challenge to break into a strange new world of Mommies and their small children and their comfortable little social network. I have no idea of the actual ages of the children of these women, much less their names. The only ones that even exist on my radar are ones that are exceptional. Exceptionally interesting or exceptionally annoying. So I am wondering how this will evolve. Am I ready for a world of cupcakes, parties where the average age is in the single digits and the chaos and noise level that seems to come with that? I don’t know. But my kids deserve a chance at a “normal” life, not MY "alien" normal of being on the outside observing… their normal – whatever that is.
I had a productive day yesterday. Ages ago at lunch with Ginger Sister she mentioned something about people who cook once a month, and they cook up lots of meals and freeze stuff and just pop something in the oven when it’s time to eat. So before our move to the new house I decided to give that a try. Mainly because I know that if I didn’t, that we’d spend a fortune grabbing “fast food” just because we’d both be too tired from the moving work that neither of us would want to cook. We liked it and I learned a lot in the process. So yesterday was my second go-round.
I started off making six casseroles with potatoes, sausage and green beans. It can be a nice combination if the sausage is good and the last time we went shopping I found a five pound bag of cooked sausage and so I bought it. (And no, I didn’t use all 5 pounds in these casseroles.)
While I was cooking I had the laptop in the kitchen and I figured out the calorie content of each serving as I went along. That made a tedious job somewhat intellectually interesting. And it amazes me how the pile of low calorie high nutrition veggies are equal to a cup of some higher calorie food. It’s really interesting to cook and do the math at the same time! So I ended up with some meals under 400 calories and some over 600, so I can do a better job of keeping an eye on my weight.
Then I made six quiches and they look lovely. I buy the deep dish pie shells at Wally’s and then load them up with veggies plus some sausage. Each one got three eggs and a ½ cup of milk and cheese on top. Surprisingly with all that good stuff in there, it’s still a good meal and not nearly as many calories as you’d think.
Then I made six veggie casseroles with a bit of ham for flavor and some tofu to bring up the protein. I baked them for an hour and that was that.
Then I baked four pork loin roasts and they turned out beautifully and they make the house smell wonderful. I wonder if that makes my dogs hungry to smell such good things?
Hubby got home just in time to skin two packs of chicken thighs. So after he did that and popped them in the baking pans I dressed them up with a variety of marinade/flavors from teriyaki to lemon pepper to the last of the honey mustard dressing. We had the honey mustard ones for dinner and they were yummy! Those turned into eight pans in the oven, four to a rack and maybe that even saves some energy to cook that much food at one time. Maybe I lose when I reheat them later, I don’t know.
I made two huge pots of rice, one a Mexican style and the other with a combination was more of a fried rice with some interesting spices plus some pineapple juice that made it taste “sweet and sour” and it turned out pretty good in my opinion.
Then I packaged up pork loin or chicken thighs with rice and veggie casserole, some in individual servings and some in doubles for when hubby is home. I counted and it looks like I made 80 meals. I’m pretty impressed with myself and who knows if it will last me a month or not but I can spend a day making some other kinds of things for a little more variety later on.
I don’t use recipes, so this kind of thing is really an experiment. And in these kinds of quantities, we’re up a creek if I make something we hate or something that doesn’t survive the freezer. LOL! That hasn't happened - YET. I spent some time on the internet doing research and it looks like some of the good folks who use this method are making primarily meat and potato dishes and a heck of a lot of cream, sour cream and cheese which doesn’t seem all that balanced to me. I was amazed at the lack of veggies or anything green, but maybe those people are adding a green salad to the meal they are reheating. But why make food ahead if you still have to make the salad? That just doesn’t make sense to me but maybe it would if I had fourteen children. So anyway, I wanted to make sure the meals I was making were healthy and balanced. When we cook in a hurry we don’t choose a healthy diet and so I have been intentional in my food choices when shopping for this kind of cooking.
When we first started to go to the church we currently attend, the word got out that hubby does most of the cooking. At the time that was a convenience issue. As a school teacher he got home long before I did and sometimes I’d be home quite late from the gallery and if the man wanted to eat, he was going to have to make something. The ladies at the church would talk to me about recipes and stuff and though I understood that they were just trying to make conversation, that just wasn’t my life. As a business owner I didn’t have time for trying new recipes and entertaining. It was interesting to notice that their assumption was that my husband cooks because I can’t. We may be a little outside the box but it would be a mistake to think that I can’t cook. I can. I prepared the meals in my family from before I hit my teens, I’ve had years of practice cooking for a family and when I prepare a meal for guests, it gets good reviews. I still remember one sweet lil church lady suggesting that maybe someone should get me cooking lessons for Christmas. What a strange assumption! So wrong on so many levels. I’m self taught at a lot of things, and if I got “lessons” for Christmas, please let it be something I can use! (Like dance or metal-smithing or hot glass.) I’m actually pretty good at creating a delicious, attractive and healthy meal. And then I put in my facebook status that I was spending the day cooking. And another woman from church made a comment about that being a sign of the apocalypse. There it is again. What’s up with that? Yes, I cook. No, I doubt that it will cause the end of the world. Yet.
I just had to sit and think about it and decide that I have nothing to prove to these people. Anyone can tell by looking at us that we are NOT starving. And though it may be a high priority in some circles for me to stay home, try recipes and take care of my husband… well… that’s just not my life. And who knows, it may never be. And before anyone decides to be sad for my husband, he is a capable man who is actually a good cook in his own right. And his life would be much less dimensional if I deprived him of this creative outlet where he can make the things he likes best. Society’s roles just don’t work for me, and much less when sweet little church ladies seem to suggest (not with their words but with their expectations) that somehow God is wrapped up in these social gender based role issues. Honestly, I’d just like to create a new “normal” where women and men both get to do the things they are good or choose to do - regardless of gender. But look at me, I’ve left blogging and gone on to preaching. Oh wait, a woman preaching? All together now: <GASP!!!>
With a nod to Mad-tante, ;)
We are in an official recession. And apparently we have been since last December. Oh come on! Who didn't already know that?
