What happens when friends are less than supportive of your financial viewpoints and certain financial discrepancies cause tension in your relationships?

Vividly I recall that worst. feeling. ever: of being squashed beneath $15,000 worth of debt and all of those crippling feelings that encompass trying to conquer such a massive debt load. Unfortunately, a prerequisite of aggressively eliminating my debt meant cutting out all unnecessary expenses, which also meant that the bulk of my social spending was in jeopardy.

If I were to vanquish my debt burden as quickly as possible, then it was no longer reasonable to squander away money on going out multiple nights a week, to unwind with the girls over mimosas and martinis, especially if I were to reign in all of that dizzying and excessive spending.

Adios, you stinkin’ turd slop of debt.

Generally, however, this particular group of friends didn’t much care to recognize my blossoming endeavor toward financial responsibility. Cutting back on spending in order to pay down debt? Basically I received puzzled looks and glazed-over eyeballs.  Because, c’mon, old people worried about that type of stuff. We were young. My friends didn’t want to contemplate their finances: they wished to smear on glossy lipstick and slip into their kitten-heeled sandals to shimmy to the local saloon and mingle with other attractive singles.

The problem was that going out in the city is really expensive and there was a certain expectation to these types of rendezvous.  This mentality of arbitrary willy-nilly spending quickly was interfering in and becoming incompatible with my own financial objectives.

I worried, would my financial fortitude waiver while I attempted to maintain these friendships?

Eventually, regrettably, I had to cut some of these friends loose. And naturally our lives diverged for whatever reason and we all began to drift apart.

My friend Allyson recalls when a financial imbalance caused strain in a long-running friendship of her own. “Jess and I shared a similar, modest lifestyle. Together we were bargain hunters and nearly always broke students. Then we graduated and I received a promotion at work. My net wealth rapidly increased as a result and, suddenly, I couldn’t openly talk shop any more with Jess. I feared being perceived as flaunting my new wealth and it spurred tension. The situation made me feel guilty and really insecure!”

For me, the guilt manifested from saying “no” to certain friends, due to their lifestyle choices. It was straining and difficult when others didn’t share a similar enthusiasm for sacrificing the ‘now’ in order to prudently plant those seeds necessary for future financial prosperity—such as systematically paying down debt, or saving. The lack of support sometimes was frustrating and isolating.

Finances have such a huge emotional component tied in, and so this has caused me to wonder: have money issues ever interfered with or caused a friendship of yours to crumble?

=^..^=

Some pirate booty for the family coffers. My lustrous itty-bitty 1/20 oz gold unicorn is killing it with her miniature awesome-ness.

Merry Christmas to meeeeeee!

So I’ve plumped up the family coffers with a new member to my coin collection. (Remember my recent purchase: an Isle of Man 1 oz gold Angel coin? Hey, that one was not my fault. Discover card practically twisted my arm with their cash back incentive, those cheeky muffs.)

This latest addition has been dubbed LuLu the Unicorn and she is sheer miniature awesome-ness.

My mystical unicorn coin is a teensy 1/20 ounce of gold, roughly the size of my pinky nail, and she arrived snugly sealed in the original packaging from the Mint, accompanied by a tiny scroll of authenticity scribed in Chinese. I can’t read it, of course, so maybe it’s really a treasure map to a hidden portal leading to a magical dimension, full of real dragons waiting to rend away our fleshy bits! And unicorns to slay the demons. Or maybe it’s really a tiny magic carpet for other miniature unicorns to frolic on and all cruise around racing each other. Because even though LuLu is only a bust portrait I am pretty sure she lacks wings.

Regardless.

The Chinese Mint released their mystical Unicorn coin series from 1994 until 1997, which features different depictions of Qi’lin (the Asian Unicorn) on the obverse and the Western Unicorn on the reverse. LuLu is from the 1996 breed and eventually I hope to collect more of these rare coins from this limited series. I do find the Chinese artwork and detail on these coins stunningly beautiful. Also it would be neat to gradually hoard accumulate a unicorn coin collection for Lexi. However, although LuLu herself is not a rarity, some of her more elusive coined cousins can cost upward of thousands of dollars.

So that is LuLu, the teensy gold Unicorn, and she’s now all mine. My preciousss.

Isn’t she swell?

=^..^=

=^..^=

Or coherently write.
(Tired. Soooo tired.)
My syntax has begun to deteriorate.

Need I sleep. Help must you, please?

See?

I feel like I am going to deflagrate into a pile of goo. Thereby I will leave you with: “My Financial Challenge Update“.

As a stay-at-home mommy without a reliable income stream, I made a financial challenge at the start of summer to raise $1,000, somehow. This is how things currently stand:

(All income was passively made from previous writing projects & sponsors.)

June – $80.00
July – $57.71
August – $257.05 $425.80

TOTAL: $563.51

Broke-Ass Mommy Site Stats

Subscribers –

July 3:
2 subscribers (Can I send you something to express my gratitude? Tater tots, perhaps?)

July 18:
11 subscribers

August 8:
18 subscribers

September 5:
31 broke-ass subscribers, as of this morning. (woo-hoo!)

Alexa Rankings –

July 10th: 3,507,434
July 17th: 1,725,804
July 30th: 1,236,943
August 6th: 906,877
August 8th: 826, 155
(current) September 5th: 369, 754

Page Rank: 2

Progress is encouraging. Sleep am I going to for next days two. Talk you with soon.

… yours incoherently slothful …

=^..^=

I am not a brave person.

Unknowingly I had walked right beneath this thing moments before while preoccupied with trash disposal. Right. beneath. it. And now the bat beckoned with dripping fangs.

Halting on the stairs of the corridor, I squealed for M.

I stood ready to engage in an epic battle, convinced that at any moment the imp would swoop down and shred apart my eyeballs. M. opened the door slowly to our apartment unit, then gently closed the door and glanced up to where I was pointing frantically.

“Oh, crap.”

He disappeared back inside for a moment, taking care not to rouse the bat or let it slip inside the doorway, and then returned, equipped with thick leather gloves. (That, and only his boxer shorts.)

“It’s getting ready to rend away my flesh!” I hopped around wildly in the hallway.

The bristly, mahogany bat calmly slept through this commotion, its snot nuzzled delicately into a wing fold.

M. snorted. “It’s not a vampire bat, you idiot.”

“It’s preparing to brutally end my life!”

M. reached up and quickly snatched the hellacious fiend around its torso while I scurried to watch the action from a reasonably safe distance.

Instantly the hellion awoke and struggled in vain, yelping in a way that I’m sure was meant to tip off its brethren hiding in ambush somewhere in the ceiling: squeak squeak squeak squeak!

I was screaming to M. about how we were about to get swooped by a whole colony of pissed off, vengeful bats while M.—still in his underwear—strutted down the stairs and out the front door with this writhing, panic-y, squeaking beast chomping down on his gloved finger. (With a hysterical-me trailing behind them.)

M. calmly tossed the bat onto the porch and away it flew.

A bulky, tattooed man was standing near the sidewalk, enjoying an ice cream cone with his daughter. “Did you just fling a bat out your front door?” He stared at us incredulously. “Don’t those things bite? Man, you crazy.”

M. held up his leather gloves and grinned.

Drama over.
Or so I thought.

For the weekend we went camping in the country and when Lexi was due her afternoon nap, I tucked her away in the tent and settled down on top of a sleeping bag to nurse her. In the process I kicked M.’s forest-green pack out of the way and shoved it a few inches to my right.

That’s when the snake popped up its head.

It slithered closer and stared at us, a demonically forked tongue smugly lapping up our bewilderment.

“S…ssnnnaaakke .. in the tent!”

M. burst into the tent, rolled his eyes and scooped up the snake with one of MY discarded socks. “Must’ve crawled into my bag when I left it under the tree,” he muttered, opening the flap and flinging the snake into the weeds.

“OMG, it was getting ready to probe my cavities!”

M: (not being at all supportive) “Will you calm yourself, woman. It was just a garter snake, perfectly harmless. Probably crawled into my pack when I laid it down beneath the maple while chopping wood. There’s a hole at the bottom of one of these pockets…”

As M. rattled on, my only thought was that I had placed that pack in the tent before dusk yesterday after M. had been chopping wood and if what he suspected were true, it meant that the fucker had been in the tent with us all night just waiting to crawl in bed with me.

Total heebie-jeebies. (Or as I call it, a-weebie-jeebies.)

M. — grateful he didn’t need to hack the slithering foe into a zillion scrappy slices with his axe.

Me — visibly shaken with the stench of snarling demons to contend with. Possibly scarred for life.

Lexi — totally unfazed.

Hope your week did not include unwanted bats or snakes.
(If you need me I will be cowering over here. —–> )

=^..^=

From best-selling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss (dude has a wicked ‘fro and beard combination, how could I not trust this man?), I present what is to be dubbed, The Best Piece of Writing Advice, Ever.

(Besides: to write your ass off.)

From Patrick’s personal blog, Advice For New Writers:

I’ve come to realize that when an interviewer asks me, “Can you give one piece of advice for new writers?” what they’re really looking for is something pithy and encouraging. They want me to say “Reach for the Stars!” or “Never give up!”

But that’s not really good advice. I mean, you could really hurt your shoulder reaching for the stars. Good advice is occasionally disheartening. “Come to grips with the inevitability of rejection.” Or “Don’t quit your day job.”

Once, I had a lovely 30 minute phone interview that ended roughly like this:

Thanks for the interview, Pat.

My pleasure.

In closing, if you could give one piece of advice to new writers, what would it be?

Live somewhere cheap.

I beg your pardon?

Odds are, it’s going to take you a long time to finish your novel. Then it’s going to take you a long time to break into the publishing world. That means you’re effectively going to be working at a job that will pay you nothing, and you’re going to be doing it for years. So you should live somewhere cheap.

I was thinking something more along the lines of worldbuilding….

If you live somewhere like Seattle or Manhattan or LA, you’re going to have to shell out thousands of dollars just in rent. If you have to work three jobs just to pay your rent, when are you going to find the time to write?

Do you know how I managed to keep working on my first novel for 14 years without starving to death?

Student loans? Some sort of trust fund?

Shit no. I learned how to live cheap. Up until 2005, I never paid more than $225 a month for rent.

Wh– how?

I’m a good bargainer. And I had roommates. And small-town Wisconsin is a cheap place to live.

Also, I lived in some real shitholes from time to time. But you know what? You can write in a shithole. You can’t write when you’re working 70 hours a week.

[chuckles nervously] Well, I think that’s about all the time we have….

Hell, I was so poor for a while I qualified for low-income housing back in 2004. Those places were pretty nice, actually.

Remember to turn in next week, folks. Thanks again, Pat.

Did you know that if you boil a paper shopping bag long enough, it makes something that’s almost like soup?

[Cut to static]

Tell me you’re not a more enlightened writer now. Listen to this man—that soup tip is genius.

=^..^=

: (

(And a slight burn, but more on that later.)

Thursday morning, M. and I discussed whether to camp out for one more night or head to Boston for the day before starting our eight-hour return journey home. The Cape Ann, Massachusetts forecast called for afternoon and evening thunderstorms, with strong winds and potential hail, so we both agreed it would be pretty miserable breaking camp with a soggy tent and water-laden equipment.

As we debated over our early morning brewed-over-a-fire coffee, a few fat raindrops began to fall.  M. immediately sprung into action and leapt into the tent. Momentarily, I heard a bunch of clattering/banging, followed by some curse words, and what sounded like a frantic struggle to roll/cram equipment into prospective compartments.

Humming, I lifted Lexi into my lap and cradled her in my arms to nurse. That’s when I noticed a black speck in the crease of my right crook. I brushed at the spot but it appeared to be embedded into my skin.

There were tiny legs and a small ass swaying in the breeze, pointing straight up at me.

Ohh crap.

“Ummm..honey? What does a tick look like?”

Silence. Then: “I’ll be right out.”

M. unzipped the tent and stepped over to the log Lexi and I were lounging on to examine my arm.

“Yep, it’s a tick, all right.”

Oh god. There was a pinkish patch of irritation creeping beneath where the teeny blood-sucker had latched on.

M. raised an eyebrow, lit a cigarette, and took a long, cool drag, before announcing: “We’re going to burn it off.”

WHAT??!

That which ensued was a trauma resembling a comedy routine: Lexi twisted in my lap and burst into giggles as I yelped in pain, while M. tried to burn the damn thing off with his cigarette — the tick was tiny and the cherry was burning into my skin! — We were in a hurry and admittedly it was not the best decision, but the relentless black tick finally did let go with head intact.

I also received a lovely slight burn mark in the process.

By the way, burning a tick off is not the proper procedure for tick removal, as we later learned. Apparently, putting the tick under any duress (like scalding it with a cigarette, or coating it in Vasoline for suffocation, etc.) may cause the itty critter to puke up its guts and act as a syringe, plunging whatever gunk/bacteria held in its stomach straight into your wound.

Here is the proper method for tick removal, as per the CDC website:

1. Use fine-tipped tweezers to grasp the tick as close to the skin’s surface as possible.
2. Pull upward with steady, even pressure. Don’t twist or jerk the tick; this can cause the mouth-parts to break off and remain in the skin. If this happens, remove the mouth-parts with tweezers. If you are unable to remove the mouth easily with clean tweezers, leave it alone and let the skin heal.
3. After removing the tick, thoroughly clean the bite area and your hands with rubbing alcohol, an iodine scrub, or soap and water.

Totally freaked out, I visited the doctor yesterday and was prescribed antibiotics for the (rare) occurrence of Lyme Disease and, in a few weeks, as a precautionary measure, will contact the Health Department to have blood work done for further evaluation.

My week-long camping adventure in Cape Ann: fun as hell.

Getting bitten by a tick on our last day: not so much.

Yecch.

=^..^=