My company is kind of funny. The Red Cross is not usually on its approved charity list, however due to the recent disasters in China and Myanmar, they’ve approved donations to several relief organizations like the Red Cross and World Vision.

I live within blocks of the Red Cross and boyfriend lives within blocks of World Vision. It’s funny that way in DC. There’s a lot of non-profits around here. I could choose simply on the basis of who as offices closest to me.

Right now, my company will allow me to assign a one-time or ongoing paycheck deduction. I’m not sure what to do here. I could take my tax refund and send the money upfront. Or I could send a sustaining ongoing paycheck deduction for the rest of 2008.

The other thing is that the codes are divided between China and Myanmar, instead of general relief funds. I am torn. I don’t identify with south Asians at all. Being Korean, and actually KNOWING people from Sichuan, I’m inclined to give all my money to the China fund. But because of the political situation in Myanmar, I am afraid they will be forgotten if I don’t send money to them now. (Plus a friend of mine who serves on an international g33k charity has actually met Aung San Suu Kyi with only good things to say about her, and I admire her greatly for her efforts to bring freedom to Myanmar.)

Right now I am quietly giving $25 a month to a US charity doing local work. That won’t change. But the questions for me now are:

1. One country relief fund or two?
2. One-time donation or ongoing?
3. How much?
4. Which organization?

I’m spolied and I’m not inclined to give till it hurts. But I did get my federal tax refund last Friday and eventually a stimulus payment will arrive. I’m trying to balance out my desires to give with my desire to pay for the remodel and pay off a credit card. But then again, since this is coming out of a paycheck yet to come, it’s not even money I’ll see if I let them take it from me before I get paid.

I know I can talk myself into anything. In the process of writing this post, I answered question #1. Definitely two country relief funds. But now I need to decide between Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. If I do the MSF one, can I enter into Yarn Harlot’s Knitters Without Borders annual donation drive? (Terriblly selfish thought, I know.)

Usually I give myself a little allowance every week for lunch and general pocket money, about $100-140. I put gas on my debit card to track in Quicken. The allowance covers most of my weekly expenses, including a few dinners or beers. If I know I’m dining out, I’ll budget $140. If not, more like $100.

Now here’s the thing. I’ve had lots of cash leftover the last few weeks. It’s good, but it’s weird to have cash left over.

I’ve been going out a lot less and I guess it shows. Good thing because I need it.

As far as the construction goes, I budgeted about right. I am sure the final bill won’t be a killer. I’m holding about $4K in cash reserves, which is WAY more than I need, but should cover any overruns that might crop up.

The contractor won’t be done till next week when I’m gone for a wedding. So he’s not going to do the walk-through with me till after the holiday. Too bad for him, but good for me since I get to hang on to my cash all the more.

He’s definitely found a good deal on a granite countertop for me and I get to look at fixtures I might want. It’s nice to have a cameraphone and snap photos of what’s appealing. We’ve traded a few emails so I’m not constantly running around to view samples of things. I’m very clear about what I want and we always confirm by photograph. I think that’s very key with being satisfied with a construction job.

So far so good. It’s been about 2 months since I’ve been in my apartment. It’s been about 3 weeks since work started. One more week to go till it’s over, and another half week till I get to sleep in my own freakin’ bed.

First off, you have to remember, I don’t cook at home. I am staying with a friend while my apartment undergoes renovation. I feel funny about taking over his kitchen, so I don’t. I usually buy my lunch because otherwise, I’d never leave my desk, ever. It comes from working in a call center. You get measured on your availability to take calls so I almost never get up.

At any rate, not only do I need to pay for a lot of gas to get to my new job, but the insult to this injury is that there’s really no place to pick up lunch out there. I have to either walk, which would be ok if my allergies weren’t freaking out right now, or drive to someone place to get food.

Driving means hopping into the car and trolling the industrial park for its small delis for something tasty. Frankly, I’m starting to think I SHOULD pack my lunch, but I hate cold food and I still haven’t figured out the kitchen at the new gig. It took me 3 days to find the coffee and vending machines because no one showed them to me the first day and the second kitchenette I was using was so tiny there was nothing in it. Not even a plastic fork.

So I’ve surveyed the places to dine and I think the local supermarket, the furthest away from the office of the ready options, is the best place to eat for freshness and price. But it’s still not cheap. I’m going to start bringing my own diet sodas soon and I’ve already started keeping some snacks in my desk so I don’t freak out with hypoglycemia. I’ll have to plan things a lot better, but I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to get so busy every day that I’ll forget to eat let alone make a market run to stock up.

UGH. The motivation to be frugal is flying out the window. I miss the convenience of urban areas, hopping down the street and grabbing a pack of mints or a soda. POOH ON YOU, SUBURBS!

Lesson here? Adjust, Accommodate, Adjust. I hate a wrench in the works, but I must strive to remain ever flexible.

One ruined batch of tomato sauce = Lemons
Lemon, artichokes, pesto, pepper = Lemonade

There was spot of mold on the jar of the tomato sauce because we waited too long to finish it off. Too bad we didn’t notice it till after we started cooking. (ok, not me. Boyfriend.) With a pound of cooked pasta, I had to find an alternative topping but there was no parmesan cheese in the pantry. What’s a girl to do?

I scrounge the shelves and find a can of artichoke hearts and a lemon. I google “pasta lemon juice artichoke hearts” and find a recipe from Food Network. It looks pretty reasonable, but I can hear boyfriend futzing around in the kitchen. I don’t know where he got pesto from, but hey, that looks good!

I chop up the artichoke hearts up and juice the lemon. I saute them and put them on top of the pasta and pesto. A little too much lemon juice, but at least I had a vegetable for my dinner. I used the whole lemon instead of tossing out the rest of it or saving it and letting that also get moldy. I ground up some black pepper for some bite and tossed it on top. I took it off the heat when the hearts were warmed through but not browning. Not great, but ok. Good enough to eat.

A well-stocked pantry is key to rescuing dinner. I’m just lucky the shelves weren’t emptier else I would have had to order delivery or take out. Despite the rising price of grain products, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep a few jars and cans of this and that around.

One sentence: Inexpensive and extremely tasty vegetarian Chinese eats.

Admittedly, I didn’t eat vegetarian there. They were out of the veggie tempura I wanted so I went with Singapore Curry Noodles because good ones are hard to find on the east coast and I miss them from my lunch days in San Francisco.

I had the chicken satay appetizer and the noodles as the main course. The satay wasn’t the best. But my friend had the crispy tofu steak appetizer. They were nicely puffy and crispy. I loved them! My friend also had the General Tso’s Chicken, but with not-chicken ‘tofu’ chunks. But they were decidedly not tofu. Soy-based maybe, but not bean curd. They were fibrous and meaty, and mighty delicious. Very satisfying with some fresh steamed broccoli in a satisfying bright green color and deliciously crisp.

The noodles were good. The dish is made of very thin noodles, a little chicken, shrimp and egg, and lots of onion, but sadly it wasn’t quite as curry as I like them. That’s ok because it was only my Plan B order. The main thing is that this restaurant does vegetarian Chinese and the price for two appetizers and two entrees was about $23 excluding tip. Not too bad for a meal in Georgetown.

Though I am raving about the vegetarian food, they will make any of their dishes with meat or soy products. And if it’s not on the menu, just ask. We didn’t try asking about thousand layer tofu crisp, but I really miss that dish from Kowloon in San Francisco and I might actually ask for it next time.

ps- This place is a few doors down from The Rhino, THE PLACE in DC to watch the Red Sox. (My old G’town roomie was a BC grad and loved going to the Rhino to watch games.) You can’t miss it. They have a new BoSox banner hanging on M Street. Gotta love it!

My mom really liked her present. It was the best $25 present I’ve ever bought for her. She bounced around trying on her necklace and pulling outfits out of the closet to match.

What a relief! I always undergo stress when I’m picking out her presents.

The only downside is that my mom had to work all day at the store. She’s short staffed and working a full shift all day long.

You know, everyone tells you must add an extra 10% on top of your estimate on any construction project to get the final cost.

Of course, my bathroom remodel is going poorly and it’s sucking up my 10% overage.

There was some concrete under the tile in the bathroom that’s coming down. Unfortunately, to get an even surface on the wall, the concrete has to be removed. Don’t ask me why in the 1950’s they put up concrete halfway up the walls, but they did. All the extra labor hopefully will not be a huge amount more, but I have a feeling it will cost me another 20% on top of the estimate.

I wanted to have a special countertop cut for me so I can have a shelf over the toilet, just like I had in the original bathroom. However, it has a 10-day lead time for the order, which would mean I’d be out of my apartment for over almost 2 months. The contractor thinks he can get me a light grey granite countertop cut in the same shape out of scrap material from his usual granite supplier. It will only cost me $100 more but will take 3 days instead of 10. Is that worth it to me? You bet. It’s been over a month since I’ve slept at home and I’m cranky.

But things got a lot worse. The contractor had a drywall guy come in and they put in the ceiling piece early in the week. They came back the next day and the tub was full of water and the new piece was soaked. Apparently, there’s another leak coming from the unit above mine. ARGH.

I don’t know how all this is going to play out, but why do I feel like it’s going to cost me more money and time, no matter what happens?

Hate the data it contains.

As someone with a professed love for visual representations of data, I was looking at this post by real estate analyst Jonathan Miller at his real estate blog, The Matrix.

I didn’t have time to read his analysis, but scroll down and look at the maps of the US. Note the dates of the data (always important) and then look at what the maps show. I’m kind of amazed at what’s going on around the country. The data seems to have been gathered over the last 4 years, but the data display is interesting. It’s kind of frightening what’s expected of consumers trying to buy their own home in many metropolises. Did we have to piggyback our mortgages? In doing so, did we create a false demand pressure not truly representative of the price of the real estate? Of course we did, but the bubble markets in all the press have related correlated data to go with it in terms of foreclosure trends, etc. Just take a look!

As a rule, I eat meat daily and would never considering being a vegetarian. However, there are benefits to eating less meat for three reasons.

1. It’s better for your health. I started cutting back on red meat on the advice of a dermatologist. I had very bad acne in college and he told me to abstain from beef because of the synthetic hormones which might cause my acne to be worse. (Stress on ‘might’, but I had nothing to lose.) Plus there are added benefits to cutting out meats like lowering your fat intake and cholesterol counts.

2. It’s good for the wallet. Meat is expensive. Pound for pound, tofu is kind of expensive too if you get the organic stuff, but let’s face it, when you’re looking at entrees on a restaurant menu, the vegetarian options are always cheaper. As it is, at the Korean wholesale place, I get them for $1.50 a block (about 14 ozs).

3. It’s good for the environment. Most corn in the US is actually used as animal feed for the animals you like to eat most. I read somewhere that it takes like 16 lbs of grain to make 1 lb of beef. It also takes a lot of water and fertilizer to make 1 lb of grain, so any quantities of those inputs have to be multiplied by 16. You can reduce your carbon footprint quickly by cutting meat from your diet.

I’m not ever going to give up all meat unless my doctor says I have to. But I’ve been eating more meatless entrees, or halving the portion of meat I do eat. Consider trying a meatless meal once or twice a week. Track your grocery spending. You might find you’re saving money. (Just be mindful of your cheese intake. That kind of negates #1 and #3.)

I’m super excited. Even though I have to spend a lot of money on gas for my new engagement, I am excited because this office is insanely casual. There’s some manual work going on there and some of the staff wears jeans and *ugh* flip-flops. I hate flip-flops with a passion, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that the other consultants on my team tolerate jeans, sneakers and polo shirts.

I have noticed that most of my management chain are South Asian and tend to wear more formal attire, without going to a full-on suit. That sends me a signal, while it’s nice to be casual, don’t go TOO far.

While I don’t plan on wearing sneakers and jeans daily through the summer. It’s nice to know that I can and no one will get mad. I still plan on wearing a dress shirt and khakis Monday through Thursday, and jeans on Friday with dressy shoes. I have never felt that it was ok to wear sneakers on-site.

I’m so happy about all this. I was so fretful earlier when I first got this consulting job. The first client site was so formal and I felt a lot of pressure to upgrade my wardrobe and buy some suits. But now I don’t need them until I return to a formal client site. I can dry clean my suits and put them into storage till October. If I’m lucky, this gig will last a while and I won’t have to spend too much money. (Though I’m getting fat enough to warrant some new khakis again. Sigh. Must diet to avoid spending money.)