Books and Bills

February marks my New Year Reading Challenge. A few years ago I wanted to reread some of my favorite books, so I decided to devote a year to them, no new books allowed. But, I was in the middle of a very long book and didn't finish it by January 1st, so I made February my Reading New Year's. Last year I had amassed a huge collection of books that I received as gifts, snatched from the local library's "free" shelf, and impulse bought at Target. My goal was to read as many of them as possible and to clear off my shelf.

I started with Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and ended with Amy Poehler's Yes Please. I read at least sixteen books, maybe more, I'm not too sure. I often lend books to my mom, so she might have one or two sitting in her house. Some favorites were Mindy's and Amy's (I feel after reading that I'm on a first name basis at the very least with these two). I also enjoyed Barbara Kinsolver's The Bean Trees and Pat Conroy's South of Broad. I read two Mary Alice Monroe books: The Book Club and Time is a River. I really loved Time is a River. That was probably my favorite of the bunch. Ones I didn't like were Jennifer Weiner's Goodnight Nobody and John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I really hated that one. Predictable and pretentious are just a few words that come to mind when I think of that one. 

On top of those books, I also had to reread Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street, and Elie Weisel's Night. Those really cut into valuable reading time, but I loved rereading TKAM and even read Go Set a Watchman over the summer, which was awful, but it was interesting to see the writing process that went into creating a classic. And Julius Caesar was actually a first time read for me. Not my favorite of Shakespeare, but a new experience all the same.

Whenever I start a new challenge, next year's challenge soon creeps up on me. As soon as I started reading through the stack of books I had accumulated, my oldest son came to me with the Percy Jackson series. My husband had started reading the first one to him, and he wanted to know if I had read them and what I thought about them. I hadn't and realized as far as "boy" books, I really haven't read a whole lot. I had pinned a lot on Pinterest and I had tried to pull a few gender neutral books of my own that I had read to share with my boys, but as far as really immersing myself in their interests, I hadn't yet done. So while I plowed through my stack, my oldest son started making a list of books to read and piling those on my new bookshelf as well.

I began reading The Lightening Thief a few days ago and I'm loving it. For me personally, as an English teacher, I find the story to be full of holes and lacking detail. It's full of random events with no real connection. Harry Potter was so detail-oriented. J.K. Rowling, like J.R.R. Tolkien, created their own worlds with a complete explanation of creatures and the workings of said world. Percy Jackson, if you haven't read it, is based on the premise that Greek mythology is in fact not mythical at all, but very real and in existence today. The gods, being immortal, have moved with Western Civilization and are now at home in the United States with Mt. Olympus being at the top of the Empire State Building. The mortals, are just that--mortal, too stupid to know what's going on around them and therefore can't see all the "monsters" in their presence. Percy is a half-blood, a demi-god, fathered by Poseidon and in just the first half of the book has already gone to half-blood camp and is now starting on his first quest. Like I said, the details aren't quite as cohesive as other masterpieces.

But, like I also said, I'm loving it! One reason, I'm trying to read it through the eyes of a nine year old little boy. He loves Harry Potter, too, but he's not as aware of the gaps in details. He's willing to accept the premise much more easily and get right into the action, and that's what this book is--ACTION! So, it's been fun being a nine year old boy each night following Percy's adventures as he kills a Fury, a minotaur, and then the same Fury and her sisters again (because the monsters come back from the dead because I don't know why, they just do! Duh!), and then Medusa again because she's back from the dead, too. It's also a nice refresher course on Greek mythology, which was always so fun to me.

The second reason is that he talks to me about how I'm liking the book. He's talking to me, not me to him. He's asking me what part I'm reading and if I've gotten to such-and-such part. He's directing the conversation. He's the expert on this, not me. It's refreshing for both of us.

Okay, so completely unrelated, but it's taken me a long time to get to this post and finish it. The puppy limits my movement in the house a lot. My dinosaur of a desktop PC is in the basement, which is our family/play room. It's covered in Legos and Imaginext, so we aren't currently allowing our vacuum of a dog down there. I can only get down to write if she is crated or someone is watching her, and usually when I do get the chance, I'm not thinking blog, but rather work or laundry.

In the midst of trying to schedule time for work and laundry and blogging, I'm also trying to get to all the other chores, namely keeping on top of the checkbook. This is one of my resolutions, trying to curb my spending, and today while the puppy curled into her bed for a nap and the boys were at their indoor sports events, I grabbed my checkbook and budgeting binder to get started on February's receipts and bills. I sat down with a cup of tea and a feeling of dread, of hopelessness, of no contol, and then suddenly I had an epiphany. I realized what I was doing wrong, why we have been overspending so much.

About a year and a half ago, I adopted a new budgeting system. I used to have a page in a notebook devoted to each spending category. Every week I'd sit down with our receipts and enter them into the checkbook and delete the amounts from the appropriate category. As we got paid, I'd divide the paycheck into each category every couple of weeks. The goal was to not go into negative numbers. It worked all right for many years, but looking at Pinterest, I thought that these other bloggers who feed their families for $100 a month might have something over me. We weren't really looking at our monthly spending or setting a savings goal each month, so I decided to make a monthly budget worksheet modeled off the ones I had seen on Pinterest. Instead of keeping a notebook, I made envelopes and put our receipts in the appropriate category envelope, totaling them at the end of the month.

In many ways this was an improvement. We could see our monthly spending more easily and I saw where I had a little extra cash on hand. The problem was that I didn't feel it was helping us to ease up on spending and we certainly weren't putting any in savings. When I went back to work, our spending easily got out of control, but after stopping work full time, we were still spending too much and continuing to spend too much every month. It finally occurred to my why! I had no idea what I was spending until AFTER it had been spent. By stuffing the receipts in their envelopes, I could forget about them. I was looking at just the ending balance on my checkbook.

So I ditched the envelopes and went back to a notebook. I'm still using a monthly budget worksheet to total everything at the end of each month and track our monthly spending. But instead of just that, I'm now combining the two methods. I total the receipts each week which will hopefully keep in the back of my mind what I have left to spend for the month. For example, I am currently over $300 in food receipts, which leaves me about $150 for the month. Yikes! But, knowing that, I hope to stay as close to the budgeted amount as possible instead of having no real idea what I've already spent and sometimes going $600 over budget. It sounds so simple, but I couldn't see it.

Here's to homecooking!