If things have looked a little odd the last 12 hours or so here, I was messing around with fonts on the blog…only to conclude that the one I had in the first place worked best. So that’s where we’ll stay!
Sentential Links #239
Linkage….
Even the “liberals are for it so I’m agin it” principle falls flat. I got nothing.
You are never going back home to the waves.
All for this week. More next week!
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More answers!
Continuing the Ask Me Anything! 2001 cavalcade! (And I’m technically still accepting queries, hint hint!)
Quince has a couple of questions:
You mentioned you live in Western NY but I have never seen you post about Chautauqua. Do you have an opinion on the place and its mission?
He’s referring to the Chautauqua Institute, which is located on the south shore of Lake Chautauqua in Chautauqua county. Yes, Institute, lake, and county all share the same name! The lake is about fifty miles due south of Buffalo, and about twenty miles or so at its western end due east of the shores of Lake Erie. It’s a pretty big lake, with a big town called Jamestown at the eastern end. Lake Chautauqua is ringed almost around its entire perimeter by summer cottages and houses, and there are two very pleasant little villages — Lakewood and Bemus Point — that are your basic “summer resort towns”. The whole place is actually very beautiful; we used to go to Lakewood every year for the 4th of July. The fireworks would be set off from a park right on the lakeside, and hundreds of boats would gather in the water around the park to see the show. This is beautiful in itself, but another even nicer tradition is how all of the people owning cottages on the water are encouraged to light red flares right at water’s edge at 10:00 pm on the 4th, so the entire lake is ringed by red light.
But the question’s about the Chautauqua Institution, to which I have never been. Ever. Why? Mainly because I’m usually busy in the summer with other things, and it costs money to do things there.
The Institution is, basically, a summer-long arts and education festival that takes place on grounds that, by way of design, hark back to the 19th century, which is when the Institution was founded. There are musical performances all summer long, including operas, chamber music, and symphonic music by a resident symphony orchestra. There are also adult education opportunities: lectures, classes, and the like.
The Institution doesn’t seem to be a big part of the WNY consciousness; maybe that’s because it’s been there for over a century and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s just kind of always there. That could be a part of why I’ve never attended any events there (and I’ve only been on the grounds twice); it just never strikes me as something I should investigate for a summertime activity. And part of that may be because summer is when I’m quite busy at work, we do other things as family activities during those months, and I tend to gravitate toward fall and late winter/early spring for vacations. I have no objection in principle to the Institution; in fact, far from it. I’m glad it’s there and I’m glad that it’s here in WNY. Maybe someday!
Given that an ideal level of debt is zero but unrealistic for most of us, how much family debt are you comfortable carrying? By comfortable I mean not caring anymore about it then say rent or a car payment.
I suppose that the best way to look at this is by percentage of income. I didn’t always think about issues like this, and the results were, shall we say, less than encouraging. It took a number of years to dig out of that particular hole, and now I’m quite a bit more careful about it. Both of us are, actually. Setting aside things like rent (which we have) and car payments (which currently we do not), I would be generally uncomfortable with any debt-to-income ratio of over 25 percent. Once it reaches that point, I prefer to start focus on paying some of it down. That’s just me, however. Since my job gives me small, but regular, raises in income, I find that as long as I keep my debt below a certain fixed number, the margin gets more comfortable over time to maintain.
I don’t spend large amounts of time analyzing my finances, but I’ve made a religious practice of putting a minimum amount of each paycheck into my savings each and every week before I do anything else at all. Then I make whatever payment I need to make that week, and whatever else is left is what I have to get through the week on. This generally works out well, although I do have to budget a bit for when I want to take a few days off from work. Unforeseen absences from work can screw things up quite a lot, but I’m lucky enough thus far that those have been infrequent, and I’ve been building a steadily-increasing savings buffer for such events, anyway. In recent months I’ve revised my approach slightly; instead of relying exclusively on cash (I don’t even have an ATM card), I make a weekly payment to a particular credit card and use that to make purchases during the week. My other “major” credit card is one I’m concentrating on paying down, and I’m now designating it as the “emergency big expense” card. (Like, for example, if a car needs brakes or something like that.)
Generally I view debt as a “necessary evil”. It would be nice to have none, but I don’t think that’s realistic. I prefer a rigorous approach to keeping debt manageable and small.
Other little money-saving things I do? I used to buy lunch at work every day, but now I only buy lunch once or twice a week, and bring my own most other days. Instead of getting coffee every day ($.99 a cup for employees), I buy a box of tea bags and have green tea most days. Even if I treat myself to an expensive container of tea ($8.99 for 25 bags), that comes out to less than $.40 a cup. That adds up. So does my long-time practice of never spending my loose change. I pay for everything with bills, and the loose change every day goes into a jar. I usually redeem a chunk of the change a couple of times a year, when we want to go for a family outing someplace, like our yearly trek to the Renaissance Faire or the Erie County Fair or something like that.
More answers to come!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator? This.
:: The next wave of film marketing.
Sorry, but that’s about it. Aieee!!! More next week, I promise!
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Answers, the I’ve lost count!
Time for a few more answers to queries from Ask Me Anything! 2011. This time out I got some questions relating to the overalls, so here are a few of those.
Lynn asks: Can you remember your first pair of overalls? Wax nostalgic.
I can vaguely remember them. I was quite little, in the preschool age, if memory serves. I wore the living heck out of those things. I don’t remember the brand, but I remember that for some weird reason, I liked them tight. No idea why…especially since, for as long as I can remember now, I don’t like tight clothing much at all. I recall that they had the standard buttons to which the buckles fasten, and then there were two atop the bib pocket (like on the pair of Dickies I’m wearing over there, in the sidebar photo in the “Your Humble Narrator” section), and for some reason I thought that the lower buttons were where you hooked the buckles. (Hey, I was four, and I might not have been the intellectual marvel you now know. Stop laughing!) But this practice ended up in one or both of those buttons occasionally ripping off, so my mother was often sewing the stupid thing back on. Until finally they decided that I had outgrown those overalls, and got me a bigger pair. I think.
My overalls memories don’t start becoming more clear until high school and college, when I started wearing them in public. That resulted in a few conversations of the “Huh, I didn’t know you wore overalls” type…and then, people pretty much stopped commenting on them. Of course, this was Iowa, where seeing people in overalls isn’t exactly like seeing rogue pachyderms in Central Park.
And a reader named Jenny sent in a bunch of detail-related queries:
Enquiring minds want to know:
Button fly or zipper fly – which do you prefer on overalls?
What’s better on the sides of your overalls, 2, 3, or 4 buttons? Whatever
your choice, why is that better than the others.
Buttons: copper, nickel or other? Which is better?
Last question. If you were a late twenties gal like myself, who
unfortunately missed the overalls glory years of the 1990s, what brand
would you recommend which you can actually get today?
I have to admit that I don’t have a whole lot of preference on details like this! The type of fly doesn’t matter much to me…unless it’s a fake fly entirely, in which case I’ve purchased a pair of overalls from an eBay seller who doesn’t know a man’s pair from a woman’s pair. Yes, this has happened. I thought I’d scored on an awesome pair of white Lee overalls, only to have them turn out to be women’s overalls. The Wife now owns those. They fit her a lot better, anyway.
Side buttons — thinking about it, I’ve never owned a pair with four buttons. That would seem a tad like overkill. Most of mine have two; three was more prevalent on pairs from places like Gap and Old Navy, back in the 90s when overalls were popular. I used to own six or seven pairs from Gap, but I scaled that back when I lost quite a bit of weight a few years ago, and now the only Gap overalls that I own are the ones pictured in the sidebar pic at the bottom (the one where I’m wearing the green tie-dyed hoodie). Those have two side buttons, actually, as do my Dickies, Lee, and Key overalls. Generally I leave the top pair of buttons unfastened, for comfort reasons.
As to the metal comprising the buttons — I generally don’t care about that, either. My Gap overalls have silver hardware; my Dickies mostly have dark bronze-colored hardware; my Lee and Key overalls have gold hardware. Again, no real preference here.
I will say, though, that in general I like overalls that look functional; like they’re actual workwear or could be. The “busier” they look, the less I like them (which is why I don’t own any pairs by Liberty; there’s just too much going on there on the bib). I just like them basic, and comfortable.
As for recommending overalls for women, well…I know they’re starting to show up in stores again now, but I don’t really know what brands are out there. Personally, though, I’d just recommend going the vintage route. Clothes from the 90s could be considered “vintage” now, right? I’m putty in The Wife’s hands when she wears a pair of these Old Navy overalls, and my favorites ever on her are these Gap ones. Or you could go really vintage, as this blogger did, with great results.
And remember, in my opinion, overalls are “flattering” — for a different idea of what “flattering” means.
More answers to come!
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Saturday Centus
Wow, did I ever have a struggle with this week’s prompt. Seriously, this was hard — much harder than the awful dog photo of two weeks back.
I didn’t really set out to approach these in the general way that I have, but each time out I’ve tried to take an “off-kilter” interpretation of the prompt, and this was no different…but this week, no good alternative presented itself to me. I kept running through all kinds of possibilities, and no dice; I feared that I’d have to play this one straight. Heck, maybe that would be a good challenge for me on one of these, some time down the road: write using a normal interpretation of the prompt!
But this time, I thought of something. I honestly could have done with more words this time out, but I think it turned out OK. Here’s my entry, with the prompt in bold.
I shouldn’t have come to Jane’s party, Brenna thought.
She certainly shouldn’t have agreed to play ‘Answer-the-Monkey’, the new party game with the computerized monkey head that read your mind and asked personal questions based on a setting from 1 to 20, with 20 being your deepest-and-darkest secrets. It was ‘Truth-or-Dare’ run by a machine. After a lot of sangria, the ladies had turned it up all the way. The ATM machine began dispensing twenties.
“Brenna,” the monkey said, “who did you last sleep with?”
Brenna glanced at the picture on the wall of Jane’s husband.
ATM was an evil game.
I dunno. I’m kind of ‘meh’ on this one….
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Something that would have been Thursday, had I been able to get off my blogging arse
Happy birthday my love!
It’s The Wife’s birthday today.
Additionally, we had our first real date just four days before her birthday in 1991, which means that we’ve been together, in one way or another, for twenty years now. Although we’re not quite there yet for her, we’ve at some point in the last year or so come to a spot where she’s been in my life for more than half of my life. That amazes me, mainly because it just doesn’t seem like that long ago. Still, we have so many memories…
One day I should do an update of this list…maybe next year. Happy birthday, O My Love!
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Wisdom of the East
Grumble….
An apology to the blogger I like enormously into one of whose comment threads I just spewed an immense amount of bile at someone (not the blogger) on the opposite side of the political fence. It may be time for me to just stop reading political comment entirely. I just can no longer act as if there’s a reasonable argument to be made for “deficit cutting” that calls for sacrifices by everybody except the rich, for an economy that is built on everyone just accepting the premise that we should all count ourselves lucky to have whatever little we’ve managed to create for ourselves (or just hold onto), for any notion that my personal freedom would somehow be lessened by the adoption of a real national health care plan, or for the idea that Government is bad bad bad but the Market is great great great and if the Market wants to screw me with my pants on, well then, I’d best be about the business of bending over first and saying “Thank you!” after.
No, I’m not in a good mood right now. So I’m off to mark as “read” every single item in my Google Reader subscriptions. The political ones, anyway.