Look:

This is a cookie sheet!  It fits perfectly over the sink of our place.  I had it out because I made bread out of the over-ripe pears yesterday and when I washed the romaine it was so easy to just set it on there and let it dry for a bit while I went to cut cucumber.

It worked so well!  The water dripped right through and didn’t spill over the counter like it would normally with our cutting board.  And once I came back to cut the romaine, I just cut it on the cookie sheet, too.  The water kept running on through the mesh instead of all over my counter!

Plus, when I wanted to drop things into the sink, it was just a little ways to reach, and I could see everything that was underneath.  So when I dropped my knife that I’d used for the cucumber, I didn’t have to go groping around blindly–I could see exactly where it had gone.

Anyway, I thought it was a fantastic idea and I just had to share it.  I’ll have more to say soon.

Cheers!

It’s been an interesting day, but in a wholly different way than yesterday.  I’m over being frustrated and scared about the whole car situation.  Now I’m upset, angry, and taking action.

There was a message on my work phone this morning when I came back from a meeting.  The Woman With The Tahoe (TWWTT) filed an insurance claim against my insurance company and they were calling to ask what was going on and get the information that they needed.  I called back, but the gentleman I was supposed to talk with wasn’t available, so I left a message and set out for lunch.

I had a lunch thing with my department today.  Normally for these things, I catch a ride with another couple women from my group.  But today, I drove myself.  As I was leaving the parking lot, I looked around for the Tahoe to see if maybe I could take down her plate numbers or something.  When I saw her car and started to drive up to it, I saw a gentleman with a clipboard taking notes.  I parked (a good ways away from her car) and asked if he was from my insurance company.  He said, no, he was from TWWTT’s company.  I introduced myself, said I was the one she was claiming had hit her, and that I hadn’t done it.  He asked if he could look at my car and take some photos and I said that would be fine.

He came over and took a look, took a handful of photographs, wrote some notes on his clipboard.  My agent called while the other gentleman was looking over my car, and he told me to expect a call from the claims department sometime later that day and that I should be sure to answer the phone when they called.  I said I would be sure to do so.

The agent from the other company was friendly and encouraging and said that, in his opinion, it really didn’t look like I had hit her.  He took my name and phone numbers in case he needed them, thanked me for letting him look at my car, and I went on my way to lunch.

When I arrived late to the restaurant, people asked what had made me so late.  So I told the situation to the group sitting around me.  A couple of them had already heard about it, but it was news to most of them.  And they were a wealth of information about what I should do.  And they were wonderfully encouraging.  It’s like having a bunch of helpful uncles.

When I got back to my desk, I called the local police to ask if I could get a copy of the report that had been written yesterday.  It turns out that there isn’t one.  I left a message for the officer who responded because he was out on the street at the time of my call and not available.  The woman who took the message suspected that because the claim was on private property and a week old, the officer probably gave TWWTT a form to fill out and file with her insurance.

After that, I contacted the security office at work and asked for a copy of the report that had been filed with that department.  That one I did get, complete with the name of the woman filing the complaint and photographs of the damage.  That’s right, I didn’t even know her name until I got the report from Security.  And can I say, there are some confusing discrepancies between reports – like when she says she saw me come into the parking lot and where she saw me park:  was it on the 6th or the 12th and was it beside her or just somewhere in the lot?  The whole thing is a mess.

I also went and spoke with the HR representative for my department.  She is a wonderfully pleasant woman and I told her everything that was happening.  She said that she would speak with Security, too, so she could get a good handle on what was happening and that I should be sure to keep her in the loop as things progress.  I mostly spoke with her to make sure that I’m not failing to do things like I should be with a situation this complicated and in a company this large.  And also so if things go badly and TWWTT gets nasty about it, I’ve already got someone who’s heard my side of the story.  I think that’s the first proactive thing I’ve done since this happened.  Everything else has been reactive, but this one, I’m stepping ahead of the game.

And since insurance is apparently one of the very few quickly moving things in the south, I got a call from the agent from the claims department from my insurance company.  He took a recorded statement about what had happened, with lots and lots of really wonderful questions.  Like, how big is the parking lot?  What color is your car?  How many blue cars are in the lot — more than one?  When were you informed of the incident?  What’s your understanding of the situation?  Were there any witnesses?

I feel good about my statement.  I answered all the questions clearly and honestly, trying to make it very clear where things were confusing to me and just didn’t make sense how she could be making this claim against me.  And at the very end, when he asked if there was anything else I’d like to add to the statement, I was able to explain where the paint on my car had come from.  He said, just from my statement, that they probably were going to deny her claim because it didn’t seem like she had any proof against me.  She can’t file a claim just based on her opinion.  It’s not the final call because someone still has to come out and look at my car and there are other things that have to happen, but he’s feeling good about it going in my favor.

Also, if TWWTT decides to argue against their findings and takes me to small claims court, my insurance will provide me with a lawyer, free of charge.

He did ask me to ask Security if there was security footage of the parking lot the day of the incident, so I contacted them again to ask if that was available.  Unfortunately, although there is a camera in that lot, it’s angled in such a way that it didn’t see either one of our cars that day.  When I called the claims group back to let them know that information, I missed the call from the woman from my insurance who wants to come out and look at my car and, amusingly, our mailbox.

Naturally, my cell phone had died by then and I don’t have the ability to call numbers that aren’t local from my work phone.  So, since Justin still has a cell phone with a Savannah area phone number, I called him and begged him to call her back.  He did and now I have an appointment with her tomorrow at 11:30.

It’s been a busy day.  But I’m feeling good about it.  I have a lot of support from the people in my department at work, all of them incredulous that TWWTT is trying to do this and several of them offering suggestions on what I should do next.  Justin, of course, is wonderfully supportive of me.  And all the insurance people I’ve spoken with today seem to agree that the claim just isn’t going to go through.  Why she didn’t just file a hit-and-run last week is absolutely beyond me.  But she can’t randomly accuse me of this and have the insurance just go along with it with no proof.

So, hopefully this link will work.  I’ll post this and then check it and then I’ll know.  But here’s the link:  CLICKY.

And it looks like they’re off by a week because I was hoping to listen to the one I missed on Sunday (Justin was sick and I was “helping” by staying home and sleeping, too).  But they’ve got 3 of the sermons up for listening:  “Introduction,” “Compromise,” and “Communication.”  I just listened through “Communication” again and I’ll have to go back and listen to the other ones sometime again, too.  But while it’s all fresh, let me help clarify a few things that Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon.

He’s been using videos from “Everybody Love’s Raymond” for examples, which aren’t on the podcast because of copyright laws.  And I can’t find a copy of it on youTube, either.  But if you can find a copy of Season 4 Episode 3, the “Can Opener” episode, it’s in the middle of that.

He mentioned Jim & Nick’s and that’s a is a barbecue restaurant and if you ever come to visit us, we will take you there because it is AMAZING.  Delicious ribs.  Amazing nachos.  I’m drooling over here….

This is what he puts up on the screen at the end of the sermon:

• Timing is everything
  • Ecc. 3:1,7
• Think before you speak
  • Proverbs 16:23, Proverbs 15:23
• Don’t send mixed messages
  • Matt 5:27
• Listen, listen, listen
  • Proverbs 18:13
• Encourage
  • Eph 4:29

If I find time in the next couple days, I’ll try to go back and listen to the others, too, and give some notes on those, too.

Anyway, give them a listen!  They’re good!

Justin’s car broke down about a month ago.  It was sometime between July 6th and 10th, but I can’t remember exactly when because I was on “vacation” and not going anywhere so why did I care what day of the week it was?  But we got a mechanic to look at it and he declared it dead and we’ve been working around it ever since.  While I was on furlough, Justin just took my car to work.  And after I needed it back so I could get back to work again, he’s been catching a ride with a coworker or working from home.  Despite all my efforts to reach out to people at my office, I haven’t found anyone willing to help me carpool.  It’s really stupid.

Anyway, we’ve been trying to figure out what we’re going to do about it.  And, because we CAN be taught!, we’re being much smarter about it than we were when my car died last year.  I don’t really want to talk about that experience, so let’s just say we made some not very wise decisions at that time.

So this time we’re doing better.  This time we’re doing research.  This time we’re being more forceful.  This time we’re actually being SMART.

And we’ve so far gone to one dealership twice and another dealership once and we still have NO car.  Because the first time, we wanted to check out what we would get if we didn’t have to worry about money and then look at what that would look like to our finances.  Here’s a hint:  It didn’t look good.  We decided not to do that.  (See?!  Smart!!)

Today, we went to another dealership, a small, used-car lot, one recommended by a friend from church, and we did some recon.  What we learned:  We could buy one of those cars with money we had in our accounts, but we’d prefer to do a little research into the car before driving off with it.  And that the guy we worked with could help us with our problem.

And then we went back to the dealer where we went in the first place, a name-brand dealer, and asked what the best deal they could give us was.  And it was pretty sad.  The guy we spoke with did as best as he could to try to get us into a car, but we were solid on the amount that we were willing to go into debt with and we did not budge from that number.

So we’re back at home, still with no car, but with more and more knowledge.  Justin’s going to look into the type of car we looked at today, but more likely, we’re going to call up the small-dealership guy we spoke with today and work something out.  If it works, I’ll tell you about it later.  Mostly, this is just to tell you what we did NOT do.

We did not go onto the lot and fall in love with a car and buy it at what they offered because it’s beautiful and we MUST HAVE IT.

We did not let ourselves get suckered into a price range where we were not comfortable.

We did not let our niceness turn us into doormats for the nice men we worked with.

We did not walk in without researching what we could afford.

We did not let the salespeople intimidate us.

We did not walk off with a car because we could afford it because we prefer to do research before jumping into the pool.

We did not lie.

We did not let our anxieties about money, debt, and car-less-ness drive us into a decision.

We did not go into the situation without very clearly communicating with each other what our expectations and priorities were.

We did not try to read each others minds but instead asked for a little bit of time alone to talk about what we thought about what was going on.

I guess what it all boils down to so far is a handful of key things:

• We didn’t buy a car we couldn’t afford just because it was beautiful
• We didn’t buy a car we could afford just because it was there
• We didn’t let salespeople influence our decisions
• We communicated clearly between each other and stuck together as a team

And, yeah, it means that Justin will still have to catch a ride with his coworker on Monday.  But we haven’t dug ourselves further into debt.  We haven’t driven home a car we weren’t totally sure about.  And we’re learning more and more how to communicate with each other about important, difficult things and presenting a unified front.

And all those things are so much better than having another car sitting in front of our house.

Well, personal finances and small business planning are the two topics that have been big and heavy on my mind lately. So, taboo or not, I’m going to talk about money.

I used to think it was sinful to want to have more money. “The love of money” and all that. I thought that being poor and not worrying about money, just ignoring it, basically, was the appropriate, Christian thing to do. That was why I didn’t really think about it much when I was living in northeast Georgia, making $1000 a month, half of which went into rent. I thought it was appropriate, that I shouldn’t want more, that I should be content with my situation.

It wasn’t until I got employment in Savannah that I realized how much money I could have been making and how little I had been getting paid and started to think about the whole situation. And I still felt like thinking about money was sinful and that I shouldn’t work too hard to make more money, that I should work hard to be a good employee and do good service for my employer and take whatever they gave me.

Hello, my name is Kylene and I am a financial doormat.

And it wasn’t that I handled my money poorly. I’d balance my checkbook regularly, I’d track my spending, I knew how to handle the necessary expenses and balance the unnecessary splurges. But I wasn’t planning. I reacted retroactively. I took what I was given and spent what was necessary, spent the rest on other things if I wanted to, stuck some into savings, and that was it. There really wasn’t any thought about the future 5-years down the road or more.

I wish I could remember when I started to think that maybe there was a different way to look at the whole thing. It might have been after Justin and I consolidated our finances and I started looking at how we each handle everything in that.  But it might have been right after we bought my car. Yeah, not the best time to have the whole revolutionary thinking thing, but considering my history, it makes sense. I’d been handling my school loans for a while and dealing with them just fine. I was used to them and they weren’t very scary anymore. Adding another loan didn’t necessarily mean that I’d think about my debt level any differently. But it did. Suddenly we had this enormous debt and it made me pause and think about money. I wished I understood it better. I wished I’d known how to handle buying a car more effectively. I wished I knew how to make that debt go away as quickly as possible because it was kind of freaking me out.

And I started thinking about other money things. My credit card debt. My savings account. My current pay level through the temp agency. Investing. Retiring. There were so many aspects about the money in my life that I didn’t understand and didn’t have good control over. I wanted that to change.

And part of my brain still kept saying that it was sinful. “Cannot serve both God and money” and all that. And to be perfectly honest, it’s still something I’m struggling with. But I know deep in my core that I don’t have to live in a trailer park and make minimum wage until the day I die. He doesn’t want us to be miserable. It’s okay for me to want to have a good situation, be able to retire eventually, be able to have children and care for them. As long as I’m serving the Lord and not the dollar, then I can think about money and investing and all those things and not be sinning.

So, all that said, I’ve been working on having a well-rounded view of finances. I still balance my checkbook and track spending. I have a plan in place to decrease our debt load. And while I’m working on those retroactive situations, I’ve also been working on setting up a Roth IRA and learning about my 401(k). I actually have a 401(k) now that I’m employed directly at my company instead of through a temp agency, which also gives me loads of other benefits. And at the beginning of next year, I’m going to negotiate very hard to get an increase in pay appropriate to the amount of work I’ve been doing for the company.

Here are a handful of things that I’ve learned lately, many of which are from Suze Orman’s Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke.

Increase your credit card score. This mystical number is crazy important and if you don’t know what it is, you’ll want to find out and then see if you can get it up higher. People who are going to give you money or big item purchases or interest rates are going to know it and so should you. And did you know that there are three different companies tracking this and that you should look at all three? I didn’t know that; I thought there was only one. And I’ll be honest, I still don’t know what my scores are because I haven’t wanted to pay for it or put the mark on it that I’ve looked just before we went to get a car for Justin. But I did get a copy of our credit reports—lists that you can get for free once a year and lists lots of interesting information, like payments that you should be making and whether you were late on any of those. Being late will make your score go down, just in case you didn’t know that. I want to know our score, but I know enough to know that it’s not very good right now and that we should just be working on getting it higher in any way we can. Like being prompt on payments and getting our credit card debt down to a lower level.

Credit card debt is a ratio thing. Your score is going to look at how much you can have in debt compared to how much you actually have in debt. So if you only have one card, but you’ve maxed it out, that’s bad. But if you’ve got several cards and they’re all pretty empty, that’s good. Keeping several cards is actually good, especially if you have a long history on them, so don’t pay it off and then close the account. Pay it off and then keep it so that ratio of how much you can have and how much you do have in debt is a much prettier number. And the companies can look at how long you’ve had a history, which also helps your case.

Pay off credit card debt first before anything else. In my situation, I should pay off my credit card debt before I even start putting money into savings. Once we’re out of debt, we’ll work on savings, but until we’re above ground, money is much better spent being put into paying things off than sitting static in a savings account. Just compare the interest rates if you don’t believe me.

Before Justin’s car died, I was planning to take almost all the money we had in savings and almost completely pay off our cards. Because we need that money now to put a down on a car, I’m glad that we have it, but getting that debt down would have been helpful in getting a better interest rate and dealing with our debt situation.

Instead, what I’m doing is this. We have 3 cards. I paid off one a few months ago and started putting the amount that I had been paying toward that one toward one of the other cards, so suddenly I’m paying almost double what I had been paying. The balance on that card has gotten small enough now that I’m going to call and talk to my 3rd card about transferring the balance over to that card because it has the lowest interest rate. Oh! That’s another thing—pay off the card with the highest interest rate first. So, after I check into how much I’m looking at for fees to transfer and make sure that my interest rate won’t go up, and actually ask if they’ll make my interest rate even lower because I’m bringing in this balance, I will, hopefully, only have one card left to pay off. And I’ll be putting into that card each month the money that I had been paying toward the 1st and 2nd cards.

Once I’ve gotten those all paid off, I’m keeping the cards and I’m using them occasionally, but I’m paying off the balance at the end of each month so I never have a balance that carries over. That’s the goal anyway. And because all these cards are in my name, Justin is going to open a card in his name so he can establish a credit card score, too.

And then we’ll put the money that we’d been paying toward the credit card debt into the car loan debt. Our school loans are smaller, so it seemed like we should take care of those and just get rid of them as quickly as we could, but nope. There’s a tax break on interest applied on school loans. There’s no such thing for car loans. So keep the tax break going and pay off the other debt first. And because we’re putting in the normal payment plus the payments that had been going toward the credit cards, it’ll go down pretty quickly.

So that’s what we’re doing about debt. On to the other half of things. When I was at my job in northeast Georgia, I had a 401(b) that I had no idea what to do with. It collected a little bit of money while I was there, and when I left, it just sat there. Because it was less than $500, every quarter or half-year or something, it took a hit because it didn’t meet requirements. I’m currently in the process of moving it to another company and making it into a regular IRA. Once I get it moved, I’m going to roll it over into a Roth IRA. And then I’m going to start putting $50 a month or so into it, until we get out of debt at which time I can start putting more money this direction.

I’ve also got a 401(k) through my company and they do a percentage match, 100% to a certain level and then 50% from that level to the next level. I am contributing up to that highest level so I get the 100% match for the first percentage and then the 50% match for the second percentage.

What I’m getting at is this: I have two different kinds of retirement plans going on right now, or at least in progress. This is a Good Thing. Diversity is the name of the game when planning for retirement. Also, time is on my side right now. Interest on the dollar, I think was the phrase. I have at least 30 years before I’m going to retire, probably, so I’ve got at least 30 years to put money away and for that to mature. The crazy difference that a few years can make when looking at interest is staggering. If you haven’t started putting money away, and I’m not talking savings accounts but actual investing, you should start RIGHT NOW. I wish I had started 10 years ago.

So #1—Be investing already. #2—If your employer has a match for your retirement plans, match them. It’s free money, people. Take what they’re handing out by matching it. For too long I was sitting at the lower level of the match, where they met 100%. Now I’m at the full 100% plus 50% and the difference in how fast that is going to increase my 401(k) is surprising. And looking at that over the length of the time that I’m employed here is staggering. And that’s at a fairly low pay grade compared to other people at the company. So match whatever the company is offering.

Now, I’m still learning, but from what I understand a 401(k) is money taken pre-taxes. So when you retire, and there are so many rules about this that I haven’t even touched because I’m so far away from needing to know, you’re going to have to pay taxes on that money. It’s tax-free right now, but it’s not tax-free forever. You pay the tax on the other end. But not all retirement plans are this way. Traditional IRAs are, but Roth IRAs are not. With a Roth, you pay the tax now and don’t have to pay it when you take it out later on. Again, diversity is the name of the game. This applies to what your money is being invested in under these plans, but also in the types of plans. So right now I’ve got a plan that’s taxed when I take the money out, and I’m working on setting up an account that I’ll pay taxes on as I put the money in.

Now, because it’s a 401(b) moving into a traditional IRA and then rolling over into a Roth IRA, I’m going to have to pay taxes on it when it rolls over. But because there’s only like $300 in there right now, it’s not going to take a big hit. But if it had been something larger, I probably would have just left it as a traditional IRA.

And good gosh I’ve written a lot on this topic and I should stop before you all fall over from boredom. But if you find this as interesting as I do, please let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions.

Cheers!

They were all pretty spotty with mold, so I washed them good and hard for a long time and in the end, they mostly ended up looking like this.

Washed and worn looking

But it’s impressive what a good dark stain will do.  This is what I did later in the afternoon.

Newly stained and beautiful

One of them is darker than the other, just because it took more weather damage than the others, but they all look so much better than they did.

All refreshed and renewed

I think I might give them all a second coat, but I’m going to wait until they’re all good and dry, which means it won’t happen for a week or so.  But they’re all covered in a very good weather-resistant stain now, so hopefully they’ll fare better than they had been.

In between washing and staining, because I had to wait for them to dry, I went to the library to return my due book and pick up a handful of others.  I’d forgotten how liberating it is to *borrow* books instead of buying them.  I can pick up books for research that I wouldn’t want to buy and keep around, but are good to be able to borrow for a while, get the information I want, and then return.

Like The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke by Suze Orman.  I’m recommending this read to everybody I know.  Seriously.  READ THIS BOOK.  It’s all about how to get yourself out of debt and into a better place for the future.  And it’s not just “stop drinking Starbucks everyday.”  It’s “this is what your credit score means and why it’s important and how you can get it better.”  It’s “don’t worry about your savings account when you have $10,000 in credit card debt.”  And “this is what a Roth IRA is and why you want to start one RIGHT NOW.”  It’s “this is how you buy a house, after you’ve paid off your credit card debt and improved your credit score.”  It’s really great.  I’ve got the book full of Post-it notes and I’m working on doing the things she recommended.  But once I’m done, I’m returning the book and I didn’t have to pay a dime for the advice!  It’s lovely!

Anyway, back from the library, I went and stained the chairs, listening to podiobooks on my music box, and stupidly forgetting to put on sunscreen or bug spray.  My back is a lovely pink now and I’ve got bites all up my legs.  My legs were all spotty when I came in, both from the splatter from the stain and because I sat on the grass and I’m allergic to grass.  The bug bites didn’t even register until this morning!

So I came in and washed, collapsed for a while because I was tired (sunburn does that) and I’ve lost track of my evening after that.  Tired does that.  I know Justin and I played a game together for a while and then remembered that one of our favorite shows was coming back on that evening so we watched that.  Eureka! Fantastic show.  And then we went to bed.

I’m sorry I failed to call, Mom.  I will do that sometime today.

Justin found a great pattern for build-it-yourself bookshelves, so I think we might be working on that today, and maybe getting together with online friends to play a computer game online, but I’m not really sure yet.

I hope you’re all having a great day!  I’ll check back in again soon!

Cheers!

I’m all about doing the little things I can do to help. I snip apart 6-pack rings so fish and penguins don’t get caught in them. This seemed to fit into that same niche. So I thought, “What is the appropriate way to crush a yogurt cup?” I tried to do what I would do to an aluminum can—pinch in the sides a little and press firmly from the top. The result, while probably classified as “crushed” didn’t really seem like a great improvement on the previous uncrushed configuration.

At which point I thought I’d do what I do for 6-pack rings and cut down the side, which is what I did with the 2nd cup sitting in my trash can from yesterday.

And then I thought I should do some research. So I went to the second source of all knowledge: Google. (The first source of all knowledge is, of course, Wikipedia.)

Google informed me that the main animal I’m trying to save is the skunk. Apparently these pungent creatures cram their little heads into these delicious little yogurt cups and get stuck because they can’t pull their head back out again. Destroying the cup is intended to help save their necks, literally.

Yoplait already did something to help, without having to change their signature yogurt cup shape. There’s a little ridge around the bottom of the cups that apparently wasn’t in the original design. It’s a tiny little change that probably didn’t draw a lot of consumer attention. But what it does is give skunks (or any other yogurt-loving small-headed creatures) a foothold to pry the cups off their head when they get stuck.

I’ll probably go with the cutting down the side of the cup disposal technique from now on, since it seemed more effective than crushing it. I don’t think the resulting edge is sharp enough to cause injury and I’m pretty sure that there’s no way a critter could get stuck if the cup has a slice down the side.

And that’s the wildlife preservation lesson that I’m sharing with all you yogurt-loving readers. Save the skunks! Destroy your yogurt cups.