This week I reviewed Kiva loans from Phillippines and Kenya, many for people wanted about $175 for a sanitary toilet. Many of the borrower photos show the borrower standing in a thatched hut or sometimes an outhouse built of cinder blocks. It will have the toilet itself but there is no plumbing. I have often wondered how they make do and I guess they must dig a pit in the ground under the toilet (?) and use a bucket of water to wash it all down. In any event, it's a good example of how a relatively small amount of money can be life-changing for someone living where the average annual income is about $4,000.

I visited a native plant garden nursery in my area with a friend who is as passionate about native plants as I am. She's chair of my town's conservation commission, and also serves on the same board as I do that promotes awareness of Japanese knotweed and how damaging to the environment it is.

I enjoyed walking around and talking plants with her. I bought a Pearly everlasting. (I always enjoy the names of these plants.) The next day, I dug up 2 smallish beds here that contained lily of the valley (spreading into my lawn after enjoying itself since before I moved here) and a daisy that was pretty for a brief week or two but rarely attracted pollinators. I'd like to get 2 more pearly everlasting to fill in that bed.

The other bed, nearby, is shaded for most of the day by large rhododendrons, so while I haven't yet settled on what to plant there, I'm thinking maybe great blue lobelia, maybe with some geranium maculatum. I have a small patch of the lobelia and it's doing great, but probably gets too much sun in its current location.

Here's a picture I took last night of a bumblebee bedded down for the night inside a lobelia flower. It closely resembles how I would feel after a long day at work. It is said that male bumblebees, which do not return to the nest after leaving, often bunk down at night in the flowers they are foraging on, both for protection from predators and also for warmth.

We're in the middle of some very nice weather here in New England so I've been spending more time catching up on yard work. Which means other things get ignored, like house cleaning.

I was doing well avoiding poison ivy rash until early August. I vaguely remember something barely brushing up against my forearm, and I remember even better scrubbing the area with Dawn dish soap, which I'd read was just as effective as specially formulated products like Tec-nu in preventing the rash. But it didn't work. I also have it on the top of one foot, which really puzzles me since I always wear socks and boots. Anyway, neither spot looks like it's spreading at all.

I heard back from my agent on auto and home insurance. As I was anticipating, no one can really beat my current insurer. I get a lot of discounts with them, the biggest being roughly $230 for having driven around with a tracker for 6 months several years ago to earn a permanent discount that transferred to my new car. I was also able to save $112 on the auto by increasing the deductible, which I'd thought was already high, but that must've been a different policy. (I wouldn't mind driving with the tracker again in an effort to earn a higher discount, but I think I already asked about that at some  point and they said no.) They gave me the same option with the home (increase my deductible), but i decided the savings I would achieve there wasn't worth the risk of having to pony up $5k if a tree falls on my house. With the ever-increasing ferocity of these storms, it doesn't sound like a remote possibiity.

So if you're curious, I'm paying $916 on the homeowners and $900-something on the car. Both those prices seem sky high to me but I know as soon as I say that others will tell me they're paying substantially more. 

We're on day 1 of another heat wave here in New England...the 4th? I went to Stop & Shop and Aldi's this morning, then sat in on a meeting of one of my groups that I volunteer with, then went to the gym but could only eke out 15 minutes on the treadmill.

The End

So, very recently I was actually toying with the idea of getting a very part-time job, just for a little pocket money. I retired in the spring of 2023 and by all accounts I will be perfectly fine, financially, but I can't help feeling a little stressed by constantly rising prices on just about everything, and it makes me feel a little insecure.

Every time I use a calculator, and also, Dido from this site tells me this, I will have about $7,000 a month in income for the rest of my life. This boggles my mind. Me, a lifetime frugalite. But I think that's once I start collecting Social Security, which won't happen for another 4 years, so I do feel cautious about going on a spending spree.

Then I was having a phone conversation with an old friend who is heading to Berlin for a few weeks with his wife this fall (so very, very jealous) but was having a hard time finding someone to look after his dog. I volunteered, and so I have my first pet-sitting gig that should yield about $500. They are very well off, like, the top 5% based on net worth, but he tells me $30 a day is on the low end for pet sitting services. They are coming up next week to leave their dog with me for a few hours so the dog becomes acquainted with my home before the 2-week visit.

This should be interesting. I have not owned or lived with a dog since I was a child. I imagine that by the end of the dog's visit, I will know for sure whether I might like to get my own dog (a retirement dream for many years during my working life and having cats) or not.

The dog is used to going outside to pee like around 6 am, which is a little early for me, and then the last outside visit would be 10 or 11. It might get a little old, but we shall see. By all accounts, she's a very well-behaved and easy to care for doggie. We have met before.  I don't have a fenced in yard and I don't really feel I want to walk the dog in the yard because there are always ticks around here; so I'll have to get in the car and driving a short distance to a nearby, better manicured park.

Also along the lines of making extra money, I'm currently working on 2 different credit cards for various rewards. I'm just about done with the spend requirement on the one card, which will give me $250 in credits for entertainment stuff. Which is fine, cus I've wanted to focus more on doing FUN stuff in my retirement at the same time I'm a bit concerned about rising costs.

The 2nd card could give me as much as $100 if I charge I think 50 purchases of $10 or more on it by August 31. I have no idea how many purchases I charge among all my cards, but it's a lot.  There are very few things I'm unable to charge, like my lawn mower guy, my property taxes and stuff like that. And I'm paying closer attention to the higher cash rewards different cards offer for different kinds of purchases, something I never could be bothered to pay attention to before. So yeah, I'm always using my Discover card this quarter at gas stations for 5% cash back.

My auto and homeowners policies are set to renew this month. They have both increased again this year, though I have a perfect record with no claims. I know it's based on other drivers and homeowners. I asked my agent if she thought the price hike for the car was reasonable, something I was having trouble determining since I just bought a new, more expensive vehicle in January. So she offered to shop it around to see if I could do better somewhere else. I'm not expecting another insurer to outdo Progressive though. I've been with them maybe 4 years now?

I recently purchased a cordless, rechargeable fan, about 8" diameter, and I love it! Being cord-free means I'm free to use it anywhere I like, including outside, which I may try at some point when I'm doing yard work. Although I don't often stay in one place. But maybe sitting on my patio under the umbrella table would be a good place to use it.

I had a birthday recently and my cousin wanted to send me flowers a few days before my birthday. When she called me on the day of my birthday, she asked if I'd received them, which I did not, and when she called 1-800-flowers they said it was delivered and gave her a time of delivery (but no photo). They promised to deliver them to me the next day, so I hung around here all day, but again, no flowers. She called them again and this time they admitted they didn't have the right flowers for what she had ordered, and promised to deliver today. Why would they lie the first time? I finally got them today. This florist isn't even located in my town, so that to me would be the first mistake, to tell a florist 20 minutes from you to make my delivery. Oh well. They ARE nice flowers.

I pulled out my 2 cucumber plants since they had succumbed to insects, but I did get about 20 cukes out of them. And now in their place I've planted a late summer crop of snow peas. In a few weeks, I'll pull out the first bed of string beans I planted, which are nearing the end of their productive life, and plant lettuce.

I always feel good when I can increase the weight I lift, pull or push at the gym. Today, I was able to increase the weight I'm lifting when doing Romanian deadlifts to 65 lbs. I hope to lift much more than that eventually.

I hit BJs this morning, then the dump and the gym this afternoon. Tomorrow, I'm taking my dad to physical therapy, and then to lunch at a cute country spot we used to love but then it closed. It's reopened as a Mexican fusion type place, much more casual than we usually eat but I think it's worth going just for the location, and actually, when I had lunch there with a friend following a protest rally this past Saturday, my chicken burrito was really very good. It's just that neither of us likes to order sandwiches or other foods you have to eat with your hands at a restaurant, him because it can be messy and me because I'm touching a lot of other stuff that grosses me out.

On the subject of the protest rally, this was one of the nicest groups of people I have yet to meet at any demonstration. This town is a very rural but wealthy country town, and the overall size of the group was modest, maybe about 35 or 40 people, but then again, its population is only about 2200 people. I just had some very nice conversations with different individuals, and all were very welcoming. 

I need to pick up the pace on my postcard writing for the Environmental Voter Project. I have 6 sheets of names and addresses, with each sheet having about 33 names. I have just a little over 6 weeks to write them all before they must be mailed, so that means one sheet a week. I am behind right now, but still have 3 more days.

I discovered weeds growing in my gutter in front. Wow. I never have that gutter cleaned out cus it has metal mesh covers on it but apparently, stuff does get in there. Have to see if my handyman might be able to do that for me. He's back from vacation in Maine soon.

Tomorrow I'm going to another rally with a new friend, this time in a different town, a country town. Then we'll hit the small deli down the road for an ice cream that happens to come from a farm here in my town, which I don't get to enjoy that often becus there is always a long line unless you go during a thunderstorm. 

It is with great sadness that I report the demise of my cucumber plants, due to cucumber beetle. The cucumbers were coming fast and furious. I got about 10 of them although 2 went soft in my fridge becus i couldn't keep up with eating them. 

The same may happen with my yellow squash and zucchini although so far, so good. Stringbeans have begun producing and I'm just waiting for the green tomatoes to ripen. I was at Tractor Supply today and bought some lettuce seed and snow pea seeds for a late summer crop that I may plant in late August.

This week in my Kiva volunteer work nearly all the loans I reviewed were the same (a little unusual). They were all from women in Pakistan wanting a loan to purchase a buffalo, to add to their herd used for milking and selling milk. I felt sorry for the buffalo: all were quite gaunt and underweight.