Well, it's barely mid-week and I already made myself a long list of things to do this weekend. Sigh.

When I got home from work, I went out with a bowl to see if I could pick off some ripe wineberries. Looks like another banner year for them as they envelop my property from nearly all sides. I only picked enough to top my breakfast cereal in the morning. But I think more should ripen by the time the weekend comes. I hope to pick as many as possible and freeze a bunch for winter.

My membership in the CSA this season is forcing me to cook things I don't usually cook. Like, I know beets are considered a "super food," but if I bought them in the past, they'd be pickled in a jar. Not bad, but not very fresh.

So last Sunday I got 4 good sized beets with my haul, but also the tops. I went online to my default recipe source, food.com, and tried out a simple recipe where you basically just cook raisins (plumped up with boiling water first), walnuts, garlic and scallions with the shredded beet greens, just long enough to wilt the beet greens. BOY, WERE THEY GOOD. The sweetness from the raisins took away the sometimes bitter taste of greens. I could have eaten a lot more of them, cus once you cook them down, what looks like a huge pile of leaves ends up being much smaller.

I may just email the recipe to the farmer's wife. And I've been toying with the idea of volunteering my time to help them write a newsletter going out to all CSA members, which I believe is over 100 families. I know they can't pay me, but I am so into the whole CSA thing, plus I love to cook and try new recipes. The person who did something like this before moved to Maine, so at the moment they are "newsletterless."

Plus, being a writer, this stuff comes easily to me. I was also wondering if they've ever done a survey at the end of the season to ask people, for instance, to name their top 5 vegetables they'd like to get in the CSA and what they thought of the program in general.

But, it is a commitment and I don't want to start something I can't stick with. I seem to always be going in a hundred different directions.

Last weekend was nearly all "chores" and not much "fun" stuff, save for an early Sunday evening walk on my favorite paved walking trail here in town. I've done that walk a zillion times before but I enjoyed it so much nonetheless. I had the place mostly to myself. The meadows reminded me of famous Andrew Wyeth's painting, Christina.

So, back to my produce. I still have a bunch of kale and 5 zucchini/yellow squash to do something with. The problem is, during the week i'm usually too tired to do any fancy cooking but yet i hate to leave farm fresh produce linger in my fridge all week. I wish I could get my produce earlier than Sunday afternoon, cus by that time, well, I'm running out of weekend time to do some cooking.

Due to the extreme high humidity, i haven't walked on my lunch hour all week; instead, I've gone to sit, or recline, actually in my car with the radio on.

Last weekend I spent some time researching the cost of cable TV with either Charter, AT&T or Fios. They all offer even the cheapest TV at a far higher price than I want to pay. When I gave up cable in 2010 (post-layoff), I was paying just $18 a month for it! Now, even if you get it as part of the threesome package with phone and Internet, you're still paying $30 a month and usually just for a year or two and then you have to renegotiate the whole thing again. I absolutely HATE having to do that, as is the case now with AT&T for my phone and internet. I'm quite sure they're counting on your not bothering to do that or not having time or being lazy or whatever so you wind up paying the higher price after the promo rate is over.

For now, I guess I'll stick with plain old, limited Hulu. The only shows I watch regularly are:
* House Hunters
* The Bachelor/The Bachelorette
* So You Think You Can Dance
* American Pickers

What I miss the most is:
* My local news stations
* American Idol
* HSN, I'm embarrassed to admit. As a marketing writer, I'm fascinated by their sales pitches and how they pull you so that before you know it, you've just got to have the latest whatever it is they're selling.
* Channel 13

Little by little I am doing the things I'm required to do as a new employee. Working for such a big company, it's frankly ridiculous to have such a complicated mountain of stuff to read and do, but of course it's all mostly necessary. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to set up my direct deposit. Then on Thursday I should be able to do some other things, like health insurance (won't be able to switch til Sept 1) and my 401k elections. Then of course I'll have to get through a pile of Group Learning Modules, which are self-directed online courses you have to take each quarter. I've been doing them all along; even as a contractor you're required to take them. Kind of a pain. There was one I flunked and so I have to retake it until i Pass. Yikes.

Oh. Last night, I found my new Frigidaire dehumidifer sitting on my front doorstep, delivered via Amazon.

I managed to get it out of the box and into the basement. Plugged it in, turned the power on and it started right up. There was next to nothing I had to do, which is the way I like it. Thus far I am using the container you have to empty once it fills up cus I only have one laundry sink down there and I have decided that yes, I will also get the DeLonghii dehumidifer repaired....another chore this weekend to drive it 50 minutes to New Haven where the authorized repair guy is.

The basement floor is STARTING to dry out; I'll have to remember to empty that bin in the a.m. before I go to work so it doesn't stop working all day when I'm away.

When I get the DeLonghii repaired, I may run both down there but I may also need to get an electrician over here to put in another electrical outlet in the corner of the basement where I want to put the Frigidiaire. I have to search down there first to see if there's one I haven't noticed before. Would be nice if there was one. You're not supposed to use an extension cord and since I do worry about things like fires, I won't do that....

Here's some not very good pix of the ailanthus tree that was taken down last weekend.

http://www.savingadvice.com/blogs/image.php?blog=3743&id=12651

http://www.savingadvice.com/blogs/image.php?blog=3743&id=12650

Photos used to be so easy to do here and now I'm having trouble. Something has changed.

Saturday a crew of 4 burly guys came to take down a 65-foot-tall ailanthus tree near by house.

They had a bucket truck and a small payloader (?) to carry large trunk chunks to the truck to cart away But what really impressed me was the surgeon-like precision with which they lowered chunks of the tree down a pulley system that avoided hitting either of two sets of power lines on either side, or nearby trees. It was very impressive. Glad that's done.

Today's haul from the farm CSA includes: 2heads of garlic, a bunch of kale, 4 beets with green tops, a bunch of Swiss chard, three zucchini and 2 yellow squash.

I blanched and froze the Swiss chard. I plan to roast the beets and use the greens for dinner tomorrow. I would have done it today but it's just too hot and humid to be using the oven.

I ate the last of the kale from last week. I also used 2 cups of shredded zucchini to make a very good chocolate cake.

I took a very enjoyable walk on one of our town's paved walking trails. I even snoozed and took a longish nap, due to the heat.

I went to the supermarket and got some stuff, then made a quinoa cranberry salad for the next few days' lunches.

Tomorrow I get my new 70-pint dehumidifier delivered, and it's badly needed. The basement floor is all damp/wet due to the humid air. It's much worse than usual since my regular humidifier broke down.

Yesterday I installed some new bamboo shades I bought for my bedroom. The dark brown really looks good with my cherry bedroom furniture. I already ordered another set (my 3rd) for my office.

I got a call last night from the neighbors behind me. The happy news is that they AREN'T moving!

You may recall earlier posts of mine about their plans to move to Tennessee (land of cheap real estate) because they over-improved their house and then he lost his high-paying job. They could no longer afford to pay their property taxes, which amounted to yes, $18,000.

They originally listed the house in the $900s. After lowering the price several times, down to $699K, with nary an offer, they decided to create an illegal apartment and a room for rent.

They will be living there too, of course, so I'm not too concerned about it. She feels that the income from the renters, plus income from her husband's future job, will be enough to pay the bills.

Right now, the husband, who worked as a toy designer, is trying to get his own puzzle business off the ground. While things still look very promising, he can't draw a salary for at least a year.

But she wants him to get a f/t job and continue the toy business thing on the side. Any job, she said, any job. He's a very talented guy, but not in a conventional way.

He has long wanted his own mini farm. They tried chickens, once, but when they became infested with some kind of parasite, he had to kill them all because the fleas or whatever they were infested everything in the barn and he was bringing them in the house on his legs, etc.

She would rather not have the mini farm because she feels it's too much work and as they get older (they are my age now) they won't want the responsibly or expense.

But now they've bought a miniature cow and they are also on the lookout for a sheep. I tried to convince her that these are herd animals that do much better in at least a small group, but she feels the sheep and cow will consider each other as their "herd." They also got another 20 chickens.

They want the cow for milk, the chickens for eggs, of course, and the sheep for, well, eventually they will eat it.

It does sound like a lot of work. The cow will need to be milked twice a day, every day. All the animals will need to be safely put away in the barn each night so the local coyotes don't bother them. (Good luck with that.)

They also started a vegetable garden.

I am glad they intend to stay now, for they have been super nice neighbors and have helped me out from time to time. I hope they get good tenants

I got fingerprinted on Wednesday for my job and it looks like i should be official on July 21.

So this past week has been my mandatory furlough from the bank.

I have to say that Monday and Tuesday, spent visiting family on the Jersey shore, were the best part of the week thus far.

Back home on Wednesday and Thursday here featured awful humidity and heat and I didn't feel like doing much of anything. I did somehow manage to mow part of the front lawn last night. Oh yeah, and yesterday I went to Idea in New Haven (a once a year event, partly because it's a 50-minute drive) and got 3 really nice baskets, some lingonberry jam and 2 plants, which I re-potted when I got home. I also enjoyed a Swedish meatball lunch in their cafeteria. Can't shop on an empty stomach!

I also made a few calls to see if repairing my DeLonghi dehumidifer would be worth it. One of the sensors is not working and I was getting an error message on the digital display. Because I may need a 2nd dehumidifier in the basement, I may buy the new Frigidaire I have my eye on first, then, if the 70-pint Frigidiaire can't handle it alone, I will cart the 50-pint DeLonghii back to New Haven to the authorized dealer/repairer, which will probably cost about $100, not including gas and inconvenience of getting there. I bought the DeLonghii dehumidifer in 2003, so would rather not spend $100 on an 11-year-old appliance that's smaller than needed unless the Frigidaire needs help down there. However, I will delay ordering the Frigidaire on Amazon until mid-next week until I earn about $30 in Amazon dollars from my participation in some forums I belong to.

Today, unexpectedly, was much lower humidity and temps, and even downright cool! It's also been raining on and off all day.

So to take advantage of that, I spent some time in the kitchen making orange-date muffins, a cold pea soup and an apricot berry salsa that I'll mix in with yogurt.

I also hit BJs to return a $30 item, stopped at Shop Rite and Trader Joe's in the past few days. And I was at Macy's today and picked up a few summer tops. Spent $90. I picked up 6 DVDs from the library (it's getting harder and harder to find foreign films I haven't seen) and I've been watching one each night.

I stopped in at town hall yesterday and determined that my property taxes would not be lowered much if I sold or gave away the easement land my neighbor's driveway occupies. In fact, because we're in a one-acre zoned neighborhood, I could only sell up to a half acre, and the assessor calculated that selling that half acre wouldn't do much to lower my taxes because it's not part of the building lot, which holds the most value. That 1/2 acre is considered "excess land," and so my taxes would only fall by $110 a year! What a surprise. I had no idea that land would be valued differently by the town.

Today I also vacuumed, refreshed the hummingbird water and made some iced tea.

I stopped in at Lowe's and was thinking of re-staining my stockade fence, but when I was told I'd need to wash off the mildew first (I guess I did that last time), suddenly it seemed like so much work, especially since the fence is completely overgrown. I may just skip it for now. I don't feel like doing battle with the jungle out there.

So here it is Friday, and I haven't done ANY of the home maintenance projects I set out to do. Mostly painting stuff. There's still the weekend.

I spoke to HR about the salary and benefits of my new perm job at the bank, where I've been doing contract writing for the past 9 months.

I'll be making $80,000 with benefits. I'm not eligible for a bonus.

I'm very happy. As a contractor, I had been making the hourly equivalent of $73,000 and my contractor friend repeatedly warned me that the bank makes contractorss take a paycut when and if they go perm. I not only didn't have to take a pay cut, I got a $7,000 bump up.

I haven't earned anything approaching this since 2009, five years ago.

I nudged a little to see if I could go higher, but the HR person said the job originally was set at $78,000 but that my boss really pushed for more, so they increased it by $2,000 but that that was as far as they could go.

I was completely prepared to push hard and had all my arguments lined up and my research on what other banks pay their writers, but I had been expecting them to offer something in the 70s. Honestly, I am quite happy with this salary and it will feel like even more since I have paid off my mortgage. I'll also be saving roughly $2,000 a year on the cheaper but very good Cigna health plan the bank offers, compared to what I'm paying now for an Aetna plan offered by the agency.

Tomorrow I will get an email where I need to electronically accept the job offer and then they will run a background check on me and send me a phone number I'll need to call to schedule a fingerprinting. Sometimes they let you provide the fingerprints electronically, which makes the process go faster. So I will be perm, she said, at the latest by July 21st or so.

The benefits include 22 PTO days that I can use for whatever I want. They'll be pro-rated this year, which I think means I earn them as I go, so if I am perm as of Aug. 1, for instance, then I would be able to get 9 days off for the rest of 2014? Can someone confirm that? Then when I started in 2015, I would get the full 22 days, but am wondering if I have to rack up the time before I can use them.

I have so many plans for the extra money. I need to create a new monthly savings plan, for retirement, of course, but I also want to ramp up some deferred home improvement/maintenance stuff. I'm thinking generator and new kitchen. And maybe restarting my Netflix.

At the same time, I want to rein in what I see as wasteful spending. It is just too easy to go down to the cafe at lobby level for an easy lunch, and I've gotten a little too used to Chinese takeout on Friday nights, so my dining out expenses have approached $100 monthly. Well, that included a $30 lunch when I took my boss out to lunch for her birthday. Money well spent, I'd say! But otherwise, I really need to tone down the eating out; it makes me go off my vegan diet and put on weight.

I'm so happy to have gotten this news during my furlough week off. NOw I can really enjoy it!!!

I was so excited to pick up my first half share of organic produce from the farm here in town. I paid $420 last fall, so now I'll be able to enjoy ultra-fresh organic produce every week thru Mid-November.

Here's what my first pick-up included>

* A head of red leaf lettuce
* a bunch of garlic scapes
* A bunch of spinach
* A bunch of Swiss chard
* A head of bok choy
* A dozen farm eggs
* A $25 gift certificate to buy whatever I want throughout the season

This is an amazing story about the power of a bull market.

First, a look at my investments (not my net worth) for the past 5 years:

Jan 2009 $315,226
Jan 2010 $434,872
Jan 2011 $486,302
Jan 2012 $461,436
Jan 2013 $519,228
Jan 2014 $587,831
June 29, 2014: $642,770

If I hadn't mentioned "bull market," you may have looked at these numbers and thought wow, she's a great saver. Truth be told, I was not only not saving any money until 2014, but I was also spending sizable wads of cash on some major home improvements (and a new car).

So despite FIVE YEARS of not saving any money, I managed to more than double my net worth!

I was laid off in September 2009, and immediately after that I stopped contributing to savings of any sort. I did, however, complete an already started screened porch-into-sun room renovation and spent $6,176 doing so.

Then in May, 2011, I plunked down $14,000 for vinyl siding and in October of that year, I threw $17,000 at a mortgage prepayment, eager to pay the darn thing off. (I finally did pay it off in 2012.)

In January 2013 I paid off a pesky sewer loan for $2900, and in May, I spent $20,000 cash (no car loan for me) on a new Honda Civic. That summer, I spent another $5,800 for a new roof.

I didn't restart saving until January 2014.

My asset allocation is pretty plain vanilla. I mostly use low cost index funds with Vanguard and T. Rowe Price in the following allocation:

Domestic stock: 45%
Small Cap 12%
Large Cap 33%

Bonds 23%

International Stock15%

REIT 7%

Cash 10%

Total 100%

Next week is my mandatory contractor furlough. The company has so many contractors working for them, it saves them money to furlough them during holiday periods like the upcoming fourth of July.

This should be my last furlough before I become a permanent employee.

My plans for this time include the following:

* Visiting my dad on the Jersey shore
* Tackling some small home improvement projects, like interior painting, re-staining an outdoor stockade fence so it doesn't rot, stuff like that
* R&R
* Making a rare trip to Ikea, which is far enough away that I make the trip maybe once a year or so, though I love browsing in the basement level for stuff.
* Getting 2 appliances repaired
* Getting estimates for either central air OR a generator that would keep critical things like the fridge/freezer operating in the event of another outage. I have felt insecure about this every since two weeklong outages during Irene and Sandy.

Trader Joe's charged me for some very expensive organic grapefruits I didn't buy. I bought organic plums, and somehow the cashier screwed up, so I will make a point to get a refund for that. I'm also returning some moldy cucumbers to BJS; none of the 3 cucumbers were fit to eat the day I brought them home, but being in a package, you can't really tell. Every time I buy bagged produce from BJs, I end up with a fair number of bruised pieces.

I still have poison ivy. I feel it's a recurrence of the original outbreak, because after I took the last prednisone pill 1.5 weeks ago, I STILL felt a little itchy, and i had the sense it wasn't COMPLETELY gone. Now i have plenty of spots all over again. I spoke to doc last night who felt I must have re-exposed myself becus she said the meds were powerful enough to have gotten rid of it. And that the only thing she could do is another course of prednisone, which I don't want to do. Prednisone leaches the calcium out of your bones.

So for now I plan on toughing it out and am hoping this new outbreak could be fairly mild. I'm not really scratching it, i have nothing like blisters, just red spots on my face, shoulder, neck, hand, behind my ear, etc. The itch, of course, is bothersome. I have some over the counter stuff for that which works pretty well but is impractical to use on my neck, for instance.

People in my dept. have been congratulating me this week following the surprise announcement by my boss's boss that I would become an FTE (full-time employee). It still isn't final since I have not discussed salary/benefits with HR and I have no idea when they will call me. I asked my boss if I'll have to finish out the original 10-month contract term before making the transition to FTE, and she said she didn't think so but that it still may not take place til September.

When I return, I will follow up with my boss to try to get some kind of time frame for how things will happen, should I expect a call from HR, etc. When I said goodbye to her yesterday and asked if she would miss me (with a smile) she actually did seem worried, so I said she could call me at home if there was any kind of "emergency." Truth be told, I'd rather not think about work at all during my week off, but knowing I will soon be perm, I wanted to score some brownie points for doing so. Plus, I will charge for any time spent on work, as I always would, as a contractor. It IS nice to feel needed, and I certainly do feel needed at this job. Not only have I seen many old letters there were grammatically inept, impersonal and unfriendly, but some were even written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, so it appeared the bank was shouting at them. I shake my head, but it makes it easy for me to add value.

So my boss was urging me to apply for my job online, as soon as it posted online. That happened this morning. My boss said it would only be up for 48 hours, so apply for it asap.

Later this morning, my boss's boss chaired our monthly team meeting with about 40 people present. I was totally surprised when she brought up the contractors' status. She said that of the 153 contractors working for the company, they can "flip" only 9 to FTE status. (That's full-time employee status.)

I am one of the 9, and I'm the only person she referred to specifically, saying, we NEED a f/t copywriter, we put the bank at risk without one, patientsaver's been doing a good job and she's going to be a f/t employee.

It's all a little weird and maybe a tad premature as I have yet to negotiate salary with HR. I guess in a way this gives me more confidence going into the salary negotiations becus they wouldn't want this person embarrassed by not having the deal work out after she announced it.

I have done my research on Glassdoor and found a handful of writers working for other banks, all making fatter salaries than me. So this I will present when the time comes.

Most of the people I work with directly (about 5 of them) all sent me personal emails with congratulations. Another person who sits next to me wants to take me out to lunch. Even the coworker I don't get along with congratulated me. Oddly, the one person who DIDNT say anything, although she was at the meeting where the announcement was made, is another contractor who joins me for lunchtime walks on a nearly daily basis. I've been talking to her all along about what's going on although nothing seemed certain until now. Her job is ending in August after a 2-year stint with the bank. I'm wondering if she's jealous, but geez, you'd think a friend would be happy for you.

She is a bit of an odd duck in that way. She doesn't reach out to others in a supportive way. I like her, but I have noticed this about her.

I had my weekly status meeting with my manager today. I hadn't PLANNED on talking job title or salary of the new position, but yes, it did come up.

I told her that while a job title is unimportant in a contract position, I hoped we could improve on my title when I move to the perm position. Like for instance, putting the word "Senior" in front of "Copywriter." Just to reflect my experience (and possibly affect raises and/or promotions).

She said my title WOULD be different...probably Marketing Manager, not becus that's really what I do, but because they have a range of job titles and that's the closest one that fits.

It would be Marketing Manager I, II or III. This is apparently being determined by my manager's boss. The title comes with a salary range attached to it. That is why they needed to match my title to some preexisting title. I know that a number of other people in my dept. have that title. I cannot start the job at anything higher than midway in the range.

I also told her I had heard that when moving from contractor to perm, it usually comes with a pay cut, and that i was concerned about how big a cut that might be, particularly because I felt my current pay was already below market rates.

Mind you, I would be a fool, of course, to pass on this job, I know that, so if the pay cut was firm, I would, in the end, accept it, but I have learned THE HARD WAY that you should try to negotiate compensation whenever possible or you'll lose thousands for being the polite and passive female.

All the more important given that she mentioned that for the past 2 years, everyone making over $75K has received no pay increases, while those making under $75K received 2% pay increases. So whatever salary I wind up with at the starting gate may be something I'll have to stick with for a while.

I was surprised when she told me she didn't even KNOW what I was making, that they just paid the agency a certain fee and what I made was between the agency and me.

She said if you want to tell me what you want to make, I can tell you if I think that's in the ballpark or not. I wasn't quite prepared to name an exact number, so instead I told her I was now making just $35 an hour. She told me that while moving to perm does typically involve a pay cut for some more senior level people, she was pretty sure that my perm salary would not fall below what I'm making now.

SWEET! I was thrilled to hear that. There may even be a small INCREASE.

Right now I am still waiting for the job posting to appear on the website.

After a long five years of underemployment and well over a dozen part-time, contract or freelance jobs, I stand at the threshold of reentering the world of the gainfully employed.

On Thursday my boss told me her boss, who manages a team of about 30 staff, was working on securing funding for a permanent writer position for me. Yesterday after work, I went out for drinks with my boss with one other coworker, and when the coworker left for the restroom, my boss said the position would soon be posted on the careers section online and that I would have to apply for the job. The job will still have to be advertised internally and externally (which makes me nervous).

I asked her if this was all sort of a perfunctory thing and she said yes, they'd been wanting a writer in Marketing for a long time and I'm the one they want.

I still have no idea what kind of salary they will offer. I have heard from others that when you go from contract worker to perm worker, they make you take a pay cut and justify it with all the benefits you'll get. But I'm worried about how much of a pay cut it would be. Some quick research online and it appears it could be anywheres from a 10% pay cut to 50% paycut.

I'm making $72K now but feel this is already under market for my experience, by about $10K.

I have thoroughly reviewed their benefits and they ARE very good. You get 18 days PTO (paid time off) and you can use these for whatever you want: vacation, sick time, whatever. There are 10 paid holidays and 3 excellent Cigna health insurance plans to choose from. The one I want costs just $400 a year (compared to $2100 with the plan I've got now with the agency) and I can set up an HSA with it. I'm very excited about that as I've never had an HSA and I understand you can save money in that account, pre-tax, for future medical expenses, even after you leave the company. So I could actually save money for medical expenses in retirement. They give you an HSA debit card that you can use whenever you have an uncovered medical expense to pay.

There's also a 401k you can start immediately, with a company match of 5% after you've been there a year; it fully vests after 3 years. There is another employer contribution of 2% of your pay made after you've been there a year.

I calculated that the benefits are worth at least $10,000.

I am very, very excited. There have been so many anxiety-filled days when I wondered if I would EVER find a permanent job again. I took up so many extremely frugal habits; some I may not drop, some I think I will.

I'll be happy to stop doing Pinecone surveys at $3 a piece. So tedious. I'd like to begin my Netflix subscription again or maybe even basic cable.

I am still a contractor now, and we have a mandatory furlough for all contractors coming up the first week of July. I am heading down to the Jersey shore that Monday to visit my dad, and them come back the next night. It's just a brief visit, but I am SO looking forward to just a break in my work routine, as I've been working steadily since last October with just occasional single holiday breaks and i really need some downtime.

Hopefully next Saturday, the tree guy will be coming to take down a 65-foot ailanthus tree that towers over my house. It's a peace of mind thing that is costing me $1500.

They added close to $100 in tax to the invoice, which I hadn't been expecting, but they said I could avoid it if I paid with a personal check instead of a new rewards credit card i just got. So that's what I did to avoid the tax charge, plus I'm now using that rewards card on other spending to earn another $100 back in bonus probably in a month's time.

Pursuing credit card bonuses is another frugal habit I adopted when I really needed the money, but as long as I can keep finding cards like this, I'd like to continue doing it since I'm spending anyway.

So, I feel an incredible lightness of being knowing that I should soon have this job in my pocket. The job is not too stressful, people generally all leave there around 5 pm and not much later, my boss is very nice, my coworkers are pretty nice and I find the work interesting. They really seem to value the work I do. I also don't have to stress out on bad winter weather days as everyone there has a laptop and you just work from home. They have a small free gym there I have yet to use.

The only things i DONT like about the job is that becus there's no real privacy in the cubes, it's not possible to make a personal call that others cant overhear. You'd have to walk into the garage or the stairwell to do that. I also can't access my personal email account during the day, which I hate, but the bank has super tight security on stuff like that. Oh, and I don't like parking in the garage; my car has already been scratched by someone who parked like 4 inches from mine and then jammed their car door into my passenger side to get out. Now I make a point to park on the top level, just to avoid stupid people.

Still, I could see myself coasting into retirement from this job in just a few years. Like 5 years. Sweet.

When I bought my house, it came with an easement running across my property. My neighbors, who have an interior lot behind my house, have rights to use that easement, which is a very long strip of land about 10 feet wide (6 feet for the driveway and an additional 2 feet on either side) to access their house.

I wasn't crazy about the easement when i bought the place, and didn't really understand what legal ramifications it might have.

I am on very good terms with the people who live in this house. They have had their over-improved house on the market since last year becus they can no longer afford their mortgage or property taxes after he lost his job.

They have lowered the price of the house at least once, and hope to move to Tennessee to start over, where real estate prices are much lower.

Years ago we briefly considered my selling them the land their driveway occupies. Their driveway had been deteriorating for years, but they had resisted fixing it because technically they didn't own the land, I did. They finally were forced to becus in the winter they couldn't make it up the hill and had to leave the car and walk to the house a distance of over 100 feet on a treacherous slope. It cost them $50,000 to repave the entire driveway.

Fast forward to today. They're having trouble selling their house. They doubled the square footage of the house to 5,000 sf and it is magnificent (in a very modest neighborhood), in a very private setting, but i am sure the long rather steep hill is a detriment.

I was also thinking recently that the existence of the easement would be a negative in any would-be buyers' minds, and I was thinking of again offering to sell my neighbors the easement, this time for basically nothing.

It could help facilitate a sale since their realtor would no longer have to "explain" the easement thing. For my part, I would also benefit by not having the easement on my deed AND my property taxes would at least somewhat be lowered becus I'd have less land. Their driveway runs at least 300 feet long and as mentioned, 10 feet wide.

So I was thinking of saying you could buy it for $100 plus whatever legal and remapping fees would be involved.

Do you think this is wise? Years ago when I first offered to sell it to them, I'd talked to a few realtors to try to determine the value of the land I was selling. I had hopes of getting $5,000 to $10,000 for it but after brief consideration (the husband liked the idea, the wife didn't) they declined because while we didn't get to the point of even discussing numbers, they felt it would be spending a lot of money and not getting anything tangible in return.

On my end, the land could never be built on, obviously, since it's not a lot, and the realtors basically said the value is established by the owner and buyer. The land is of no value to me and i treat it, for all intents and purposes, as their land. I don't use their driveway or maintain it in any fashion.

Reducing my property taxes, if only by a few hundred a year, would be a big plus in my book as I currently pay $5800 a year.

Today, given my neighbors' precarious financial position, I am pretty sure they would not be interested in buying the land from me for anywheres near $10K, or even $1K. But if they only had to pay the associated fees involved (so I wouldn't be out of pocket in anything), they could be interested in doing so as a means of facilitating the sale of their home.

The other thing to know about this situation is that the husband has huge money-making potential. He was working for a toy designer for a well-known company when he was laid off, and after the layoff he started building his own company. He knows a lot about the business and used to travel to the factories in China to oversee production. Last time I spoke to them, their business was looking very promising, he's gotten lots of orders from different toy stores, etc, but they don't feel he can take any salary for a full year until the business takes off.

So I don't know, but another possibility would be to arrange the deal would be to say you owe me $X in 1 or 2 years from now, presumably when they could afford to pay me. Although even that is maybe too iffy.

This morning I picked my mother up and then we went to another town about 40 minutes away where she was dropping off her art for an exhibit next week.

After that, we went to Whole Foods and wandered around, sampling all sorts of things including the king salmon!

We both did some damage there. Then I filled up her gas tank for her, we went home, I carried all the groceries up and while she made us a salad for lunch, I vacuumed her condo. After lunch, I helped her deal with bills and forms.

It was all kind of exhausting and by the time I got home, not having done many of my own errands, it was already 3:30 pm.

I chilled out some with a bottle of beer, did a little bit of garden work, refreshed the hummingbird water and made a vegetable slaw for next week's lunches.

A friend of mine called and he's coming over in the a.m. so we can take a longish drive to get get some new fish for his pond. The other fish were all killed after his neighbor sprayed insecticide on her patio that washed down into his pond. Not sure why that won't happen again. My friend is not a confrontational kind of guy. I will have to ask him.

So I won't get too much more done from my long list of things to do, but anyway....one needs to get out and do something fun. We'll probably get lunch after he gets his fish, but he'll have to drop me off after that becus the fish will be in oxygenated water and need to go in their new home fairly soon.

When I first started blogging here over 5 years ago, my big thing was saving for retirement. Now, I can see a real shift in focus to taking care of my mother's personal finances. It's not a little thing.

I never really imagined I would be assuming control of my mother's personal finances, nor was I prepared for what it involved. It's certainly been a learning experience. Here are some of the nitty gritty details of my efforts to come to grips with it all.

My mom turned 80 this spring. I have noticed some serious memory problems and she has great difficulty understanding different bills (too many numbers) or even things like reading the instructions on her new cell phone. This has been a gradual decline. She's not ready for assisted living, but she definitely needs help in the areas of managing her finances and housework, for instance.

Last winter I took my mother to my own attorney, who happened to be an elder law specialist, and accomplished some very important things: I became my mother's power of attorney (POA), we got her a living will and we updated her regular will, which still contained her old married name. (I can imagine the probate delays that might have caused.)

More recently, my mother agreed to let me handle her bills after months of weekly phone calls telling me she couldn't make sense of this bill or that one. It was stressful for her, as, like me, she has always been extremely punctual and careful to pay her bills on-time, and it was stressful for me, because it was nearly impossible to troubleshoot things over the phone, and working f/t doesn't leave me much time to go over there.

So after getting the POA, the next thing I did, just 2 weeks ago, was to go to her bank with her to turn her checking account into a joint checking account, with my name on it. I doubt I'll need many physical checks, but I ordered some anyway, just to be sure.

I spent more time at my mother's yesterday calling different creditors of my mother's, waiting on hold to talk to a rep to get myself added as an authorized user to my mother's account. For her homeowners and car insurance, I had also faxed in my power of attorney paperwork earlier last week.

With each creditor I called, I spoke to them a while explaining that I wanted to begin paying my mother's bills and to have them either emailed (preferably) or snail mailed to me. Then I had to put my mother on the phone to give her permission. Then I got back on. It was a pain in the neck, but I did manage to get myself added as authorized user for:

1. Her Amex card (which automatically pays 3 of her bills)

2. Cable TV

3. Her homeowners and car insurance, through the same company

4. AARP Roadside Assistance (automatically renews and billed to her Discover card)

All the paperwork will be either mailed or emailed to me now so I have to be really careful these things get paid. It does feel strange since, not having children or even being married, I've never really been responsible for another person's finances before. It feels a little scary, to be honest.

So now I can access my mother's checking account online. At some point soon, I'm going to need to balance her checkbook. It hasn't been balanced in over a year, and that's a big source of concern to my mother (as it should be). However, I don't have the time or energy to try to find the error or errors in over 12 months of statements. I mentioned to her before that one way to determine the right number is to not write ANY checks for a full month, but she has too many bills that are automatically debited from her checking. So I don't want to mess with that.

The good news is that the roughly $2,000 difference is in her favor. I still think it may be helpful to not have her write any checks for a month, and then I can monitor her account online and see when any automatic debits go through. Once they do, I can then give her what is hopefully the correct account balance to use in her checking account register.

I may also call the bank guy who helped us put my name on her account, and ask him for his advice on how to reconcile her checkbook.

I have so many phone calls to make related to my mother, and some of them can't be made in the evening. I recently learned that I will have the first week of July off from work becus it's a mandatory furlough for all contract workers.

Note to self: This would be an excellent time to take care of issues like this.

My mother can't find her Discover card so i couldn't take care of that one yet. I also still have to transfer over her AT&T bill (internet and phone), CL&P and one other credit card.

My mother gets less than $1,000 a month from Social Security, yet I see from her Amex bill online that she spent over $100 on vitamins last month, plus $54 on a stupid emailed health newsletter which I'm pretty sure she's not even aware she was billed for. I will have to talk to her about that later. Much of the vitamins are probably a waste of money because she is very nutritionally aware and eats extremely well.

Sorting thru all this stuff is definitely a time suck. I am still going into her email on a daily basis (without her knowledge) and deleting junk email and unsubscribing to as much as I can.

The need for me to step in and get involved with all this has been building for the last year or two. If nothing else, I hope to reduce the number of stressed out phone calls she makes to me about her bills.

Most recently, she withdrew $100 cash from the bank and then lost it. Of course, I have to listen to the whole story and there's little I can do except ask if she looked thoroughly in the car, etc.

Then yesterday she called to tell me she "thinks" she found it. She found over $300 in a stash of cash in a certain place she'd put it to keep it safe. She's not sure if this is the money she lost from the bank or if this is money she stashed there earlier. I'm guessing it probably does include the money from the bank.

I didn't get as much accomplished at my mom's yesterday as I'd hoped, partly because my mother's central AC broke. (She said she was waiting for a call back from a neighbor whose friend does HVAC work, etc.) But it was 82 degrees in her condo becus the windows are hard to open (for her) and they were all closed. So I opened them all up to cool down the place a little; i don't know if she slept with them open or what. I also called her neighbor to see what was going on and he agreed to call his friend again, but I told my mother not to wait too long for him and that she might have to call someone else to fix the AC becus the weather will be getting very warm soon. She's on the 2nd floor of her condo building.

I took her shopping for a lightweight vacuum at Best Buy 2 Saturdays ago and we got one i thought would be great for her as it was cordless, lightweight and bagless, but she had trouble putting it back in the charging station so i wound up buying it from her yesterday for $95. I didn't especially need it but i will keep it as Best Buy has a strict 2-week limit on returns.

I already know my mother should really be hiring a housekeeper to do that kind of heavy cleaning. I have brought this up with her repeatedly, but unless i take charge of finding and hiring someone myself (and I would feel obligated to be present during the cleaning to make sure they didn't steal from my mother with all the little tsoskes laying around there), I know it's not going to happen.

Maybe I'll just plan on vacuuming next Saturday.

I've also begun surreptitiously grabbing small handfuls of old newsletters and magazines she picks up free from the health food store (dating back to 2011) to throw away. She has too many piles of paperwork all around the condo and i actually feel the piles in the bedroom constitute a safety hazard. She says she's going to read the stuff, but if she hasn't read things from 2011, i doubt she ever will. I may also start doing the same with the piles of books on her bookshelves, not enough that she would notice them missing, but i know she won't read the old encyclopedias and stuff like that. The more I do now, the less I'll have to do later. She has piles of old records but no record player, so I'd like to sell them and get a little money for her. That is something I'll have to talk her into.

I also grabbed one of those Chase Bank offers where they give you $125 if you open a checking account with them. Being on a fixed income, I know $125 is a lot of money to my mother, and I could see her opening an account with them just to get the money. Heck, that's the kind of thing I do with credit cards, but having another checking account would really complicate things just when I'm assuming control of everything, so yes, I grabbed that little Chase offer and tossed it. Call it tough love.

As you can see, attending to my mother (as much as one can 1 day a week) is becoming a job in itself.

At some point I may want to inform my mother's brokerage, where she has her mutual fund investments, of my power of attorney status. I don't think it's really necessary now as she makes only infrequent withdrawals from her accounts there, as far as I know, anyway. But it would be good for this to be taken care of now, because if or when my mother's health deteriorated to the point where I needed to move her to assisted living, that would be a whole new pile of paperwork and issues to deal with, and already having the rest of her finances under control would make it easier.

Lessons learned so far? Getting the power of attorney was the most important thing I could have done. A good friend of mine had been telling me repeatedly to get this done, and soon. It was a process. As with other things, my mother didn't agree to this immediately.

The POA really smooths the way and facilitates a great deal when you are dealing with creditors or anyone else.

The one thing I meditate on is finding more patience within myself to handle all this with grace and kindness. I am a very impatient person.

Year to date, I've earned $390 from credit card bonuses:

Feb: Discover card bonus $150
May: Capital One: $32
June: Bankamericard Susan G.Komen and Amex card bonuses: $208

I'll be starting to work on a new NFL card bonus soon that Bankeramericard issues. Actually, I'll be able to earn the $100 bonus for this one in one fell swoop as I plan to use it to pay for the $1500 tree takedown in my yard in a few weeks.

Tiny green mulberries are already beginning to form on the mulberry tree outside my office window. the birds will be picking them off soon before they're even ripe. I love being able to watch them from my vantage point at my desk.

I had to go to doc tonight after work to get some prednisone pills which I'll take for 12 days, starting tomorrow. She said it will make me irritable but energetic. It's ITCHY! Welt on my eyelid, behind my ear, neck, upper chest. Not fun.

I am still working on getting my mother's creditors to start sending me the bills. I discovered that it would probably be easier with most of them to just call them with my mother present and then have her get on the phone to add me as an "authorized" user. I had been trying to fax my power of attorney paperwork and it was just a pain waiting on hold for someone to get the fax number, etc.

So tomorrow for the 4th Saturday in a row i am schlepping over to my mother's. It's the only day of the week I can do this unless i take time off from work, which I'm not about to do.

At least I now have access to her bank account online, and the new checks have been ordered.

Speaking of time off, there is a mandatory furlough for contractors at the bank for the first week of July. I'm not happy about going without a paycheck that week, but I have no say in the matter. So I've arranged to spend an overnight at my dad's on the jersey shore for 2 days, and then hope to get some home improvement-type work done around the house. And squeeze in some MUCH needed R&R.

Three of us walked at lunchtime today, and we were all looking forward to the ice cream truck that parks outside the bank every Friday from 3 to 4. We were so disappointed to not see his truck there....he is on vacation. I did grab Chinese to go for dinner tonight as a consolation prize.

OK, let's face it...I'm a flipper. No, I don't flip houses but I sure to love to "flip" credit cards to earn those lucrative upfront rewards.

Since 2013, I've gone through 19 rewards credit cards. Currently, I have 7 cards:

1 & 2: USAA VIsa and Amex Cash Card are my oldest cards, and so while they both have lousy rewards, I'll hold onto them to maintain a decent credit score.

3 & 4: I'm partial to my Cap One Visa Platinum and BankAmericard Cash rewards card because with the former, I got to personalize the card with my own design (a peacock feather closeup) and with the latter, a small portion of every dollar I spend benefits the World Wildlife Foundation.

5. Citi Forward

6. Discover

7.BankAmericard CashRewards

I finished the spend requirement on my Barclaycard MasterCard and should get the $100 bonus soon.

Then it occurred to me that since I am having a large tree taken down in my yard in a few weeks, to the tune of $1,500, this would be the perfect time to get another bonus reward card to defray a part of that cost.

So I applied for and was approved for another "spend $500 in 90 days, get $100 back" card...the NFL card where you get to pick your team logo for the card. I'm not a big sports fan, but I'm running out of card offers, so what the hey.

As for the tree, it's a 65-foot-high ailanthus tree. This is considered a "junk" tree and it was the tree featured in the story, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for its tenacious ability to grow right up through a concrete sidewalk.

This one is a little too close to my house for comfort, maybe about 25 feet, and in Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, several large branches were shorn off and carried by the wind to land even closer to my house.....like 10 feet away. I've also noticed some kind of insect damage that extends from the base of the trunk up about 10 feet. This alone is reason enough for concern, I think. This is a humongous tree. At the base, it looks to be 3 feet in diameter.

I had been pricing getting this tree down last summer, but while the estimates I got then were in the $1200 to $1400 range, it didn't include taking the wood away, and I've got so many old tree stumps, logs, branches and other debris in the woodsy periphery of my property, that I just want this wood taken away. Leaving logs here would attract ants and termites. So $1500 with removal seems in the same range.

And when I researched the one guy I was thinking of hiring last year, I discovered online that he had come here from Pennsylvania with a long string of customer complaints about taking people's money and not finishing the job. Then I think I was having money issues as I wasn't working steadily, so nothing ever got done.

The tree is on the shared property line with my neighbors. If my neighbors weren't senior citizens, I would ask them to go halfies with me on the cost, since the tree is very close to their power lines coming in off the street. Or at least to chip in something. But I know they're on a fixed income and I don't have the heart to ask. They have given their permission to have the tree crew drive their truck across their yard to access the tree, cus on my side there's a whole lot more overgrowth and it's just tighter quarters. So at least that's something.

I've asked them to do the work on a Saturday so I can watch and take pix. I've had trees taken down before, and there are many different ways I've seen it done, but it's amazing how well they can control the drop of tree limbs so they don't crash down in the wrong place.

I had to have a talk with my boss about a coworker I sit next to who is difficult to work with. She gets very personal and sent me a nasty email last week and she's very emotionally unstable, coming in crying and sniffling one day and then all chirpy happy the next so I can't concentrate on my work. I had a lightbulb moment yesterday about it and I really think she's schizophrenic, meaning she has extreme highs and lows. (This used to be called manic depressive.) It fits her to a tee.

My boss (a woman) was very receptive to what I had to say. I'm not the first to complain about her. She actually decided to tell the other woman she can work at home 2 days a week (she now works at home 1 day a week but takes extreme liberties by leaving work early using various excuses) and that i could work at home 1 day when she is in, so that we'd only have to work together 2 days a week!

You would think it would be easier to move someone's seat, but that's not really true where I work. I told my boss that while I appreciated the offer to work at home, the 2 of us should be able to work things out, and personally, I'm not sure that inability to get along with a coworker is a good reason to work at home. Our boss is incredibly understanding. She encouraged me to get together with the coworker to talk things out. Which I will do, but i think there's a risk of a big argument, but it needs to be done, becus every time she's made a sarcastic comment to me or sent her snotty emails, I've not responded at all, because i care about my reputation where i work and if i were to respond, there would a cat-fight which EVERYONE could hear. We work in cubes with very little privacy. I think things have gotten worse with the coworker because she interprets my non-reaction as not defending myself, and it's emboldened her to say whatever she likes.

My coworker once told me she found her job to be "incredibly boring," and she likes to dabble in my job, which I don't appreciate. As project manager, she's supposed to shepherd various writing projects, usually letters that I write, through the review/approval process. She's supposed to review the copy and is able to make SUGGESTIONS to me if she sees something amiss, but she acts like she has the final say, which she doesn't. She also can be very arrogant and makes a big stink if I don't take her edits. My boss has reiterated that as the writer, I make the call on anything related to the copy (punctuation, grammar, style etc). That's what they hired me for, after all.

The good news out of all of this is that my boss reiterated that my coworker's job is definitely done by year's end, while they want to make my job permanent. My boss said her boss is working on getting the funding for the position. (I do hope it's a decent salary, but guess I'll deal with that when the time comes.)

Today I completed my $500 credit card spend with the BankAmericard cash rewards card. I did it in the first month of having gotten the card, so when I get my bill in another few days, I should be able to collect the $100 bonus pronto. I love these offers.

I see from My Money Blog that Chase Freedom is offering a $200 bonus after just $500 in spending. I may call and see if I can do the offer after having done it once before and then cancelling the card. I hear this can be done.

Let's talk finances and not let spammers make the site useless.

A note to legitimate bloggers here: please post an entry...on any little thing...to push out the spam entries.

I'm happy to report the following vital stats for the month of May:

My total expenses: $1451
My total income: $5529

It was a five-week work month, so my net from my bank job was $4,900. I also made $174 in mileage reimbursement for a meeting in Massachusetts that cost me roughly $35 in gas, $32 in credit card rewards, $202 from freelance writing and $206 from selling plants from my garden.

Net monthly savings: $4,078
I've saved $13,500 for the year!

(I had to adjust this figure downward from $15,000 because the accounts i use to hold my taxable retirement savings are also a parking place for my property tax payments and so i forgot to deduct the $550 I put aside each month for my twice-a-year property tax payments.)

My net worth is now $630,667 and I've already exceeded my net worth goal of $623K for year end. (See sidebar for details.)

Not a bad month all the way around.

I am making tiny progress in my attempt to take over managing my mother's finances.

My mother is 80, and she is having a great deal of problems making sense of her bills and keeping on top of them. She has been basically driving me crazy with frequent phone calls asking me to troubleshoot individual issues, and of course without having the bill in front of me to look at, it's practically impossible to figure out what is wrong.

I have offered several times to manage ALL her bills if she would put my name on her checking account, making it a joint checking account. She was very reluctant to do that, but yet she kept calling me for help in figuring things out.

Finally, last week, she agreed to let me do it because it's just beyond her and it causes her a great deal of stress. She always complains about her "paperwork" and "catching up."

So we agreed I would go over there this weekend to set things up. I created a simple spreadsheet with all her individual bills and months left in this year, to show her how I'd fill in the amount of each expense. Once we went the bank to turn her account into a joint account, and got myself a set of checks with both our names, I would then contact each utility company, her car and homeowner's insurance providers, etc. etc. to ask them to start sending her bills to my address. I would also create online accounts to pay everything that way, and an online account to monitor her checking account as I would need to know when her Social Security deposits were made, and in what amount, so I can make sure to balance her checkbook, which has been another extremely trying thing for my mother.

I was over there yesterday and it was as if we never had the earlier conversation. (I suspect my mother has dementia.) There was another protracted conversation about it. The frustration nearly drove me to tears. She trusts me to manage her bills, but what was keeping her from agreeing is embarrassment that people that "know her" at the bank or elsewhere would think she has dementia (a word I have never used with her in conversation). She also did not want me to pay her common charges for the same reason and felt that people would look at her funny if they knew her daughter was paying her bills.

I finally got her to agree to my plan but by the time we got to that point, it was noon. I called the bank, which was about to close, and asked what was required to turn my mother's account into a joint checking account. She said you just need to come with your mother to sign the signature card, and bring your power of attorney paperwork with you. So, because I don't want to lose pay by taking time off from work, we'll have to wait til next Saturday morning to do that.

Once that is done (and I sure hope my mother will remember why we're there next week) then I can start the other part of the process, contacting billing companies to mail me the bills, and setting up the online accounts.

There are 2 bills I'm concerned about that I actually left for her to handle because they are current bills and I knew I wouldn't be able to start paying her bills for probably a few weeks.

One is her electric bill, where she owes as I recall around $1,000. The problem i think is that she's on a budget plan where they bill you a fixed (same) amount every month, but it obscures the true cost of the electricity you're using. We had a very cold winter here and my mother had her electric heat up to her usual 72 or so degrees, not realizing how much she was running up.

The other big bills include 3 bills from private ambulance companies from when she called 911 to go to the hospital. She's done this multiple times before because she has atrial fibrillation and she panics when her heart starts fluttering. For some reason, now she's getting these big bills, and I'm worrying that I should have taken down info on them so I could call to inquire about them on her behalf, but i honestly was feeling so overwhelmed and emotionally drained from just having to convince my mother I need to step in, etc., that I instructed her to just pay the current bills.

She said they had greatly reduced the amount owed of one of those ambulance bills and i think she is expected that to happen with the others, although she hasn't spoken to them and doesn't know why she's gotten these bills. I may have to intervene. I have such limited time.

And of course there's her checking account, where her balance differs from the bank's by about $2,000, she said, although the difference is in her favor. Still, it should be balanced, and I'm looking at her checkbook and seeing a zillion different notations and notes of her. It could be impossible to "balance" and maybe not worth the aggravation. But if I decide to just go with the balance the bank says it has, then she's going to want an explanation as to WHY or where did she make a mistake or whatever.

I did 2 other things while I was at my mother's: I started helping sort through her "paperwork," which includes several large piles on the floor around her desk. In the past when I've tried to throw things out,she protests and says she wants to read that but hasn't had the time. Well, half this "paperwork" was junk mail or articles on nutrition or other matters she has an interest in. I threw a lot of it away, knowing that she likely will never get around to reading it.

The other thing I did, and you may disapprove of my tactics, is I saw my mother's password written down on a sticky on her monitor, and I wrote it down.

When I got home, I was able to log in and delete over a hundred junky emails in her inbox. These emails tend to paralyze her. Many of them were spam emails that resulted after she went online and clicked on a political ad. She's an Obama supporter, and so she gets dozen's of these emails every week asking for money to support the campaign.

I had to laugh because when she got these personalized emails from the President or Michelle Obama, she really believed they were coming from them personally, and she wrote them rather lengthy letters as if they were really being read by someone, explaining that she was a self-employed artist and couldn't afford more than a $5 donation.

I unsubscribed her from as many of these as I could. I hope I did not overdo it, but I do feel that minimizing her junk mail and clearing through some of the piles at her desk will help lower her level of stress and anxiety.

My level of stress and anxiety is another matter. I had all sorts of errands planned for after I left my mother's, but I felt so drained, i really had to push myself to do a few of them. Eventually, I hope that managing my mother's bills will be more or less routine, but right now, it's been like pulling teeth even to get this far, and really, I have yet to set anything up.

I do have an older sister but she doesn't want to be "involved" with dealing with my mother so it basically falls into my lap. My sister's way of dealing with my mother is to avoid contact as much as possible.

I recently purchased a book on Amazon written by a longtime cartoonist for the New Yorker. The book is filled with cartoons that delve into the author's own experiences caring for her aging parents before they died. One of them had Alzheimer's. As a cartoonist, she was able to to inject some humor into all these trying situations, and I really got some chuckles out of some of them already, which I can relate to.

I think the title of the book is something her parents would always say (like my mother) whenever she brought up certain topics: "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?"

Thank god, my father does not have any mental issues. While my parents have been divorced since I was 6, I have talked to my father a few times about my concerns about my mother, because since my sister is not helpful, my dad is really the only person I can talk to who truly understands the situation and can offer advice. I think I will call him today to see if he has any suggestions.

This was NEVER something that was on my radar, but I think caring for my mother as she ages is going to be a huge part of my life moving forward. It's scary. It's practically a full-time job. Not having had kids, I haven't ever experienced really taking care of another human being; i was always just responsible for myself, and I've been fully independent of anyone else, financially and otherwise, since I was 21.

There are many things I still want to do with my life, namely, travel. I am determined to still be able to do things like this but my mother's slowly increasing dependence on me is definitely a complicating factor.

Another challenge to deal with down the nearby road is getting her to start paying for occasional housekeepers. I have done the vacuuming and dusting in the past, but working f/t, i can't do this anymore. Right in her complex is a woman who cleans houses, and I urged her to start with her first because she knows her, and to find out what she charges. But that hasn't happened. Getting my mother to do things is very difficult. I have my hands full right now.

Once I get her bills in order, I may just call someone, but I also worry about having a stranger in the place alone with my mother and I might feel the need to be there while she cleans.

I worry about theft, mainly. Yesterday I returned to my mother a nice bracelet she'd been wearing Mother's day and which slipped off her wrist onto my car seat. She hadn't realized it was missing. That's the kind of thing i worry about should strangers come in the house and wander through the rooms without her constant supervision. It would be too easy to take something.

In other news...
The Las Vegas author paid me the final balance ($145) she owed me for editing her manuscript.

And the other author finally got a job! She's very excited becus it pays $20/hr and she said she'll finally be able to give me 2 more books to start editing by end of June. Of course, she's changed the start date more times than I can count, but it would be nice to have a new project to work on.

In addition to that, looks like I'll have something else "big" to edit for another client who is an IT director at a private Jewish school in New York City. He's written a new software program that he wants to launch. I've been editing his work emails for several years now and he really likes my editing, but often times i have difficulty understanding what he's trying to say and the subject matter is not something I know much about. Guess we'll see how it goes. He has trouble organizing his thoughts; that's why I edit his work emails...he said he's mailing me a document his lawyer drew up and wants me to sign so I'll have to review it carefully as i don't plan to hire a lawyer myself. I expect it's mainly aimed at keeping me from talking about his new software program.

Okay, probably a lot of you cannot relate to the fact that I've had to give myself a daily self-injection for every day since Jan. 1,2000. That's 14 YEARS, for my MS.

I just got off the phone from ordering my first delivery of the same medication, but they recently came out with a new form of the med with a higher dose but you only have to inject three times a week.

I am so excited. I am really looking forward to giving my body a break from all the injections. They often leave a lump that takes a very long time to go away. You're not supposed to inject in the same spot twice.

Anyway, this is one of those little things that is going to make my life much better. What's more, the co-pay for this with Aetna, my new insurer, will be ZERO. Nada. Nothing.

I was concerned that switching from my regular med to the new 3-day-a-week regimen might cost something, but with the pharmaceutical company's patient assistance program, the $450 I'd normally pay in the co-pay for a 3-month supply is $0. Phew.

I'm now into my nearly 8th month at this contract bank job. I am so grateful for everything this job has done for me. It's not just relieved my money pressures, but since becoming eligible (after 6 months) to enroll in the recruiter agency's health plan, it's saving me several hundred dollars a month on premium costs and now even my MS med copay is nothing.

I am so appreciative and feel like I've been down to the bottom of the well in recent years and now I'm back up and doing well. If I can just hold onto this bank job beyond the original term (September 2, 2014). All the other contractors I know are having their terms renewed repeatedly, but for just 3 months at a time.

One more woman came by after work tonight to buy some plants, pushing the total I made from selling the extras that seem to proliferate here to over $200.

Not sure if I'll keep posting my ad on our Patch site here or Craig's list as having to hang around the house can get in the way of other things I like to do.

We'll see. It's hard to resist making a few extra dollars on the side.

Yesterday I wrapped up editing a 200-page manuscript, and the woman's initial impression was very positive. She said she'd be mailing off the $145 balance tomorrow. And she's already into her 2nd book, 2o pages into it and wants me to edit that. She seems similar in that regard to The Author, except that this person seems to have the funds needed to pay me, whereas The Author is still broke.

I got so much done.

1. Planted onions, spinach, peas, marigolds and sunflowers.

2. Mowed the front and back lawns.

3. My friend Dave came over. He helped me install a brand new Andersen door handle on my front storm door. The old one was over 20 years old and totally crappy looking...this one looks great!

4. Although he tried to pay anyway, i treated him to lunch at the local Chinese place, as a thank you.

5. I FINISHED editing the life coach's manuscript....finally. It seemed like it was taking forever. 200 pages edited, now she owes me a balance of $140.

I had 3 more people come over to buy perennials I dug up from an old garden and made another $61. Total made from selling plants in my yard this weekend and last is $181. Not bad!

6. I picked up a few groceries and went to the landfill.

7. I also vacuumed the whole house. It really needed it.

I feel so happy to have gotten the garden planted (although there's more I still have to dig up) AND also to have that door handle installed. I bought the new one a YEAR ago and it's been sitting on my kitchen counter all that time.

It was wet all day and now the heaviest rains are here. It's raining so hard that even though I went to bed a little after 10 am, I now can't sleep as the rain pelts the windows. It's about 11:30 p.m.

So glad the end of the work week is here again.It was another long week. I had to drive up to Dedham, Mass. on Wednesday for a meeting, then drive back home again same day, about 5 hours of driving in all. So that was very tiring.

This weekend I'm getting together with a former biking friend. We'll probably go to lunch and maybe do something else. I seriously need some me time. Also on Sunday I have more people (3) coming over to buy perennials from me. As mentioned earlier, I made $120 from selling perennials I dug up from my garden. The 3 that are coming Sunday are very conveniently all expressing an interest in different things, so maybe I can sell the bulk of what I have to them all. One wants gooseberry and lamb's ears, the other wants astilbe and solomon's seal and the other wants hosta and spreading groundcovers.

One of my two old real estate clients contacted me tonight, wanting to know if I still wasn't able to freelance for them becus I'm busy with the bank job. I hadn't told him that a big part of the reason why i don't want to work for them anymore is because by the time all the taxes are deducted, i really don't wind up with much. But I can't tell him that since there's nothing he can do about it unless he's willing to accept higher fees from me, but i don't think they'd want to pay as much as I want to make!

Certainly now, working f/t at the bank, and doing other freelance on the side, I don't need to work any more. I really have to consciously carve out time on my weekends to do fun stuff, otherwise, i allow myself to get all bogged down in the usual chores and before you know it, weekend's done.

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail informing me that my personal information was "recovered" during an investigation by law enforcement and Amex.

What does this mean, in bank-speak? That my card information was hacked and stolen by ID thieves.

I had to laugh, because these are exactly the kinds of customer communications letters I write in my new(ish) bank job.

But I was surprised that Amex not only didn't offer to issue me a new card with a new account number, but they didn't even offer credit monitoring services, which is pretty routine these days.

They did supply with the letter a laundry list of things I could do myself, like check my credit report, "be vigilant," yadda yadda yadda.

I called them up to request a new card and account number, and they agreed. They also said they'd transfer over all my points and credit card history so that my credit wouldn't suffer by closing out one of my oldest credit cards. But I had to ask for all this specifically; it wasn't proactively offered.

Since I had them on the phone, I did ask about the new propel card and would I be eligible to earn those rewards if i already had another amex card, since they denied me rewards once before based on that fact. I don't think the rep understood my question and i didn't want to get into it at the office, so i let it go as I'm not quite ready to go for that card. I'd like to wait til later in the year when my car and homeowner's insurance are due, as that's an easy $1,000 of spending right there.

But I would urge anyone who already has an AMEX card to double-check with them first before going for their new card to avoid being severely disappointed when they don't give you the up front bonus!

In other news, yesterday's payday was the first of 2 monthly deductions for health insurance. At $87 per deduction, or $175 a month, I will realize a monthly savings of $229 (compared to what i was paying with my Obamacare plan) without doing a thing. Love it. I've arrived at Reasonable Cost Land and don't ever want to return to Downward Unemployed Spiral of Escalating Costs.

In my last post, I happily reported having made an easy $100 from selling perennials growing in my yard as I work to return a very large but unkempt/overgrown bed to lawn. I decided to repost the Craig's List ad for these plants because I still have quite a few things left that I could either make some decent money on or throw in the compost heap. So there are 2 more people who have expressed interest (and 2 still who expressed interest earlier) but it's doubtful it will happen this weekend since today it's raining and tomorrow is Mother's Day. I would squeeze someone in if they wanted to come, but don't think it will happen.

Next week I have another trip to Boston area for another daylong meeting. I can look forward to 5 hours of drive time round trip. They're all meeting for drinks afterwards, and i feel some subtle pressure to at least pop my head in there, but considering i don't like to drink and certainly don't want to drink before facing a 2.5 hour ride home, I don't plan to go to that at all. I'd just as soon get on the road as soon as the meeting ends.

However, a while back i asked my boss if there was any way they could move back the start time of the meeting to better accommodate those of us who were driving in from out of state. My friend said they'd never do it and didn't really care whether it was a hardship to get up at 5 to get up there in time and then drive back home, making it a very long day. Lo and behold, they did move back the start time to 11 a.m., so i can leave around 8 am, which seems almost civil. I'm allowing an extra half hour for traffic, which may not be enough, but that's all i'm allowing.

Otherwise, work is fine though there is plenty of drama with one of the women, B., who sits next to me. She seems to be a Teflon contract worker who has ingratiated herself with our boss and thus seems to be impervious to anything bad happening even though she goofs off for the majority of her day, has gotten away with not showing up at the office numerous times, even missing a conference call because she was busy making vacation plans for Labor Day weekend. She has ZERO work ethic. Everyone seems to be aware of what's going on except our boss.

Then, finally, another woman, M, who sits in my area, complained that this woman's frequent emotional breakdowns were too distracting to deal with and asked to be moved to another location. Although B. was spoken to by our boss, she now simply spends more time texting rather than talking on the phone because she knows someone complained. But now she's hell bent on finding out who complained to the boss about her.

She IM'd me and asked me point blank and I told her no, it wasn't me, although I've known all along it was M. who complained, and I was fully prepared to support what M. said should our manager ask me, but she never did. You would think the boss would want to get to the bottom of it. M. and I are the only two who sit near B., so you would think our manager would want to talk to me to see if i corroborated what M. said, but that never happened.

B. doesn't suspect M. AT ALL, because M. is very pleasant to her. So B. was taking to M. yesterday saying how upsetting it was to know that someone ratted her out, and M. proceeded to try to give her advice and told her to forget about it and move on. M. must have been feeling very nervous because I had already told M. the day before that I'm not going to lie to B., and that while I won't volunteer information, I will tell her if she asks me any specifics.

After talking to her husband about it, M. was feeling very nervous about letting B. know it was her who complained because she she thinks B. is unstable and doesn't want a confrontation, but it was extremely awkward hearing her talk to B. about it. It's possible B. may still suspect me since I'm the one who can be cool with her because she's such an emotional yo-yo and can be annoying so I vacillate between trying to help her (she's beyond help) and trying to steer clear of her as much as that's possible when i sit next to her and do work with her.

Ahh, the pleasures of being back in an office environment.

I feel like I accomplished a lot today, but I am extremely wiped out.

My Guatemalan guy who was here 2 weeks ago and who STARTED dismantling my picket fence never called me back to confirm he was coming, and in fact he did not show up. I don't think it was a language thing; I mentioned "lots of digging" and I have a feeling he'd prefer to cut trees down to digging in the dirt.

So I was left to soldier on by myself. I worked on and off in the fenced garden all day, in between taking rest breaks and greeting 4 or 5 different people who showed up to buy plants from me.

I made $100 cash(!) by selling some gooseberry bushes and assorted perennials. One very nice woman works at a certain company I'm familiar with and said she could pass my resume on to her boss, who is looking for writers. I also sold gooseberry plants to no less than 3 people. One guy said he had fond memories of growing gooseberries when he was growing up in Romania. The other guy was a transplant from Ukraine and said gooseberries are hard to find here, so he was excited to see my ad. He was perfectly happy to dig up my big bushes, but as he drove off, he stopped short because the bush had fallen out of his pick-up!

I may give my resume to the woman, just to see if I get an interview, although I would much rather stay at the bank if i get a perm offer since I already know that job pretty well.

So, back to the fenced garden plot, it is so large, about 10 x 25 feet long, that I chose to mentally divide it into thirds, just to make it more imaginable. I was digging out clumps of wild oats, which were hard to dig out, as well as invasive pachysandra and other stuff. At the same time, I was digging up valuable perennials to either move them elsewhere in the yard (more digging to plant them) or putting them in pots in the hopes I could sell some. At the same time, I was also pulling up bricks with my shovel. Years ago I had a brick walkway in there; I started carting the bricks in my wheelbarrow to the driveway; perhaps I can sell them too, cheaply; if not, they'll go the dump.

It just was a ton of work. I can't say I completely cleared the area, but I think if I throw grass seed down and get grass to grow, I can just mow the grass, as well as anything else that manages to still grow there. The idea is not to have a perfect lawn, but to "tame" this land and keep it under control so it doesn't look so unkempt and wild-looking. (Speaking of which, I surprised a garter snake in that area and he slithered on.)

Tomorrow I will mow the back lawn as well as the other 2/3 of this fenced area that I have yet to dig up. I just want to mow it to tame the growth.

I also completely removed the foliage that was shrouding one entry hole of the woodchuck, so I'm hoping this will be enough to finally encourage the animal to find somewhere else to live. Although I don't know where the 2nd entry hole is, exactly. It's usually within 20 feet of the other hole.

So tomorrow I will plant grass seed where I dug. I also want to get the veggie garden going and possibly get a haircut. I have onions to plant too.

Today after digging all day and playing plant lady i ran to Lowes to get the grass seed (and some cilantro and parsley for the garden), filled up the gas tank, bought a tarp to cover my firewood with and got groceries at Trader Joe's.

Blue milkweed, ready to bloom.


Lungwort

Last night was the first mowing of the season. So that's why I was in the vicinity of one of my bluebird boxes. Sadly, as I walked by with the mower, I saw three small blue eggs at the base of the box. Each one of them had been intentionally pierced and then thrown out of the box by a house wren.

Breaks my heart. Bluebirds rarely get a chance to nest in the boxes, because the much more aggressive wrens will destroy their eggs, as described above. Then they will build their own nest in the box.

I cleaned out the box of the completely built nest of pine needles, picked it up out of the ground and have moved it to a location closer to where I can monitor it. Not that I can do much to prevent wrens from doing the same thing again. It just takes a few minutes for them to pierce bluebird eggs. It's really upsetting.

Last week I welcomed the return of hummingbirds. They were at the sugar water feeder I put up every spring. It is said hummingbirds faithfully return from Central America to the very same location up north, so I always want to put out the welcome mat when they get here. The males arrive first, ahead of the females. It is truly a miracle they make that journey of thousands of miles at all.

As I may have mentioned, I have begun the process of dismantling a large (roughly 10 x 20 feet) fenced in perennial garden on the north side of my house. I just don't have time to maintain it and when it gets overgrown, it becomes an eyesore.

I want to clear it out of valuable plants and then plant it in grass, which I can at least mow to keep tidy looking.

So last night I posted about a half dozen plants on Craig's List for sale. I've got about six different people coming today to buy them!

Everyone knows that not everything is dug up, and hopefully most know that the plants don't look like the pictures (taken in summer) I posted with the ad. I explained in great detail to a few, in case they are novice gardeners, that most plants are just now beginning to emerge from the ground, but when they are dormant is a good time to transplant.

I did dig up a number of plants and they don't look like much now in the pots. People may not want to buy them as i think so many are conditioned to expect gorgeous annuals in bloom, for instance. They may not be willing to take a bet on something just poking out of the soil, even with my assurances.

I'm selling everything cheaply to make it worth their while to come, so $5 for most plants and $10 for a tray of certain groundcovers. The pachysandra is free!

I have two different men interested in my gooseberry plants. One is taking 4 smaller plants and the other is willing to dig up 2 full size plants. Gooseberries are delicious in a pie but truth be told, I rarely picked mine. Mostly, the birds got them, just as they got the tiny cherries on my dwarf cherry trees and the blueberries and the strawberries. Unless you have large areas on which to grow these things,the casual home gardener shouldn't plan on getting a whole lot of fruit for the effort.

I spoke to Sergio Thursday about coming back today to continue dismantling the fence,and to dig up the sol in advance of sowing grass seed. His English is so bad, but he said he would call me back, I think, although I did not hear from him. In a way i feel i'll have my hands full with people coming throughout the day, and I'd have to be careful that Sergio didn't trample the plants still in the ground while doing his work. So in a way, it'd be better to dig up and sell the most valuable plants first, although things grow quickly around here and if I don't wrestle control of this plot quickly, it'll become totally overgrown and I won't want to go in there from fear of ticks. So time is of the essence.

It's going to be a very busy day.

I spent a good part of Sunday working to clean up a large, fenced-in area to the north of my house. The old pine picket fence has begun to fall apart, so I made the decision to dismantle the whole fence instead of repairing it.

I became fascinated when I saw this:



Can you tell what this is? These are tiny lichens in bloom! They are no more than one-quarter inch in height. I never realized lichens "bloom," nor that those blooms are a bright red against the pale grayish green on the lichens themselves.

Here's another shot, looking down:



Fascinating!!!


This is a pot of hens and chicks I put in the basement on a lower shelf, not really expecting it to survive. I'd totally forgotten about it until its pale foliage, starved of sunlight, caught my eye in the dark basement and I realized it was coming alive.

And, of course, I can always count on my daffs to brighten a day in April.