I am feeling a little better today.
entries for the fair took an hour to decide and fill out the forms, 4 hours of finishing up projects, 3 hours to gather, label, and load, 2 hours to drop off (including drive time and I was going to the fair anyway 1.25 round trip), 2 hours to pick up (not going anyway) - 12 hours
so, next year I don't enter anything that is not already finished when the form goes in in June. - 8 hours
and I start gathering right away (spreading the gather, label, and load time out over three weeks)
since the 4 hours of drop off and pick up can only be reduced by about 15 minutes by entering one item, it seems silly not to enter as much as I want. It is more fun that way and I make a little money ($73 net this year, so about $6/hr).
yesterday I delegated the shopping, put the baked goods on the shopping list, and had dh pick up dinner. Nobody died. There is more trash and less nutrition, and the budget doesn't have much slack for that sort of thing, but nobody died. The world is still turning on it's axis.
hiring out the painting - anything I don't do on this project increases the time and/or cost. I agreed to paint. It was part of the planning. We have an initial construction loan - which is spent and 10% paid off. We have a line of credit which we are trying to use as little as possible. So less picking up dinner etc. means more money to work on the addition without tapping the line of credit and paying more interest.
Dh salary allows him to pay the construction loan and the minimum payment on the line of credit should we max it out without giving up all the monthly discretionary budget, but it would be very tight - (Netflix, monthly take out, decent groceries and an extra tank of gas for non essential trips) Whatever part of the discretionary budget is available each month gets set aside to avoid using the line of credit. By keeping my expenses to a minimum I am able to put an extra $500 a month toward principal on one of the loans (line of credit if it is open, construction loan if not) dh can't retire until the construction loan is paid off.
so me painting matters.
It takes just as long to feed one chicken. And one chicken becomes such a pet that your heart breaks when something inevitably eats it. At the beginning, I had 3 chickens. Elanore got trapped under a sandbox lid and died of heat. I cried for days. It was hard to forgive the careless child. I got a larger flock and stopped naming the chickens.
i will put the goats in the garden to clear it and eat the poison ivy in August when I am home more days to supervise.