m_d_h | Entries tagged with money

yeah, there was only one, because he/she kept hanging around on the roof for a few days looking for a way back in, I got some close looks, and photos, and,

yeah, I did evict the squirrel,

via the application of cash and multiple phone calls, that's how I roll

Downloaded the new version of TurboTax and started on my 2020 tax return. I don't have the form from Fidelity for my play money account yet, so I can't finish. But the IRS isn't accepting returns yet anyway. I'll have some net gains from my trading activity of a few hundred dollars.

I had to spend time tracking down all my charitable contributions, because I started several new ones during the year as part of my Green Communism initiative, which will push up my refund amount. Also, a bunch of our theater season tickets were converted into donations when the shows were canceled.

This year I'm not buying new season tickets -- I'm not sure whether they're even available yet -- but until we're all caught up with the regular monthly bills I'm not laying out that kind of cash for entertainment. I'm keeping the joint spending to a minimum right now. And there hasn't been much reason to spend on myself either. Dax vet bills are the biggest expense on the horizon right now.

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Was looking at some senior living places, there's so many kinds. Not all of them are inexpensive. Some are reserved for low-income seniors. Some are luxury buildings that cost a lot. And many of them are meant for people who are disabled, frail, or in cognitive decline. I'd be an "active" senior, heh. Some are 55+ but others are 62+. I don't really need an inexpensive place until I retire, and at that point I may be moving away anyway. So, I don't know if senior living in the DC area is really going to happen, but if I decide to live on my own before I retire it is at least worth investigating.

Reminds me of when I went to visit my father in his assisted living building, I remember I was envious because they had a library and a board game room and all their meals were made for them. Not much privacy, though, I wouldn't be able to play loud music and smoke and have fellas over for spanking parties. But if I get to the point of needing assisted living, a library and a board game room would be great.

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Sometimes now I swing between feeling like I'm handling the social isolation of Quarantine OK, and feeling like I'm on the verge of boredom. Now I don't even have a weekly TV night with T, he quit that when Star Trek ended. He's just playing his video games every night after dinner and all weekend long. Tonight I was bored enough to start doing my taxes, heh. I offer to do stuff with him but he'd rather sit by himself staring at a screen and fiddling with a controller. Sometimes he plays video games with friends online, but mostly it's just solitaire.

I thought about making a habit of playing music on the keyboard every night after dinner but I was concerned that might feel too much like work, after spending a day doing chores, exercising, working, cooking ... I should do something more playful and relaxing, not goal oriented or skill building.

I wish I could pay to skip the vaccination line, heh. No, not really, I'm OK if there are people who need the vaccine more than me. I can understand letting school teachers and first responders go before me. And then people who serve the public in restaurants, shops, and agencies. Flight attendants, bus drivers. But it would also be easier to administer if they just went by date of birth -- everybody born before 1950, then 1960, etc. Let me know when you get to my birth year. Here in MoCo it's still just the folks who are 75+. Other states are pulling way ahead of Maryland, even DC is faster than Maryland. Most of the people I personally know who have had their first shots work in health care. The rest are white guys over 65 who live in DC.

T left very early this morning, earlier than I expected. I still needed to work a half day, so that's what I did. Stopped working at 2pm, started warming up for toys 2:45pm. Nothing on the Bug Calendar until Sunday afternoon! Yay!

For some reason T left his new laptop behind, which has an account for me from when my laptop was "sleeping", so I'm using that to type this while my other laptops are busy showing porn :o)

I created an account at a poetry site, and posted two of my favorite poems there, along with the one I wrote this morning. I already have two followers! I've had multiple people who are close to me in real life ask me to write more poetry, but I feel like it's not something I can produce on demand, but maybe that's just a confidence thing, maybe if I worked at it instead of occasionally pissing it out on the page after a long period of pent up poetry piss ...

I once described poetry as prose with most of the words deleted, but there's more to it than that, and so many different ways of doing poetry. But working on poetry more may lead me into writing lyrics and then putting together music with vocals ... so, more angles on this very slow project that is nevertheless moving forward -- my concept album. I know the title of the album, the names of the songs, it's top-down in this way, but also bottom-up in that I'm going to grow my songs into the concepts instead of growing the concepts into the songs. Can I apply the role-play method I use to write stories to writing music? How would that work?

27 days since orgasm, feels like longer? Tomorrow I may draw another card, and I probably will. If I'm still awake at midnight I may draw it then. I can't expect anything to come of this draw, my expected date of next orgasm is in February now? I haven't been horny much lately because of my overall life confidence issues since my annual review last Friday, but my mood has been improving. I've done some good work this week, although my Boss can't see it, so much of what I do is stuff he'll never know about. I did some top-level negotiating with representatives of a major multinational corporate acquisition valued at tens of billions of US dollars this morning. Not to "brag" but to build up my self-confidence, that I have wonderful attorneys working for me, who can brief me up in 30 minutes, and then I can go toe-to-toe with major multinational corporations.

Sometimes T says I should go work for those multinational corporations and increase my salary by several times. But instead I daydream about becoming a union organizer on my way to becoming a neo-gatherer heh.

I wouldn't have any money problems if I weren't in a nesting relationship with T -- I didn't have money problems before I bought this house with him. I don't need more money, I need the streams of money that I do have to be predictable, which has always been the issue with T -- eventually I get the cash, but the timing can drive me nuts, because our personalities are different along the money dimension. And I need to stop living in this money pit of a house, which, yeah, by retirement time the plan is to have a much less expensive dwelling.

Part of me wants to move back to Racine, the city I was born in, after retirement. It's one of the most affordable places to live in the US. Because there's no reason for college graduates to live there, heh. I think about living there for a year to write a book and create an album and volunteer with some sort of political cause. Heh, we'll see. For now, I'm just trying to not go crazy while waiting for this Quarantine to end.

The cycle continues -- the maids come every two weeks, we pre-clean for them, it's usually a stress increaser for us both on a Monday morning. But we were able to put the cats away without drama and everything was ready by 8am, when I left for the condo. It was raining hard when I had to take out the trash and recycling, I wore a raincoat but my shoes and shorts were soaked. Rain had decreased by the time I had to drive downtown, no flooding, no usual delays or detours.

T seems grumpy or stressed about having to go back to full-time work after taking time off. My own work To Do List is manageable again, it usually decreases around the holidays and picks up again mid-January. T also seems grumpy or stressed that we haven't put everything away in the basement yet, but that's complicated because he wants to be in charge of doing it in a well-organized way, so I cannot help unless he's ready for my help, so he feels like it is all on him. And back on Friday morning when he was interested in working on it, I was recovering from that spell of vertigo -- instead of waiting for me he dove in and worked by himself. By the time I returned to the house on Sunday he was worn out from working on it himself, without me, but he also didn't ask me to come home on Saturday to help ... which he could've done ... so ...

It's tough when he wants to be in charge of something but feels like it should be a joint chore, because he has to pre-work it and then we both need time and energy after he does the pre-work, and then he has to tell me what to do, and then I don't always do it the way he intended me to. As for me, I'd just get rid of most of the stuff in the basement, far more of it belongs to him than to me. I'm not into "storage" per se. If I don't use something regularly, and if there isn't room for it to be stored or displayed in the living area, then I'm usually happy to dispose of it, via the trash or recycling bins if necessary -- T likes to give it away, which adds another level of complexity and slows the process way down. We do have more food requiring storage than usual right now, because of being home all the time and wanting to limit exposure at grocery stores. But I view the main issue is just junk we should get rid of. Other than food and cleaning supplies, I'd keep nothing in the storage room. If your clothes won't fit in your dressers and closets, you've got too many clothes. And I let T use 3/4 of the upstairs closets to my 1/4.

There's also the pileup of junk that happens when you live in the same place for 15 years.

So, I might skip the condo this weekend, intending to help T with the basement stuff, but then that will require him to invest time and energy doing it with me. We'll see later this week.

I'd said we'd deal with the leaves after we dealt with the other stuff -- including the budget stuff. Now the budget stuff is taken care of so I'm paying a crew to rake up the leaves. It's tough for me to think of spending money when we're months behind on things as it is. It's a stress on the relationship, my conservatism about spending money versus his liberalism. I'm not against spending it, I just want to have it before I spend it, or know how I'm going to pay for it. And I also want to keep an emergency reserve, in case of emergencies.

From T's point of view I run "hot and cold" about money. I'm hot when I have it, and cold when I don't. He's more willing to use credit than I am, but then he runs into things like credit limits and late fees and such, so he experiences cold spells with money as well, just at a different point along the spectrum -- when a bank says no more. I don't ever want to hit the point where I cannot raise additional funds from a bank, so I keep a big cushion of cash around and pay bills on time. I used to be more judgmental about this, although I'm still not easy-going about it. I didn't pick up on this relationship conflict until a few years into the relationship, because when I met T his finances were being floated by the housing bubble, and he was able to cash in at the peak of the bubble. Then when K lived with us we were able to split many expenses three ways. After K moved out, T''s profits from the housing bubble had been spent, and then we experienced a 50% spike in our shared expenses, and it's been a point of conflict ever since.

Anyway, I think I'm going to do a dance video workout here at the condo this morning, as I'm not that busy with work today. I haven't done one of these videos in a long time, because the fall weather has allowed me to run and hike much more often. So, I should probably start over with video #1, plus the abs workout. Then I'll have lunch delivered and go through all my emails and draw up a new work To Do List.

Thanksgiving Day -- it'll just be me and T this year. He tried to invite another household, and then a different another household, but folks weren't interested. Which is totally fine with me, under the circumstances, because cases are spiking locally as well as nationally, and deaths are back over 2000/day. I'd rather T and I don't become statistics. But long ago T had ordered enough food for six people in anticipation of having a few other folks over, so we've got A LOT OF FOOD. T prepared some of it yesterday, he'll prepare the rest this afternoon, we'll eat around 6pm, and will continue eating until I die from becoming fat.

After lunch my job is to go get wine.

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I do not know my word count for NaNoWriMo yet, but I went ahead and ended the story now rather than trying to squeeze in one more plot point between now and Monday night. I will probably write about these characters again someday, but I want to switch over to creating music for a while. I'll spend some time over the long weekend pulling all my various LJ fiction posts into a big Word document that contains the two "prequels" and this month's "novel". Then I'll share it with anybody who wants to read it.

I enjoyed it! That's what counts. It reminds me of the creative writing I did in school -- in the way that I enjoyed doing it.

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This morning I took the financial information that T has provided to me and I looked over the past year's worth of joint expenses and I created a budget for 2021. How many dollars for T to catch up, and then how many dollars per month, on average, to keep current. Then we'll do quarterly reconciliations to divvy up any over/under spending.

After I plugged all of this into my own personal budget for next year, I saw that I've drastically underestimated my own cash flow -- I'll have a bunch more cash than I thought, once T catches up, assuming we stay caught up. The basement fix was more affordable than I thought, if we keep current on all the other joint bills

This is perfect because I want to buy some more butt toys at Black Friday discounts tomorrow! And now I don't feel too poor to do so!

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I cannot describe how HOT this Mark from Reddit is (not Matt, Mark). So many things about how he looks and how he chats with me push my buttons. He could be an amateur porn star if he wanted (for all I know he is a porn star but isn't going there with me, using a private account instead of his public account). He's smart, well-mannered, into most of the kinks I'm into, and we're matching each other on pace and disclosure. So many fellas skip the pleasantries when they chat with strangers, no "hi" or "later", no explanations for ending the chat in mid-paragraph or not responding for days, no willingness to talk about what's happening in the rest of their lives, often no face pics, no mention of family or boyfriends or job.

Mark just sounds like a normal guy to me. Which means he's not normal, because I'm not normal, but you know what I mean. And he's just so fucking HOT and sexy (naked) and handsome (clothed) I can barely handle it, man. I hope I have caged wet dreams about him :o)

He lives in Canada, so no way to see him in person until After the Vaccine. But I've enjoyed trading pics, videos, and chat with him so far. Of course most of the Reddit fellas live far away. That's kind of the point -- I need to avoid hitting things off with the local fellas via Recon or Grindr until I'm willing to actually meet them.

And for the past 16 years I've mostly avoided hitting things off with the long-distance fellas, because I want to actually meet them. But I became too socially isolated during Quarantine. My friend Steve helped me to break the online ice by playing some board games with me via FaceTime. Then Matt from Reddit got me to download kik. Now the deluge of kik-wielding hot boys who are into daddies.

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Before Quarantine, my sex life was mainly a keyholder partnership between Sirs Zero and Ben, with an occasional hookup or repeat visitor on the side.

During Quarantine, my sex life was all Sir Zero, until he moved away last month :-(

Now my sex life is the Cum Deck, my Time to Self, and my growing collection of Reddit boys.

After Quarantine, I'm not sure I'll just go back to Sir Ben as the Dude in Charge of Bug, although I have no reason to ghost or discard Sir Ben, I'd be happy to play with him, I miss him, I like him a lot. But maybe the next phase of my sex life won't be about either Sir Zero or Sir Ben controlling access to my cock. Maybe I'll work out a new set of rules, maybe some other guy will become my primary sexual/romantic partner, maybe I'll be happy single and uncollared as I amass a crowd of local friends-with-benefits. I don't know. But I don't think I'll just return to where I left off in mid-March 2020.

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If I stick with the Cum Deck until After the Vaccine, and keep playing around online with HOT Reddit boys, it's bound to eventually drive me fucking crazy. I designed the Advanced Rules to be challenging ... ... ... and so far they've been easier than they should be; on average I shouldn't have drawn two cum cards already. It means the rest of the deck will likely be about 3x tougher than what I've experienced so far. Eeek. Help!

The pressing matters regarding the house, the condo, my sister visiting, and money -- have all been taken care of, at least facially and for now. There's even nothing on my work calendar until Monday, although the Monday deadline is significant and could require that I work on Sunday if my teammates can't pull their shit together before then. Things should slow down next week for the holiday.

The condo shower plumbing is now better than it was before, even before it started leaking, and I spent some time cleaning the bathroom after the plumber left. I'll spend more time cleaning the bathroom and the rest of the condo soon -- especially when I can be here for two nights, I will clean everything top to bottom if I can stay here an extra day -- it won't take long, small condo -- but that's probably the Fri-Sun after Turkey Dinner. If I'm here only one night, the next morning I'm always having some amount of transition anxiety about cleaning up from the night before, so I don't usually get to the more long-term cleaning of surfaces. But when I'm here two nights, the first morning I should be good to do the long-term cleaning.

We're getting more good news about the COVID-19 vaccine candidates, at least from the companies producing them. We still need the federal regulators to look at their applications. But it is getting more realistic that at least one vaccine could receive emergency approval before the end of this year. Then it would be a matter of time before everybody who wants the vaccine could get it. So sometime next year? There's still the possibility that the regulators won't approve these candidates once they can look at the data for themselves, or that slow-acting safety issues will arise. And we're still going to see tens of thousands more deaths in the US, if not hundreds of thousands more, before the vaccinations will make a difference.

T endorsed my proposal. He will make nominal monthly contributions toward the basement repair project until some point after it is finished, when we will apply to refinance our mortgage at a lower interest rate, without the federal insurance fee, and we will add a HELOC. Then we will use the HELOC to reimburse me for the basement repair project, and then my cash balance will return to where it was. We will share the cost of the HELOC payments the same way we share the cost of the mortgage payments.

This is no help to my sister, as it will take a couple months for all this to happen, and meanwhile I'm out $16K and feeling temporarily cash poor.

I will call her over the weekend to get more details from her -- the initial beg came over text message with two solid reasons but no other details. Perhaps after we talk I'll hear a smaller amount than $5K that would be helpful, that I can still commit to. I would not feel OK forking over $5K now. Horrible timing, because for the past several months I've been in quite a generous mood, but this basement project drained me, and another $5K would have me crossing one of my red lines.

I do not want to borrow money to give to my sister right now, that would violate my conservative money sensibilities. Horrible timing, if she'd asked a week earlier, she'd probably have it.

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Ugh. Lately family have been asking stuff of me that I'm not comfortable giving, like going to graduation or Thanksgiving gatherings with multiple households, or coughing up lots of cash, whereas I'm not asking stuff of anybody. Well, a phone call from K now that he's moved away, but it sounded like he enjoyed speaking with me also.

When does Bug get to ask for something?

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B gave T a gift -- a rather expensive telescope. This evening T showed me a close-up of the Moon, and Saturn big enough that I could see her rings. I'd never seen Saturn's rings with my own eyes before :-) He's taking his new toy with him to the beach so he can look at stuff from a less light-polluted vantage point.

I'm usually the one handing out expensive gifts. Again, when does Bug get to ask for something?

I created this Green Communism ideology for myself, which involves ultimately giving away -- as the next 30 years pass -- over 90% of my current standard of living. When does Bug get to ask for something? If I needed cash for an emergency, who could I ask? Who would buy me a new laptop? Who would take me on a trip?

Eh ... I don't need anything. But I'm suddenly feeling this backlash against all my perfectionisms. And feeling a bit taken for granted, and even abandoned at times. Who would take care of Bug?

Empathy fatigue <----

Still haven't caught up with T about money stuff, we've just been too busy, he had that class over the weekend, and it is finishing tonight. I'm not concerned about myself, I had enough cash to cover the basement repair or I wouldn't have signed the contract -- but I cannot dig deeper into my wallet for my sister's surprise request until I've worked out the latest spending with T. I've pretty much let go of the guilt about this, however. Her request was sort of the Last Straw of Guilt that broke through a huge pile of guilt I was already carrying around, and I'm still figuring out what that means. When I wrote over the weekend about how I don't have to be all those zillions of perfectionist things, that was the moment when my back broke and I gave up. Since then I've been giving myself permission to have more fun, although I've still been busy since I returned to the house. Work, chores, exercise.

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Talking with K after he's moved to Portland made it feel more real somehow. Instead of processing feelings about his move, it's like I teleported directly to the reality that he has now moved. So now my regular in-person social circle is 50% smaller than it had been, until I either do something about it, or I Receive the Vaccine -- which will be untold months from now.

Seeing B in person on Sunday was good. I never really wanted him to disappear from our lives, the anger I felt toward him was because he had disappeared from our lives after his husband moved in, and so I was willing to follow through and just leave him behind and move on. But T ultimately refused to move on, and now B and his husband are in the process of separating, so ... in a month or two I'll probably be seeing a lot more of B.

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On the Polyamory subreddit, people have been popping in and asking, "How do I meet other poly people?" And I've been responding, "It's a Pandemic, you don't! The more responsible poly people aren't open for business right now!"

Though I wonder whether I will ask any of the people I already know to become physically intimate soon. I can't see myself wanting to hookup with a new stranger until After the Vaccine.

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What if the vaccine is only 50% effective, sort of like a flu shot, what then?

I will nevertheless return to as normal a life as I can. To the extent other humans will join me, after they've received the vaccine also. Because if it is only 50% effective, than that's our new reality. We cannot continue to social distance and wear masks and avoid multi-household gatherings for the rest of our lives. It would be nice if sick people would stay home, to reduce the spread of germs, but we have to return to normal eventually.

All of this social distancing was to buy time until we have a vaccine, and to flatten the curve until then. If we were to never have an effective vaccine at all -- if all the dozens of vaccine candidates fail -- we'll just have to give up and let the million or two million people die so we can return to normal lives.

It would've been great if the US could've done what some other countries have done, implementing strong test, trace, and isolate regimes, to save more lives along the way to a vaccine. But is a country like New Zealand supposed to cut itself off from the rest of the world indefinitely if there is never a vaccine? When over 99% of the population would survive infection? Eventually a majority of the population is going to say, fuck it, we'll take our chances.

I'm holding out until I get the vaccine, and then I'm returning to normal. I will have given up 12-18 months of my life to avoid this thing, and that's plenty. If there's never a vaccine, I may as well get sick in my early 50s when I still have a good chance of beating it.

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So I understand, to some extent, the people who don't want to wait for a vaccine, and just want to return to normal now. Especially the young folks who don't have much risk. I'm willing to keep up these protective measures until we get a vaccine, but not forever. Some people feel like we've already given up too much. But it's about how many hundreds of thousands of people will die in this country so you can go back to normal.

What's your empathy level, what's your fear level, what's your courage level, or are you just stupid and don't even know what the risks really are.

If the vaccine is only 50% effective, I expect a large chunk of people will continue to hide from the virus indefinitely, because of their own personal risk factors, their own fear and empathy levels, or maybe they live with elderly relatives. We'll just have to see what kind of vaccines we get.

I spend $16K on the basement, then my $2K laptop dies, now two days later my sister says they need $5K for [reasons]. I told her that it's a tough week for me to come up with more cash because I just shelled out $16K on the basement and T hasn't yet told me how he's going to pay me back for his half. I didn't tell her about the laptop, that's not really the issue. It's the $16K! Temporarily eating up my cash reserves.

But I'll have a conversation with T over the weekend and then crunch the numbers to see whether I can help my sister. It would help if by then I'd fixed my laptop -- if it is just a loose plug inside the case.

Ugh.

Perhaps I could organize a little telethon among my other siblings and see if we could each kick in $1K instead of relying on Bug to do the entire amount.

I'm looking into refinancing the house because we have enough equity now to get rid of the mortgage insurance, and then we could also take out a HELOC, but that takes time and I wanted to finish fixing the basement first to help with our appraisal.

Ugh.

What next, the week isn't over yet.

My personal spending during September was the lowest since the 35-day federal government shutdown.

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VirtualExile

May 2025

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Page Summary

I did evict the squirrel
tax season
Home Alone :-)
the next maids day
Turkey Day stuff
back to Quarantine Normal?
money stuff
stuff
oh come on
One practical effect of adopting Green Communism

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