Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: dailyprompt

  • Budgeting: A Tale Of Two Lives (Then and Now)

    Write about your approach to budgeting.

    Over the decades and over the years, my approach to budgeting has changed.

    Partly because of the times, but mostly because of the circumstances.

    Time was I had to budget to the penny every single month.

    Part of this was because my mom was a CPA and budgeted to the penny every month so that was normal for me. But mostly it was because I was broke.

    I was in graduate school with rent to pay, then I was a lowly-paid teacher with a mortgage to pay, and every single month money was tight. Exceptionally tight.

    At the time, I used a chart on graph paper to keep track of every necessary bill (mortgage, electricity) and reconciled the checkbook to the penny, and if a bill didn’t arrive on time I called to ask how much it was so I could pay it and not worry about it showing up unexpectedly. Every month was down to the dollar, and more often than not the last week of the month was a reliance on broccoli soup since broccoli was cheap. I remember joining a mail-order coffee club because they gave a free coffee machine, and that was the only way I could afford a coffee machine. Adding to that was the city of Seattle, of course, which had exceptionally high license renewal fees/taxes each year for car renewals despite the fact I was driving a very basic and aging car, so every August when that was due I’d moonlight a second or third job to cover that expense so I didn’t have to fret about it.

    But overall it was hell.

    Today budgeting is easier.

    I have some money in savings, I am steadily building my retirement savings for 10 or 15 years down the road, and we’re good about not living beyond our means, and all my financial obligations except credit card* are on autopay, and my daily expenses go on credit card, so I don’t have to hyper manage my budget anymore. In fact, although I religiously check every expenditure that goes out, I don’t budget per se, and I don’t fret per se, although if we have a big expense coming up (trip to see family, house repair) I’ll put the money for it aside in a separate account.

    It’s hard to be poor. It’s exhausting to be poor. It’s stressful to be poor. There is absolutely no margin for error to be poor. So for me when I was part of the working poor (much of my adult life, actually, given that I gave my 20s and part of my 30s to teaching) I relied heavily on a budget, had no room for extras, and kept track of every single penny.

    I’m grateful that in recent years I can be more re-active and less stringently uptight. It makes life more enjoyable. And it also gives me compassion for the people who are part of the working poor like I was.

    NOTES

    (*) Not having credit card on autopay forces me to go through the bill each month in a timely manner to comb for errors and/or fraudulent charges while also keeping an eye out on my spending habits for the month so I can adjust if necessary.

  • Inadvertant Criminal: Killing Stress (Illegally?) In Alaska

    Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

    In 2003 I was stressed.

    I was in software sales, selling to the State of Alaska, and 600-employee company I worked for was largely dependent on our client (State of Alaska) signing our new sales contract to meet our numbers for the month.

    The sales organization I was working for, like most sales organizations, was not a tolerant organization. They needed me to bring in the new contract and by gosh if I didn’t bring it in then quite possibly I was going to be fired. So I felt a lot of pressure.

    A wrinkle was, I’m ethical. I refuse to lie, cheat, bully or bullshit to get a contract signed, so I was essentially relying on good old fashioned pleading (“please can you sign this by the 31st??”) and client relationship (if a client likes me they’re more likely to try to get it signed on time) to get this thing signed on time, but the reality is I didn’t know if my client could get approval from the state to sign it by the end of the month.

    It was evening of the second to last day of the month, and the next day would determine whether or not the contract would be signed on time, and my boss (who was under the same pressure I was) and I flew up to Alaska to try to nudge this contract along, partially because it’s true the squeaky wheel gets the oil. That night, after spending an afternoon with the client, we went out to a dinner, had a few more glasses of wine than we should have, then joined some other associates at a local bar for another beer or two, mostly to drown out the stress we were feeling over getting the contract signed.

    I wasn’t obnoxiously drunk, but I was pretty tipsy by the time I left the bar and walked the few blocks to my hotel.

    Little did I know that I’d broken the law that night.

    According to several online sources, Alaska has a state law prohibiting being intoxicated at a bar. When that law was signed, and why it was signed, I don’t know, but it does appear to be a law all the same. And I definitely had had a glass of wine or two too many that night.

    Thankfully the contract was signed the next day, so the deal was signed and my job was secure for at least a day until the next morning when it was the first of the month and the rat race started all over again. But best of all, I didn’t get fined or jailed for unintentionally breaking a law that evening 🙂

  • My Autobiography Title Would Be “Ugly Boy” (AKA Takes A Licking And Keeps On Ticking)

    If there were a biography about you, what would the title be?

    As a teen, I was teased a lot about my looks.

    But my favorite tale is the time in eighth grade when my classmate burst into class. “Hey everyone, get this!” He called out to the class. “Tony’s grandma was looking at our yearbook last night and stopped and pointed at a picture and said, ‘Now that boy’s ugly.’ So Tony looks who to see it was and it was Rob!” Of course, I’m Rob in that story, and I can still hear the laughter from my classmates.

    To make a long story short, that was a painful comment but I kept my head up. And I have many many faults, but I’m a reasonably confident person who didn’t let that teasing about my looks in my formative years bring me down and in fact had a lot of fun in my teen years. I’m actually kind of proud of that if I’m honest, that I hung in there and resisted the urge to withdraw from the world despite some heartless ribbing along the way.

    I’ve had a lot of luck in my life. But I’ve also had my share of times where I was kicked in the groin. I had undiagnosed autoimmune disease as a kid but somehow emerged from that reasonably productive as an adult. My first marriage was to a selfish narcissist who eventually kicked me to the curb after extracting every morsel that she possibly could from me but again I emerged from that too (and today am re-married to a much better person). And perhaps luckiest of all, I was diagnosed with a potentially terminal (50/50) lung disease at age 42 but not only survived that but emerged from it mostly okay.

    So I feel like I’ve lived a lucky life where I have so much to be grateful for, but also one where I’m frequently called “Ugly Boy” (mostly figuratively but one time literally) that I have had to stave off and then emerge from. And I have done just that.

    I feel so fortunate for all that. So grateful for that. I am proud to say that I was called “Ugly Boy.” And that I emerged from that a-oh-kay 🙂

  • Living A Different Life Than My Parents (AKA My Parents At My Age)

    PROMPT: What were your parents doing at your age?

    I was always 5-10 years behind my parents.

    By the time they were 20, my parents were married (to each other 🙂 ). They started careers at 21, having kids (me) at 21 and they owned a house by 22. Later, they upgraded their house by age 27, started earning decent money at 30, and making great money at age 40.

    Me?

    I was married (for the first time) at 25. Started my career job at age 29. Had kids and a house at 30. And started earning decent money at age 35.

    Always I was about five or ten years behind them. And that was okay.

    By some miracle I caught up to them by age 40.

    At age 40 I had some lucky breaks in my career, and I too suddenly started making pretty great money, just like my parents themselves had done at 40. Mom was proud of me, telling me that I was farther ahead of them by age 40, but the reality is we were about even.

    Then life took me on a different path for me.

    I got lung disease at 43. What started out as some fatigue and breathless when I exercised at age 40 was diagnosed as potentially-fatal lung disease when I was 43. That irrevocably changed the course of my life.

    Whereas my parents spent their 40s having fun and accumulating money for retirement, I spent my 40s managing my health and holding on for dear life to my life and my career.

    I spent countless hours in the doctor’s office. I lost a job, then found and lost another job. Meanwhile, after 5 years of trying to push and horse whip me back into my past successes despite my lung disease, my (now ex) wife lung gave up on me and moved on, first emotionally and then completely.

    By 50 my parents were living their greatest life and could retire at any time.

    By 50 I was job hopping, making half what I’d been at age 40, job hopping, managing my health as a second job, and hoping I could scrape enough together to retire by age 70.

    In short, by age 50 my parents had been a LOT better off than I was.

    And that’s okay.

    I’m not my parents. My life is not my parents’ life. I was blessed because life could have just used my lung disease to kill me, but instead it spared me and I learned that I am a survivor, a battler, and surprisingly resilient.

    And, overall, happy. Happier than I was at age 40, for sure.

    I’m remarried. I won’t retire rich but by age 70 I’ll be okay.

    In short, I was behind my parents, then caught up to my parents, then life pushed them ahead while knocking me back. And all in all I’m grateful. Because at the end of the day, all that matters to me is carving out some joy, managing my stress, and being alive.

  • An Average Home (AKA My Dream Home)

    Write about your dream home.

    There was a time when I daydreamed a LOT about my perfect home. Oh my gosh I wanted a perfect home.

    My perfect home was large, of course, with a large yard, of course. It was on a quiet street with a view of the mountains and water. And there was a spacious swimming pool and a sport court complete with a basketball hoop. And everything (!!!) was in perfect condition, not because I was a relentless do-it-myselfer but because I had a staff of people to keep everything in perfect condition for me.

    How much I yearned for all this. Sometimes that yearning hurt my heart. A lot.

    That was then.

    All those things are less important to me now. I’ve learned that I have a lot of friends with perfect houses who I can visit. And that since I have a visual imagination (I’m not a visual person but I have a visual imagination) that I can image living in a perfect home. And that a massive perfect house with an attending staff headspace and energy. And would cost a lot of ongoing money.

    For me, now, my perfect house is an average house. A smaller house. It has a few bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms, an artificial yard that stays green and needs no mowing. It’s large enough that the kids can crash when they need to.

    I love our house now. It has all these things. Plus a lot of trees. Right in the heart of Seattle. It’s Larissa’s house, not my house. But in my lifetime I’ve owned two homes and a fourplex: that is a lot of homes (seven, technically) to manage. So I’m okay sharing Larissa’s house with her, sharing the upkeep with her while allowing her to reap the financial benefits of homeownership (while I myself am invested in stocks and bonds to cover our living costs in retirement). That’s okay with me.

    I really am grateful that life can change us. That once I yearned for bigger things, but now I’m okay with simpler things while also admiring/helping people who want/need bigger things. There’s no perfect answer to a dream home, it’s what works for the person. For me, I’m right where I want to be.

  • Is There Any More Evidence That Earth Is Hell Than No One Breaking In To Clean Our House?

    It’s a long decidedly-uninteresting story as to why, but our cleaners don’t clean our basement, just our main floor. Which means cleaning the basement is on us, which means in busy times (nearly always) the basement doesn’t get cleaned as often as it should except for our office area.

    This morning I noticed some dirt left by our contractors (or me) next to the basement exit door. It needs to be swept. And it sure as heck won’t get swept today. Yes, I keep a small broom upstairs to sweep by that door, but in my long list of priorities sweeping the floor next to the basement door is not high on that list.

    Which makes me wonder: Why don’t good break-ins happen??

    We’re forever worried about people breaking in to steal our laptops from our office. And it’s possible that can happen if we don’t take precautions like not leaving the laptops in view when we’re not around. But there is basically zero chance of anyone breaking in and stealing the dirt by the back door.Of breaking in and sweeping, or cleaning the bathroom, or upgrading/optimizing our laptops, or vacuuming the couch.

    Which is more evidence that Earth is actually Hell. That somewhere out there in the omniverse at some point in the past we were condemned to amnesia and prison or to hell, and it’s here, on Earth. I love life. And I love our Earth. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hell.

    For example:

    Why is paranoid schizophrenia always bad? Why is it that the unfortunate souls* who suffer from it have misguided delusions that often hurt themselves or others? Why aren’t they walking in an imaginary world filled with happy people who tell them to do amazing things, rather than a scary world where voices tell them to do bad things?

    Why are people always abducted for bad things? For money, or to hurt them? Why isn’t there ever a time where someone disappears and it’s because some good samaritan crazy person kidnapped** them to HELP them by curing their cancer or making them more youthful or something? Like suddenly our friend is abducted, then a few days later they’re returned with that cancerous growth removed?

    Anyway. Earth is Hell. I’m convinced of it. And I need to look no further than the unswept dirt on my floor and how there is zero chance of some hooligan sweeping it away for us.

    NOTES:

    (*) Note: a recently past family acquaintance had this — it’s awful)?

    (**) My heart goes out to the Guthrie family. And also the families of the 90,000 outstanding missing persons cases in the US.

  • AutoPay and Digital Music Are The Greatest Inventions In My Lifetime :)

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    The world has changed so much in my lifetime.

    When I was born, we’d never been to the moon. It’s possible it was all a hoax and we still haven’t been to the moon, but let’s assume that it’s real and we indeed have been to the moon. That was the year after I was born. Pretty amazing. In my lifetime, so much has changed, of course. There are too many inventions and changes to even begin listing since we all know what those are. But, for me, the greatest inventions have been autopay and digital music.

    How much I hated paying bills before the 2000s. How much drudgery it was. There were checks to write, stamps to buy so I could send in those checks, reconciliation at the end of the month to make sure everything was accurate. Then for every day spending there was so much speculation how much cash I might need, then persistent worry I might lose or miscalculate the cash. Now it all — everything — just goes on my Visa which I can then peruse in a few minutes at the end of the month, challenge quickly online with Visa if something seems amiss, and then pay with the click of a button. Every expense imaginable goes on that credit card, and it has just made everything so much easier to deal with!

    And then there’s music.

    How much time did I waste in my life making mixed tapes. Or rewinding cassettes. Or cleaning records. How much money I spent for albums that overall I didn’t like very much but had two songs I liked. And how many times did I have to listen to a song over and over and over again on the radio until the point a song that I might have once liked became absolutely intolerable to listen to, not to mention all the ads in-between songs. But with digital on-demand music, every song I could possibly imagine is right there for free.

    The world has changed so much. Many of these have been bad, some of these have been good, and there’s no doubt it has changed the world so very much in 50 short years.

    But my favorite changes are on-demand music and auto pay. They’ve made my life so much easier and more enjoyable — every single day.

  • A Peaceful Morning Coffee Outside Makes Any Day An Ideal Day (AKA What Is My Ideal Day End To End?)

    Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.

    My ideal day is sunny.

    Maybe it has rained overnight, maybe not, but in the morning when I wake up the sun is out, the windows are open, and I can hear the birds singing. The temperature is pleasant, and of course the flowers are in bloom.

    My perfect day involves leisurely coffee with Larissa. We’re dressed and sitting outside sipping coffee. It’s still on the early side and the day is still fresh. Maybe we’re on our patio, maybe we’re with family, maybe we’re on a rooftop deck somewhere. Maybe we’re near a blue ocean, maybe we’re in view of the mountains. None of that matters. As long as it’s sunny and mild, and the air is fresh, and we’re sipping our coffees together outside, it’s all good.

    Meanwhile, we have some savings, our bills are paid, we no debt, our families are healthy and happy, and we’re not rushing off to some mandatory situation that day. Basically we don’t have any major worries at the moment. I’m not saying none of the situations don’t exist right now, but any ideal day must have these situations going on (or not going on) in the background.

    After that? I don’t care. Because already it’s an ideal day.

    Life is hard. But if we can carve out any moments of joy during the day, and we can start out the day with a peaceful coffee, and we have no significant worries (health, financial, safety, famine, drought) at the moment, then that is a terrific terrific day. Anything else is just gravy IMO.

  • How The Passage Of Time Has Influenced My Perspective

    How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

    How The Passage Of Time Has Influenced My Perspective

    I was 43 the first time I started to relax.

    For 20 years of my adulthood I’d fretted and toiled. Fretted and toiled, mostly about each of life’s milestones.

    First, it was to graduate college. I was going to university in a small town that I didn’t like very much, because being in my early 20s I didn’t want to be in a small town — I wanted to be in the city! So I wanted out of that college, and the best way to do that was to graduate, so I fretted and toiled my way toward graduation.

    Then I graduated and it was time to get my career going. Except we were in a mini-recession (early 90s) at the time and no one was hiring recent college graduates. So I worked a series of grunt jobs as a mover and a DJ and bank teller and tutor, and meanwhile went back to school to earn my teaching certification. I’d love to say those were good times, but they weren’t: it was a time of very low checking account balances  and day-to-day drudgery and all through those years I fretted and I toiled.

    Then I got out of school and got my first career job and then wanted so desperately to have a house. I felt like houses were out of my reach, and felt a lot of resentment at older generations for creating a world where I couldn’t afford a house. I spent a lot of time fretting and toiling although after a few years I was actually able to buy a house (!).

    And so it went.

    Every single step of the way, year after year of my 20s and then my 30s, I fretted and toiled. Fretted and toiled. I was pretty miserable most of the time, if I’m honest. Yes, I had my moments of joy, and on the surface everyone always commented how happy I seemed, but there was just this overwhelming sense of toiling and fretting surging through my veins like an invisible poison. I worked and worked, and when I wasn’t working I was taking care of the kids and the house and covering for an always-absent (now ex) wife, and all the time I worried and fretted about this and that, always worrying about the next milestone.

    Then there was hope!

    There was a moment — actually two — when I was 43 when I finally relaxed.

    The first moment was on an early morning bike ride. We were at our vacation home, which I loved BUT which I was forever worried about paying for, and we were at the house one summer week when I was on a dawn mountain bike ride through the forest. There was a moment along the river when suddenly I realized the early morning sun was on my face, and the birds were singing all around me, and the river was murmuring next to me, and meanwhile the sweet smell of nature was in the air. And suddenly I just stopped. I stopped, got off my bike, and just soaked in that moment for a minute, then two minutes, then 15 minutes. There literally was not another human being around me, and I suddenly wondered if I were in heaven because it was just soooooo peaceful. Up until that time, I’d never experienced a moment like that before.

    The next moment when I relaxed was THE moment when I relaxed. Age 43, and having dinner with my parents, and was making great money, and my work seemed to love me, and the kids were teens and seemed happy, and my (now ex) wife was around helping a little more often, and I was even still in my athletic prime (I’d batted .920 in and still regularly making diving catches during the recently-ended softball season), and suddenly I thought, “I’ve made it. I’m going to be okay.” I actually thought life might freeze at that very moment, where I’d be okay and age 43 forever.

    But time didn’t stop. And (thankfully) life didn’t stop.

    It kept on coming. Moment after moment, day after day, year after year.

    That was way over 10 years ago.

    In the decade since that moment at dinner with my parents, so many changes have happened in my life. I was let go for the very first time, and then for the second time. I battled a fluke lung disease (successfully, thank goodness). I got divorced and then after promising myself I’d never date again actually dated again and got remarried again (to a much more present person than my ex was). And meanwhile the years just keep on coming. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

    To me, the most shocking things aren’t the life changes I’ve undergone since I was 43 (actually, each one of them has been a blessing). It’s that each year just keeps on passing. That life just keeps on passing. One year after the other. And it makes me realize the folly of toiling and fretting about milestones, about wanting to achieve certain things on a certain timeframe in life at the expense of being in the moment. Because life is in that moment. My amazing ex-grandmother-in-law used to say, “Life is what happens while you’re making your future plans.” How true that is.

    I wish I could go back in time. And to tell myself to stop fretting. And to stop toiling. Because that stole so much happiness from me, and sucked 20 years of my life away.

    But.

    But!

    I’m here now. And presumably I still have a few decades of good life left in me. And I’ve been influenced by the passage of time in that I’ve learned to just be in the moment, to just feel joy in the here and now, and to take a moment to appreciate each and every day.

    Regret is folly. Better is to take what we’ve learned and to apply that to our present and future. Because our present and future is all we have in our life. And I’m just so grateful that time has taught me to appreciate today.

    Wishing you a great day.

    NOTES:

    • Every day WordPress offers a writing prompt. I’ve never been a writing prompt person but actually have been enjoying these prompts. This is my response to today’s prompt.

  • The Folly Of A To-Do List (AKA My Non-Existent To Do List)

    Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.

    WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT NEVER GETS DONE ON MY TO DO LIST? Nothing. Because nothing is on my to-do list. Because the world doesn’t make time anymore for to-do lists. Explained…

    Years ago I carried around two notebooks everywhere I went.

    The first notebook were my notes. Every call, every meeting, every day, I jotted down the date and who I was talking to and then took detailed notes in real time, often writing in my notebook while keeping my eyes focused on the person in front of me (i.e. I was the master of the no-look note-taking 🙂 ).

    The second notebook was my to-do list. After every single meeting, I copied my to-do items into that list, then every single day I religiously reviewed that list to make sure I was addressing everything I needed (or promised) to take care of.

    Sometime in the early 2010s, I switched to Excel — I had a tab devoted to my to-do list, and then in 2015 I moved from Excel to One Note for keeping track of Asks. In fact, OneNote — and the tables feature in particular — was awesome!

    One of the things I’m most proud of was in 2019 when I had a critical opportunity I was working on. My larger team was struggling (way behind in its numbers) so needed the revenue from this major opportunity I was working on, and my client really needed our (or at least someone’s) SaaS solution to increase their online sales by 400%. Because it was important, the opportunity had a lot of people weighing in on it: my CEO, the client’s CEO, my client’s CFO, my client’s head of PMO, my client’s dozen mid-level people contributing to or influencing the buying process, and the Client Executive Sponsor who was funding the project, not to mention my internal sales engineers and stressed out sales manager who needed the deal to close to presumably keep his job.

    Every single day during the critical middle-few months of this opportunity several items were added to my to-do list for that opportunity, and each of them had multiple facets. In short, I had a to-do list that was scores of items long that contributed to whether or not I would win a $4.1M contract and help a client. If I’m honest, it was a daunting undertaking.

    But I’m happy to say I did it, and I did it successfully. I juggled all those items, completed them to satisfaction in that the client said my follow up is what won us the opportunity (vs the two other primary competitors), we signed the contract and basically I owe it all to my use of the tables feature in OneNote wherein one column was the to-do item, the next column was the requestor, and the third column were my running notes on where I was. First thing every single morning at 5:30am, while most of the world was still sleeping, I started running through that to-do list to make sure all my i’s were getting dotted and t’s were getting crossed and everything was moving forward schedule.

    But that was then.

    Now I don’t have a to do list.

    Why?

    Because life is too fast for a to do list.

    It’s fast and it’s too overwhelming.

    There are too many asks from too many sources and a modern-day expectation of instant turn-around times. (I remember a client asking for information in 1999 — I got it to her early the next morning and she said, “That was too fast! I thought it would take a week or so.” But in the 2020s I feel like everyone expects follow-up information not next week and not today but RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW). So there is almost no point to a to-do list because by the time I jot the item down the requestor is already wanting it to be done.

    So, instead I take notes, bold the key items as I type them in case I need to reference them later, and then get it done as soon as I possibly can, which is usually right now. If something is worth doing, it’s generally worth doing now. And so now is generally when I try to do it. If it’s important enough, and it takes more than a few moments to complete, then I’ll remember to do it, and if it’s not important enough to do right now or to remember that I need to do it (sort of like I don’t need to put down on my to-do list to pay a bill — paying bills is important enough that I’ll remember it). then maybe it shouldn’t be on a to-do list anyway.

    It’s ironic that in an over-busy world a To-Do list has become almost outdated. Because if I take a few days to respond, then it’s probably too late, and if something has been promised and is important enough to promise, than I should do it now not tomorrow. So there just is no point to a to-do list.

    So, when I’m asked what never gets done on my to-do list, I say this: nothing. Because there is nothing on my to-do list. If I’m being honest, I wish that weren’t true — it was a friendlier and less stressful world 25 years ago, when I had a notebook filled with my to do items and a week was acceptable except in case of major fires. But it is what it is, and all I can do is adapt to what is.

    DISCLAIMER:

    • Every day wordpress issues a prompt and I’m finding myself enjoying answering that prompt. Today’s was: What is something on my to do list that never gets done.
    • No AI was used in the creation of this response. It is 100 percent organic which is why it isn’t all that great hahahah