Sad day

I'm sick today. I have a throat thing. And I also have some very sad news to report: the amaryllis isn't working. I'm not sure why, but it's only growing leaves -- no bud stalk. I suspect that means I could keep watering it forever, but it won't have a flower this year. Maybe they lose the ability to flower after awhile? I'm gonna have to call Grandma this weekend and check in on that one. Maybe I'll also have to go out and buy a new amaryllis. Would that be a variable "household" expense? Or a irregular "misc." expense?

Budgeting

I took the advice of Anonymous and downloaded PearBudget, a spreadsheet designed to help you make budgets and track expenditures. I never thought keeping a budget could be so fun! And I have no idea why it actually is fun, but it is. PearBudget has you break your expenditures into sub-categories under variable expenses (like groceries and entertainment), regular expenses (like rent), and irregular expenses (like gifts, vacations, or one-time big purchases). You can make the sub-categories anything you want them to be. I found that thinking about expenditures in terms of whether they're variable, regular, and irregular was really helpful in considering where it would actually make sense to cut back.

I haven't come to any major conclusions about my spending just yet. In January I spent about $80 on groceries and about $250 at restaurants. I thought this might be a sign I should cut back on dining out and cook more, until it was pointed out to me that I'm still spending less than $11 per day on food (seems pretty reasonable for the Bay Area). For now, I guess it's enough to have an understanding of where my money actually goes coming into focus.

Maybe that career in accounting isn't quite as hopeless as I thought.

Champion this

I'm on the phone with Sallie Mae's endless series of recordings right now, trying to sort problems with some of my student loans. The fact that they open the call with a recording that says, "Sallie Mae, champions of higher education!" kinda makes me want to stab someone's eyeballs out.

Quick lessons in negotiations

Some quick tips I've picked up in class so far that may prove useful in your negotiations this weekend:

1) Always make the first offer, unless it is socially unnacceptable to do so.
2) Never accept a first offer.
3) Never reveal your BATNA. You can say that you have a BATNA, but never reveal specifics to the other party.
4) Don't mistake silence for an answer. Wait to hear a concrete response before making concessions.

I know those underwear!

In fact, I have the exact same pair. And I wouldn't say they're underwear, as much as I would say that they're a serious piece of technical equipment. They attach at the base of your bra and provide coverage all the way down to your thighs like bike shorts. They work by sucking everything in, to the extent that you can't really breathe -- they give you a little lift in the ass, and they magically make dresses that are maybe a size too small wearable. They're a borderline miracle product. However, I'm also working on a theory that having your internal organs compressed in such a way may severely limit your tolerance to alcohol and result in embarrassing behavior at formal functions. I have no way to substantiate that, of course, but it feels true.

I'm not sure why Katie is taking heat for wearing them. They're kinda hot. You know, in that wrestling singlet way. And she is married to Tom Cruise.

BATNA

"BATNA" (pronounced bat-na) is a new term I learned in negotiations class, and I'm a little obsessed with it. I think I'm a little obsessed with negotiations class in general.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative To the Negotiated Agreement. In a negotiation, pretty much all of your power comes from your BATNA. A simple, quick example is that if you have an offer from someone who wants to buy your futon for $100, you would never accept an offer from another party for under $100, unless they could sweeten the deal somehow to get it to a value of more than $100 ($90 and they haul it out of your third floor apartment for you, and then give you a backrub?). $100 is your futon BATNA.

I think BATNA needs to be worked into my day to day vocabulary and I'm keeping an eye out for such opportunities. It should have some good applications in conversations about dating.

Hotties

If you do a Google Image search of my name, these are the top four images you come up with:

Update on the resolutions

I have made absolutely no progress on my resolutions so far. I've not signed up for the Y membership and I haven't gone back to motorcycle school. I have no excuse for my poor performance.

I guess that I have managed to consistently track all my spending. In this case, I think ignorance might have actually been bliss. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the data. Spreadsheets? Pie charts?

Even though I now know that I spend a whole lot more on food and transportation than I thought I did, I can't really cut either of those things out. The only other conclusions I've made are:

1) I spend a lot of money in order to be with friends or while I am hanging out with friends.

2) Much (almost all?) of my happiness comes from time spent with friends.

And so,

3) My happiness is expensive.

This would seem to contradict the accepted wisdom that money can't buy happiness.

New semester, new attitude

I've recovered my enthusiasm about being a grad student. Every second of last semester felt like torture to me, but this one is fun and interesting so far. Having friends in classes might make all the difference.

This time around I'm taking Leadership (aka How to be a CEO) and Negotiations and Conflict Resolution. The cool thing about Leadership is that half the reading for the class was published by my group at work, so I'm getting up to speed at work and doing homework at the same time. Plus, it's genuinely interesting material. The cool thing about Negotiations and Conflict Resolution is that you can pretty much use everything you learn immediately and in almost every area of your life. Not to mention, the professor is soooooo dreamy.

Today I turned in an application to head the social committee. If I get appointed, I'll get to make budgeting decisions about happy hours and pretty much any other kind of event we want to plan. It feels a little like trying out for student government in high school, but I'm super geared up about having outside funding to plan parties for people I drink with every weekend anyway.

Blech

I sure do suck at this blogging thing lately. Everything I'm spending a lot of time thinking about these days is unblogable -- either too personal or just not even slightly interesting to anyone living outside my head.

I'm also a little disappointed with Google's new version of Blogger. It makes some things really easy because you can drag and drop the design elements of your blog on the template. However, it makes other things impossible to figure out. They're little things, but they're driving me bonkers. Like the title of this blog, for one. It should be RBlog, not RBLOG. Can't figure out how to change and I've spent at least an hour on it. Anyone know?

Virgin breakfast

This piece of toast has been sitting on a filing cabinet around the corner from my cubical since before Christmas. Miraculously, it does not mold.

Oh, Linda...

Yesterday, Linda sent me a bunch of photos of Jake Gyllenhal and other beefcakes as potential blog content. I guess it was a subtle reminder that I am once again falling behind in my posting duties. Instead of posting any of the pics of hot men, I am instead going to post the response I got from Linda when I then asked her to come to a Tainted Love show with me next weekend. This is a for real email:

"Tainted Love is so fun! I have a Senior Citizen Crab Feed that night, but hopefully it'll be over in time for me to drive back home, change, and cab it to Bimbo's. This is perfect because I've been craving dancing."

Ladies' night

Linda and I are having an estrogen attack... for the last couple hours we've been making a pot roast, drinking wine, gossiping, watching the Golden Globes, and flipping through issues of Us Weekly and Victoria's Secret catalogs all at the same time. The only thing that could top this off would be brownies, facials, and a maybe pillow fight.

Getting my Us Weekly fix while watching all these blinged out stars on TV has prompted me to decide that Justin Timberlake should get back together with Britney Spears for awhile. Maybe just a couple months. Justin just broke up with Cameron Diaz, he could grab massive amounts of media attention with the move, and Britney could clearly benefit from his superior classiness and business judgement (Brit's people might even pay him for such assistance). They were super cute together. He could get Brit's image back on track so easily. Her publicist should make some calls.

Amaryllis 2007

I think some of you may remember the excitement that surrounded last February's amaryllis bloom. I thought I might enhance the enjoyment of the amaryllis this year by creating a little anticipation for y'all. I brought the bulb out of its hibernation spot in the laundry room last weekend and gave it some water. Here's the current state:





Now, just sit back and prepare to be amazed by nature.

A new resolution

I added a new resolution to the other two (no, Jeremy, I'm not talking about THAT one -- though I'm working on it, too). I'm tracking my spending in hopes of eventually developing a budget. I wanted to come up with a budget, but realized that I have pretty much no idea where my money goes. So instead, I'm writing down everything I spend money on each day through the end of February to see if it leads me to any huge revelations. I suspect I will confirm that I spend an embarrassing amount of money on wine, cab fare, and pedicures.

In the meantime, I need to figure out how to organize all the data I collect. The usual categories to budget for seem to be things like housing, food, entertainment, transportation, communication, travel, and clothes. Linda posed a good question the other night -- does dining out count as food, or entertainment? And what if you're paying for someone else's meal? And do drinks count as food? I think I might also invent my own "personal upkeep" category that includes all visits to salons and gym membership fees.

Two thumbs up for the Y

I tested out the Embarcadero YMCA last night and I found it to be a very pleasant experience. The staff was super friendly and way more outgoing and genuinely nice than I've seen at the other gyms. The locker room was okay, not great, but the steam room and sauna were clean and inviting. They'll be remodeling the locker room in February, which will be an inconvenience, but will also mean an entirely new, shiny facility. I hope they put in new lockers, because the ones they have now require you to bring your own padlock, which is a huge hassle for me. I can never remember the combo.

None of the equipment was overcrowded, nor was the pool. That was a bit of a surprise to me, since I expected a new year's resolution rush of eager exercisers. Most importantly, the place wasn't a scene. None of the women in the locker room had extensive plastic surgery and none of them were applying make up pre-workout. There were a lot of people in my age range who looked fit and relatively interesting. A reasonable amount of checking each other out was happening, but it wasn't overwhelming or icky. There were also enough semi-attractive guys to watch lifting weights that time on the treadmill seemed to pass just a little bit faster than normal.

They offer a cardio kickboxing class on Tuesday afternoons and Wednesday nights. I'm going to scope it out next week and see how scary it looks.

Questions for you

From a book I am reading:

"Are you on this planet to do something, or are you here just for something to do? If you're on this planet to do something, then what is it?"

I find them to be hard questions.

Pit stains

Why do some shirts turn yellow under the armpits, but others don't? I mean, it's the same sweat and the same antiperspirant, right? Shouldn't the discoloring effect be a little more consistent from shirt to shirt?

And, more importantly, how do you get yellow pit stains out of a shirt?

This post is terrible

I think that lately the difficulty behind regular blogging is that it requires the same kind of thinking as my job. I go to work each day, and I've got to come up with all this stuff to say all the time... Intelligent opinions, feedback, creative ideas, etc. The blog is like that, too. It doesn't have to be intelligent, I suppose, but it has to be something somewhat unique and from me. Recently I'm noticing a lot of instances when I don't know what I think or what to say. In fact, I might be brain dead. Much of the time, I just want to say, "I don't know. What do you think?" Maybe it's a sign that I've naturally come to a point where I am ready to develop my active listening skills.

Unfortunately for you, I subscribe to the theory that if you have writers' block, you just have to write through it. About whatever comes to mind, without considering the quality too much. As long as you write (or in this case blog) something, you're making progress.

On that note, over the weekend I did a massive early spring cleaning. You might be surprised at how useful and truly inspirational Organization for Dummies actually is. I threw out about four garbage bags full of old papers, files I didn't need anymore, goodwill stuff, art projects gone wrong, and the like. Then I rearranged my bedroom furniture. My things still aren't as organized as I would like them (my biggest problem is clothes and where to put them), but it's a good
start -- a bit of a clean slate for 2007.

The SFUSD is ridiculous

In an effort to keep this blog movin', I promised myself that I would post something every day before leaving work for as long as possible. Now it's getting hard. I can't get my camera to download pictures, so I have no easy way out. I think I'm going to have to write about something.

That something is going to be the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and their ridiculous enrollment policies. I have recently been semi-involved in applications for elementary school (or at least I've been an active observer). In other places, public school is public school. That means there's a school in your neighborhood, your parents at some point roll into the office and tell the school you need to go there, and you go. It's close, it's convenient, if the public schools are bad your parents start trying to figure out a private school option, but you've always got the back up of the school down the street.

In San Francisco, it is nowhere near that easy. They've got this whole system set up to promote economic diversity in each school. That means you can't just send your kid to the school down the street. You fill out an application with a bunch of personal information and a list of your top seven choices of any of the public schools in the city. Your kid has only an 80% chance of actually getting admitted to one of those seven schools. There is a waitlist for each school and a second round. Keep in mind your neighborhood school might be one of those that are really poor quality.

Essentially, they're trying to prevent having all the rich kids going to one school. They don't want the schools in the Marina to have a better quality of education, or more funding (there is a lot of fund-raising through parents and communities in the public schools here) than the schools in the Mission. That's an admirable goal, but I don't think they've seriously thought about the repercussions of this system. It means that a parent who lives in the Noe Valley and works downtown could easily have to somehow get their kid all the way to a school in the outer Sunset before heading into the office. That could easily add an hour to your morning commute, and you'd never be leaving the city. It also means they have to figure out someway to get their kid home at 3 pm.

I remember that I started coming home from school on my own in middle school, but a lot of the kids I went to school with took the school buses home. This system makes that overly difficult as well, because it's one thing to have a ten-year-old walk home or talk a school bus alone, but it's an entirely different thing to expect them to get from Cole Valley to Potrero Hill unsupervised.

I'm pretty sure that this whole system is why I see tons of kids under five in the city, but rarely see kids that are older. Unless you get lucky and get accepted to a decent school near your place, the system becomes unworkable since it's pretty much impossible to live in the city and support kids without two working parents.

And no, the fact that I'm thinking about kindergartens does not make me old. I'm going to go out and rage tonight just to prove it. And when I say "rage" I mean drink a glass of wine, watch a DVD, and fall asleep on the couch at 10:30.

It's tricky

There's been a lot of confusion expressed to me lately over "Linda." The truth is that her name isn't really "Linda." That's pretty much just a code blog-world name. Her real name sounds a little bit like "Linda" and frequently, in real life, people mis-hear her and think she said her name was Linda when it is really something else that's not quite so common or forty-something sounding. Thus the "Linda" joke. If you have met a friend of mine who looks exactly like the photos of Linda, but who has a different name, then you can pretty much assume that the person you met is really actually the "Linda" I refer to.

On the same note, it's exciting that so many of you are still reading RBlog even though I haven't posted anything in an eternity. There hasn't been much in the way of comments posted recently, but I've received a ton of real-life comments. Makes me feel like the effort is appreciated.

Should be noodle not Doodle

I was going to actually write something today, but somehow time got away from me. Maybe tonight. In the meantime, in my effort to keep posting regularly, you get a couple pictures of Linda's mom's new GoldenDoodle puppy.








She's a mix between a golden retriever and a poodle. I think that should make a Goldenoodle, but apparently no one agrees with me. I've been told that it's GoldenDoodle. Anyway, the puppy's name is Maggie and Linda's mom is a Proud Puppy Momma (PPM?). And Jeremy is in love with Linda's mom.

Happy 2007!

Jeremy, Linda, and I all survived Mexico. Some of us got off better than others. For example, Linda was struck down by a mystery stomach ailment and rung in the new year with a whole lotta pukin'. Honestly, she was sick for days and I was a little worried. I think she's finally on the road to recovery.

I haven't downloaded my photos yet, but here are a few from Jeremy's set to tide you over:




Us Weekly: More captivating than a Mexican sunset. How did the Idols get thin? Linda must know!




Hard to tell where Becky hair stops and Linda hair starts.




By day she's a mild mannered attorney. By night she's La Boca del Mundo, avenger of justice! (This is actually a Mexican wrestling mask I bought for Sam. It hasn't yet left my purse, and I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be able to part with it when the time comes.)




Here's our whole crew on the sunny, sunny balcony. Ay, dios mio. I already miss the sunshine.

As long as I'm posting photos...

You may as well have one of Jack in his Halloween costume.

This is a test

Well not entirely... I did want to share this photo with you -- it's Dave and Sam on their recent Utah ski trip, and they make me smile. However, I'm primarily interested in whether or not I'll be allowed to keep the photo posted once Dave notices it (if he notices it).

Progress

I haven't forgotten about my resolutions, yet. I took a tour of the Embarcadero Y yesterday and got a free pass to work out until January 16. I want to look at the one in the Presidio and also the one that's closer to my office, but the YMCA membership seems like a pretty solid bet. I'll be ready to sign up for a membership before the end of next week.

I've made less progress on the motorcycle license, but here's the scooter I think I might buy:




Isn't it cute? It's under $2000, and also comes in pink. The riding lessons start back up the third weekend in January, so by then I won't have any excuses left and I'll just have to go and do my best not to kill myself. There are four different weekend sets of lessons I could attend before the end of February.