December is always an expensive month. I rarely open my wallet for anything other than food, absolute necessities and vacations for most of the year. Then December rolls around. It’s the holidays and despite my hatred of shopping, I must shop regardless, so I spend my time and buy the things I’ve been putting off all year long (like new undergarments, replacing my broken measuring cups, getting some much needed work tops, etc). I have some chipped dishes that need replacing too but I’m still holding off on that one.
The other thing I have is some time. I always take the last week of December off because I have no daycare coverage and this gives me some time to plan for 2011. Over the holidays, I booked one of our family vacations.
The other thing we’ve been talking about is sending Babci to Poland to visit her identical twin sister. I have to tell you that there is nothing more fun than seeing those two together. Babci kept postponing the trip because it is a super long journey for her…about 18 hours of travel time between car and plane + the 2 hours of checking in etc before the flight. Plus, it’s a lot of money and she hates spending money. My kids call the other Babci, Baba (which is a shortened version of Grandma). Anyway, Baba’s kids spoke with my mom and said she was a little down due to her health problems and asked for her help. Well, that’s all it took for her to agree to get a plane ticket and in a week, she’ll be in Poland for the last 2 months of winter. She’ll come home right in time to start planning for gardening season. We’ll miss her dearly, but everyone’s looking forward to the trip. I contemplated taking the last week she’s there and going with my youngest son, but my husband said I was insane for trying to do that with our schedules right now.
How Do I Take Advantage of This?
Cable -The very first thing I did was cancel her cable service. She had a great introductory offer that I was able to get for about a year, and she previously had dish, so this has been the first few months in 5 years where she’s had to pay $72/month. I tried calling, etc, but they played hardball with me and my husband wasn’t about to allow another dish back on the house. (He just spent time undoing the mess the last dish guy had made on the roof.) I’ve been mad at cable ever since and resent every bill I send to them so I was psyched to do this. That’s $150 saved with the hope that I can get another introductory offer when I rejoin (although I heard one teller saying it has to be off for 6 months before the offers become available to old customers again).
Heat – Her heating bill will be lower because it’s freakin’ cold here right now and 1/2 of her upstairs is gutted with no insulation. She’s been living downstairs but it’s still been pretty high. In addition to that, some of her radiator pipes are leaking very badly which my husband patched with some fancy tape stuff. It is a temporary band aid, so we now have the opportunity to fix some major issues while she’s gone. A lot of the radiator valves are also shot. It’s going to be expensive but hopefully her heating system will be more efficient as a result. We meant to get to it this summer, and the leaks weren’t quite as bad last season, but it just didn’t happen. She has a new furnace which we bought when the oil tank started to leak (we converted over to gas at that time), but it’s still far from ideal.
Kitchen – Babci uses the kitchen all the time. While we are remodeling the bathroom upstairs, we had a little bit of an accident and the ceiling now has a hole in it that is currently being secured with some packing tape. I’m contemplating doing a little work there. Her cabinets are fine, but she definitely needs her ceiling fixed as well as a refresh from her 1970’s flooring and countertops. If I farm out the countertops, that won’t take much time..I’m still on the fence about what I want to do there. We bought the house in 2005, so it’s worth way less than we paid for it. I do want a nice place for her, but the money we put in we likely won’t get back (but should make it easier to sell as it was a total dump).
I doubt I’ll have time to do anything with all the other work in the house. It is functional, just fugly. I would love to try a cork floor there although I’m not a big fan of floating floors in general. I know she’ll hate tile because it’s too cold and hard, but most linoleum is cheesy and rips too easily. I swear they used to make it much thicker back in the 70’s because that older stuff is indestructible.
Food Challenge– I won’t feel obligated to do a long shopping trip every week and I’m glad I can avoid Walmart. I can’t seem to leave that place without spending $100. Plus, babci has a bit of a food challenge for me too. She makes a lot of things out of eggs including her own noodles, so she goes through a lot of them. She currently has about 6 dozen eggs, 20 pounds of onions, 60 pounds of potatoes and 20 pounds of beets in her food storage. Oh, and also 9 pounds of hamburg and 15 bags of frozen zucchini. I don’t eat nearly as much as she does of these things, so I’m now going to try to add potatoes to 2 meals/week to try to get through some of her stockpile.
So, those are my random thoughts for this Monday morning. If you have any suggestions on how to use my excess produce, please let me know. Also, is there anything else I should try and get done while she’s gone? It really would be good to take a few days off from work while Babci is gone so we can make some headway at her place. My husband’s doing most of the work, but come spackling, painting and tiling time, I will take over.
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