Tag Archives: budget

Secret Gardens: A Personal Update

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Where we last left off, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere coastal California with a broken derailluer and a bout of food poisoning from an extremely tasty chicken curry salad that was causing me to vomit every 30 minutes into a bush near my tent. Okay, maybe you didn’t know that that was where we last left off because I didn’t exactly come right out and say that, but that is what was going on in my world.

Anyhow, I had just retrieved my touring bike from San Francisco where I had left it and proceeded to bike my way north up the coast. I was attempting to make my way back to Arcata to rekindle my love affair with the folks at the Humboldt Garden Collective.

Uh-huh. Sure. Right.

What? Don’t give me that look. Am I really that transparent? Really, radical gardening is super awesome…for so many reasons. Community. Food. Security.

Okay. Fine. His name is Brian. I’ve kinda fallen for this guy named Brian.

You got me.

Brian was also the one that came and rescued me from my dehydrated hellhole along the Pacific Ocean, and brought me back to his trabin (that’s a trailer & a cabin combined) in Arcata. Its a charming little homestead with a wood stove and rugged wood furniture. If you light a fire in the stove it feels like you’re camping far far away from the adjacent house with all the roommates and the bathrooms and the kitchens and internet and such. I like to pretend that “my office” is the front porch atrium space with the tomato plants growing near the door. I really like it here.

And don’t you worry, I am finding plenty of things to fill my time–meetings, gardening, reading & metal mostly. Not metal like welding, metal like death metal. My neck is sore from too much head banging. I need to look into doing yoga for thrashers. I imagine there would be lots of head rolls involved.

As for The Humboldt Garden Collective? Well, we are hoping to get a big project completed this weekend and a fundraiser done within the next month. Personally, I’d like to see the Collective working with food banks and other community food programs like Food Not Bombs to network together all those perfect permaculture people in the area that are interested in working with food–both growing & sharing–in their community. We’re working on it. It’s inspirational, really. Much to do on this front, indeed.

Let’s See, What Else?

I’ve gone camping in the mountains twice since I’ve been back. Its calming up there and much warmer than it is down here on the coast. All this camping and nature time has given me an opportunity to read and write and philosophize like I’ve always wanted. I’ve been reasearching & learning–fine tuning my thoughts on food, capitalism, work, progress and the like. This is the time that I was craving back when I was trying to cram my entire life into the evenings and weekends. I could go weeks without making a home cooked meal, or months without reading a book or even years without being truly challenged intellectually. That is just no way to live, I tell you.

For some reason, I imagined that after I worked so hard saving all that money, freeing myself of my worldly possessions and hitting the road, that I would want to be on the move experiencing new things each and every day. India, Bangledesh, Spain, Portugal. Hop. Hop. Hop. Amy Voluntourista Jet Setter Extraordinaire!

Garden Goats

I find this, however, not necessary or desirable. Pace of life and sanctity of space is still very important to me. Slow travel, I insist. I will hop somewhere again soon, mostly likely to the other side of some proverbial pond, but not just yet.

So as we speak, I am considering staying in the area with Brian and the Garden Collective and all these quirky Arcatans and the pictured goats until after my birthday on November 5th. I have also considered leaving much sooner than that, but I don’t think my work will be done by then. Volunteering takes commitment.

From here, I’m looking at plane tickets. Panama, Peru, Thailand, Taiwan and the Phillippines are all coming to mind. Though nothing is for certain. I’m learning to live each day as it comes and worry less and less about making plans for the future. As I learn to relinquish control and live in a nearly constant state of uncertainity, I’m finding it easier and easier to live for the moment and be happier in such.

Yup. So there’s some hippy-dippy meditiating in the woods kinda writing for ya, but ya know, when I signed up for this, I was never quite sure what was gonna come out. So, you can’t be sure either.

Scene. Seen? Seen.

 

 

 

Q1: Big Money Charts – Attempting to Live on Minimum Wage

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I’ve been firmly unemployed for a little over two months now. I have been thoroughly enjoying my free time. I’ve been able to work on many projects (including this one) that I wouldn’t have been able had I otherwise been gainfully employed. There is, however, one little question that I can’t seem to avoid.

Open scene: intimate gathering among friends, cocktails in hand, light indie music playing in the background, calculated ambient light focuses on two guests on the couch.

Guest 1:    So, what do you do?
Amy: Me? I write and volunteer.
Guest 1: (confusion)  Uhh. So that’s like your job?
Amy:  Not really. I’m doing it because its what I want to do and I think its important.
Guest 1: OK, so then what do you do?

Picture pulls back then rockets towards Amy’s forehead symbolizing entering her inner dialogue.

Goddammit. Why do people ask this question if it’s not the question they want answered. Just come out and say it, “How do you make money?” At least that would be straightforward and honest. What exactly we are trying to suss out with this question still escapes me. Is this person happy? Are they rich? Do they enjoy their work? Can I date them? Are they successful? Can they fix my car?

I have to fight off the urge to say something like, “I work with a very tight knit group of wealthy individuals. My job is to eliminate people who know too much. Shall I go on?” Or perhaps, “Fine! You caught me! I sell my dirty underwear to creepy people on the internet,” and burst into to tears and run off.

But really, com’n, how do you make money?

Well, to be honest, currently, I don’t make any money. I have saved up enough to “pay myself” for hopefully a year or more. Some call it a gap year, I call it a project.

So, starting about one month before I quit my job, I decided that I would try an experiment to limit my expenditures and stretch out my freedom. I was and still am trying to live within the means of someone working minimum wage in the United States, which according to my calculations is about $1160 per month**.

At first, I kept my experiment a secret. It felt almost insulting to experiment with the reality of millions (arguably billions) of people. However, as I failed month after month, I realized that this was a story that needed to be told as well. Honestly, this is the graphic that broke this camel’s back: 

After I saw this, I started to talking with people. I heard about a lot of frustration, shame and guilt related to the issue. As I was comically fumbling through the fringes of frugality, many people I care about very much were carefully navigating this world, and had been for quite some time.

Unfortunately, for some reason, its taboo to discuss money. I suppose if you had a lot if, it may be kinda awkward to tell everyone about it. I forgot, the rich make the rules. But back here in reality, if you’re working a standard week earning what we as a community agree is the value of a standard person’s time, you can’t afford to have two things go right or wrong in the same month. Maybe this is something we should be talking about more openly.

Fortunately for all of you, I routinely keep strict financial records and produce colorful graphs at the end of each month to detail my expenditures. What, doesn’t everybody? Whatever; I do that….and the chips are in for the first quarter of 2012.

In the spirit of advocacy and of just plain letting it all hang out, I present to you…

MY BIG MONEY CHARTS!

January 2012

Despite all my best intentions, in January I overspent by $238.44 or 20.56%. Daaamn! You’d think I wasn’t even trying.

To be fair, I needed to pay the dump & various trucks to free me of my possessions, aaaand it was my special friend’s birthday, but I could have done better. Since I was still employed for most of the month I felt like my lavishness was justified. Oh com’n, don’t look at me like that. I had a lot to celebrate.  What? A girl can’t have a vices column without gettin’ the stank eye? Sheesh.

However, if you’re on the other end of the spectrum wondering how the hell I spent so little, I answer, “I hate shopping, live with roommates and ride my bike everywhere. That pretty much takes care of it.”

I would probably categorize this as my typical semi-frugal fully-employed spending.

Now onto February. This month I only overshot my target by 14.75% or $171.10. Come on, that’s not bad. It’s a 7.41% decrease in spending from the previous month. Sorry, my nerds showing.

Looking for “excuses” as to why I couldn’t keep my spending within the wages of your average minimum wage worker? Well, I went to the dentist.I needed a deep cleaning and a few cavities filled. I only went to the cleanings so far, next month is the heavy lifting. I want to make sure to avoid a root canal. Ouch!

February 2012

Other than that, I splurged on some Mac accessories to try and make the whole iPad thing work for me. Unfortunately, I don’t really like it as a work station. I’m debating getting something else. Not cheap. I’ll probably just make due. Finally, I spent a little extra on food, particularly groceries. We joined a co-op and bought a juicer, so we needed many tiny mountains of nice fruits and vegetables to experiment . So many tasty fruits and vegetables. Nom!

I would like to tell you that by March, I finally got the hang of it, and squeaked by heroically at the end of month. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Somewhere around the middle of the month I decided that being a stingy girl was no fun at all. I went on my Small Town Review, and drank coffee whenever I wanted. And then there were the birthdays, three in one month, and I may or may not have bought everyone a round of drinks on more than one occasion. Um, I do believe that there was also a delivery Chinese purchase for three in there as well. Oops.

March 2012

By the end of the month, I was truly frightened to find out how far I had strayed. I didn’t want to pull the final calculations together at all.

Thankfully, however, I didn’t do nearly bad as I thought. I guess I was able train myself to forego buying nearly anything, and to feel truly guilty for every splurge I make. Oh joy.

The kicker is that I’d have been one Chinese take out night away from success had I not paid taxes this month. Yup. Taxes. Now some may argue, that if I had, in fact, been making minimum for the last year, I wouldn’t have had to pay taxes, and instead I would be getting a refund. That may be true, and as it should be, but that means, my friend, that you are missing the point.

The point is: no matter what, something will happen. There will always be a cavity or a birthday party or worse, an illness or an injury, foiling any attempts to stay housed, fed & out of debt. This is a reality for millions upon millions of Americans.

Bummer, bra, bummer….

Yup. There you have it, I have bore my financial soul to the gods of the internet in the name of those less fortunate than myself.  And yes, concerning this particular challenge, I am a failure. If this experiment were real, I would be out on the streets or just another couch surfer wearing out their welcome. Each month I got better, but I still wasn’t able to do it. Nevertheless, I refuse to reinforce the idea that one is a failure if they are not able to make ends meet on limited (yet socially acceptable) wages. I am not a failure. We are not failures. There is something else, very real that has failed us here.

Thoughts?

**Also, If you have a better idea of how much somone living on minimum wage in the US would make in take home pay, please let me know. I’d love to hear that it is more. Thanks!

Small Town Review: Estacada, Molalla & Silverton

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I have a propensity towards travel that I like to call “low & slow;” I may have I stole the phrase from Johnny Vagabond who describes his travel style as such:

 To me, traveling low to the ground, taking ground transport where possible, and traveling as the locals do is the ideal way to experience a place. Being poor, it’s also my only option.

My special friend and I have been traveling together like this since we met. One of our favorite things to do is to get in his car, go to some place pretty and hang out together. Actually, the place doesn’t even have to be all the pretty. I’m easily pleased, and a quiet field in small town will suit me just fine. 

This past week, in an effort to minimize the effects of my houselessness, Special Friend and I decided to go on a small town tour. He’s even hung black curtains in the back of his station wagon so we could and rest whenever necessary. 

As you can imagine, I have a severe case of wanderlust that can only be appeased by a bout of low & slow travel. And how low & how slow are we really talking? Well, the navy blue station wagon in which we travel sits a mere foot and a half from the ground, and it took us 4 days to make it 62 miles from home. Not kidding.

My special friend is a hard working digital nomad that needs to stop and access the internet at frequent intervals. As for me? I just  seem I find charm and pleasure nearly everywhere I go, and need to get out and explore as necessary.  When we first got in the car, we had no particular destination in mind. He just started driving and I just started talking.

Before I knew it we were exiting the southeastern corner of Portland, OR and on our way into the unknown. Over the next three days, these city slickers putzed around Highway 211/213 trying to find those tiny towns in Oregon that have all the charm of the big city without all the pesky people.

I could tell that we crossed Portland’s urban growth boundary when I started to see more trees than cement. Cheers to proper city planning! Night falls we approached our first stop.

Estacada, OR (pop. 2,371)
I’ve always enjoyed Estacada. It is a great little town to go to if you want to camp by a beautiful river or get away from the overly hip Portland scene without traveling too far. They were able to preserve their downtown, which lends a certain je ne sais quoi that is necessary to keep city dwellers like myself from thinking that this is the place where I will be Texas Chainsaw Massacred.

Estacada is not scary, it’s the kind of place where everybody knows your name. I love it. We spent the morning in Barbara’s Flower Shop which also sells chocolates, coffee, hand-made cards & the soup of the day. Every brick & mortar business in Estacada was so versatile. The local hair dresser also does tattoos and the music shop sells paninis. Brilliant!

All in all, the wi-fi is plentiful, the people are friendly and they even have fair-trade coffee. I’d give it a 4 out 5 stars on the small town scale.

Molalla, OR (pop. 5,647)
The next day, we find ourselves in Molalla, OR. We tried to find an internet cafe to no avail. We couldn’t even find a decent park that wasn’t part of the high school. There were quite a few bars in the heart of downtown. One could not help but be mesmerized by the over-sized white stallion bucking on top of the saloon of its namesake. They chopped off the tip of its penis so as to avoid being too graphic, of course, in case you were wondering.

By the time we had explored the offerings of the  town, it was starting to snow. We  were trying to find a local food store and ended up at Fred’s Food Mart which contained no actual food but plenty of corn derived psuedo-food & cheap beer. Safeway on the outskirts of town was our only bet. Now granted, we actually didn’t go to any bars to sample the local culture, but I would have to say the Molalla, Oregon is NOT the kind of place that these wannabe digital nomads could settle. The snow, however, made the decision for us. We were stuck until morning.

Overall, I give Molalla one star for being a small town with friendly people in it. I give it a second star for having a giant white stallion statue with a chopped off penis in its downtown. Two stars for Molalla, Oregon.

Silverton, Oregon (pop. 9,222)
As soon as we could get our traction away from the snow, we hightailed our way out of Molalla, Oregon. I wasn’t impressed. Silverton, however, had me at hello. I knew right away that Silverton was alright when we spotted a handful of coffee shops in the downtown serving nice coffee and advertising their wi-fi, or “wee-fee” as these language crossed lovers often say.

The streets were adorable with people walking around, chatting and looking genuinely happy. Its nice to see a small town that looks alive. There was a movie theater and a river running through the middle of town. Perfect! We stayed and worked for  a while at the Silver Creek Coffee House, where we could plug into the matrix and watch the river run beneath us. Each shop seemed quite proud of Silverton’s history, and we learned all about “Silverton’s most famous citizen,” Bobbie the Wonderdog and his 2,500 miles trek back to his home in Silverton, Oregon. Heartwarming, but wait! It gets better. A mere 20 minute drive away is the Silver Falls State Park with dozens of hiking trails and beautiful waterfalls. We went on one short hike, but I wasn’t quite prepared for all the snow and my beat-up canvas shoes left something to be desired. We could have spent days exploring there. Silverton also has lots of parks, scenic view points and even a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Impressive.

Anyhow, Silverton Oregon gets 5 out of 5 stars from this small town reviewer. That’s right. I liked it that much. Perfect score!

Back to the Big City…

And so concludes this segment of Small Town Review, please join us next time as I try to illustrate to my Moscow-native boyfriend what “rural” means. Until then, happy wandering!

Raw Foodist?

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While I was “floating” last week, someone dropped off The Raw Food Detox Diet book. Oh god, not another book about food.

At my last job, we were knee deep in the shortcomings of the industrialized food system. In my humble opinion, a lot of our problems concerning our health, education, nutrition, environment and economy could be solved (or at least addressed) by implementing a strong local food system in every community. It’s heartbreaking how easy it could be. Please pause for a moment of silence for the loss of our natural food system.

I am not, however, here to preach about the problems of the world or act like I have the solution. I’m just here to blog. Right? Whatever.

So anyway, I read the entire book that day–cover to cover. A lot of the information wasn’t new to me. Really, the craziest things I learned about were poop, and the types of poop that there is. Never mind. I’m stopping here.

I’m not becoming a raw foodist. Eat more whole foods. Great idea! I really do feel best when I eat tons of fruits & vegetables and almost no wheat/gluten. I’ll try to be better about that, but that’s not really the epiphany that came out of this. What was the epiphany? Simplicity in food & habits.

The less I need my extravagant food & bad habits the longer I will be able to travel the world. 

Plain and simple.

So what’s the first thing to get the boot? COFFEE.

And what was my secret? NAPS. LOTS & LOTS OF NAPS.

How’s that for some self-help blogger guru bullshit? You’re welcome.

Introduction to Houselessness

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These past five days or so, I’ve been…”floating.” I don’t really want to call it “homeless,” because I feel like I have many homes in lieu of the traditional one. I don’t, however, have a place that is all mine and that houses all my stuff– now, I’m saying “stuff” like someone punched me in the stomach, stuuuuff. Oooof.

Well, I don’t have one of these places. I don’t  have a place that isn’t occupied by the man that actually owns the the place. You see, the guy whose room I’m currently subletting is back from tour, and needs a place to rest his weary head while he is in our beautiful city of roses. Therefore, I needed to do my best to disappear.

my homeless house circa 2007

I’ve been houseless before. About a five years ago, I ended up in  the woods of Colorado. Its a long story, but essentially I was squatting in an abandoned miner’s cabin without electricity or running water, 10,000 feet above sea level for several months after college. I even held a job in fancy hotel a mere two mile hike away.

Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t quite as prepared. Here are some things I’ve learned during this initial bout of houselessness.

  1. A portable bag of toiletries is extremely beneficial. Be sure to include shampoo.
  2. If you’re staying with friends, cook them dinner. And while you’re at it…do the dishes,.
  3. If you’re sleeping in a car, make sure you go to the bathroom before you settle in.
  4. If you’re staying with men in their twenties remember that they may or may not have clean towels and/or toilet paper. Be self-sufficient.
  5. Always carry a change of underwear. Always.

My expert traveler homeless vagabond self of several years ago would be ashamed that I hadn’t already learned these lessons. However, at this point in my life, I feel no shame admitting my shortcomings and feel even more compelled to write them down, because hell, my memory could go at any moment.

Bear with me.