Caliente
It was darn hot today. The weather says it hit 106, but my house was a trooper! We never really needed to turn on the AC, though it was 88 degrees in here by the peak of it. We got new blinds installed a week or two ago, and it’s amazing how much keeping the sun out of the windows does for the temperature inside. I’m very pleased! Plus I washed and cleaned all the front windows today before it got hot, so it was looking particularly nice and sparkly when we finally got to pull the shades back up.
I’m doing an excellent job of wasting my break away, which I suppose is one of the activities I actually intended on accomplishing. I do wish I could put myself to task a little better doing school work in addition to the projects and gardening I set up for myself. It’s hard, because if you start the day with school work, you end up wasting the whole day sitting at the desk or table, and then by dinner time I feel like I’ve gotten nothing done, and that I’m a dope for having not left the house all day. However, if you start the day in the garden or doing some housework, like I prefer, you end up spending the whole day doing not school work. Definitely sub-optimal. Perhaps I’ll have myself better put together when we hit July. It really has only been a could of weeks since class ended. I’m always too hard on myself!
I’ve been cooking so much, it really makes me happy. This week I’ve mastered the Denver omelet (why did it take me so long to figure out how to cook an omelet?) and I made red beans and rice for dinner today. Mmm. We’ve got so many delicious left-overs in the fridge, and lots of tasty salad stuff we haven’t even dug into. For all that cooking more means eating well, it does sort of obliterate one of my better excuses to get out of the house. But we’re doing a good job of saving money, anyway. And it means I get to try out a bunch of new ideas – ricotta pancakes, mozarella chicken panninis, baked sole…
Money is still too much on my mind, but I think that’s always the way of things. We did our budget for next year, and calculated it a few times over and came to a very sad conclusion: there’s really no way to pay for car insurance. I’m feeling very deflated after this decision… I was really looking forward to having a car, and having a car of our own we could take places more guilt-free and easy-like. The prospect of Davis without a reliable car next year is rather daunting, though do-able. I guess it’s the first thing we’ve really had to cut out in the “you can’t afford that” category. We’re just going to be barely scraping by next year – we’re already making so much less money than we were when we were both working, and our appointments next year (and the loss of the one-year-only fellowship Lewis had) means we’re making almost a third less than that. We’re canceling all the extraneous costs (our veg box, our carshare dues) but that really leaves just a smidge of an emergency buffer after our necessary budgeted expenses. So unless car insurance is magically rather affordable, we’re sunk. And that means a few things for me, the spelling out of which seems so trite. It means I’m probably giving up the gym, because I can’t seem to muster the gumption to bike there (particularly in 90+ degree weather), and it means I need to start shopping at the Co-op weekly or more often. I’ve been getting so spoiled by the ability to drive to the store and bring home all the bottled water and cat litter my heart desired. Now it’s back to the ol’ cubic feet calculations. Whine, whine. I know. Like I say – it’s just the first of these “we can’t afford this luxury” things, and it’s a cranky one to let go.