Are you a saver or a spender? Money is a personal topic. Not everyone is willing to talk about money. Today, I want to share my story though, in an attempt to show you what I have learned in my money journey.
How a Spender Found Freedom in a Budget
In Praise of a Short Commute
While driving home from work the other day, I marveled for the umpteenth time about how nice of a drive it is from work to home. Why is it nice? Oh, sure, it’s not a super-busy stretch of road I’m driving, and the views of open fields next to suburban neighborhoods are great. Those aren’t it, though. The real reason the commute is so nice is because, both time- and distance-wise, it’s short.
Traffic is the Real Problem
I entered the working world at the same time I was learning to drive. This led to commuting from school to work and from work to home. The great thing was that we lived in a rural area. Those less populated country roads allowed you to just get in your car and go. Cruising down the road at the speed limit (or a little higher)? Not a problem.
Project: New York Cheese Pizza
I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.
Preparation
We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).
Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:
The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender:
Children’s Books to Set Up Routines
When we first brought our oldest son home, we did not have any routines established. It took us a while to come out of the fog of newborn life. As we wanted to establish routines for our family, especially at bedtime, we asked ourselves what we wanted that to look like. Then we looked to children books, to help set up these simple but powerful routines for our family.
Responsibilities of a Father
Somedays, it feels like “responsibility” is treated as a dirty word. In our current sensationalized-news and media-centric environment, the idea of ensuring that we serve, and love, those around us seems, well, outdated. Tell someone they’re responsible for something and you’re just as likely to get a finger pointing at someone else as an acknowledgement.
From a real-life conversation . . .
This all came to mind the other day when walking with some friends. The one said, “I get the feeling Keith goes home and sits down and reads with his kids and spends time with them”. Then, jokingly, they pointed to another friend who’s a dad and said you expect he just goes home and drops all his efforts at the door.
Yes, they were joking about that other dad. I have known dads, though, who fit that mold. These are the ones who invest more time in their work than their family, who feel like video games are more important than quality time with their kids (see this previous post about that), or who feel they have the same responsibility level as their kids.
DIY Gift Card Holder – Great for Teacher Valentine!
Today we are going to venture to something near and dear to my heart, crafting. I find craft time is very limited right now. Anytime I get to craft and it has a dual purpose (i.e., Valentine’s gift), it is a win-win for me. These gift card holders make great Valentine’s Day gifts for teachers or anyone you care about!
VALENTINE GIFT CARD HOLDERS
Today’s project will be Valentine gift card holders made out of recycled material. In this case, I used recycled Kool-Aid drink pouches. I love this project, because it is environmentally friendly, hello upcycling! It is is also cute and makes a fun gift for the receiver. It takes a little sewing, but it does not take long to do one. (If sewing is not your thing, I am sure some hot glue or even fun duct tape could be used to put these together.)
Five Lessons Learned from Living in Ohio
In finalizing this “Lessons Learned” arc of blog posts, I wanted to end where I grew up: Ohio. Blame it on time, as well as changing perspectives and needs in life, but these five were a lot harder for me to come up with than the ones for Oregon and Colorado. Don’t get me wrong, though–I loved the surroundings I grew up in, and have a lot of family who love living in Ohio still.
So, without further ado, here are the five lessons learned from living in (and growing up in) Ohio.
LESSON 1: Lake Erie is pretty impressive
I did live in a lot of different places in Ohio, usually near farms. My Dad and Mom (OK, stepmom, just so you don’t get confused) always lived near Lake Erie, though. As one of the five Great Lakes, it’s obviously a huge body of water with a large shoreline. As a kid, I loved going across the bridge that takes you over Sandusky Bay, which is off Lake Erie, out to Marblehead. When you’re in Marblehead, you can check out the lighthouse there and just get this really
Mom Friends: Why you need them and places to look
Motherhood is difficult. It is a journey, and it is best not completed alone.
MOTHERHOOD THE JOURNEY
Being a mom is hard, even on its best days. You try to get the little human to do things like sit nicely (so you can buckle them in a car seat), clean up after them for the umpteen millionth time (hello potty training), and are on call twenty-four hours a day (sick child anyone?). It’s easy to get worn out and discouraged. We birth or foster/adopt these amazing little humans, and journey through this life using every available resource to us, as we endeavor to raise responsible adults. Each day can be a learning day for both the child and the parent involved. It is exhausting at times. One of the most helpful things I have found in this journey is Mom Friends, or, my Mom Tribe!
Five Lessons Learned from Living in Colorado
Following up on my previous post (Five Lessons Learned from Living in Oregon), I thought I’d continue in that vein by looking at where I previously lived–Colorado. For three of those years, I lived with the wife there, but for the other five, I was on my own.
There are some great things that you can find in both Colorado and Oregon–a general friendliness from a lot of people, lots of places to go enjoy nature (hiking and biking especially), and even Voodoo Doughnut (their bright pink boxes are HIGHLY visible in the airport). We’ve enjoyed living in both states, and I’ve talked to multiple other people who have enjoyed or would enjoy living in both places too.
As a clarification before you read any further, these “lessons” aren’t anything like, “Things I’ve learned about life from living in location X.” They are, instead, the lessons of what is good and unique in the different places that I’ve lived. There are, of course, many more than I could list here, but these are my biggies.
With that explanation done, here are my five lessons learned from living in Colorado.
LESSON 1: There are fantastic views
I grew up in Ohio, where there really aren’t mountains. Sure, we’ve got some hills, but the highest elevation there is 1,550 feet. Colorado, in comparison, has fifty-eight (!) mountains
Organization – My Doom, Or Is It?
The ball has dropped and people are excited about the new year. Social media is inundated with posts for a healthier and better you, and one of the big topics for January is organization. I wish the word “organization” conjured up positive mental images in my head, of a perfectly organized home or the newest organization item I was adding to our home. However, organization for me is a word of anger, resentment, frustration — a trigger word if you will. While for anyone else it is simply a word, for me it is a strong word, and it has been wrecking my life.
BACKGROUND
How did I get here? Why is this such a strong negative word for me? Here’s the root of my problem: I am a creative person who wants to be organized, who at times keeps up the appearance of being organized (especially as a teacher and now as a mom), who wants organized structures in place, but is terrible at follow-through. For example, when I was little my mom would ask me to clean my room. I couldn’t just do a clean sweep of the room though; I had to go through and turn out drawers and “organize” everything into groups or parts. It would take forever. But the problem was that two days later, after I had “organized” everything, I would have turned it into a total disaster.
As a student, I wasn’t really organized at school either. I would find myself many times taking a binder and reorganizing it, because I had papers stuffed everywhere.