Parentheses Day! (yay!)

I think the most annoying part of being an adult is having to keep track of money. (There are other annoying things, too- like complete legal culpability from now until I die) I was going over my spending for the last 2 months and I'm only spending $20/week on groceries (thank you, endless supply of free food at work) but then I realized I was spending another $19 (on average) at restaurants. How is that possible? I eat out like never! Also where are all of these clothes I keep buying? I am only in student loan debt, not credit card debt or anything, but it's sad that if I only kept from buying clothes and accessories this month (what did I even buy? Shoes and a jacket? Why did I buy a jacket in California in spring when I already have jackets?) I would have $88 to spend on art supplies. Right now I'm playing with all of the additives for acrylic paint that make it incredibly more cool. No one knows whether acrylic lasts longer or less long than oil paints because acrylics were invented in the late 1950s. Thank you, the late 1950s!

I thought I had a new hobby.

The lost and found at the hostel is kind of awesome. It gets full really fast because it is just 2 rubbermaid bins and people are forever leaving behind their pants and shoes and shampoo. So, after 3 weeks/whenever it overflows we take the oldest stuff to goodwill. But, the tiny things we never take out because someone might call us and ask about their headlamp that they left in California and it doesn't take too much space. I decided, though, when someone found a locked combination lock, that after a month I would claim it as my own because it seems like a useful and slightly frustrating hobby- just turning it to all the numbers I can think of on the theory that someday I will be in tune enough with the original owner that the combination will come to my fingertips and I will have a useful tool in place of my hobby. It is a really nice lock, sleek and black with gold wheels and I could buy my own for $5 but that is not the point. However, this would be a more long term hobby with a lock with more than a thousand possible combinations.

I'm getting good at cello again! I don't know how children become proficient at instruments because personally I was 18 before I could practice for more than an hour per week. I haved loved the cello since I was 11 years old but I think it might be coming together now, and I'm leaving the beginner phase and becoming an intermediate cellist. I've been buying and downloading pieces and teaching myself them, and I'm pretty good at it. My favorite right now is Bach's prelude to his cello sonatas. I think that might be the most purely beautiful piece ever written. It's not evocative; it's just beautiful. I am also trying to learn celtic music which is going okay. It sounds lame because I am classically trained and I can;t get the real rhythm but the music is so good that I think it still sounds nice.

Yeah, I practice like 2 hours a day or something. I should maybe minor in music. I have a crush on the music department itself.

Hostel

Today at the hostel we have a girlscout troop. They look tiny, not like I remember my troop being, but aside from that they make me really nostalgic. I miss having a safe structure for exploration, a literal handbook as blueprint for my moral code.

They look so awkward, though. Were we that ill at ease with ourselves when we were 9? I'm sure I never was.

:'-(

I am trying not to be too personal about my landlord's business on the internet or with people who know him, but I am having an incredibly bad day, the bad part of which was all crammed into the last 3 hours. Basically I gave notice and he's not taking it appropriately. From what I know of him he handles people moving out without very much grace at all, but I had not seen him treat anyone the way he is treating my other roommate (who is simply moving out w/o notice, i think, because some people have limits on their tolerance), with threats and so on. I know a normal person wouldn't treat me that way, not least because there are a few tenants not officially planning to move, but I'm not sure about this one. I do know that I am right in the dispute, and being right is brilliant for self confidence and peace of mind. Apparently legally even if I were wrong I wouldn't have to deal with it today.

I have no idea what is going on with him, but he might be afraid for his mortgage with all of us moving. I bet that will work out for him though, because banks don't want foreclosures anyway, especially when they have a lot of them to deal with, like right now. And I know I'm hurting his feelings because I worked really hard to get along with him. I also know that I'll be carrying my laptop and other essential things with me until I get a new place.

There is a saying, that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. I have always always found this to be true. I have halved my trouble with 3 people, and 3 internet places, and God. So, I am only feeling 1/128th of being spontaneously evicted. I know that sounds kind of dumb, because compounding math of feelings is amorphous, but I think between 10 pm when he told me and 1 am when I am vaguely blogging it I feel almost all the way better. Better enough to go to sleep.

If only my break was the first week of April instead of the last week of May I could have handled all this when I didn't have 4 classes and 2 jobs.

Cramming

I am the worst at cramming, actually. But I found that I like studying Microeconomics more when I can internet it instead of looking through pdfs. I have developed a very nice, streamlined set of notes based on wikibooks. As a workaround to how I can't memorize graphs because there are infinitiy of them I have made a one page drawing of all the curves, each on their own axes. It's helping a lot.

So that is my cramming success story. My cramming failure story involves printing 200 pages of Astronomy pdfs 4 to a page, cutting them out, and making a tiny, tiny astronomy textbook for only about $5.

It's taken 2 hours so far.
I'm going to lightly tea stain it and make it a navy blue cover with !latin! and maybe a silver map of the orbits, including Europa and them.

This is all part of my plan to become an astronomy hobbyist with the scope and mostly an orrery. I am going to make one during spring break. Not a working one, though apparently you can make one of just the sun, earth, and jupiter from a clock because jupiter's orbit is 11.86 times slower than earth's.

That is the cheat way, but the real way apparently involves sandcasting and looks impossible:

Budget

I got a budget! I made it up and it is: $20/wk food, $20/wk books or clothes or anything. Rent and tuition are not on it because those numbers are set, and I don't need to carry envelopes to remind me of them. There is this budget system where you put your money in an envelope for each category and that is your budget. You can write on it what you bought, but I just buy what is on my list of food I am out of (a "Shopping List", if you will)* and from the other category I buy things that catch my eye and cost less than I have in my envelope, so I don't write it down.

I noticed despite making noodles, chicken soup, pizza and bread from scratch, I am consistently caught at school without enough food- I spend 8-14 hours out of the house, so I really should be carrying lunch -and- dinner. So I had been spending money eating out, even though I can make most things more deliciously, with the exception of Mexican and Chinese food.

Whenever I get a new hobby (tennis this spring is going to be even better than budgeting!) I like to research it instead of figuring it out by trial and error, so I have been going to budget websites. I can tell I'm wired differently than some of the people on there. The craft and cooking and vacation ideas sound wonderful (I need to find someone to carpool to Niagara Falls with!) but the haggling and writing letters of complaint sound terrible. I go thrifting all the time, but the way the articles say the clothes are "just as good" as new, name brand clothing is really unappealing. I shop at thrift stores because it is almost free, and I get things that are totally wearable or wearable but they are going to become something fancy! Like in the BNL song, if I had money to spend I'd just buy more thrifted clothes. Also this, for Nick.

Another thing that seems strange is hoarding change for other purchases. It seems sneaky. I think in olden times women had to manage money like that, so the money for gifts and such came from nowhere and not the budget. Nowadays it really seems like a time sink. The idea is to stay under budget by using lots of coupons, and then whatever you save goes into a jar, and do the same with change. One person said she writes her checks a little over and gets change to put in the jar. But it's nto money from nowhere, it is money you already had, and why not make your budgeted amounts lower and have a category for "things I want"?


*Sorry, I just got done with final papers so elaborating is the name of the game.