gijasue's blog

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life…and the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either then they know how to use. — Samuel Johnson

This was today’s daily thought and it kind of hit home.

Money and time. That’s one of the things that is so frustrating about my job right now.

I get paid by the hour and I’m contracted to work 25/hrs a week. At first, I thought this was enough time to do other activities as well as spend some time with A. But, when the opportunity arose to work more hours, I took it. Although, after each week was up, I lamented the time I didn’t have to do other things, I was greedily adding up my hours and spending my pay in my head.

And I planned on what we would do with this extra money each month — pay off the bills, put some in savings, take more and nicer vacations. Until I was told that I had to cut my hours and they took away one of my projects.

At first, I was outraged. I’m good at my job, and I do it better than what was done before. How could they think of doing without me?

But after thinking about it for a while, and talking with J., I realized that the extra time I would have and the absence of stress would be worth the hours and money I would lose.

Now I’ll have time to take A. to the library again or on outings to the pool or movies (they just started showing English language movies in town). And I’ll finally get back into working out, after skipping so many workouts in the last few weeks.

Yes, money and time can be a problem. There’s never enough of either. But, I think that finding out what you can live with and be happy with is the most important thing in life.

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.”

— Doug Larson

Well, that was the thought for the day that came to my e-mail. I just thought that anyone who knows me would find this amusing when it’s applied to me.

Because, as you all know, I like to talk. And, most people know also that I still have that blonde streak running through me, although I’m mostly fake blonde now.

So I guess that leaves out my chances for being wise.

I know it’s been a while since I wrote.

Anyway, I just had a few thoughts while I was driving to Munich today. I think this was my first time driving alone both ways.

After a year here in Germany, I’m still amazed by the fact that I can drive as fast as I want on the autobahn. It’s something I think about a lot when I’m driving by myself on it. Actually, I don’t get to drive on it very often because I’m usually in the passenger seat when we go on long trips.

And that’s part of the fun of the autobahn. In a way, it’s not a really long trip when you can drive as fast as you want. It’s about 60 miles, give or take a few. And for the first ten or 12 miles, going away from Garmisch, and the last five or so coming into Munich, you can’t go much faster than 50 miles an hour — and that’s only outside the small towns where you have to go about 30.

What I’m saying is that when you’re driving on a no-limits autobahn (they do have speed limits in certain places and in construction zones, which can be pretty large, too) the only thing to keep you from going certain speeds, is your own car (and gas ecomomy, if you’re worried about that).

Now, I love my little Subaru Outback. It’s actually pretty speedy and handles very well (four-wheel drive and all that). But, coming out of Munich today, it was pretty clear what class my car was in as I “put the pedal to the medal” and watched four Mercedes fly by me while I slowly inched my speedometer up to 100mph.

And Mercedes aren’t rare in this country. I could have said the same about the millions of BMWs and Audis that have flown past me on the road but it just happened to be the Mercedes.
What I’m really saying is that, although I know that my car will do over 100 (when Joe and I are in the car sans A., we regularly get it up to 105 or 110 without thinking about it), it’s really no “competition” when it comes to what those other cars can do that my car can’t.

That said, it’s nice to be able to open up and drive the way I want to drive and not have to worry about the police stopping me because I’m over the speed limit — because there is none. I know that my American driving training is still alive and kicking because it still kind of tickles my fancy and makes me feel like a schoolboy when I drive that fast.

Of course, reality does poke it’s head in every once in a while and tells me to be careful. And I think I am. But I think inside I’m still that young girl my parents were afraid to put into a car because they thought I would drive too fast. And they were right. I do. But over here, it’s allowed.

Well, we’re halfway through another week already. I know this because I just put another issue of the newsletter to bed, but it really doesn’t seem like Wednesday. More like just one long day since the beginning of the week.

The trouble is that it seems as though I should have enough time to keep up with everything, since I’m only working 25 to 30 hours a week, but really, I’m just barely keeping the chaos from enfolding us entirely. At least that’s the way it feels.

I think part of the problem is my sleep habits. I’ve always felt more comfortable going to bed later and getting up later. This causes my day to start later than it should, which pushes everything back until I don’t have the kind of time I need before 5 p.m. rolls around again.
Sometimes I feel lazy but I think that I just choose to take my free time later in the day than most people. And I think it works better this way because I actually have time alone — since my husband goes to bed earlier — where I wouldn’t otherwise. He has his time alone in the morning.

I know that things will have to change over the summer before A. starts to go to school. I’m looking forward to it in a way, it’ll make me get up earlier and give me a chance to have some more time during the day.

I know that this new job is taking over my life right now, and I guess that’s normal. But I hope that in a few months I’ll have a more even-keeled perspective and I’ll be able to take back the part of my life that needs keeping up.

Here’s another new look for me. It’s the green relaxed look. It’s the view we have out of our dining room window.

The other, red look, was a photo I took in Venice. The boats actually had blue covers on them but I changed them to red and then I tinted the whole scene red to go with the color scheme of the theme.

I think I might also go with a blue theme, too and then just switch off and on whenever I feel like it.

Like I said before, if you like one better than the other, I can switch them pretty easily if I need to.

If you haven’t noticed (all five of you … ) I’ve changed the look of my blog.

Since I changed to this new blog, I now run wordpress (believe me I really don’t know how all this stuff works) and you can choose “themes” for your blog and just change them at will. So, I’m trying this one, although it’s pretty dark. I just like the style of it and not neccessarily the color scheme. It give me more space for my blogs, width wise, and it offers more on the side. Let me know how it works (you can write comments if you want to).

On the subject of blogs, I’ve been looking at some of my favorite ones (I may actually get around to putting them on the side so you can link to them yourself) and noticing that they are not being very prolific writers.

As most of you know, I’m not the one to talk since I took off a few months recently. But it really is depressing when you look on all of your favorite blogs and 90% of them are exactly the same as they have been for the last few days to a week.

So, since I don’t want to be like these thoughtless bloggers (I know, I’m the worst of the lot), I’m going to try to post more often. It’s actually ironic but since I now have a job, I’m on my computer more often and it just seems to be something that is easier to remember more often.

So, we’ll just have to see how this works out, won’t we. Those of you who like my blog, keep your fingers crossed and those of you who don’t, well, you’re still reading, aren’t you?

A. read a book today. Of course, it was with my help since she’s still learning her lowercase letters, but she still did it!

Recently we borrowed a Seasame Street learning to read video from the library. A.’s been wanting to watch it every day for the past five or six days. Tonight, she saw it again.

Up until today, she didn’t seem to want to try to read. But tonight in her bath tub she was putting together letters (she has a bathtub alphabet) and sounding them out. Of course, she doesn’t know how to spell, so she made a few nonsense words. So I told her that she could help me read her book before bed tonight.

I picked out a few short, almost baby books of hers that she hasn’t read in a while. The first book she chose to read was Kipper’s Opposites. At first she didn’t remember the book so well, so she was really sounding out the letters and figuring out the words by herself. After a few pages she started to remember and read them without sounding them out, but it was so good that she was excited about it and getting the idea, I didn’t want to slow her down and make her feel like reading wasn’t fun.

She also read Blue Hat, Green Hat and, of course, this was much easier for her because it was just colors and clothes, which she knew (and it was all in capital letters). And she always gets such a kick out of the turkey and his OOPS. This one was actually so easy for her that she almost sounded like she’s been reading for a while (but I knew it was only because she knew the book well and her colors and clothes).

The last book was The Foot Book and this was a little more difficult. After the other two, I think she thought she could read really easily from memory but she didn’t remember all of the parts. I didn’t push her, though, because she was already getting frustrated when I corrected her a few times.

She was so excited that she had a hard time getting to sleep. She kept talking about wanting to go and make her own words and sound them out. I was just so happy that she wanted to do this that I could hardly scold her.

It’s so interesting how you can see the light bulb go on in a child’s head. About three months ago, about the time we had been here for a year, she went back to painting actual people and scenes.

You see, she had drawn potato head people (that’s what I call them because they are just a circle with arms and legs, two eyes and a mouth) a few months after she turned two, but then about a month after we got here, her painting had turned into blobs and there was nothing recognizable in them, they were just a mess of paint

I had thought that maybe this was her way of showing her trauma over the move to Germany, since she had never shown it in any other way. (Just a side note: today she also told me that she wants to stay in this house forever. This, after almost a year of her saying that she didn’t like this house as much as the one we just left.)
Then, she started painting and drawing people and scenes and her art work at the childcare and at home just proliferated. She was drawing all the time. A month later, two months ago, she started showing a real interest in drawing letters. I encouraged her to write her name on toys she wanted in Christmas catalogs. Now, she can write almost every letter fairly well. She’s still working on recognizing and writing the lower case letters, but that’s fine with me.

And the reading thing came out of the blue, too. We had gotten a reading DVD, about two years ago, that she likes quite a lot and watches often, but she never really wanted to read until now. Who knows why? I’m just happy that she wants to.

Another good thing to go along with this is that I recently found out that she’ll be able to go to kindergarten next year because the cutoff is Oct. 31. Everyone had told me that it was Sept. 31 and I was worried that she’d get bored doing another year in childcare. But now I don’t have to worry about that either.

An interesting thing happened today, someone I knew from church while I was in high school but had lost contact with over the years, sent me a message over MSN Messenger. Actually, a few days ago, she asked to be added to my buddy list and I said yes, but I didn’t know who it was.

She said she sent me an e-mail, too, but I have no idea if I deleted it myself or if it got filtered out with my junk mail. It really is a sad world when the junk mail these day uses such familiar wording that it’s easier to delete anything unfamiliar then to take the chance that you’re getting a computer virus.

So, we talked for a little while.

It was kind of weird remembering some of the things that happened so long ago. I know that I wasn’t particularly happy with what I was then. It wasn’t a “I’m unhappy so I’m depressed” kind of unhappy, it was just a lack of self-confidence due to many factors. One of the biggest was that most of my fellow schoolmates treated me badly. It probably initially started because I was an outsider at a small church school with less than 20 people per class, but it grew into something mean and out of control because I was gullible, trusting, emotionally sensitive and easily bated (there are probably a lot more reasons, but these were the biggest ones that had to do with my character and not what I looked like, etc.). My need for socialization, and lack thereof, made the situation even worse because I was seen as a pest even when the others in my class were tired of picking on me and willing to hang out with me.

Unfortunately, I see this trait in A. and I hope that once she begins school and needs help with making friends or just getting along with others, that I can use my experience as a guide to what she should avoid. This is where I hope the characteristics my husband has given to her, kick in.

But back to my story.

Back in high school, I was overly sensitive to things. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t imagining that the other kids teased me. Since I have graduated, I’ve had at least five of my classmates apologize (or as close as they would get to apologizing) for the way they treated me (this is out of 16 that graduated with me and at least three of those didn’t have anything to really apologize for and two are already dead). How many of you, who remember being treated badly, have had that happen?

Being overly sensitive did have a way of warping the way I felt about that time. For the longest time I harbored, deep in my heart, some kind of need to change, or make up, for that period of my life. Of course, I wanted to show my classmates that I was better than them or had made something of my life, but what person doesn’t get that feeling at some time in their life, especially close to high-school reunion time? But it was more than that. It was a need to show them that I was worth something, worth their time and their friendship. Which is something they didn’t think I was worth in high school.

There were times in my life when I would look back at my school days and feel something grip my heart almost painfully when I thought of all the injustices I was served. It took a lot out of me to keep this pain going, but most of the time I just couldn’t let it go. I just felt I had to make it right and show them that they were wrong. For a long time it shaped how I treated people and made friends.

Although I’ve felt comfortable in my skin and basically happy with the way that I am for over twelve years now, it’s only just thinking about high school today that made me realize that the pain is almost completely gone.

I don’t know when it left me. I don’t know how, either (even though I have some ideas). I’m just happy it’s gone.

My husband has a saying he continually repeats to me, that goes, “The best revenge is living well.”

I don’t know if I was out for revenge in particular but I do feel as if I’m living well. I’m very satisfied with my life now and if I never see those high school classmates again, that’s fine with me.

Just a footnote: The woman that contacted me today was not one of my classmates from high school.

It has begun.

This weekend we started a kind of allowance for A. She got some money for cleaning up the living room and some for cleaning up her room. Of course, they were such disasters that we had to help direct her where to put everything because it was just to large and long of a task for her to do all on her own. But, she did very well.

Usually she loses interest in about one minute and walks away. The interest she had in getting some money, kept her on task for as long as it took.

Then we went out and bought her a cute little gold piggie bank (probably one of the cutest I’ve ever seen). We told her that she was to put half of her money in the piggy bank and the other half can be her spending money. She was OK with that because she just loved putting the money in the bank. We also gave half of it in coins so it made it more fun for her to put it in the bank.

And today at Children’s church, she even gave some of it to Jesus. She was so happy to have her own money to do that, she was showing it off to everyone.

So, I guess we’ll see how it goes from now on. I think it may slow down her requests for toys at the store when she sees her money go so fast. At least that’s what I’m hoping. And I hope she learns the right way to save money and how to enjoy what spending money she has and not spend it on worthless things, like I did as a kid. Only time will tell.

Tonight we went out to the “moving food” place. That’s A.’s name for the sushi place that we go to every so often. The reason it’s called a moving food place should be fairly obvious, but for those of you who don’t get it, it’s one of those places where the food goes around on a conveyer belt.
It actually may not be the best sushi ever, but it’s basically the only sushi place that I know of around here. I didn’t eat sushi enough before I got here to really know the difference between average and great sushi. It was just too expensive where I lived in Maryland, and when I lived in Korea, they had there own way of doing food wrapped in rice and seaweed (it was called Kimbab: Kim, meaning seaweed and bab, meaning rice — simple but explanatory). I think it was much better in Korea, even if it was simpler, and it was a heck of a lot cheaper.

Anyway, it’s good enough in my opinion (I’m sure some sushi snobs around here would say something different) and the best part of it is, we don’t have to wait for the food. When you have a pre-schooler, that makes such a difference. No whining about being hungry or when will the food come or having any low bloodsugar tantrums. And when it comes, well, A. just loves it. She can see it moving over to where she’s sitting, she can choose what she wants and she can pick it up herself. Entertainment and a meal, all in one fell swoop.
OK. I know a lot of you might be saying, what kid likes sushi? Now, I have to say that A. doesn’t like the sushi as it is. But take off the fish or push out the veggies and what do you have? Rice or rice and seaweed. It’s one of her favorite things. Add a little soy sauce and she’s right there.

Yes, it is a little weird that she likes rice and seaweed but, we had left Korea less than a year before she was born and we still ate a lot of our rice wrapped in seaweed. We even went to a Korea restaurant every so often while we were in the states. She likes picking up her rice with seaweed and for her it’s a normal thing.

And there are other things she likes to eat there. They have their version of chicken fingers and she absolutely loves the rice chips. And they usually have sliced oranges or some kind of fruit bowl going around almost the whole time and she tears into them, too. Sometimes there’s other things that she’ll try but the novelty of the moving food covers for the lack of variety in the food she likes.
Overall, it’s a win-win situation for us. Yeah, it maybe a little on the pricey side but the convenience and speed of this place covers a lot of other faults it may have. I think the “moving food place” is moving on up to a spot at the top of our favorite places to eat list.