Dog #4 and actually all the dogs

I feel I should correct the record on Dog #4, who turned out to be affable and relatively low-maintenance. He arrived with the name "Rocky"* but since he was a stray, we can call him whatever we damn please, and there's nothing about this dog's personality that calls for "Rocky." (Dog #1 was an owner surrender whose owner didn't have time for him, which is ludicrous because that dog just wanted to sleep in your bed all day, and his name was "Maddy Boy," but we didn't have the heart to take away the single point of stability in his life.)  I'm pretty sure Dog #4's name should be Kevin or Jason, because he feels like a midwestern junior in college in the '90s who's the nicest guy in one of the lower-key fraternities. His soul wears khakis every day. However, the kids outvoted me, and we're calling him Teddy.

Teddy is a sweetheart. He knows no commands, and his elbow calluses suggest he's spent a lot of time sleeping on concrete, but he doesn't act like a yard dog. He loves being petted, lets you take food right out of his mouth, sleeps uncomplainingly in his crate, is easy to walk on a leash, and adorably insists on pawing all his blankets and cushions into a complicated nest. He's got a few negative points. He peed in the house once. He's un-neutered (which the girls find embarrassing and horrifying), so he actually drools and licks obsessively when he smells plants that lady dogs have peed on, and he will hump people if you let him get both paws up on any body part, but we've learned to head it off by never letting him get both paws up on any body part. (And he's got a neutering appointment in two weeks, which should temper the humping a little.) The vet thinks the sad raw skin on his back and sides is a bacterial infection secondary to a flea infestation, but he has no fleas now, and his skin is healing up nicely. A few ticks have come off him - after Dog #2 we're pretty sanguine about ticks in quantities smaller than fifty. Duchess is a pro at tick removal, and we keep them in a jar on a shelf. 

Conclusion: a week in, Dog #4 is giving Dog #1 some strong competition for Best Dog Yet. We'll see how he shakes out. 

I've learned a lot about fostering since signing up. It has been rewarding, but I don't think we'd have signed up for it if we knew then what we know now. It makes a very very (VERY) tiny dent in all the overwhelming awfulness of the world, which feels both good and wildly inadequate in the current state of things. I didn't realize that dogs come to you in a state of physical and emotional distress - even if they're not coming off of years of neglect, they are coming off of weeks or more in a stressful shelter environment and then a long trip. Even Dog #1, who had a naturally confident and even-keeled temperament, and whom I don't think had been abused or even really neglected, spent a lot of his first week with us just sleeping in his crate, doing what the dog rescue fanatics call "decompressing." You're supposed to keep your house very calm, keep the dog confined to a small area, only interact with them when they approach you, and more or less ignore them otherwise. It takes weeks (or longer, for the worse-off dogs) for them to feel safe enough to start to relax and be themselves. And then, if you're successful, they get adopted and you cry.  (I have high hopes for Teddy, whose awful-looking skin was making him a very unattractive adoption prospect straight out of the shitty under-resourced shelter he was living at - I think he'll be very adoptable once he's neutered and his fur grows back.) And then, unless you've had enough, you start all over again with another dirty, exhausted, stressed out, bug-infested, bacteria-infected, peeing-in-the-house, sad-eyed beastie whose personality and history is a total unknown.

*As far as I can tell, every pitbull who arrives at any shelter is given one of maybe six names- Rocky, Champ, Blue, Missy, Sadie, or Nala. 

Kids these days

I've been reading a book about how screwed millennials are, and what I'm gleaning from it* seems like it will dismally apply to Duchess and Skipper.

Also, Duchess and her phone. Ugh. She's constantly holding it and staring at it. Last night I made her turn it off earlier than usual, and she was such delightful company - she played a stupid card game with Skipper, manically and amusingly did a dance and voice interpretation of my uterus, and worked on a crossword with Cook.** I've missed her.

*Kids are having to work increasingly hard on training themselves and making themselves more valuable resources in order to compete with each other for increasingly unstable and poorly paid jobs. This is bad.
**I have fond memories of doing crossword puzzles with my friend in middle school, in the Eugene Maleska era. That's how I learned the word "ort."

Just a note

I was looking at the coverage of the marches today, and I got curious and went to the Fox News home page:

At first I thought it said nothing about the marches, and then I saw the little item on the bottom lefthand corner.

Here's the NY Times:

No wonder it feels like we're living in different worlds, when your standard media coverage (not EVEN your facebook feed) looks so different.

Anyway, Skipper and I are off to the Portland march. Don't look for us in the Fox news coverage; we won't be there.

2017

Well. It's a new year!

Things I expect to happen in 2017:

• Duchess will become a teenager. 
• Skipper will sleep over at a friend's house for the first time.
• Duchess will move into the basement (aka The Dungeon of Asbestos and Radon).
• I will get a new job. 
• Cook will finally get fed up with his job and will also get a new job.

I don't have any resolutions, though of course I'd like to be a better person. Though I think I'd like to wear more wool. And sing more. Sleep more. Try not gain all that weight back. (I don't have any actual plans to make these things happen, so they're just New Year's Vague Notions.)

We've had an exceptionally mellow two weeks. The girls have pretty much just laid around and read a LOT of books.  Duchess is done with it and ready to see her friends, but Skipper, unsurprisingly, says she'd be happy to log a few more weeks of this. We've also been enjoying a nearly-complete hiatus from extracurricular activities, and are musing over how nice that is and what that might mean for future choices.

Duchess attended one day of Zombie Camp this last week, and her reportage from that experience was interesting. She was one of the few kids who didn't get caught and "infected," and she spent the entire day pretty much running away from and hiding from the ever-growing zombie hordes in the woods. She said she was on high alert all the time, and that her vigilance, while exhausting, was what kept her "alive" because she was the first to realize whenever the zombies were attacking, and the quickest to leap up and sprint for safety. I find this reassuring given the growing likelihood that society will completely collapse in the next few years - Duchess will survive, at least for a little while. (She will, however, NOT protect any of the rest of us. She figures we'll be the sacrifices she'll have to make in order to get away.)

Skipper chose not to go to day camp that day. Skipper hates day camp, because day camp is all about new stuff all day - new place, new kids, new teachers, new activities. Ugh. New stuff is the worst. She instead spent half the day at my office and half at Cook's, with a shared pizza lunch interlude. Both offices were very empty and she was very quiet, so it worked out fine.

So - 2017. Let's hope for no zombies.

The future

Skipper's teacher made a poster of the kids with signs identifying their career plans. (This is a ridiculously adorable and sometimes moving activity that I've seen lots of teachers doing lately.) I took a crummy camera photo of it while attending the Big Graduation Ceremony on Friday. See if you can find Skipper.






















The key here is to look for the kid who is hiding. While also clowning around. (Pitstock's photo is directly underneath hers, by the way.)

















And there she is. She explained to me later that she was specifically thinking about saying she would be a paleontologist, but decided to keep it open-ended.

No jetpacks.

Portland is getting a bike-sharing system, and while I have issues with it, I'm getting pretty excited about the potential short-term future of urban transportation systems. I imagine Dutch in 10 years,* preparing to go out with friends - she'll pick up her Mobile Device Of Some Kind** and tell it where she wants to go, and it will tell her the best way to get there. But it won't give her driving directions. It'll tell her where the nearest available bike or car can be found (maybe a commercial car or bike share vehicle, or maybe a peer-to-peer share vehicle, parked in somebody's driveway,  available for instant rental by MDSK), the location and arrival time of the next bus, the location of the nearest available cab or jitney or whatever.... Maybe she'll grab a bikeshare bike and ride it to the light rail station, where she'll dock it and hop on the train.

It's going to be great, you guys. Of course, there's going to be a lot of stuff about it that's going to piss me off, and I'll be sure to be grumbling about how much goddamn time Dutch and Skipper spend hunched over their MDSKs,*** but we're going to get so much closer to having really flexible transportation options. If the Republicans don't screw it all up.


* This scenario assumes that society doesn't collapse, and that Dutch has a safe home and a reasonably healthy social life...
**which will be able to do a billion things that I can't even imagine...
*** and of course if we've moved toward massive 20-lane highways filled with driverless cars, I'm going to be REALLY pissed.

Today Dutch started two savings jars - one is labeled "collage" and the other is labeled "horse camp" (by which she means a week at a sleep-away horseback-riding camp in summer 2013).*

Dutch is planning to be a wildlife biologist. Four years at a public university (in-state tuition) is likely to cost something like $40K/year by the time she gets there. I think it's probably a good idea for her to start saving.**


*I'll leave you to guess which one gets the larger portion of her allowance.
** And learning how to spell "college."

Apparently, exercise and volunteerism are mood-lifters. Who knew?

I'm feeling pretty down these days. Today I find myself with childcare and without work, and  I made myself a to-do list (actually a teux deux list, because I completely love the app) in an attempt to keep myself from just dropping off the kids and then spending the day lying on the couch listening to The Swell Season and feeling sorry for myself.

One of the items on the teuxdeux/prevent-plummeting-into-despair list was to volunteer at the Friday Running Club at recess at Dutch's school. I'd done it once before - volunteers stand at one corner of the playground while the kids run laps, and each time the kids come around, they stop and present their laminated cards for you to check off another box. I loved it. I love seeing them coming toward me, with their wide-open faces, every single thing they feel written all over them.* Some of them are running socially, with friends, and some of them are running alone, and some of them are sprinting, and some are trotting, and they're all just intoxicated with it - with whatever it is about it that works for them, and maybe just with the pleasure of being out of the classroom for 20 minutes. They RUN, some of these kids, like no adult ever runs, like they're both running for their lives and running for sheer joy, at the same time.  You should see them. They look like hope and joy and everything that's good about people, in the shape of small, sweaty, snotty, red-faced, screaming banshees.  It's pretty amazing to me that so many of them participate; many of them run for the entire recess period. And I get to see Dutch, who loves loves loves it that I'm there,*** and her friends, so it's just all good.

So I did that. I left later than I'd planned, so I biked there at top speed,**** standing up on my pedals like I was a first-grader myself, and got there all sweaty and windblown, with freezing red cheeks, and it felt really good. The recess was just as fun as it had been before. Then I biked home, downhill, swooping around corners at daringly high speeds, and that was also excellent.

Anyway, now I'm home, with a cup of tea, listening to The Swell Season, blogging. But I put blogging on my teuxdeux, so it's okay! The take-home message of this post is this: If you're feeling depressed and hopeless, you should go ride your bike and cheer on some sprinting 7-year-olds. That'll fix you right up!


*I only volunteer at the first recess, before lunch,** which is only K-2. I expect the older kids are more jaded, having reached the advanced age of 9.
** This is a really welcome change from last year - the K-2 kids get recess before lunch, so they've burned off a fair amount of steam by the time they sit down to eat.
*** When I told her that my job had evaporated, she said "That's too bad. So can you volunteer at Friday Running Club now?"
**** That is to say, MY top speed, which is very slow. Grandmas out for constitutionals breeze past me. Damn you, grandmas!

Sentimental Interlude

My friend is getting married this weekend. We won't be there when she gets married, so I'm not going to be able to stand up and give a toast, but I wish I was (though it's a barbecue-and-hammocks kind of wedding, so I'm not sure toasts are even an option). This friend was my first real friend, the first friend I chose, the first friend of my heart. I had friends before that (though not very many, as I have been socially awkward since my first breath), but they were mostly proximity-based - neighbors and family friends - or the sort of person who is kind to a socially-awkward classmate not so much because of any particular chemistry as because they are just kind people.*

This friend arrived in my life when I was miserable and mean and sad. She was smart and funny and weird and warm-hearted. She was generous and expressive and loving in a way that I was afraid to be myself, and she showed me that being open to happiness often requires making yourself vulnerable. She taught me that it was fine to be both cynical AND sentimental. She introduced me to the joys of crossword puzzles and trashy books. I think it's not too dramatic to say that her friendship changed me, and only for the better.

I wish for my daughters that they find friends like this, who open their hearts to joy. And for my friend, I wish joy.** And trashy books, and crosswords, and everything else that is good.

*And may I say how grateful I am to those people? Deanna whatever-your-name-was in fifth grade, I'm talking to you. Thank you.

**But this does not affect my opinion that Beaches is a terrible, terrible movie.

Christmas in March

Hi! I'm alive! All is well. We're just really busy, and I'm spending all my spare time thinking about kinnikinnick and evergreen huckleberry.

The Big Cooks and Antarctic Uncle/Green Thumb Auntie have been visiting, and doing extraordinary amounts of home improvement chores* as well as keeping the kids busy and happy.

I have been gardening. Mostly what I've been doing is killing the lawn and coveting plants at a local nursery. I've never been interested in landscaping, having a primarily utilitarian approach to gardening, but I find myself pretty excited about the idea of filling our property with native plants and edible plants. (And when I find a native edible, I get VERY excited!) We have figs and grapes already, and I will be planting strawberries, blueberries, and salmonberries this week. Salmonberries, you guys! My plan for the summer of 2016 involves eating our own huckleberries, salmonberries, blueberries, strawberries (wild and cultivated), thimbleberries, and currants. I'm not sure if this plan will survive my laziness, my lack of horticultural expertise, and/or birds, but we'll see. It's a nice dream, at any rate.

I asked a local arborist for free wood chips, (on the advice of an avid gardener I know) and he delivered unto me a truckload of chipped up bits of Douglas fir. I have no idea if this is a good mulch or not, but it's all over our yard now, and it smells like Christmas everywhere.

And I'm alive! I hope you are all alive as well.

*Removing ancient contact paper from built-ins, removing a TV antenna from the roof, fixing both bathroom fans, installing baseboards, painting, replacing switchplates, sanding, organizing, and generally troubleshooting all day long.

Resolutions

I don't have any resolutions. I haven't really caught up with my life enough to feel in control enough to make changes. I can't remember the last time I felt caught up with my life. Maybe 1992? No, probably not.

No, wait! I do have a semi-resolution: I'm going to write some real letters this year, if I can remember how to write things by hand.

Cook and Dutch are sitting on the floor right now, drawing pictures and waiting for the New York New Year, which we will celebrate with sparkling cider and a round of memories of 2010/hopes for 2011. Then Dutch will be allowed to stay up as late as she wants. She's never yet made it to midnight, but Cook and I almost never do, either.

2010:

1) Cook got a job with benefits. BENEFITS!!!

2) I graduated with another useless degree that doesn't seem to increase my employability even an iota.

3) Dutch, started school, learned to read.

4) Skipper learned to talk, sort of. She said her longest sentence ever tonight - "Come help me take out." She learned a bunch of other skills that make her significantly more like a functioning member of society, like laughing at other people's jokes (and saying "FUNnnneee!" to really hammer it home).

5) People I love got married, had babies, moved, lost jobs, got jobs, were happy, were sad...

Oops - we took a break to watch New York New Year. Dutch told her first joke of New York 2011. It was absolutely awful.

6) Dutch's missing tooth finally grew back in, after four long years.

7) Skipper learned to love tofu.

2011 is shaping up to be the year in which we move to a new house, Dutch learns to ride a bike, and Skipper leaves diapers behind (oh, please).

Happy New Year! I hope it's a wonderful year for all of you.

Getting this off my chest

I think you (all of you!) know I have strong feelings about cars. Cook and I, over 12 years of cohabitation in cities (and 10 car-free years) and several years of work and education in transportation planning, have come to a shared position of disbelief and horror that we live in a world that is designed around cars. This feeling is always there, but when I stand at a bus stop watching a river of cars whiz by me at high speeds, or walk across an ocean of free parking,* or read yet another article about person killed by a car, it wells up in a bubble of anger. I hate it that cars get so much of our space and time and money. I hate it that they kill so many people, and yet we all just accept the huge risk of injury or death by car as part of everyday life. (While decrying transit and bicycling as dangerous.)

I want cars to be reassigned to a subordinate position as one of many transportation options, and demoted from their current place as the ONLY real transportation option. Think how lovely a world in which cars aren't the center of everything would be. No, really, think about it. It would be quieter, and there would be a lot more open space. People would walk more and bike more and not have to be afraid of being mashed. Stores and offices and whatnot would be located closer together. Car crashes wouldn't kill 35000 people a year* in the United States, and air pollution wouldn't take thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Healthcare costs would be lower. People would be less stressed and have more money.

Here's crankypants Todd Litman on the subject:

I am not suggesting that everybody must give up driving altogether. My research and my personal experience indicate that the best transport system is multi-modal: good walking and cycling conditions; good public transit, carsharing and taxi services; and mixed land use to minimize the distances people must travel to reach common services and activities. This is no more "anti-automobile" than a healthy diet is "anti-food," it lets users choose the best mode for each trip. I do not believe that people should be forced to live in such communities, but housing in such neighborhoods should be available to anybody who wants, including those with low incomes, and people who drive less than average should not be forced to subidize people who drive more than average.

There are two possible responses to the high costs of driving. We can continue to increase road, parking and fuel subsidies in an attempt to keep automobile travel affordable. However, this entails huge costs, is unfair to people who drive less than average, and exacerbates problems such as traffic congestion, accidents and pollution. Alternatively, we can create a more diverse and efficient transport system. This requires shifting some road space to alternative modes and increasing vehicle fees. By reducing the amount that people must drive to satisfy their needs this approach reduces total transport costs, reduces traffic problems, and provides other benefits to users and society.

It would be so great, wouldn't it?

*Parking! Ugh! Don't get me started!

**That's a lot of people, isn't it? Given that we started two wars over far fewer deaths, maybe we should have a War on Cars! I could definitely get behind that.

Hooray!

It's World Car-Free Day! What are you doing to celebrate?

Welcome!

Today's news brought to you by the recession.

Keeping up my string of depressing posts (is anybody still reading?), I feel the need to inform you that my dream job has, in fact, been filled by somebody else. I caved in and emailed my rival, and she told me she'd heard through the grapevine that they filled the position internally the week the opening was posted, and never even interviewed anyone.

Glass-half-full take-home message: Hey, at least I never had a chance, so I didn't exactly get rejected. Exactly.

Glass-half-empty take-home message: The competition for jobs is so acute that I can't even get an interview for a somewhat unusual job for which I am very well qualified. And all my serious competitors for this job are still unemployed.

Next steps: Today I applied for an $11/hour temporary job for which I'm massively over-qualified (and probably won't even get an interview, because 9000 other people will apply), and started the paperwork to get the kids onto the state health insurance program.

Looking ahead: If anybody knows of a job even vaguely related to planning and health, preferably with benefits, please let me know. We'll go anywhere.

I'm the one whining.

*Warning: self-pity wallow ahead!*

I'm having a pretty glass half-empty period right now, as Dutch could tell you, despairing about my job prospects, and Cook's. I am wobbling around in a chronic state of exhaustion and anxiety. I would say that I really need a vacation, except that what I REALLY need is a job, and the gaping holes in my schedule after June 14 are a cause for dread, not for anticipation.

I've talked to Dutch a lot lately about borrowing trouble. She tends to immediately leap to the worst-case scenario for the future when she's under stress. We've talked about how it can be a good idea to prepare for and act to prevent the worst-case scenario, but that there's a line between doing that and just freaking out needlessly and making yourself miserable over something that may or may not happen.

At the moment, I'm trying to walk that line. There are so few job postings that I need to be aggressively networking and sniffing out any and all possibilities. But I don't have TIME! And I'm exhausted! I'm doing some of the preventing-and-preparing work,* but I don't have the capacity to do enough. So I worry, instead, because I can do that while I walk and cook and wash dishes and lie fruitlessly awake at night. I worry a LOT.

I want to buffer the girls from this overwhelming anxiety, but I'm really not succeeding. Dutch knows the facts about our situation (temp jobs, no idea where we'll be in six months, etc.). I've told her that I feel stressed about it. But I would prefer for her to remain ignorant about how deeply terrible it's making us feel.

Instability: not great for family life. Go figure.

*Okay, I'm done. Now, I will remind myself that, in fact, nobody is dumping crap on me, and my life is actually pretty awesome. Unstable, yes, but awesome.*


*I check job postings at all the places I can think of. I check listservs. You know, the bare minimum.

Mundane miscellany

Yesterday we got the results of Dutch's school lottery - she didn't get into the two language immersion programs (which we really wanted), but she did get into another neighborhood school, and she's waitlisted for the Spanish immersion program there. This means that we don't have to move before school starts, which is a relief. She's pretty excited to have a place to pin her kindergarten dreams to.

Also, four kids in Skipper's daycare class have hand, foot, and mouth disease. Some other kids are out for other reasons, so Skipper was the only kid present yesterday. She had three teachers at her disposal. The teachers sent a handout home with us at the end of the day with information about HFM, including the helpful reassurance that it is NOT the same as mad cow disease. Phew.

Also, Skipper's walking a lot more, demanding to nurse every fourteen minutes, shrieking when thwarted, and hitting people* in the face. Toddlers are so adorable.

That's the news here. Strangely, the employers at the job I really really want have not yet contacted me to beg me to work for them. Maybe I'll get that call today.


*Mostly me, actually. She also specializes in grabbing glasses off people's faces.

Hopes/Fears

A long time ago,* in a galaxy far, far away,** I got an interview for a job I really, really wanted. They called me to schedule a second interview. Meanwhile, I was offered a job I kind of wanted. We needed the money, and I was unable to negotiate to keep a bird in the hand until the other bird decided whether it wanted to come to hand, too. Or something. Anyway, I withdrew from the running for the job I really wanted, and took a job that turned out to be kind of awful. Two years later, the job I had wanted opened up again. I applied, got an interview, and was rejected. I was pretty sad. I still think about that job with regret.

On Monday, I found a listed job that I really, really want. I REALLY WANT IT. It's pretty much the job I went back to school to get. I know that there's no guarantee it would actually BE a good job, and I'm sure there are plenty of other jobs that I would love, but it feels like this is The One. Which, of course, means that if (and when***) I get rejected, it's going to break my heart and plunge me into the pit of despair.

I submitted my application last night, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. I lay awake last night thinking about how wonderful it would be if I GOT the job and how awful it would be if I DIDN'T get the job and how wonderful and how awful and how wonderful... it was terrible. I keep ambushing Cook (usually when he's deeply absorbed in solving a problem or lost in thought) and saying pointless, no-good-answer things like "They'll call me for an interview, at least, won't they?" or "Do you think they'll call my Reference One?" or "Cook! I REALLY WANT THIS JOB!!!" and finally he semi-gently suggested that I come up with a better way to spend the next six weeks. My current plan is to apply for as many jobs as I can find, to spread out the anxiety a little.

There's more here than just the pain of rejection. The thing is, I never thought when I was young and feckless that I'd be this desperate in my adulthood to find a job, any job. I thought I might have a hard time finding my dream job. I didn't think I'd be grateful to have a part-time $12/hour job, and be struggling to find anything else. Now a door has opened just a crack, and I can catch a glimpse back into that lovely world I thought I could live in, where you GET a chance at a dream job. All this anxiety is (I think) the emotional equivalent of cringing from a door that's about to slam on your foot.



*Six years

**Oakland
***That's not false modesty. I've been involved in enough hiring processes to know that it's kind of a crapshoot anyway, and when there are about 800,000 other applicants in the crapshoot (many of them very well-qualified), even a fabulous candidate like myself has to acknowledge that the odds are ominous.

Up in the air, without George Clooney

I'm going to graduate in June.* I have no idea what will happen after that. Actually, we know that Dutch will be in kindergarten. Somewhere. That's ALL WE KNOW about the fall. There are all sorts of scenarios. Cook and I both have remote possibilities of permanentification of our current jobs. I have to start applying seriously for permanent jobs all over the country starting in April-ish. The public school transfer lottery takes place in mid-March, though if Dutch gets into none of the programs for which we apply, we'll probably just have to move to the catchment area for a different school before September.** In the meantime, we have to attend six meetings for the various programs, and fill out a ton of paperwork, just in case.

We really have no idea what we're doing.

In other news (consistent, though, with the theme of total cluelessness), today Dutch had an Art Sale, in spite of my efforts and Cook's to persuade her that she needed to think the idea through a little more. She stood at the end of our driveway with a crumpled brown paper bag containing three battered (and, truth be told, ugly) artworks brought home from daycare over the last year. She had no sign and no table, and it was raining. And cold. Plus, the foot traffic on our street is pretty much limited to the crazy guy with the bandages wrapped around his head and the dog with the poop-crusted back end, and a steady trickle of down-and-out trudgers walking to the stab-n-grab convenience store down the street to get cigarettes. No art was sold in her 45-minute shift. While I was peeved by Dutch's cranky insistence on doing something so ridiculous, and even kind of embarassed by the whole venture, I also felt grudgingly respectful of her determination and slightly charmed by the sheer weirdness of it. She may not have a ton of potential as an artist or an entrepreneur, but she has the courage of her convictions.

*I AM! No matter how hard my group project buddies try to drag me down.

** We believe in public school, and in investing in your neighborhood school. But we don't want to continue to live in our current neighborhood, due to the long bus commute downtown, and we have reason to believe that Dutch is not a child who will do well with school-switching. So we need to start investing in a different neighborhood school in a neighborhood where we might be able to stay. Besides, the neighborhood school in our neighborhood burned down in the fall, so the kids are busing across town, which is crappy.

Living

I just learned last week about the concept of a "housing wage," which is the monthly income that would allow a household to rent a 2-bedroom apartment at 40% of the median rent for the area. This measure is of limited utility, given that a "household" could be a single person or, say, a family of eight. Some people are advocating for looking instead at how much money is left over to spend on housing AFTER a family pays their other necessary expenses (like... oh... childcare!).

A "living wage" in Portland is apparently $27.30/hour for a family of two adults and two kids. I make $12/hour. Cook makes more, fortunately. But all our jobs are temporary, and I doubt we reached that threshold for the year in 2009.*

My goal for 2010 is to ensure that our family earns a living wage all year. My hopes, of course, are grander, but I think this is a nice solid goal.

Next week, my further adventures in downward mobility!

*Note to self: must do taxes.