by The Happy WAHM
That is not so cool!
But, yeah, I did it. And to be blogging about it is just my way of saying, “I promise to blog more, if you will just stay alive!”
Earlier this evening, or make that yesterday evening, since we’ve crossed midnight now, I had this on my Facebook Page.
Do you know of a sure-fire way of killing a site?
Don’t update! Even when WordPress tells you there is a new version available, don’t update.
That way, you don’t need to create a back up.
Because you need to back up your files before you do anything, right?
So you just conveniently forget about it.
And your site remains at the original version you created it with, which was 3.5. Or was it 3.2?
And that’s okay. Your site is working fine without the update.
And then watch 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9 go by.
Still, you don’t update.
And here comes 3.9.1.
And someone has kindheartedly created a back up for you.
So you think, oh, it’s ok to update now.
While you are busy printing homeschool exercises and editing an article, you had the urge to update.
And so you happily click on the update button.
But because you are pre-occupied with something else, you forget to deactivate all your plugins first, which is another requisite before you update.
So you give your site a heart attack by letting it sit with 3.2 for a loooong time, then update to 3.9.1, skipping all the other versions, with all the plugins running, and no idea whether any one of those may not be compatible with the update.
THAT is the process of successfully killing a site.
And THAT’s exactly what I did.
Share this if you know of anyone in danger of committing this crime.
Save someone the anguish I’m feeling right now.
Fortunately for me, I have partner who’s a WordPress ninja, and she amazingly revived my dead site.
And I… I almost died of heartache, too. But I had faith. To the One up there, and to The Techie Mom.
The only thing that makes me sad now is that I lost all my social media leverage. Zero tweets and Facebook likes. But hey, who knows? They might be restored, too. If not, well, please go ahead and start clicking those icons below each of the posts. 🙂
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post?
Please leave me a message, or post them, at my Facebook Page.
by The Happy WAHM
It’s Sunday morning, and I have the place to myself. We’re spending the weekend at Peninsula de Punta Fuego. Husband and kids have gone to the beach, while I opted to stay back and have my me-time. It’s our third year here, and I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see, plus I’m really very tired I have no energy to battle the heat outside, so I opened my laptop to try if I can verbalize the myriad of emotions that I’m feeling about this blog, particularly about my failure to live up to my promise [to myself] that I will keep this blog updated this year.
There’s a long list of events that I want to write about, but I can’t seem to find the groove to start. There’s our vacation time in Baguio; then my Nanay’s 75th birthday celebration; then our first Boracay trip; my brother’s 50th birthday celebration; bonding time with my nephews; a reunion with colleagues from my corporate life; Mother’s Day and how I feel about it, really; our third run of the WordPress Workshop; my 8th anniversary as a work-at-home mom, which by the way, I quietly celebrated by giving birth to a new baby, www.startupwahm.com; and finally, yesterday’s third run of the Real Ways to be a WAHM Workshop.
That’s a long list, and a nice one to have. At least I can’t claim that my reason for not updating my blog is due to lack of topics to write about. I think I’m just lazy.
Or afraid.
Or insecure.
Or both.
But that’s just about my blogging.
I’m the person who always takes the bull by the horn. I approach life always with positivity. I see opportunity in every challenge. And for each door that closes, I always know that a window will open. As I was telling someone last night, when that one door closed on me back in 2006, God opened a window. And not just an ordinary window. It was a French one.
Lately, I’ve been feeling restless. I want to write. Not just blog, but write. Not just an article, but a book. My concern is the time. I know that should I ever start to write, I have to give it time. But time is extra precious these days. Being the breadwinner in a single-income household means I have to really prioritize revenue-generating activities, and that leaves me no room for being whimsical.
I berate myself for being so ambitious about writing, when I can’t even keep my blog updated. I have eyes green with envy when I see blogger friends announce their latest blog posts, and I head over to their sites and read, and feel the envy increase two-fold because they have such pretty pictures to go with the posts.
So now I question my real reason for the un-updated blog. Is it the scarcity of time, or is it my insecurity?
Insecurity that I can’t write sensibly? I know I can, yeah? Insecurity that I can’t put out great pictures to go with my post? Hmmm… now, that’s a thought. Are pictures really necessary? Well, I know they’re great to have, but I think I won’t get shot down if I ever post something without an accompanying photo. Or will you? Nah. I don’t think so. I know you can be forgive me if I post this one without a photo.
So maybe it’s really the time.
And how much time do I really need to write a blog post? Timestamp tells me I’ve been on this screen for the past 8 minutes. But I know that it will take me a little bit more to give this post a title, a description, and add some links. I’m still considering whether or not I should post this without a photo. So maybe it’s safe to say an average of 30 minutes will suffice?
So it’s not really the time, either. And the one reason that’s left is that I’m too lazy to even show up. And that’s not good. Not good at all.
Woody Allen said this:
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
And then there’s Chuck Close:
Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.
You won’t believe how many times in a week would I find myself thinking of something that I want to write about. I would be brushing my teeth, taking a shower, sorting the laundry or cleaning the windows, and a thought will hit me and I will have a few paragraphs written in my mind. And then I would think about logging in and writing a post, followed promptly by one reason or another to put it off for an hour, and that one hour will become a day, then a week, until the idea completely dies down.
So yes, I totally fail to even show up. I’m lazy.
I know this is not yet the time for me to sit down and write, but as always, my heart is full of hope that one day, I can make that dream a reality.
For now, I just need to show up. Even just for this blog.
Photo Credit: simplereminders.com
by The Happy WAHM
Are you the WAHM who maintains a to-do list daily?
Do you ever get the feeling that you are so tired with doing a lot, only to see your task list with so many unchecked items at the end of the day?
Well, I am that WAHM. Not so much for work-related items, but more on my home chores. Although I have all my office chores in Google Task, I still have this handwritten list on my desk with my Mommy tasks. I love doodling and scribbling, so having this handwritten list is a good excuse to scribble. Plus, I find that I retain them in my brain more efficiently when I write them.
But retaining and executing are two different things. So let me give you an example of how my home chores get accomplished. Or not!
Because I have homeschool hours in the morning, I try to complete my home chores before school starts. So breakfast and home chores, then homeschool, then lunch, and finally, I get to dig into my office work.
So my home chores would be limited to one hour to two hours, max. That means I don’t make it a goal to finish everything at one go. I allot the time, and whatever I finish within that time is good.
The other day, I set out to clean my office window, sort the kids’ clothes drawers and pack old items for giving away, and make a list of items that we need to replace so I can work on the budget. Realizable for the two hours allotted, right? First item: My office window. It’s that little window downstairs beside the garage.
Not much of a task, right? But it took me about two hours to complete. And here’s why…
I took out a wet rag, and started cleaning the glass. My system in cleaning glass windows is to use a wet rag first (not so wet, though) and then follow with paper. You can use old newspapers or pages from old magazines, but I use our waste paper from homeschool.
So, done with the wet rag. I went inside to get paper. Found the trash box to be full, so I decided to take it out for disposal. We have four sacks outside: one for dry cartons and paper, one for plastic bottles, one for cans, and one for non-biodegradable assorted trash. The one for assorted trash is picked up by the municipal garbage collection truck, three times a week. The other three, we just get them ready for the garbage man who buys them from us. Found the sack with plastic bottles to be almost full, too, so I went back in and checked the bathrooms for shampoo bottles that may be ready for disposal, so I can have them sorted along with the paper and cans. Garbage sorting done, finally was able to get back to cleaning the glass.
Then I went on to clean the grills. As I was cleaning, my eyes caught sight of the grass starting to grow below the window. I started weeding, with the goal of just finishing that small part below the window. Before I knew it, I’ve weeded the grass off half the front yard. Uh, not much of a yard, but I don’t know what else to call it.
After I’ve swept off the grass, I went back to cleaning the grills. And then it’s time to rinse the rag, before I give the grills another wipe.
Then I thought, wait, might as well wash the other rags, too, so I can maximize the use of laundry soap and water. So I collected the other rags inside the house, and went on to handwash eight of them.
I had a bubbly basin full of water with soap, and felt so bad about just throwing it down the drain, and I thought, well, the garage is so dusty, so I decided to use it to clean the garage floor. I did that will all the water that I used to rinse all the rags. So I have a bunch of clean rags, and a clean garage floor, too!
And finally, I was able to complete cleaning my office window. One item ticked off from my home chores list, and my time was up. One out of three is not so bad, yeah? Especially since there are items now that won’t even make it to the list.
But the other items in the present list will need to be transferred to a fresh sheet so I can schedule it for another time. And there’s another excuse to make use of my mechanical pencil. I’m happy!
How do YOU get your chores done? I do hope you will share!
by The Happy WAHM
While I may be bravely going on with life as if nothing has significantly changed, I am also hard at work doing what I’m expected to do – making the best out of a bad situation. I have faced our new reality right from Day 1, and I have since taken these small, but necessary steps, to get us better prepared to survive, and with God’s grace, even thrive.
Assessing Our Current Situation
It’s true, what we need is a great workable plan. But we really cannot make a realistic plan of what we need to do and which direction we need to go if we do not know where we presently are. So just as I did nine years ago, I sat down with my pen and notebook and created a list. I tell you, I’m really getting good at this. 🙂
So my first list is all about what we have. Bank accounts [bank name, account number, balance-to-date], investments, assets inside the home like the computers and gadgets, appliances, the cars, and the value of the house itself. It’s like, okay, if my kids are about to go hungry, what can I sell?
And then another list is of what we owe, like ongoing amortizations on retirement funds, credit card balance [which thankfully is not much], and the projected big ticket expenses like tuition fees. This gives me an idea of how much more we need outside of the day-to-day cost of living. And yeah, the emergency fund, which we need to continually add to.
On another sheet, which I have since transferred to Excel, are two columns – income and expense. Under income is my salary from my retainer gig. Well, that’s all it’s going to be, for now. And under expense are the usual suspects. 🙂 Food, toiletries, gas, internet, phones, electricity, car maintenance, etc. I added these to the monthly totals of the payables above, and what I ended up with is the amount that we actually need monthly. Since we do not have any clear prospects yet for the replacement income, we need to make short-term decisions, and those are basically steps that we need to do to lower our expenses and be within my income range.
What Are Our Absolute Necessities?
Another way of posing that question is: where can we drastically cut expenses? Good thing that school is out, so transportation expense is down to almost zero. We just need to plan our grocery trips more efficiently and cut back on lunches or dinners out. We have also talked to our 14-year old who has a cellphone budget of Php200 a month [that’s Sun’s Unlimited Text with 4 hours of calls monthly] and asked if it’s okay if Daddy will just pass a load to her as needed, until further notice. Thankfully, it was accepted without any fuss.
We have also agreed that we will let go of the older car, as it needs higher maintenance and consumes more gas. And it will not make sense to have two cars when both of us will be working from home, anyway. [That part about both of us working from home is still a work in progress.] The proceeds will be saved for the maintenance and upkeep of the remaining car.
For the utilities, we have already implemented power-saving rules around the house [which I may write about in another post]. All we need to do is to make sure that those are strictly implemented. Since it’s summer, my contribution will be the no-spinner policy in the laundry department. I’ll just take advantage of the scorching summer sun to dry the clothes. And a more efficient scheduling of wash days. Since a full and a medium load consumes just about the same amount of electricity, it will have to be full load all the time.
Keeping a Watchful Eye
You may think that it’s OA to be listing down every cent that goes out, but yes, that’s what we intend to do. This will help us determine how we are doing in managing what we have. This may also aid us in determining where to take our food from – the market or the grocery. We’ve also agreed that we will use purely cash from this day forward, to avoid unconscious overspending. Because I’ve always paid my credit card in full and on time, we’ve never paid for interests [nor annual fees] on our card purchases. But it is always best to err on the side of caution, so yeah, no more credit card purchases for us. What my brother told me resonates: If you can’t pay for something in cash, you can’t afford it. That has been my mantra, too, but I kinda have gotten used to the convenience of paying with plastic. But in times like this, we cannot afford to slip.
And so keeping in mind what Benjamin Franklin said, we do have to keep a watchful eye, even on the little expenses. 🙂
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post?
Please leave me a message, or post them, at my Facebook Page.
by The Happy WAHM
From a dual-income to one-income household, these are the questions that we had to deal with in the past three weeks:
- What are our essential costs?
- How much can we realistically afford in terms of expenses?
- How will we cover health insurance?
- Is our life insurance adequate?
- How will we cut back on costs?
- How long can we survive with just one income?
- How will we fund the kids’ education?
- How will we fund our retirement?
- What are our options?
- Can we find/create a replacement income?
This is not the first time that our family plummeted from two incomes to one. Back in 2005, when I prematurely gave birth to our third child, husband and I had to make the hard decision of letting go of my salary to give childcare a priority. Although we knew we were not ready, we had to take the leap of faith and together resolved to make things work. It’s been more than seven years, and we have not regretted that move. I have since created a new career, and we were back to a dual income situation in no time.
Middle of last month, we were again put in that same situation, where we had to simply accept the cards that we were dealt with. This time, it’s the husband who’s losing the income. The same, but different. The blow is harder this time.
Losing the Benefits
Working as an employee has its perks. You get group life insurance and health insurance, you need not lift a finger in getting your income tax return filed, your SSS contribution is merely deducted from your salary, and if you’re lucky, you get transportation allowances.
When I gave up my job, we were still okay with it. He simply claimed the tax deductions while I went ahead to file my own, I just had to take over paying my SSS contributions, and changed my status to dependent for the health insurance. This time around, the changes brought greater impact. No more health insurance. Several trips to SSS and the BIR will have to be made, and we have to give up his car. Soon. But what breaks my heart is the way this change has affected him. Me, I’m like rubber. I bounce back easily. Him, he’s like glass. To say that he is heartbroken is an understatement. I know he’s trying to put up a brave front, but I can see that he is struggling with acceptance.
Facing the Challenge
One advantage of having to face the same predicament twice is that we were not totally blindsided the second time. What we have experienced before taught us not to be complacent with our finances. We’ve created safety nets that we are now bound to make use of. I know it’s going to be a bumpy ride, but we are here to take on the challenge. We survived the storm the first time, when we were neck-deep in debt, when the kids were still in their high-maintenance phase, when raising kids without a helper made our difficult situation even more strenuous, and when working from home was not as popular as it is now. This time around, we are in a better position than the last. Not ideal, but still better.
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post?
Please leave me a message, or post them, at my Facebook Page.
