Duncan's Blog

Write and Live on Your Budget​

It should be a piece of cake, right? Identify long-term goals that require money. Prioritize monthly spending from necessary to trivial. Add your net income and subtract expenses. Adjust planned spending or consider additional income as necessary.

Even though I have ten checking accounts from financial institutions (banks and credit unions, mostly), I still find budgeting one of the more difficult household tasks. Cleaning up after myself is probably number one. So what’s the problem?

My housing payment is the same every month. Utilities fluctuate seasonally, but I more or less know that there will be a bill and that a mean average should be set aside for gas, electric, water, trash, phones, and cable/Internet. Health insurance is paid directly from the paycheck. Car insurance is one thing that I review regularly. But, when I find a low price should I jump on it? I wonder if changing car coverage frequently might be upsetting the cart!

The plan seems so nice and neat and useful on paper until … I see things in the grocery store that I decide I need to have, or my car decides that it is in need of new tires, or my dentist tells me that my co-payment is going to be higher than expected, or the Dollar Tree raises its rates to $1.25+ per item.

I’m pretty thrifty with food and manage to live on rice, beans, and produce. I only eat meat outside the house and even then it’s usually just chicken. I also don’t eat out more than once a week. No smoking habit. No drinking habit.

Thrift is also a habit that spills into eating. The meals are budgeted, weighed, or measured. Most Americans recoil at the notion of weighing or measuring plated food, but I find it comforting. It gives me control over what I eat. I guess most folks feel they would rather eat with wild abandon and suffer the consequences of over-consumption with excess weight to carry.

Both weight and money have been life-long struggles. One day my day will come!

It's hard to explain to people who have never been to or lived in a communist country that there are actually things that might be there that warm the heart or evoke memories that aren't harsh. As a grandchild of persons who had escaped the Holocaust, I know full well that there are places on the planet that some people would rather wipe completely from their memory.
I've never been to Cuba. In fact the only Spanish speaking countries that I have been to are Mexico and Costa Rica. Each country has it's own cuisine, spices, preferred drinks. Cuba is no exception. For me, I am more concerned with a flavorful meal rather than something that is laced with aromatic herbs or hot spices. I never understood the thrill of getting your tongue and pallet burned on a spice or of getting your nose offended by an herb that smells like armpit or soap.
Cuban food never seems to fail. Whether I'm having a piece of roasted chicken, plantains, white rice, black beans, or even a bowl of soup, I always find myself comforted by the dishes placed before me. Of course, it's a country that's run by a pretty oppressive regime and I would not want to spend much time there.

Sometimes in my life I wax nostalgic for simpler things and times. They can even be times and events with which I have had first-hand experience. I think about the wringer machines that way. I remember seeing them at a local car wash. The machine seemed to run for 5 or 10 minutes and then some guy would take a break and run the wash rags through the wringer and hang them up.
Then once, ages ago, I remember spending a long weekend in Vermont at a friend's home and I saw that he had a machine. I asked him if I could use it and he seemed puzzled why anyone would want to do laundry on a weekend when laundry day is Monday. So, he explained to me how it worked and what was needed. The same wash water is used for the entire laundry (no matter how many loads you use). Water had to be manually drawn for this (he had a water pump in his kitchen (he was upscale because he didn't have to go outside to fetch water). I never got the feeling as if the clothes were ever fully rid of the soap from them. Even if they went through rinse water... the rinse water would be recycled as well. Fortunately, his machine was electric.
it required more work and attention that I probably would have wanted to spend and there was a specific order with which everything needed to be done. He was also fussy about how the clothes were to go out for hanging (they needed to be hung upside down and two items that were next to each other needed to share a clothes pin.
It seemed energy efficient but required a lot more work than I was interested in expending. I prefer my city life and do well with the American spin machine. Still, I do think about those machines from time to time and wonder just how different a shirt would feel if it went through the wringer.
<SHRUG> ... It's about as contemplative as thinking about using a manual typewriter every day!

Ever know anyone who's been in the hoosegow? A friend of mine has been behind bars for a few years for and is going to be released to rehab in a couple of months. He's all stoked about getting out. I don't blame him. I cherish my freedom; an expression well worth learning to say in many languages.

I've been writing to him to keep his spirits up. I have not, however, hold him that he is not welcome in my home or in my life. I wanted to give him hope to get over the hump of incarceration. Sadly, he has brought too much pain to too many people and he has never owned up to any of it. It's a long story that is laden with gossip so I can't / won't post the details here.
He is a role model to me, however, as a person who has never been approached by law enforcement or accused of wrong doing.

vogue [ vohg ]
noun
something in fashion, as at a particular time:
Short hairdos were the vogue in the twenties.

popular currency, acceptance, or favor; popularity:
The book is having a great vogue.

When I was younger (before the days of the Internet), we could only listen to music if we had the recording. These could be on tape, 8-track, cassette, or phonograph record. By the time CDs came into fashion, I was already somewhat grown up. It took time to get a recording ready. You'd have to find the album, the 45, or the position of the recording on the tape.
Of course, if you were a musician, you could pull out the sheet music and play it on your instrument. However, if you instrument were a reeded woodwind, brass, or recorder-like instrument, you'd be hard-pressed to sing along (unless you had the golden voice of Marion Lush).
Anyway, there are times when I think about what I'd like to hear when I feel as if the world is: (a) caving in on me, (b) slinging biohazardous waste my way, (c) dealing me a hand of crap, and so on, and so forth. The above-mentioned was a 1965 recorded song on the A-side of a 45 by the Vogues, a Pittsburgh boy band. (Are they still a boy band after they've graduated high school?).
It's a pick-me-up tune with clipped, short phrases. "You're the one," "Baby, you're the one..." It must be nice to have a you're-the-one in one's life. It's even better when the you're-the-one feels the same way as the person who declares that the you're-the-one is the one. I think about that aspect of life and relationships when I have reveries about the ones who have crossed my path and turned into disasters. Some never quite grew. Others became bitter and mean. And then there are some who simply fell off the RADAR. No Facebook, no twidder, no hits on web searches. Kind of reminds me of the time I told someone that when I was growing up, my Mother would make us tuna fish sandwiches with Peacock tuna rather than with the more expensive Bumble Bee brand. "Peacock? Never heard of it." So, I did a search online and nothing came up. There was a reference to the store at which the Peacock brand tuna had been purchased:

"One indoor market was directly across the street from Jake’s pickle stand. As soon as you entered, your salivary glands began working overtime as the intoxicating aroma from the heartburn-inducing fare at
Feuer’s Appetizing overwhelmed your nostrils. Squeezing past his barrels of salted herring, trays of
pickled herring, slabs of smoked salmon begging to be sliced, platoons of smoked whitefish, and tubular
salamis aligned like artillery shells, you came upon the chicken stand."

Tuna is a staple in my life. Wouldn't say that it releases me from a funk (like the Vogues' tune), but it is--shall we say--a comfort food.