Why did you buy that?

11 months later..

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:26:05 +0000

Oh boy! A year with a real income! Let’s see how we’re doing..

Paid down $9700 worth of student loans. All private loans are now dead and buried.

Saved up five months worth of expenses in the bank

Bought a $1100 car last March
Which as we all know, frequently turn out to be more like $3000 cars, in hindsight. Oh well. His name is Sheldon, and he is a 1988 Volvo 240 DL wagon.

I also learned a Very Important Lesson about getting a car throughly checked out by a mechanic before you take it on I-5. No one got hurt, but I was pretty terrified of driving up until a few months ago. I (mostly) fixed myself with the same logic I use for dog training..

Conditioning is some pretty strong stuff. This was my theory: Something scary happens, and you associate fear with a certain situation. You encounter a similar situation (or something that reminds your brain of it, whether it is something that is actually dangerous or not. Your brain is too busy being all “OMG SCARY!” to be logical about the whole thing. Like the dog drooling when the bell rings.)

You run away. The anxiety is gone as soon as you’re away from the scary thing. The fear is reinforced. This is negative reinforcement in the operant conditioning sense - you take something away (the fear) which reinforces the behavior (avoiding the scary thing.) The next time you see the scary thing, you have an even bigger fear response. Which gets reinforced yet again, because you run away from it, which relieves the fear. Repeat this enough, and you’ll end up with panic attacks (for some people at least, I think this is how agoraphobia starts.) I didn’t want to end up hiding in my house for the rest of my life (which was a distinct possibility.) So I started small.

Even though I was Very Scared, I drove to the grocery store down the street. Nothing happened. Then even though I was Very Scared, I drove a little further. Nothing happened. And then to work. And to the gas station. And to knit night. And then on the highway during the day in the right lane. And then at night. and in the rain. And then to the airport. And to the coast. And before I knew it, I was passing people on 217 on the way to Corvallis. If you go long enough without reinforcing a behavior, it will extinguish itself. I also bought myself a car GPS, which helped immensely, and worked on establishing some incompatible behaviors (like singing in the car.) So I am a huge clicker training nerd. However, it worked, and I’m immensely proud of myself.

Other things I did this year:

Cooked a ton of food in my kitchen.

Ate cake on an enormous boat.

Hung out with the very best dog in the whole wide world.

Hunted dinosaurs in Costa Rica

Played with vacuum tubes

Kapok! Also, don’t buy stuff

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:30:00 +0000

I may be the only person in the Portland area who starts yelling when they see that Kapok fiber yarn is now available on the market, but who can blame me. I lived in Ecuador for a year and a half, and had the opportunity to observe this lovely tree in the wild several times. I had wondered if the fiber it produces was spinnable but from my research (ok, from some Googling) it appeared that it needed to be mixed with at least 50% cotton for stability. I never imagined that it might be commercialized in yarn form one day. Until I walked into Twisted and saw this:

85% Cotton 15% Kapok

I’m curious to know where they source the Kapok and if it is harvested in a sustainable manner - the manufacturer’s web site says “grown on the equator.”

yay!

For now, I have plenty of yarn and fiber to keep me busy, but perhaps there is a Kapok sweater in my future.

I’d like to conclude with a revolutionary new personal finance method:

Hello world!

admin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:47:08 +0000

Although I recently graduated and was able to procure a great job, I have found it hard to shake the student mentality. My goal is to live on half of my income and pay my student loans off, as well as have an equal amount of savings in two years. I created this blog to track my progress and to ponder some of the more interesting things that I see available for purchase while I’m out and about.

spinning wheel

At the moment I have neither a car nor a TV, but I do have a lovely spinning wheel which I nabbed off of Craigslist for $100. Fiber arts can be about as economical or as expensive as you want to make them. Right now I’m working on spinning up a pound and a half of mystery oatmeal-colored wool and a chocolate brown alpaca fleece.