cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuition After taking yesterday off, I'm all rested and ready to get back to building now. I'm starting to moderately flip out about Ida's tuition for next year. At her current school, tuition for what will be her new age group would be around 0,000 a year. No. Fucking. Way. So she has to start someplace new in the fall. At first we were hoping to send her to a local Waldorf school. It seems perfect for her. However, even that is about ,000. I can't come up with that much money either. I don't know what the fuck we're going to do. There's another school that Trish is going to visit on Friday that costs ,000. Which is how much we paid for Ida's tuition last year (this year a family member covered it as a one-time gift). The thing is that last year, a loaf of bread cost half of what it does now. Inflation has gone fucking crazy since back then. Everything in my household budget costs more than it did a couple of years ago, yet I'm making the same amount of money. So even though I could squeeze out ,000 for tuition 2 years ago, I can't do it now. This is, like, I might have to get a second job on the weekends or something. I'm sitting on a little pile of cash right now from my dividend check, but this still means that horrible financial trouble is brewing. I can't wait until she can start public school so I won't have to pay for tuition any more. When the baby gets old enough for pre-school, we might just have to pass on it. Find some kind of home-schooling group? I don't know. One thing that is absolutely certain is that we will not be having any more children unless things change financially in a major way. Ida keeps asking for a baby sister and Trish keeps dropping hints that she would be up for it. But no. In the first place, I would have, physically no place to put another kid. We are packed like sardines into this shit box of a house as it is. No closets. No extra bedrooms. I've got no place to put another kid. In the second place, it would fucking bankrupt me. Another baby would re-set the 5 year clock until the youngest kid starts regular school and Trish could start working again. Right now we're looking at 4 years. Ouch. The part about this tuition thing that hurts the most right now is that it happens to be the exact amount that I would be spending to have a foundation put in for a new house. If I can just get the foundation poured, then I can frame the house myself. I know I can. But I need a foundation to start working on. This fucking shit with the pre-school tuition is probably going to kick the new house away by another year. Which means another winter in this hateful shit-box of an uninsulated house that costs me around 00 a month to heat. I am more than a little tempted to just keep going as I build the workshop. Put in a bathroom and make the attic into a sleeping loft. Fully insulate the walls. Have this building serve as a very small but well-laid out house that we could comfortable spend the winter in without spending thousands of dollars on heating oil. This would be totally illegal, of course. I have no permits or anything for this thing to be a house or to get to the kind of size I'm talking about. But it is very tempting. What I am probably going to do is at least set this building up as an emergency back-up. Insulate it and put in baseboard electric heating along with the wood stove. I was planning on a little rainwater catchment system to fill a 55 gallon food grade barrel that will be up on a platform in a sort of cupboard in the corner of the room. Via gravity, this will supply a small sink. If things get bad next winter and we can't afford heating oil, I could set the thermostat in the main house down to 45 degrees. Just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. And we'd sleep in the workshop, which I will be able to heat with wood, which I can get for free. We'd use the bathroom in the main house but spend the rest of our time in the workshop where the temperature would be more comfortable. At 190 square feet, it will actually be a good bit larger than any single room in the main house. 10:44 - 2008-03-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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