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No school today because Good Friday. It really is the perfect week to not be in school anyway — two late start days and no school on Friday.
Last Wednesday, I stayed home to have a phone call with K. (which was delightful!), and so R. took A. to the therapist, where she had a meltdown. Today we had a zoom with the therapist to talk about what happened when I was not there. The format will change slightly to include a little yoga calm and center at the beginning and end of the session. I think this is a great idea, and look forward to understanding what that means specifically and how things go as a result.
A. today was pretty tolerant of chewing, but in combination with R. practicing piano, it was no good.
Last night, I was on FB wasting time, and I saw a buzzfeed listicle about travel products (you don’t need to know the one because there are many and they are largely interchangeable. Travel Products are absolutely a substance of abuse for me, so I carefully went over the list and identified several possibly interesting items. I decided against all but one (which I ordered) for a variety of reasons (the Alleyoop makeup pen was really cool, but the color selections I could find were way too boring for me). As I was poking around on the Zon, I noticed an ad for “Water Bottle Cleaner Tablets”, but it was “Fresh” scent, and No. So I found unscented water bottle cleaner tablets and then I asked, what is in this? Citric acid, sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate, IIRC. I have citric acid. Hmmmm. I did not buy the tablets, but I did make a note to ask R. about the relative safety of citric acid in water bottles. Today, he confirmed it should be fine in plastic, and also in high quality stainless steel (otherwise might cause rust).
Today, I realized that this process was me generating a hypothesis (If I clean the water bottles with citric acid, then they might not have a weird smell that annoys A.). So today, I described the entire thing to her. She had questions! My first hypothesis (Hey, this might fix the smell problem!) was not an If …. Then … statement, so unacceptable. I rephrased it as above and that was acceptable. Next objection! But there are no numbers! I said, Science does not have to be quantitative. It can be qualitative. She did not know that. And this is a big deal in a bunch of ways, but _especially_ in terms of Science being a way of thinking about How Do I Solve Problems / Answers Questions. If you don’t realize “Hey, this might accomplish this goal” is a hypothesis, if you don’t realize “the experiment can be sniffing it and checking whether it still smells bad”, then you can’t really use Science to accomplish your goals or answer your questions.
I am not dissing the school system for where my daughter was WRT understanding hypotheses (or, for that matter, the purpose of an essay, a project for some other blog entry). I’m mostly kinda sad, because it’s a more general problem that reflects other problems in our society. There is still so much more work to be done.
Piano lessons were moved to today since no school, and they seem to have gone well.
I had a delightful phone conversation with K.
It is sunny and mid 40s, so I will soon be headed out for a walk with M.
ETA: The walk was fun.
ETAYA:
Wired has an article about YNAB:
https://www.wired.com/story/you-are-not-a-budget-rave/
I have never used YNAB. I’m a terrible human being who has never had a budget. I mean, there was this one time, where I sat down at the dining room table with a pencil, checkbook, my Paid file, and some lined looseleaf paper. I gridded it out and figured out what my expenses over time were in some detail (like, dentist, annual checkup, glasses, in addition to the usual food, rent, gas, car maintenance). I was trying to come up with a realistic amount of money I could save on a regular basis for buying a condo (or house, but ultimately it was a condo). I was horrified at the small amount it looked like I could save; I had had some additional goals like, travel to visit my sister in Europe. Anyway. The major effect of this exercise (took a few hours) was that I started aggressively trading down in what I ordered when I ate out, and where I went to eat out, and pushing hard to eat more meals at home, and to bring food to work and stuff like that. The usual. At the same time, I did much more detailed research about how I could get a home loan that wouldn’t require a huge downpayment, and that project was extremely successful (Washington state has a long history of programs for first time buyers that reduce downpayments and keep interest rates reasonable). Once I had bought a place and unpleasantly realized that the person I thought would be moving with me and helping pay the bills … wasn’t … I really reduced the amount I ate out and everywhere else I possibly could, but then I retired because I got to a situation where I could and it made sense for risk reduction purposes to pay off the condo which reduced my run rate considerably. And _then_ I had to keep the bills super low for a few years, or I was going to have to go back to work so I figured out how to walk most places, and when all the free days at museums were and so forth.
And that’s basically about it for me and budgeting. Things eased up after a few years, and I haven’t really had to do any big budgeting exercises since then. So I am _not_ the person to critique a budgeting system.
However, I did get kind of curious about the YNAB communities and checked out the YNAB subreddit. It eventually “clicked” in my head that what people get from YNAB is figuring out ahead of time what they _are_ going to need money for, and pre-allocating the money coming in for the money that _will be going out_, so they don’t have issues of needing to borrow suddenly and often at punitive rates and so forth.
And _that_ part of budgeting I do understand. It was a little startling to realize that’s what YNAB teaches. Good thing to learn!
This is absolutely me sandbagging when it comes to how many books I read about money management and money discussions / negotiations within intimate relationships and retirement planning, and planning for kids, and planning for future illnesses and figuring out one’s values WRT to charitable / philanthropic stuff and so forth. I was trying to stay focused on the technical aspects of budgeting, but it is clear that YNAB does also force people to think through these other things as well, and those are _also_ good things to learn.
Last Wednesday, I stayed home to have a phone call with K. (which was delightful!), and so R. took A. to the therapist, where she had a meltdown. Today we had a zoom with the therapist to talk about what happened when I was not there. The format will change slightly to include a little yoga calm and center at the beginning and end of the session. I think this is a great idea, and look forward to understanding what that means specifically and how things go as a result.
A. today was pretty tolerant of chewing, but in combination with R. practicing piano, it was no good.
Last night, I was on FB wasting time, and I saw a buzzfeed listicle about travel products (you don’t need to know the one because there are many and they are largely interchangeable. Travel Products are absolutely a substance of abuse for me, so I carefully went over the list and identified several possibly interesting items. I decided against all but one (which I ordered) for a variety of reasons (the Alleyoop makeup pen was really cool, but the color selections I could find were way too boring for me). As I was poking around on the Zon, I noticed an ad for “Water Bottle Cleaner Tablets”, but it was “Fresh” scent, and No. So I found unscented water bottle cleaner tablets and then I asked, what is in this? Citric acid, sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate, IIRC. I have citric acid. Hmmmm. I did not buy the tablets, but I did make a note to ask R. about the relative safety of citric acid in water bottles. Today, he confirmed it should be fine in plastic, and also in high quality stainless steel (otherwise might cause rust).
Today, I realized that this process was me generating a hypothesis (If I clean the water bottles with citric acid, then they might not have a weird smell that annoys A.). So today, I described the entire thing to her. She had questions! My first hypothesis (Hey, this might fix the smell problem!) was not an If …. Then … statement, so unacceptable. I rephrased it as above and that was acceptable. Next objection! But there are no numbers! I said, Science does not have to be quantitative. It can be qualitative. She did not know that. And this is a big deal in a bunch of ways, but _especially_ in terms of Science being a way of thinking about How Do I Solve Problems / Answers Questions. If you don’t realize “Hey, this might accomplish this goal” is a hypothesis, if you don’t realize “the experiment can be sniffing it and checking whether it still smells bad”, then you can’t really use Science to accomplish your goals or answer your questions.
I am not dissing the school system for where my daughter was WRT understanding hypotheses (or, for that matter, the purpose of an essay, a project for some other blog entry). I’m mostly kinda sad, because it’s a more general problem that reflects other problems in our society. There is still so much more work to be done.
Piano lessons were moved to today since no school, and they seem to have gone well.
I had a delightful phone conversation with K.
It is sunny and mid 40s, so I will soon be headed out for a walk with M.
ETA: The walk was fun.
ETAYA:
Wired has an article about YNAB:
https://www.wired.com/story/you-are-not-a-budget-rave/
I have never used YNAB. I’m a terrible human being who has never had a budget. I mean, there was this one time, where I sat down at the dining room table with a pencil, checkbook, my Paid file, and some lined looseleaf paper. I gridded it out and figured out what my expenses over time were in some detail (like, dentist, annual checkup, glasses, in addition to the usual food, rent, gas, car maintenance). I was trying to come up with a realistic amount of money I could save on a regular basis for buying a condo (or house, but ultimately it was a condo). I was horrified at the small amount it looked like I could save; I had had some additional goals like, travel to visit my sister in Europe. Anyway. The major effect of this exercise (took a few hours) was that I started aggressively trading down in what I ordered when I ate out, and where I went to eat out, and pushing hard to eat more meals at home, and to bring food to work and stuff like that. The usual. At the same time, I did much more detailed research about how I could get a home loan that wouldn’t require a huge downpayment, and that project was extremely successful (Washington state has a long history of programs for first time buyers that reduce downpayments and keep interest rates reasonable). Once I had bought a place and unpleasantly realized that the person I thought would be moving with me and helping pay the bills … wasn’t … I really reduced the amount I ate out and everywhere else I possibly could, but then I retired because I got to a situation where I could and it made sense for risk reduction purposes to pay off the condo which reduced my run rate considerably. And _then_ I had to keep the bills super low for a few years, or I was going to have to go back to work so I figured out how to walk most places, and when all the free days at museums were and so forth.
And that’s basically about it for me and budgeting. Things eased up after a few years, and I haven’t really had to do any big budgeting exercises since then. So I am _not_ the person to critique a budgeting system.
However, I did get kind of curious about the YNAB communities and checked out the YNAB subreddit. It eventually “clicked” in my head that what people get from YNAB is figuring out ahead of time what they _are_ going to need money for, and pre-allocating the money coming in for the money that _will be going out_, so they don’t have issues of needing to borrow suddenly and often at punitive rates and so forth.
And _that_ part of budgeting I do understand. It was a little startling to realize that’s what YNAB teaches. Good thing to learn!
This is absolutely me sandbagging when it comes to how many books I read about money management and money discussions / negotiations within intimate relationships and retirement planning, and planning for kids, and planning for future illnesses and figuring out one’s values WRT to charitable / philanthropic stuff and so forth. I was trying to stay focused on the technical aspects of budgeting, but it is clear that YNAB does also force people to think through these other things as well, and those are _also_ good things to learn.