4 posts tagged “my mundane life”
We've had to really crack down and budget since I quit my job to go back to school. Our Springfield utility bill included all utilities, electric gas, water and sewer in one bill. When we moved here we got our first utility bill. I looked at the short period amount and made a rough calculation of what a full month's worth would be and set that as our utility budget. A couple of weeks later another utility bill showed up. Apparently the first one was just electric and gas, the second, seperate bill was sewer and water. I redid my rough calculation and increased our utility budget. Then our first full month electric bill showed up and I had very much underestimated the full month amount of that bill. So I increased our utility budget. Today our first full month sewer and water bill showed up and I must be the most optimistic person in the world, because I sure underestimated that one as well. First I stared in disbelief at it, then I opened up our budget spreadsheet and stared at it for a while, and then I baked a blueberry cobbler and made homemade vanilla ice cream. The picture is actually from the last time I made cobbler and ice cream. Today's is still baking. I'll worry about the utility bill tomorrow.
Our new dining room table. The chairs required quite a bit of assembly, so we didn't get to try it out yesterday. We will have dinner there tonight. Mara is excited to eat somewhere that the entire table won't shake when someone cuts their food. Dave and I were both impressed with the butterfly leaf that folds up and stows away underneath the table top. This picture was taken without the leaf.
When approaching a project, my father takes the attitude of if you are going to go, you should go all out. When my mother asked him to build me a trunk like one I had fallen in love with at a craft fair, he designed a template so that he could batch produce them. All of my female relatives got one as a gift that year. When I asked for a simple book shelf to put my text books on, the piece kept growing and becoming more complicated until it finally morphed into a china hutch. Dad approaches gardening with this same zeal.
My mother suggests every year that maybe they should scale back the garden a bit. Maybe just plant enough for them and their family. Every year my father plants enough garden to feed a good sized village. My parents give produce away by the sackful each summer. When I was growing up, I hated that garden. I was not much of a vegetable eater back then, and I was not then, nor am I now, a gardner. I don't enjoy it, and I don't have the knack for it that my parents and older brother seem to have. Plants left in my care sense the futility of the situation and give up and die immeadiately. I realize now that my parents really did not make me share in the gardening much, but at the time, I felt like I did a lot. I remember sitting on the front porch or at the kitchen table snapping beans. I hated the dusty, dry, fuzzy feeling of the beans on my fingers. I remember standing at a sink full of corn cobs and cold water trying to get all the little silks off and just getting frustrated when they would stick all over my hands.
This morning I finally made it to the local farmer's market and bought some produce. As I paid $4 a pound for home grown green beans, I realized how much I took for granted having all the fresh vegetables that we could eat every summer. I miss eating BLT's made with fresh from the garden tomatoes and lettuce. I miss eating green beans at every meal for weeks on end. I miss cooking up two huge pots of sweet corn for both lunch and dinner. I miss the garden that I disliked so much back then. I get sort of sad and nostolgic thinking about summertime meals as a kid at my parent's house. Now if I could I just figure out how to turn my nostalgia into a green thumb, I'd be in business.
What did you do this weekend?
This weekend I learned exactly how dependent on the internet I am. Dave and Mara left early Friday morning to visit Dave's parents for the weekend. Friday afternoon our internet connection at home quit working. For the next 24 hours my sole focus became getting the internet back. I made numerous calls to Dave and everytime we came up with a new idea to fix it my spirits would soar and then I would be crushed when it didn't work. Finally, Saturday night we figured out that it was our wireless router that wasn't working and I could get to the internet as long as I kept my computer plugged directly into the dsl modem. A huge sense of relief washed over me. I felt like I could finally relax and enjoy my weekend. I'm sure that my need for the internet is heightened by the fact that this summer I'm staying at home with Mara in a new town where we don't really know anyone, in an apartment with no tv reception and very little radio reception, but I feel like the internet has become my only connection to the outside world and that really concerns me.
