Would You Rather....

Would you rather

A) earn 50,000 a year while others make 25,000

 or

B) earn 100,000 a year while others make 250,000?

When Readers Digest posed this question I picked A, much like everybody else so they say.

 I have to admit that when I first chose, I thought I was being frugal.

Actually in all honesty I think what happened is given the choice of the two I believed I wouldn't even need 100,000 to be happy.

Someone with less than 20,000 yearly thinks that making an extra 30,000 sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Then I kept reading, trying to see if the article had a point..... it did!!!!

(this is surprising only because I rarely seem to have a point when I ramble about random things... although that may be why I'm not published and Mr Stewart Foxman is.)

The point was we all suffer a little bit from the "Keeping up with the Joneses"  syndrome.

 (nobody apparently is trying to keep up with the Kardashians anymore.. the Joneses must be slightly more attainable...)

 Actually to paraphrase the article, people are willing to forsake a doubling of salary just so they can outspend their neighbours.  We all just want more more stuff than the next person.

psshhhaw I said... I'm not that shallow... I don't need other people to gauge how happy I am... and then I thought about it... I have a lot of time to sit and think about things like this, as I have an hour drive to work every morning.

 So during this mornings drive I convinced myself that I chose A because I believed 50,000 was enough to make me happy.... especially since if no one else made that much the cost of living would have to go down and I'd be able to get everything I'd ever dreamed of.....

... it had nothing to do with at least I'd have more money than everyone else.

 At this moment of self-celebrating-clarity the Turbine Truck passes me. This is a long-haul truck that is carrying HUGE steel cylinders through the narrow roadways. I've met him every workday for the past month.

 There is always a string of cars behind these trucks, as there is a half hour stretch where you simply can not pass. Driving behind these massive trucks probably turns that half hour stretch into something more like 45 minutes to an hour.

 (I'm not rambling here.. I promise I do have a point)

 This morning I decided to count how many vehicles were subject to this torment.

Eight...... as I counted them I thought to myself, "well I may have a long drive to work but at least I'm not one of those cars....."

... uh.... wait a minute.... did the sight of someone less fortunate than I just make me happier about my own situation??

 no, I'm not that shallow... remember, I just figured that out. Just a flukey coincidence That I hate being stuck behind trucks and I decided to be happy that this morning I wasn't.

 As Karma would have it...I promptly turned the next corner and found myself squarely in behind a large slow moving log truck..... Today of all days.

 Now not only was I stuck behind something on the Port Motoun Road, which in itself drives me absolutely bonkers.  But I also had the weight of a guilty conscience for not being as much of a "love thy neighbor" type Christian as I thought I was.

 I decided not to bother thinking about either thing and started wishing for the zillionth time this summer that I had a car with air conditioning (see, the $50,000 would actually be quite useful to me)

 And on the next turn I see a gaggle of cyclist straining with their orange vests and high flying tail flags to get up the steep hill that I was easily coasting down in my non-air-conditioned car.

Then without a chance for me to tell it to zip it's lips, my subconscious  managed to mummer "Well, you don't have air-conditioning but you're sure as hell not as hot as those poor people"

Any self riotousness I had left, flew out my open window.....

So now I choose to accept it....

 I may buy my sunglasses from the dollars store instead of the Gucci web-site.

 I may have purchase my Steve maddens from Frenchies for $4 instead of $400 from a boutique downtown New York,

 I may not want to go $400, 000 into debt just so I can have the biggest, bestest house on the block.

 But dammit I can't help but gain a little peace to my mind to hear someone, somewhere has it a little worse off than me.

 According to Foxman, that makes me human, which in turn makes it impossible for me to be frugal.

According to my conscience, at least I'm not as bad as so-and-so down the road.....

Brick by brick

If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put foundations under them."
~~~Henry David Thoreau

I tend to build a lot of castles in the air.. in fact I'm pretty sure I need to apply for a second zip code those castles have grown so many.

Some of these castles I've abandoned. I realize now that it's not actually ideal to live in seclusion on the Island for the rest of my life (I like society, most of the time).

I've also given up on becoming a runner ( I just honestly can't give enough damn to keep going).

I have to admit I've let the castle with me being a coupon queen become a little dusty ( first you have to find the coupon, then you have to WANT what it's couponing for, then you have to find the damn product, and if you're prudent enough to actually BRING the coupon with you to the store you still have to actually USE the product in the end... that's a lot of work to save 35 cents)

Another one of those castles included updating every day.. a new and funny quip about life each morning... why not, I have interesting conversations with my clients everyday. I should be able to put one in blog form.

Hell I spend a half hour every morning mindlessly biking around, why not use that time to think of something funny, then sit down, enjoy my morning coffee and breakfast and write.

It was a grande plan m'am, and as grand plans seem to do... it collapsed.

Turns out, I actually have other things that are more important than a daily rant.

Also turns out, a daily rant takes more time to type and post than it does to simply actually RANT about something.

And as you may have noticed from a previous post... it actually does take a lot of concentration to not end up in the ditch while biking with a 45pd Husky attached to you.

Not to mention that my morning coffee and breakfast is actually quite enjoyable because I have NOTHING to do but enjoy my coffee and breakfast.

But I'm not ready to put this castle in the marathon-coupon-hermit category... I simply need to reconfigure the floor plan...and maybe try to post once a week......

I hope.

Just as I'm learning that the house building process takes longer than expected ( yes people told me it would, but who wants to believe everybody else??) I'm also learning that you don't just pick up someday and jam Blogging into your life.

So I'm going to start slowly, one weekly ranting brick at a time. I still have a faint sliver of hope that someday I will be so good that I will be posting everyday....

Perhaps I should start taking my laptop with me on my bike rides....

Hey I have a turbo stick, I can post from the ditch if I have to.

Cheese Please

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
Eleanor Roosevelt

Most Sundays, around 1 pm you can find me cooking. That is something that most people think I can not do.

Most people have tried my cooking, and they actually have reasons to believe that cooking is in fact the thing I can not do.

The problem is sometimes I think I can. It's not really a problem I have to deal with, as much as the people at Sunday dinner.

My family members have become my test subjects. I never even gave them the courtesy of a consent form. I just serve it and pray no one dies.

There are some dishes I may never live down (or be forgiven for). I may have almost killed a few people with some Cajun Potatoes.

And some that are best not served at all. There was an incident with some brown rice that I actually made people put back because it was so bad.

Every once in awhile, I hit jackpot.

Well maybe not jackpot, but at least mediocrity.

I mean, sometimes what I cook is edible.

Those dishes usually involve lots of cheese. I've found if you smother anything in cheese it's generally well accepted.

Perhaps it is because I follow rules such as that, that I am not a success of the culinary kind yet.

Last Sunday I'm proud to say not only did people like it, but they ate all of it!!

This is actually an accomplishment on two levels, one- they've liked your food, and two- your dish only gets washed if it is empty.

Therefor making something that everybody likes means you go home with a clean dish. As opposed to going home with leftovers that sit in you fridge for a week until next Sunday when you need your casserole dish and have to wash it yourself.

I figure, washing dishes is something I'm already pretty good at, so no need to practice that one any more than I have to.

I'm also slightly ashamed to admit that I think last Sunday was the first one EVER that my dish was washed. So I'm excited to try this whole "cooking things people will like" thing again.

First I think I'm going to have to go buy more cheese.

Clipping away at my stress

Stress: The confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it ~

Toady I think found the best stress reliever in the world.

I spent two hours, outside, with bugs, and ticks, doing something I generally loath.

I was gardening.

Well before you break out the knitting needles and blue hair dye, hear me out.

I was actually pruning grape vines.

I should mention that this activity is actually as far away from actual gardening that I can get. There has been no planting. Or watering. Or weeding.

Well I was clipping away 1 1/2 foot spruce trees. I guess you can consider that weeding.

The vines have run our property. We havee been tearing them out of apple tress and running them through the chipper for weeks now.

That part I don' t consider gardening. That's actually just general destruction.

It is also the polar opposite of a stress reliever. It's a proven fact that the more time you spend trying to get rid of 100 yr old grapevines, the more they tangle and snag and remind you that they've been around for that long for a reason.

Pruning on the other hand, is tedious, yet insanely gratifying. Like Kinder Surprises, only without the calories. (you may wonder how I can find Kinder Eggs tedious... it is getting the stickers straight, they stress me out, but that's a completely different rant, for another day.)

The vines I've been pruning have been strung up in row, but not much else has been done to them in 70 odd years. Until I got the inspiration that I want to cultivate them to make homemade wine (that is stage two of the stress relief)

It's almost as good as cutting my own hair, only without all the silly walking around like a shorn sheep until a professional fixes it.

In fact, I know just about as much about pruning grapevines properly as I do about cutting hair. I just hack away at what looks dead to me, and try to make it all even.

I should add that my excitement for this new found activity has persevered through two and a half sections of one row.... I have about six more rows with 7-8 sections each left to prune.

I'm considering this as more of a long term hobby, rather than a weekend project.

I also have no clue if all my stress relief is just stressing out the vines. I have to wait until fall to see the fruits of my labor. Or lack there of.

But at least I'm giving my hair a break.