Housing court tomorrow

Tomorrow members of my family will face the housing court judge who will decide whether to grant them an extension to pay or to unequivocally move forward with eviction. Considering that the three of them live in a bronx apartment that costs less than $1000/ month and they’ve been there over two decades, this is extremely distressing. You can’t house 3 people for 1k in many places here. It’s unheard of, and it’s only because of rent control that they pay so little. Once they are kicked out, they will have to pay going rates.

Now you might say, why do they need to live in NYC? Can’t they move somewhere cheaper? I don’t see how though, because none of them can drive or afford a car, and 2 of them are disabled so there’s no chance of learning to drive. The only places I can think of that aren’t in the city but allow a person to meet their needs without a car are assisted living facilities or in downtown locations of other cities, but neither can house 3 people for under $1k, as far as I know.

So, where does that leave them? I wish I knew.

Meanwhile, it’s not easy to pay our own rent, and the hot water disappeared again yesterday and isn’t back yet. We pay about $1.1k/month for the privilege of living in an apartment (near the subway at least, albeit the end of the line) that has been burgled twice in 6 years and, lately, loses heat and/or hot water about 10-25 times a year.

And still I know we are lucky in some ways, as there are Americans who have it worse. Americans who live in slums, shacks, trailers, and homeless shelters, who despair at the prospects of a jobless future, who cannot feed their children.

What a luxury it seems to be worried about deficits and taxes.

City dwelling & CO2 production

Today I looked at this cool slideshow from Scientific American.  In particular I liked this image:

City dwellers produce, on average, less CO2 from fossil fuels than suburban or rural residents, who use vehicles and outdoor equipment more.

This is one of the things that I love so much about living in New York City.  I use only public transportation, mostly subways and occasionally buses, which are part of a clean vehicle fleet.  The taxis, while not yet upgraded by and large, are at least beginning to be overhauled to clean vehicles as well. I don’t own or drive a car, I never buy gasoline, and my husband, a life-long New Yorker, doesn’t even know how to drive.

Admittedly, my apartment building, which is not a designated “affordable housing” unit but is nonetheless mostly low income residents, is woefully wasteful in its degraded and leaky plumbing system.  But I don’t have a yard, a lawn mower, a need for sprinklers, or many rooms to heat, cool, or keep lighted.

While I sometimes consider what it would be like to move to a house with a yard for raising our future children, I can’t imagine making the transition to living in a sprawled community that requires a car to go anywhere.  I like it better here, in the city, where I can use only public transportation, and enjoy the many public parks with the rest of my community.

You can’t live on $500k in this town? Bull.

I just read this article in the NY Times, on the effect that a plan by Obama to cap top executive pay at $500k for banks accepting bailout money will have on these executive’s lifestyles.

And I just had to write a post, because nothing pisses me off more than some of this crap. The author nears the article’s conclusion with this:

The total costs here, which do not include a lot of things, like kennels for the dog when the family is away, summer camp, spas and other grooming for the human members of the family, donations to charity, and frozen hot chocolates at Serendipity, are $790,750, which would require about a $1.6-million salary to compensate for taxes. Give or take a few score thousand of dollars.

I read a NY Times magazine article during the election season on Obamanomics, and found that I really felt good about his economic policies, ideals, and views.  His positions are probably the closer to my own than those of any other politician, and certainly any president or even major presidential candidate, ever.  One of the things in the article that stood out to me was the tenet that society functions the best, driving production and increasing economic success, when the top executives of a company make about 25x more than the bottom employees.  So if the lowest employees at the bank make $40,000 a year, then the top employees should make about $1 million.  In that case, the $1.6 million/year that the article is claiming is needed to lead the common lifestyle of a bank executive is roughly 50% more expensive than it should be for all of the employees and the company to perform their best.

The article goes on to explain the need to fit in with other bank executives:

Does this money buy a chief executive stockholders might prize, a well-to-do man with a certain sureness of stride, something that might be lost if the executive were crowding onto the PATH train every morning at Journal Square, his newspaper splayed against the back of a stranger’s head?

The man would certainly not feel like himself on that train, said Candace Bushnell, the author of “Sex and the City” and other books chronicling New York social mores.

“People inherently understand that if they are going to get ahead in whatever corporate culture they are involved in, they need to take on the appurtenances of what defines that culture,” she said. “So if you are in a culture where spending a lot of money is a sign of success, it’s like the same thing that goes back to high school peer pressure. It’s about fitting in.”

My response? Ok, but the point is, your bank failed and is looking for a government bailout.  You need to suck it up.  Top executives are supposed to earn the pay that they receive, and banks that need bailouts, regardless of how common that may be, failed in their jobs.  So what’s the harm in instating laws to encourage them to work towards success in order to earn the money they make?  That’s what capitalism is supposed to be about.  When they’re able to give themselves huge salaries regardless of whether they lead their companies towards success or complete failure, capitalism isn’t working the way it was meant to, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the capitalism that people like my father hold so dear.

Even if they’re rare, there are a number of chief executives who lead successful companies without living such extravagant lifestyles.  As far as I know, Warren Buffett, one of the most successful men in the world, is one of them.  Obama’s plan would be hoping to help change the culture of the self-absorbed members, not trying to sink companies in need of a bailout by sinking the self-esteem of their chief executives.  Maybe when they lead their companies to overwhelming success through good decisions and leadership, they can start making over $1 million again.

These people can’t live on $500k in this town?  I live on $50k in this town.  Maybe I should be teaching them a few things.

The organizing bug

Well, it’s summertime, and somehow it seems that for me summer and home organization/improvement seem to go together.

Last year, I renovated the bedroom – painting the walls a lavish, dark red, and adding real bed and dresser furniture, care of my lovely momma. There are still a few upgrades I want to add to the bedroom – a new mattress, for one, a few more bins/baskets for some excess clothes we tend to keep out, and some wall art. I dream of getting this nice space-saving sewing workstation, too. Admittedly, it’s not the same color as our current bedroom furniture, but it folds up small (essential in a NYC apartment), and it’s on wheels, so I can easily wheel it out to the living room if the hubby is sleeping. Maybe I can get it later this year for my birthday (I’ll be 25!) or our 2 year anniversary.

This year, Husband and I are both spending lots and lots of time at home. He’s been working from home for a year and a half now, and now it looks like I’ll be joining him. I work from home many hours a week on T! stuff, and I also do data analysis for the lab from here too. If I start pursuing freelance science writing, I’ll be doing that from home as well.  This also means we use the kitchen more since I’m home more to cook and prep food. (Husband typically feeds himself, but rarely chooses to cook anything elaborate.) We’ve accumulated a fair number of things that no longer fit on our various media shelves, and we also have new business related things that we need to store. So I’ve been thinking mostly about how I can upgrade the living room and the kitchen.  Finally, I’ve also just been thinking about what our living patterns have evolved into and how we could make more efficient and fun use of our living space.

So today I made up an organizing list. I started by writing out everything I could think of that needs a place to store. I categorized them by room, including closets as rooms. Then I thought about what we actually use daily, monthly, or only seasonally, and planned the storage location accordingly – making the things we use most often the most easily accessible. Next, I considered what would be the best storage solution for each item – drawers, boxes, bins, or shelves. I chose drawers or open-lidded boxes or bins for things we use often, and boxes and shelves for everything else. Things used only seasonally will be stored in lidded boxes on high shelves, in closets and out of the way.

I’ve picked out items and made a plan for everything. Now to buy the storage furniture and containers – a little at a time. Even though I can’t buy it all right now, I enjoy planning and organizing so much that I don’t care. I ordered a little bit of it, some really cheap organizers from Amazon.com, and I’m on my way to more efficient living…

Splitting up home chores

A friend of mine was recently talking about how she splits up various household chores with her husband, and so I’ve been thinking about it myself. I thought I’d share it here because it’s interesting to me how different things work for different people. To give you an idea of how long we’ve been working on our own balance of chores: Husband and I have been living together for 3.5 years but have only had our own apartment and the chores that go with that for 2 and a half years. And we’ve been married for a year and change .

For Husband and I, it’s always a bit hard to tell if we’re splitting work equally, because we both tend to consider not only effort but pleasure or nuisance level as well, and our individual perceptions of that are not straightforward. So instead of just saying “You spend x hours and I spend y hours and they’re even (or not)” we look at how much we like or dislike those hours.

With cleaning, this has led to an imbalance in hours spent because Husband has a much lower cleanliness threshold than I do. It’s hard to make him clean a room constantly and in a timely manner when I can tell the disorderliness doesn’t disturb him at all. So I settle for asking him to help clean up sometimes, when it reaches a level that I dislike, and he doesn’t mind, although sometimes he’ll ask to do it later in the day. It’s like that for lots of chores – I can get him to split cleaning the dishes (no dishwasher) with me, but it requires that I not mind them sitting there for up to a day. Sometimes, I just feel like I don’t mind it as much – I don’t always see it as a nuisance (sometimes I even find it a bit relaxing), so why should I make him do it when it’s clear he really dislikes it? So I guess we maybe split the dishes like 10% him 90% me in the long run, unless I’m going through a stressful time and ask him to help with it more.

However, he does help out with things that he doesn’t enjoy doing. We don’t have laundry in our building so we drop it off a few blocks away and pick it up the next day or two. We agree for him to do it because neither of us likes it but it requires lugging a heavy cart up two flights of stairs on the way back.  He always makes the phone calls (deliveries, bill pay issues, troubleshooting, etc) and takes the trash out (down the stairs and around the building into the alley…fun).

He never cooks dinner for us both (maybe once a year he’ll make a tortilla pizza that he gets into), but I don’t cook when I don’t want to. He either makes himself something simple (his menu options are usually: ravioli; beans, cheese, tortillas; cereal and milk) or orders food. He’s a creature of habit so this is good enough for him. He never asks me what’s for dinner, and genuinely treats it as a special thing when I do make dinner, even when I do it as often as 2 or 3 times a week. But the rest of the time we just take care of ourselves for food. Sometimes if he wants something and I only sort of want it, I’ll agree to make it if he keeps me company in the kitchen, but he doesn’t help cook. We just talk while I do the work.

So our cake-cutting algorithm has led us to this, for most household chores: It likely won’t get done if I don’t ask for it to be done. Sometimes it’s done better and faster if I do it myself (cleaning bathroom, floors, dishes; cooking). But, he always acknowledges the work that I do, and would never, ever ask me to do any of it because he wanted it done. He says thanks when I do different things around the house, and I make sure to do the same for him, even when they’re small things. (i.e. Thanks sweetie for remembering to refill the ice cube trays!) This definitely helps us to avoid feeling unappreciated.

My point is, if you just look at what he does and what I do with regards to cooking and cleaning, it would seem uneven. But, we talk about it often enough, and he takes on some chores I don’t enjoy and runs various errands for us both. We’ve tried out arrangements where he did higher amounts of housework, but I was constantly being the household manager and it just didn’t feel right to me because it was adding stress. He always appreciates when I do do things and never minds or asks about them when I don’t do them, so up to now, this has worked for me.

A big thing is we don’t have kids yet, so who knows what will happen then?!

What is your household chore split up like, or if you live alone, what would you think is acceptable?

and…

We just learned that one of our deliveries was supposedly delivered on Thursday.  That means they left it outside our door again.  And this time, it had fun things in it, so it’s gone.  Woohoo!

Safety….or lack thereof

There is now a sign on the outside of our apartment building bearing the symbol of the NYC Police Dept, with a clip-art picture of a cat burglar, warning us that there have been numerous apartment break-ins recently in the area and that tenants should be extra careful and reported any suspicious activity to 911.  We found this sign the day after one of our packages which had been left outside our apartment door (which they are NOT supposed to do) was opened when I found it.  Good thing it happened to be the package with the $10 cake caddy instead of the much more exciting video games that we are expecting to be delivered.  This was not the first time a package had merely been left on our doorstep – even those that require a signature are sometimes merely left outside our door or with a random neighbor whom we’ve never met.  But this was the first time that our suspicion, that this wasn’t safe here, was confirmed.  And then the very next day I see the sign on the building’s door. Lovely.  Perhaps we’d better start looking for some renter’s insurance, so at least we’ll be insured against theft.

A strong desire…

So lately I’ve really been wanting a baby.  I’ve written about this before; it’s been particularly strong this month.  I think one reason might be because they refilled my birth control prescription with a different generic brand, and even though it’s supposed to all be the same, they do have different effects sometimes.  I’ve been having various unwell feelings all month (like nausea, sweating, and headaches) that can be explained by hormonal changes, so I suspect that this brand is affecting me.

In addition to the feeling that hormones are really affecting my body, a new couple-friend whom I met last spring and kept in touch with all summer is having a baby.  Like right now, as we speak.   I visited their apartment earlier this week, and when I walked into the bedroom and saw the empty crib and the baby swing and other stuff all ready for the baby’s arrival, I felt so emotional that tears came to my eyes.  Lately I think about what a wonderful father Husband will be and what a wonderful mommy I will be, and I just can’t wait to bring a little being into the world, our little being.

We are, of course, far from being able to afford it right now, as we are in more debt than just credit-card at the moment.  I get a stipend payment in September, and I shall be using it to pay overdue rent and rent for the whole semester too, so that will eat up most of the check.  Still, as depressing as it is to barely see the money, it’s good that it is enough to pay both our back rent and our rent through December, so we will feel much better once that is taken care of.  Living in NYC and a fairly minimal life, the rent is by far our largest expense.  All week I have been visiting and talking to new students who have just moved into apartments through the campus housing office, and although their apartments are cheap for the neighborhood, I can’t help but feel that since we struggle to pay our rent out here in our burrough of the city, we just couldn’t have afforded a one bedroom on campus.  Our rent is only 2/3rd that of the average rent for a one bedroom through campus housing, which in itself is probably only 3/4 of the rent of a one bedroom in the neighborhood that isn’t through campus housing.  Ah, to live in NYC.

Painting

Well, the bedroom is almost finished painting. Yesterday I painted a lot – I finished the trim, but ran out of trim paint for the last 3 cubic feet on the door. Then I got to painting the walls – 1/4 of them were still white, the rest needed more coats of paint. So now half the room is completely done, with 3 coats of the paint. We used Raspberry Truffle from Benjamin Moore. I actually used the new Aura paint, but that was because when I first went in, the salesperson told me that it was so good I didn’t need primer and I only needed one coat. He also sold me only one gallon even though I was sure I’d need more, because he said it goes on the walls so thin. I was skeptical, but he assured me, and so I took it and left. Well, 2 more gallons later and I’m out of paint and need more again. Moral of that story? Don’t believe salespeople when they make outrageous claims about how good the new paint is. One thin coat? Hah. Took 3 coats on each wall, and as I’m about out of paint again and not finished, in the end it’ll be about 3.5 gallons of paint for the whole room. My original calculations were that I’d need 3 gallons of paint plus tinted primer, so I guess in amount this isn’t that different, but the Aura is expensive and it’s been annoying that they keep telling me “No, you’ll only need this one gallon, more than that would be overkill” and then I have to make another trip to the store to get more paint, and if I had bought it all at once, it would have been mixed all into one container to ensure that the paint color exactly matches for the whole thing.

Here’s a picture of a corner that is finished, with part of the door in the picture, which is just about finished:

One thing to note, however, is that the amount of light in the picture is not the same as is naturally in the room; I had the lights on AND the flash, so the paint looks brighter than it actually appears in the normal lighting in the room. Still, you can see the walls are nice and even now. Once the furniture and other decorations are added, I’m pretty sure it will look awesome! (I was going to say it’ll be the best room in the apartment, but as this is a 1-bedroom, that’s not saying much.)

Painting

Well I haven’t posted in a few days, including over the weekend. One of the reasons is because I’ve been very busy painting the walls of our bedroom. I had never painted a room before so it’s been an interesting experience. I’m not done yet though, because I’ve been taking only a little at a time – like 3-5 hours a day. I did the ceiling, the walls above the above molding, the upper molding, and the window frame. Now all that’s left is the walls and the molding by the floor, and the door and door frame. It should be easier now though because I won’t need the stepladder nearly so much, maybe only for cutting in by the top molding. So far it looks pretty good, but I am looking forward to the whole room being done and getting the furniture, so we can see how it looks when it’s not so empty.

It’s been a rough week overall. Not that things have been going badly; they are about the same. But I’ve been very down. Yesterday I cried like three times, and it’s basically for no good reason. But it was really emotional crying, like I could have just choked on the depth of emotion, the depth of sadness, that I was feeling. It really hasn’t been much fun, but Husband has been a great companion to help me through the feelings.

I won’t be posting much this week as I’m going to visit people for the 4th of July and the rest of the week. Happy 4th of July to my American blogging friends!