I know I left things sounding pretty dire the last time I spoke about my home refinance situation.  I’ve been meaning to make note of the resolution here for a while but then I also didn’t want to jinx anything.

I made a deal with the devil parents.  I know it’s not an option everyone has and to be honest I really tried to exhaust every other option first.  Let me tell you a story or two…

When I went to college, my middle class parents made too much money for me to qualify for any financial scholarships and even though I was an Honors Student in high school with an excellent GPA and a semester of college Freshmen English completed during my final semester, it wasn’t enough to overcome the advantage of having parents who were well-salaried even if I wasn’t and didn’t want to be associated with their dimes.

I had no choice but to accept the charity of my parents.  For four years, my parents paid for my college education as well as my room and board and any other expenses outside of the pitiful money I made at the handful of underpaid part-time jobs I attempted to work while acquiring a 5-year degree in 4 years, which required attending 4 semesters a year (2 in the summer) plus 1 extra 5 week semester one May where I had to read almost a novel a day.  For 4 years, my parents wanted to know how I was spending not just my money but my time as well.  You know, they wanted to make sure that their investment was paying off.  And don’t think they didn’t have a say in what classes I took or what major I had.

During those same 4 years, my parents were also  financing a scholarship for another student at another college.  This young man whose name I’ve never known — let’s call him Joe for the sake of this story – was actually from a family who could not afford to send him to college and knowing my parents he probably also had an excellent GPA in high school.  I’m told that they never met him but that he was from a minority ethnic background.  I suppose he had a choice to accept the charity of my parents, but probably the idea of 4 years of tuition at the local university was a good deal, so why pass that up?

So, here’s the facts: Joe and I both technically had scholarship agreements with my parents, but they were vastly different agreements.  Joe’s agreement was limited to spending four years keeping up his grades and getting his tuition paid while getting a degree in a Business major.  My parents never once called Joe  at his home to check on him; they never wanted to know what his study schedule was like; they took no role in making decisions about his class schedule or his extracurricular activities.  They did not discuss whether or not he had a t.v. in his bedroom or whether or not he should have to eat breakfast in the cafeteria.   In fact, as far as I know, Joe went to college with the goal of becoming what he wanted to be growing up, experienced college the way he wanted,  got the degree he wanted, and possibly got the job he wanted afterwards.

I wanted to be a journalist or a writer in my heart of hearts but those jobs didn’t really “make money” according to my parents so I was steered toward the sciences or engineering.  My senior year of high school, I was leaning toward physics, aerospace engineering, or mechanical engineering.  (I kind of liked finding out how things worked and I was really into science fiction.)  My parents were thrilled.  I started college as a mechanical engineering major but after fourteen months it was clear to me that neither physics nor engineering were interesting enough to me to keep me awake or keep up my grades for 4 years of college.  I had an interest in Accounting, which if some of you recall is what my father is — he’s a CPA — and I still wanted to be a journalist or a writer.  However, Business majors apparently were not as successful, money-wise, as science majors or engineers and journalism and writing was still a big no-no.  The only degree in Engineering that I had any talent at and promised not bore me to death was Computer Science and thus the agreement was made with my parents –

Don’t get me wrong, I have never said that I didn’t like being a programmer.  I enjoy programming; I’m quite egocentric regarding my programming skills, I admit.  In fact, I am a self-proclaimed programming diva.  I love the challenge of troubleshooting, the art of design and development, the triumph of doing the impressive impossible.  There’s simplicity, logic, puzzles, beauty, and drama in the world of programming.

However, at the time, I probably would not have chosen this as my career had I been given the opportunity to pick any career I wanted.

My scholarship agreement involved so much more than Joe’s.   And I’d rather not hear from the crowd who just wants to tell me how I should have just walked away from my parent’s money and rules, learned to take care of myself, put myself through college, and be my own person; until you’ve been there, felt the enormous pressure weighing on you, you can’t say anything, know anything.  At the time, I sold my soul to the devil my parents to get a college degree because that’s the only way I knew how to get one.  The scholarship system really is set up to screw the middle class student who doesn’t want to or can’t depend on his or her parent’s income.

I’ve always said that the price of taking money from my parents always comes with mental anguish  interest payments.

The second story I want to tell involves a time after college as a 20-something when I was living paycheck to paycheck as an underpaid programmer with no benefits and no vacation time with a roommate who made even less money than me.  Honestly, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t making a fortune like all of the books, guidance people, and PR promised programmers and geeks would be making in the 90′s.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had to live on the Pantry Diet in the past; well, that’s when I discovered that wonderfully undelightful diet and when I learned to dig through my sofa for loose change every Saturday morning after having my friends over on Friday night.  I recall that you could get a McDonald’s All-American Meal for $1.59 back then. (For 10¢ more you could get cheese…of course, that was after the first time I was a vegetarian and before I found out I shouldn’t eat meat because of my kidneys. )  I got into about $5K – $7K debt and I just didn’t know how to get out.  It was like quicksand; every move I made, I sank further into debt.  Eventually in desperation, I went to my parents for help.

You have no idea what it’s like to have to admit to my father that you are in financial trouble, that you have run up credit cards and not paid them off every month, that you have not lived within your means.  There are hours long lectures; there are repeated questions about why you made the purchases you made, why you spent the money you did, why you didn’t pay the bills you didn’t.  There are doomsday tales of people your parents knew who went into debt and horrible things that happened as a result.  Heaps of guilt is shoveled onto your miserable self as if you weren’t already feeling wretched.

Talk about feeling like a failure when you get into stupid debt and you are the child of a financial control freak CPA.  I suppose it’s like being the criminal child of a Supreme Court Justice…or at least that’s how it feels, the crime of stupid debt while being the child of a CPA.  Should have known better.

It took me about 10 years to both pay off the money I borrowed from my parents and the rest of the money I owed, but I did it, and I felt good when I did it.  Becoming debt free is liberating.  It’s kind of like that feeling you used to get on that last day of school every year when the Summer was just starting and you had 3 whole months of freedom ahead of you with nothing to tether you down.  It’s like that, but better.

And I had planned to stay that way.  Honestly.  My father heaps a good deal of guilt on me about living within my means, but my parents also dish out a lot of conflicting messages each with their own built-in pressure, even at almost 40.

As soon as I was out of debt, even though my plan was to spend the next 2 to 3 years building up a savings to be certain I had an emergency fund and a reserve and a down payment before  considering anything like buying a home, my parents immediately started pressuring me to buy a home because I was just “throwing my money away” on an apartment and it was time for me to “invest in real estate”.  It was all they talked about when they talked to me and I admit, I have issues about needing parental approval;  I’m still discussing this in therapy.  My mother even insisted on driving me around to go look at houses while I was recovering from an outpatient surgery procedure that she flew in to take care of me for.  So, I bought my beautiful house much sooner than I probably should have — right before the housing bubble burst.

And so, having to have my gall bladder removed, needing an emergency appendectomy, discovering an autoimmune kidney disease and gastroparesis on top of my other health issues, having the furnace fail and thus need to be replaced, suffering ice dam damage to the roof requiring a new roof and repairs to the bathroom, the kitchen and the living room, having the unexpected need to replace my car, and dealing with the unexpected increase in utilities and other bills…well, my limited savings in 3 years has been over-exhausted.  Every time I got some money saved, it immediately got spent again by the next unexpected thing, until all I had was my credit card, which I very reluctantly used because I knew from experience what that was like.

And having my mother give me advise such as “You really should have $10,000 in savings” or “You should be making extra payments on the house” when I tell her how I’m struggling financially really doesn”t help my mental state.  And I can’t blame anyone but myself for being in this position because technically I’m the one who got me here.  I’m always saying that once you become an adult you become responsible for your own actions and you can’t blame your parents or what your parents may have said or did to you in the past for anything you do as an adult.  I want to blame them for pressuring me, for subconsciously enabling me into positions that are hazardous to my financial and mental health, positions where I will need rescuing, positions that will leave me dependent on them, forcing me back into the submissive child co-dependent role.  I want to blame them, but I have allowed it to happen…again.

I spent about 4-6 months last year trying to get a loan for debt consolidation through the usual routes and even though I still have a good credit rating, no banks or lending institutions were interested.  Even Lending Tree didn’t respond and they have that 24 – 48 hour guarantee.

I know from experience that if I have fewer payments per month, it is easier for me to pay everything off, but if I have to stretch my dollars to cover too many debtors then nothing will get payed off.  However, no one was lending.  Then when I tried to alleviate my pain through home refinance, well, we know that had problems due to the fact that my home lost value; the bank wanted me to give them about $15K to pay down the house to 95% — if I had $15K, I wouldn’t need to refinance, right?

So, after a lot of soul searching, sleepless tossing and turning, stomach acid churning, I talked to my father about what happened with the home refinance and with the bills last year and how things got behind.  Despite the fact that I outlined how my income increased minimally in 3 years and my basic expenses including property taxes and escrow plus the addition of a loan for the new furnace and a loan for the new car had grown exponentially and not in proportion to my income, my father gave me a lecture about learning to live within my means.

However, with the lecture also comes a loan for the money to pay down the house to refinance and also money to pay off a credit card and my Time Share loan.  This parental loan is a long-term low interest loan, but as I know from experience it comes with extra terms that usual loans don’t have.  For example, I recently admired something and wistfully said that it was something I’d like to have one day and my father replied, “Does that fit into your new budget?”  Now, I didn’t even plan on buying whatever it was; heck, I didn’t even add it to my Things I Want wishlist, which I use to keep track of things I really want.  Already the mental anguish part of the payments has begun.

So, the good news is that my house payments will be $400 lower starting April 1rst.  Plus, I’ve consolidated about $10K with that $15K my parents loaned me; so I’ll be making fewer payments that are less money, which will allow me to rely less on credit each month.  I actually opened a second checking account and I will keep paying all of my bills out of my current one and will use the new one to buy groceries, pay for the monthly household things, and spend on whatever the variable monthly expenses are; thus, the original account should always have the amount needed to pay the bills for the month at the beginning of the month and the new account gets what’s left over.  I think this will actually make budgeting easier since I have such a hard time dividing things up into categories.

I’ve been working on this whole budget plan thing for a couple of weeks now and I still don’t feel any further along than I was when I started.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m an intelligent person.  I can grasp the very basics:

Income – Expenses >= 0

I mean, I did study accounting in college and I do have a programmer’s logical mind.  Plus, I was a math minor.  I get the most basic part of the concept.  Really, I do.

However, I just don’t think my brain is wired right for easily latching on to the complexities.  For instances, most books and examples out there all offer up examples of income that is the same amount and dished out on the same two days every month and most of the expenses are fairly simple and fixed every month; a few of the examples might show the occasional expense that might be paid quarterly and they all usually show groceries and dining out as unpredictable.  Clearly none of us eats exactly the same thing day after day and no one is stupid enough to pretend to make the assumption in a sample budget even.

It seems like everyone these days are jumping on this zero-based budget bandwagon.  ”Zero-based” sounded a lot like what was in my checking account so I looked into it.   It turns out that it’s not what I thought it was.  Zero-based budgeting is basically a method where at the beginning of each month you spend all of your expected incoming income “on paper” — every dollar has to be spoken for, every dollar has to have a job, so to speak.  You make a list of all your expected expenses and you dedicate every last expected incoming dollar to every last expected expense until the balance is zero.  Now, one of those “expenses” can be a savings account so its not like you actually have to really spend all of the money — I mean, spending it all is what got you in this problem to begin with, right?  The idea is that you don’t just have money sitting around doing nothing, idling about, burning a hole in your pocket, raring to go do some evil by bringing some infomercial trash into your home…or whatever unnecessary thing you might spend money you might psychologically think is “free” on.

Well, that method seems like it’s solid and it appears to work for a lot of people.  Radio/TV talk show host Dave Ramsey has built himself a cult based on it, but I have to agree with my Daddy — there is just no way that you can budget for little thing.  The whole zero-based budget method stresses me out just thinking about all the ways I’ll feel like a failure throughout the month as surprises come up.

A number of years ago, I did really well using the envelope (or my Daddy calls it “the shoebox”) method – a method of budgeting where monthly or biweekly or whatever period, you set aside a certain amount of money for expenses in categories, in envelopes marked for that purpose (ie. mortgage/rent, groceries, gas, auto repairs, etc.) . Then anytime you want to  make a purchase or pay a bill, you check in the associated envelope for the type of expense to see if there are sufficient funds;  if the money is there, yeah!  Go for it! Otherwise, you have three options: 1) you do not make the purchase/pay the bill; 2) you wait until you can allocate more money to that envelope; 3) you sacrifice another category by moving money from its associated envelope. The flip side is true as well, if you do not spend everything in the envelope this month then the next allocation adds to what is already there resulting in more money for the next month.

The envelope method is just a tad more flexible for me.  There’s the psychological feeling that if I don’t get it right on the very first try, I can rearrange things while no one is looking and no one will care — in fact, the rules say I can so there’s no cheating.  Plus, I feel like I can have an envelope marked “Miscellaneous” that covers anything I forgot about when I made up the budget and drop any left over money into it every month; then at the end of the month, I can re-allocate that money over to savings, where my emergency fund is going to be building.

What kind of budgeting method works best for you?  What sort of mental tricks do you play on yourself every month to make it work?

Last night I saw an advertisement for something I could use.  It doesn’t really matter what It is.  Let’s just say that if It functions as advertised, it would make me look nice and probably boost my self esteem as a result — basically, the next best thing to magically making me a Supermodel overnight.

Anyway, It was one of those special deals with “order now” and “get this extra thing free” plus “get this other thing half price”.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  You’ve wanted one of those before.  You may even have ordered a few.  The whole thing was very seductive.  If you called right then, you could get the whole special deal.  (How do the sales people know when those advertisements are running really?)

Now, I’ve been reading The Budget Kit and a number of budgeting and personal-finance-related blogs lately, there’s a big focus on differentiating needs from wants, and a bigger focus on restricting the purchasing of wants or prioritizing them, especially when you are in financial trouble. So…I took some agonizing time to consider whether It was a need or a want. Clearly, It isn’t required to sustain my life — It isn’t food, water, medicine, air, shelter, wood for heat…Therefore, It is not a need.

Thus, It is a want.

Having divined this truth, since I am attempting to spend as little unnecessary money as possible, to straighten out my finances, to get back on track, I did not make the purchase. I agonizingly did the right thing. Non-spendoholics must not even have to think about such choices. They just know and do the right thing and there’s no residual disappointment.

Unfortunately for me, my new little frugal angel and my old spendoholic devil manifested themselves last night as I slept. I spent the night dreaming that I was arguing all night with my mother about whether or not she would allow me to buy It; she kept insisting that no one needs an It, but I argued that she used to encourage me to get one when I was a teenager and I had a perfectly good one in my 20′s that wore out. This It is better.

The whole thing has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I hope it will get easier.

I still remember the day River Phoenix died. I was in love with him, of course. O.K. I didn’t know him enough to love love him, but I loved the thought of who I thought he was.

And I remember the day he died quite clearly in my mind.  I came home from dinner with friends and heard on the late night news about his untimely and at the time mysterious death.  I remember the devastated, crushed ache of my young early twenties heart.  As time went on, all I could think about when I heard his name or saw one of his movies was what a terrible waste his death was — all that fantastic talent gone in the blink of an eye, snuffed out because of stupidity.

For the longest time, I couldn’t watch his movies.  They just made me too sad.

When Heath Ledger died in 2008, I didn’t have the same puppy love crush and thus didn’t feel the same crushing ache, but I did feel devastated for  the loss of amazing talent that was just gone in a heartbeat.  The story is all too familiar and yet no less tragic.  Like River he had graduated from child parts to brilliant adult roles and unlike so many actors in Hollywood today, he was able to play characters other than himself.  He had a lot of promise.

It’s been only recently that I’ve been able to begin watching movies which star him again.  Still, I feel melancholy.

Britney Murphy’s recent bewildering passing brought up all the same internal sadness for me.  Britney was another promising star in my mind.  Perhaps she wasn’t Julia Roberts nor would she have ever been some Angelina Jolie, but I believe she had the promise to be a great comedienne actress — one of the greats even.  At 32, she was so young, too young.  Her life and her career were just beginning and it was all over in the blink of an eye before there was a real hint of the shine her star could have been.

One of her movies recently aired on cable, one I really like because it made me laugh, but 5 minutes in I had to turn it off, because watching her made me cry.

The thing is that it’s not just actors who die young that break my heart.  Every week I hear about tragic deaths on the news, young people killed in accidents, crime, war — their lives were just beginning but  now they are gone and who knows who they might have been, what wonderful, amazing things they might have accomplished, but for a moment of stupidity whether it was their stupidity or someone else’s?

And it makes me sad.  I am devastated, crushed, and my heart aches.

Yesterday, I mentioned my “Eat Only What’s In My Pantry For A Month” diet.  I sort of invented this diet in my late 20′s, after-college, starving under-paid programmer years.  I’m quite sure there are many variations of this diet around and they probably have more or less inventive names.

Back in December when I was starting the paperwork to attempt to refinance my house, before the emergency surgery interrupted, I talked to my shrink about my options should the refinancing fall through.  I brought up this memory of one July back in my younger years, admittedly when I was healthier and more socially active, that I quite literally brought a random can of something every day to work for lunch; it would be “Oh, looks like I’m having beets today!” or “Hmmm, green beans!”  I ate dry toast every morning and at least once or twice every weekend, a friend’s mom would feed me and I was not ashamed.  I only spent money on rent, utilities, and gas.  I had less than $10 in cash in my purse the whole month and I believe I managed to end up with at least $5 of it.

I used to think once you got beyond 35 years old, you couldn’t live like that anymore.  I always get a laugh when I tell people that one of my favorite memories in college is going to Krispee Kreme at 3am after the midnight movie when the “hot now” sign is flashing and buying one donut but not having enough cash to pay for it so I had to write a check…and worrying that it would bounce before my monthly allowance check deposited.  You can only really get away with that in college, right?  I mean, try explaining that kind of expense as a 38 year old.

So, here we are on Feb. 2nd and I have begun my “pantry” diet.  It’s going to be hard because I’m going to be out of candy and chips really soon.  I can make my own soy milk and soy yogurt — I have a stockpile of soy beans for some reason.  I have a lot of rice and couscous and frozen fruit, some granola.  I’m sure I have some oatmeal, canned beets, and green beans.  There’s a bean soup mix in there and a few bags of frozen veggies.  I even have the things I need to make a rather dull pot of spaghetti.  I think if I plan things out, I can make it through 26-ish days of February.

I just feel a little too old to be doing all of this…and I sure wish I’d stockpiled more chocolate bars before January ended.

My mother has a talent for offering inappropriate advice at the absolutely least welcome time.  We have a regular conversation about how difficult it is for me to save money.  This conversation has been repeating itself many times over the last 10 or 15 years.  It seems that every time I get a little bit of money in my savings, something big and unexpected occurs that wipes my savings totally out.  Then when things get tight for me, my mother has the audacity to say something to me like, “You know, it’s always best to have have about $10,000 in your savings.”  She’ll also let a day or so pass and then mention that I really should be making extra payments to my mortgage principle a couple times a year.  Meanwhile, I have been telling her things like I have to make a choice between eating lunch this week or paying the water bill or that I’m not sure how I am going to pay the $1,000 bill I got from the hospital for the emergency surgery I had last month when I also have to pay for heat.  Where does she expect me to come up with $10,000?  If I had $10,000 I wouldn’t be starting the “Eat Only What’s In My Pantry For A Month” Diet.

It’s that kind of useless advice that people offer that boggles my mind.  There’s never any additional advice attached that helps explain how you are supposed to reach the lofty goal of the advice when you are in the particular situation you are in.  It’s kind of like the obscure New Year’s resolutions “I want to lose weight” or “I want to be more healthy this year.”  There’s no specifics.  Everyone with smarts knows that in order to make a resolution you can keep, you have to have a specific goal — like “I want to lose 10 pounds” or “I want to walk 30 minutes 3 times a week.”  Then you can make a plan to achieve your goal.

The problem with arbitrary advice like “You should keep 3 months-worth of your salary in savings” is that it doesn’t take into account the financial situation the person is in already.  Is the person in debt over his head?  Is the person living paycheck to paycheck?   Is the person making more every month than she is spending already?  A person who is struggling is going to have a lot harder time figuring out how to save that much money; in fact, such a person might find the feat overwhelmingly hopeless despite the fact that the advice is painfully obvious and having that savings would in fact make life easier.  Dishing out such advice without actually offering any real direction on how to achieve this while still being able to pay bills and eat is just as useful as announcing that you hope for world peace.

But it’s worse because it’s thoughtless and hurtful; it sets the receiver of the advice up to feel like a failure because he or she can’t snap his or her fingers and magically make all of his or her financial woes go away.  It’s clear what the goal is, but the path isn’t always obvious and unless you are walking it or at least can see the same point-of-view and offer more than a trite recitation of what all the books or magazines or talking heads have been repeating for ages, sometimes the best thing to say is “I empathize” and leave it at that.

For the last few months I’ve been struggling to pull the purse strings tightly together.  I’m about to have another round of what else can I do without.

In the meantime, I began the desperate process of applying to refinance my home; my property taxes have consistently gone up in the three years that I’ve been living there.  I’m now paying $350 – $400 more than what the previous homeowner paid the year I moved in.  Let’s just say that $1900+ a year is not fun to come up with even when it’s divided up into 12 payments and added to my escrow.  The $172 Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) that the broker told me I’d only be paying for a year — yeah, he saw a naive sucker coming — really bites, and to be honest, I cannot figure out how Chase calculates the escrow.  Even if I were to write a check for $600 at the beginning of the year, it would not reduce my mortgage bills by $50 each month.  Forget trying to discuss the logic of that with them.  Bank people do not live in a world that operates with the same numeric logic that the rest of us do, I have learned over the last year or so.  Bank math logic is mysterious and mystical.  I really thought I understood accounting when I took it in college but apparently they teach all of the magic spells that go with it in the non-Freshman classes.

So, I currently have a 6.5% interest Fixed loan.  I was told that the only way for me to have financial relief was to acquire a 4.75% Fixed interest loan, which I can only get if my home has gone up in value by at least $7,000.  When I plugged the information about my home, including the fact that it has a brand new roof, a brand new furnace, and a brand new fence, into the Quicken Home Value Calculator, it indicated that my home should go up in value about $20K.  Well, clearly Quicken doesn’t know squat.  My home, on which I owe just over $207K, was just this week appraised at $208K; it was compared to three homes that sold last year between July and October; none  of them were more than 30 years old — mine is 50 years old.  Plus, mine was valued higher than those three.  My house has lost $10K in value in 3 years thanks to the economy, despite the fact that I have put $22K into it.

Now I am between that mythical rock and that unfortunate hard place that everyone keeps talking about.  I was smart enough to get a fixed loan and my loan is not with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, so I do not qualify for Obama’s Making Home’s Affordable program.  I sure would like to know when that stimulus package is going to start helping someone like me — the single, barely making it, childless, almost 40 white females who theoretically did all the right things to be successful, independent women and got dragged kicking and screaming into this recession with all of the two-income folks who at least have each other or each other’s incomes.  I’m not poor enough to qualify for property tax exemptions and yet not rich enough to actually afford the increase in the costs of food, gasoline, electricity (which went from $67 per month to $171 per month in the last 3 years), and other necessities.  I have cut out doggy daycare, cut way down on Nexflix (from 6 to 3 per month), have put a stop to online impulse shopping sprees, and have been trying to get every last ounce, morsel, drop out of every container the last few weeks.  I would hate to think that in a month or so I might get to the point where I think I might have to start considering which of my medications I might have to forgo.

Anyway, I am about to attempt to appeal my property taxes, though I was told by the town clerk that the assessor is usually dead on and everyone’s taxes went up because the school’s budget went way up this year.  The thing is that my taxes are pretty high compared to the rest of the houses on my street — I’ve looked.  Mine are closer to the house with the swimming pool and finished basement.  If I’m going to pay that much in taxes, someone better come over and build me a indoor greenhouse in my basement or something to offset the cost.  (I don’t want a pool or some fancy Mother-in-law suite. )

I feel like I’m drowning.  The cost of living has increased and my salary is not increasing with it.  I’m in quicksand; I know I’m not alone, but it sure feels like it.

The following post may have moments of too much information, but I swear there won’t be any dirty underwear.

Tuesday before last, I had a cable repair person scheduled to arrive during the specific hours of sometime between 9am and 5pm EST; so I arranged with my manager to “Work At Home”, which is an almost impossible status of being to gain permission to be. For example, my Director believes that you cannot Work At Home for personal reasons such as home repair, sick children, sick self, snow storms or broken automobiles; however, if you have a provable reason to need to do your real work at home, such as you can only get it done due to too many distractions, if you work from home for one day, you can apply for a Work At Home day. My Manager convinced my Director that I needed to work on some documentation from home coincidentally the same day the cable person was coming to my home.

Now, I happened to notice there was a giant snow storm coming to Maine scheduled for that Wednesday, so I called my Manager and suggested that an extra Work At Home day would be needed for this documentation. It worked. I woke up on Wednesday morning with a small stomachache, nothing unusual for someone who is used to being in pain. In fact, I now believe that the two types of people most in danger of unexpected illness are those that feel no pain and those that suffer chronically from it. The pain in my stomach grew such that by lunch time, I no longer could work or do anything except think about the pain; it was sharp, cutting and spread through my abdomen top to bottom and cut to my back, as my stomachaches always do. I began to assume this stomachache similar to two previous ones that took me to the E.D. — once in New Orleans when after spending a whole night of unbearable pain and not being able to find a comfortable position to sit, lay, or stand, I stumbled down the street and up the ramp to East Jefferson General Hospital, and then once here in Maine, when I collapsed at work from the blinding, shooting pains. Both times, tests revealed nothing definitive and I was sent home with painkillers and continued discomfort.

So, since I was watching the first big snow storm outside my picture window and I was sure I knew that going to the ED was a waste of time — that is if I could manage driving myself into Portland to go to the ED, which would have been 40 min on a day without a snow storm — I decided I could tough it out. Of course, part of my problem was that though my GP had given me a prescription for Oxycodone for my migraines just the week before, I had not had time to get it filled because I am a workoholic. Plus, by the time I thought about going to get it filled, the storm was in full force and so even though the pharmacy was just 5 minutes away, it was not open. Following my mother’s advice, I doped myself up on muscle relaxants and went to bed, trying to sleep. Eventually I found a position that didn’t hurt as bad as any of the other 100 other positions though it was completely awkward.

The next morning, the pain was not as bad but still awful, so I called in sick. I also ignored my mother’s and my Manager’s advice to call the doctor, because the doctor was in Portland and in my mind, if I was too sick to drive to work in Portland, I was too sick to drive to the doctor in Portland. By Thursday evening the pain was less. Not better. Just less. I was planning to go to work the next day and I was planning ahead. I needed to spend the weekend cleaning house — I had a house appraiser coming the following Thursday (hoping to refinance based on home improvement home value increase) and I was going out of town a week from Sunday and my house had gotten into that condition where you think you’d be embarrassed if your mother came by, let alone a stranger.

Friday morning, my furnace seemed to have had a thermostat issue overnight and I had no hot water — note, this is part of the “always leave home wearing clean underwear rule” nightmare I’ll be coming to. Because of this, I couldn’t wash my hair or shave my legs; thus, I put on a cute “newsboy” hat to wear to work. My mother called as I slowly got ready and again, my mother told me to call the doctor since I was still experiencing pain, though it was now only 20% of what it once was.

I was getting things done at work, feeling accomplished, and placed a call to the doctor’s office while I had a minute. They felt I should come in just to have a look-see. I thought it was going to be no big deal, so I mentioned it to my Manager and zipped down the street. The next thing I knew I was being told that I needed to have CT Scans and stat labs and go to the ED. They couldn’t tell if it was my always-in-danger kidneys or my appendix. I was a little freaked but for the most part, all I could think about was how boring it was going to be sitting in the ED for hours, so I stopped back at the office to borrow the Duty Officer laptop — workohlic, anyone?

I was actually feeling better, almost fine, except extremely thirsty. I was working wirelessly, watching CNN report the latest about Tiger Woods every 20 minutes, between blood- letting and CT scans and the next thing I know, it’s my worst nightmare. Dirty hair, unshaved legs, house so messy I wouldn’t want the cats to see it, and suddendly I need surgery and need to ask neighbors to feed & walk the dog, & God, I am so embarrassed. Plus, the house was not going to be cleaned before appraisal or trip to New Mexico, which surprisingly I can still take. This is why you should not put off what you can do today.

After the emergency appendectomy, because I didn’t have anyone to come to the hospital to get me, I didn’t have after surgery meds so I could drive myself home.  I actually stopped at the grocery store too.  I was in massive pain.  I barely managed to put everything away and take care of the cats and my Pug baby, and change into PJs and take pain meds and call everyone I was supposed to before I passed out in bed.

Sunday night I woke up to discover the furnace was still not working. Had to call for emergency maintenance I could have done myself if I could move and bend and lift. And while that was happening, a second snow storm was occurring.

I’ve spent the last few days sleeping with no appetite and lots of nausea, but I’m always thirsty.  Every time I  eat anything more than a popsicle or a cracker, I have extreme nausea or worse.  I’ve got lots of migraine to share and I can’t decide if I’m hot or cold but I do not have a fever.  Plus, I’ve had some really weird dreams — like going to Martha Stewart’s house which is like Toyland or having to abandon the planet due to environmental crisis but the Republicans are dragging their feet on something yet blaming the Democrats for stalling on something specific  or invasion by some sort of Klingon-Decepticon hybrid invasion where the guy from Law & Order who used to be on KVille also plays a cop in the new Star Trek movie and there is a reference to Law & Order.  I also dreamt I went back to college and roomed with this girl I was best friends with then, but who I had a falling out with since — this is a reoccurring dream where the roommate changes.

I’ve had to cancel my hair appointment, reschedule the home appraisal, and Loki can’t come with me to New Mexico now because I can’t carry him — he’s off to boarding at doggy daycare.   Actually, I can’t take my laptop, semi-professional camera, or much of anything on my trip.  I haven’t finished knitting my mother’s present.  Or shopping.  I’ve been trying to backup my laptop for 8 days, but haven’t been awake enough to do things correctly; so I can’t upgrade to Windows 7.  I wanted to work from home this week and amazingly the Director finally agreed but I haven’t been able to stay awake or focus.

It’s a typical J. Lynne holiday season.  Historically, December, especially right around December 12th, is really not good for me.  Seemingly catastrophic things seem to occur around that date.

So, it turns out that Maine doesn’t get much sun.  Or, rather, it doesn’t get as much sunlight as other states, like those that aren’t in the most upper northeast corner of the U.S.  (Did you know that about 5 years ago, there was talk of moving Maine into the Atlantic Time Zone so Maine’s days wouldn’t have to be so short — and there’d be more sunlight at night to ski?) I knew I’d been suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder since I moved here in 2004, which basically means that once we get to the Winter switch of Daylight Savings, my body automatically starts shutting down at 4pm every day.  I can physically feel the sunset like a heavy blanket covering me, weighing all of my muscles down; I don’t even have to be near a clock or a window to know it’s happened either.  I just feel it’s happened.  By 6pm, I want to be in my PJs, and I just don’t know what to do with myself because technically it’s too early to go to bed.

Interestingly, it turns out that Maine’s short days have had another affect on me as well — or rather, they have likely helped along my poor health by denying me that vitamin-D everyone always talks about.  Supposedly, we should be able to get enough vitamin-D naturally without having to ingest it from dairy and food products that have had it added, like store-bought orange juice or cow milk.  Theoretically, just walking around, living our lives, we should get enough vitamin-D from the sun to be healthy.

That’s not true for everyone, I guess.  It probably doesn’t help that I spend 8+ hours 5 days a week sitting in a building with few windows sitting in a chair typing on a computer during the usual daylight hours and then on the weekend, I’m not really an “outdoorsy” kind of gal, though I want to embrace my inner-gardener and house-maintenance home-owner.  The normal levels for vitamin-D labs are 30 – 100 ng/ml; my result was 16 ng/ml — it’s been suggested that any  results below 20 ng/ml are considered serious deficiency states and increase your risk of breast and prostrate cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Hmmmm…there might be something there. After doing some research, I discovered some studies indicate that sufferers of chronic musculoskeletal pain may be suffering from symptomatic vitamin-D deficiency.

Dr. Michael Turner from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, indicated in a news release last March that this is especially likely in many patients labeled with fibromyalgia when certain risk factors are present, such as obesity, darker pigmented skin, or limited exposure to sunlight.  The news release was in connection to a study published in the journal Pain Medicine in November 2008 in which Dr. Turner was the lead investigator;  the study suggests a correlation between vitamin-D deficiency and the amount of narcotic medication taken by chronic pain patients.  Turner’s group discoered that vitamin-D deficient patients who required narcotic pain medication were taking much higher doses — nearly twice as much — as those with adequate levels of vitamin-D.  Plus, these patients also felt they had worse physical function and worse overall health.^*

Since I have such a low vitamin-D deficiency and such a high level of pain and no one will give me anything more than Tylenol, which doesn’t help, these studies do sound hopeful and promising.  My rheumotologist seems to think so anyway; I have a nifty new prescription for vitamin-D.  Yep, none of that random convenience store pharmacy vitamin-D for me.  He says you can’t trust what’s in those bottles; you can’t be sure the dosages are really what they say they are, especially if they aren’t made in the States.  So, I have a prescription for a daily dose of 2000mg of vitamin-D.

We’ll have to see if it helps.  At the very least, it should raise my vitamin-D levels.  I’m not so sure about how it’ll do with reducing the chronic pain – it turns out there haven’t been many successful studies where treatment of vitamin-D benefited chronic pain sufferers; the vitamin-D might just be a red herring.

If your dog is fat, you’re not getting enough exercise.
~Author Unknown

Play with Me?

The very few airlines that allow dogs to fly in the cabin have a weight limit. Can you believe they don’t even take a cuteness factor into mind when making the final decision?

I was told by the unpleasant woman at Delta Airlines that if Loki is so much as one (1) pound over 20 pounds, he won’t be able to fly with me to see my parents at Christmas.   What a nasty surprise that’ll be at 6am the Sunday before Christmas, eh?  Can you imagine?  I’ll be there with my precious baby, my packed luggage, my anxiety pills, and my ticket; my friend will have dropped me off so I don’t have to leave my car in airport parking and she will be long gone.  Then, there will be some woman who’s cranky that she had to get up so early to deal with overweight luggage filled with presents or souvenirs by tired and irritated travelers who really didn’t want to be awake that early either and just want to get to their destination.  This cranky woman will see the flag on my account made by the unpleasant woman from the phone and she will insist on weighing my darling Pug, which will require taking him back out of his carrier which took at least 20 minutes and a number of scratches to get him into in the first place.

And if he is even one (1) pound over, she will say he can’t go — because smush-faced Pugs don’t do well in the cargo space and I wouldn’t let them put him there anyway.  And at that point, I’d have to change all my outgoing flights so I could find someone to come get my poor baby.  Plus, it would break my heart.

I realize that airlines are becoming obnoxious about luggage weight.  They are nickel and diming everyone over every ounce of checked luggage.  Heck, even to take a pet as a carry-on, it’s $75 to $100 each way.  As it is, the rules are getting extremely restrictive.  You can take almost nothing with you on vacation anymore.

If you want to bring a laptop and a nice camera, you have to get a special carry-on bag that can pack both, because you can’t check those items — and you wouldn’t want to, right?  You can bring one small carry-on luggage bag and another smaller bag such as a laptop case, camera case, tote bag, or purse.  You cannot have multiples.  For example, the days when we women used to be able to get away with having that extra storage space called a purse because we were women is over; the purse is now considered one of our carry-ons.  Note, the pet carry-on counts as the luggage bag.

My last trip, I traveled without Loki, which I really, really hated, but I couldn’t figure out the logistics and I don’t even travel with a laptop anymore to my mother’s total shock.  I do carry an almost professional camera with nice lenses that I don’t want broken.  As a woman, I need my purse.  I don’t know how men live without one.  Where do they put all of their shit?  I put extra stuff in there when I travel.  Plus, I don’t like to put my medicine bottles in my checked luggage ever since the few experiences with the MIA luggage — though it showed up, eventually.

And I realize that every one else who’s going to be getting on planes that day will be considering what to pack and what to carry on.  Many of them will push the envelop, especially since it will be the holidays and they have gifts to deliver to friends and family.  People will be traveling with noisy, small children that always have tons of accessories like car seats and strollers — and no one ever threatens to weigh them!  I just think that the few extra pounds that Loki has put on since last Christmas isn’t going to ruin anyone’s trip if they were to look the other way.

Feed me?

That last trip, I loved spending time with my family during the trip, but I hated not having Loki with me.  He really is my therapy dog, even if he isn’t trained.  I call him “My Happy Place.”  I went to this class on Conflict Management last year where the teacher taught “centering yourself” so you can focus and calmly deal with the situation; she had us pick a place or a person to focus on to use as our “centering thought” and thinking about Loki is what calms me down.  He’s just so loyal, charming, companionable, clownish, mischievous, silly, loving,  childish, and precious.  Even though I can barely take care of myself, having Loki to need me and having him to care for gives me strength.  When I’m upset, angry, or anxious, he just is what he is and it’s enough to distract me from my self-destructive thoughts.  He’s like my child and I resent that anyone would expect me to just leave my child behind because he weighs more than 20lbs.  It distresses me how compassionless people, and especially big companies, are to those of us who need our four-legged companions with us.

Anyway, despite the fact that he behaves as though he’s hungry all of the time, like any normal Pug, this morning, I cut back on his food, which was already one of those “weight watcher” kind of mixes.  I told him “no more people food”, but he just wagged his tail at me; I don’t think he quite understood at the time.  I’ll just have to be strong when he looks at me with those sad, teary eyes that accuse me of not feeding him.  No more plates to lick and no more sharing my snacks.  In fact, I’ve decided not to snack at home, which will do me good too.  Plus, even though I really can’t afford it right now due to having had to replace my vehicle, I’m going to take him to doggy daycare every day until it’s time to go — I told them this morning that if they see him try to nap, they should shake him awake and make him run around and play the whole 8+ hours.

If this doesn’t work, you may very well see a red head and a chubby Pug wandering around the airport at Christmas begging for a ride to New Mexico…maybe Santa will give us a lift; those reindeer can clearly handle a few extra pounds.