MoneyWell Edges Ahead of iBank in my personal OSX Financial Software Race

It looks like I might need a separate category for financial software, or in MoneyWell's case, a bucket, but I went ahead and bought a license for the MoneyWell program I've been using.

The more I looked at it -- and yes, my kids will be back next week so I won't be sitting home, eating ice cream, playing with financial software, and blogging about it -- the more it made better sense as a program that allows you to manage the flow of your financial life.

It's an engaging tool for budgeting, and that's what I need.

It is a little hard to let go of keeping track of the level of detail I'm used to, but really, there's no reason to keep track of payroll deductions, etc. They're constant, and having that information in your financial software doesn't really allow you to manage your financial life better. The bucket system is intentionally simple. They are planning to introduce tags in the future to let you keep track of a little deeper layer of detail, but the more I think about what the program does, the happier I am with it.

OSX Finance Software Revisited: iBank versus Moneywell

For the time being, iBank has won my personal contest for OSX financial software. I was beta testing Financial Life for Mac, but the beta expired, and a popup box popped up saying, "check for updates, otherwise there is a new version available on the web," or something like that. The "check for updates" menu item, however, was grayed out. When you close the popup menu, the beta closes as well, so you are unable to check for updates. That's no way to treat a beta tester, even if its just some insignificant, carfree, beekeeping blogger. On top of that, Quicken pushed the release date back again, from this summer to this Fall. Enough is enough. My Quicken for Mac 2007, for some reason, also quit downloading my credit card spending information. I kept getting an error message. With the online feature on the old Quicken becoming crippled, I forked over the $60 for iBank. Financial software has really helped keep our finances in balance. The expense, to me, is worth it.

iBank works well, and it connects to the iPod Touch, right now through a web app connected to Mobile Me, but they've submitted an iPod Touch/iPhone app to Apple. Once that is out, you can use you iPod Touch to record your expenses even when you are not connected to the internet. That shouldn't be an issue with the iPhone, except that it sounds like AT&T has a few holes in their coverage area.

The software, however, is not perfect. Most of my complaints pertain to the aesthetics. There is an annoying animated rolling-into-place with the charts. (I don't know why it annoys me -- it might be because the jerky rendering makes me worry about the stability of the program -- but it does). Reports are hard to get to, (you access them through charts), and you can't specify time periods for your reports. All reports are in a standard twelve month format. And the graphics are just clunky. The income/expense graph, that you access by clicking on the "through time" button on the chart is made up of very thick bars that abut each other. With the current release, they placed the expense bar on the bottom of the graph, so you can no longer tell, at a glance, if your income is keeping ahead of your expenses. The charts just split down into smaller and smaller slices. In Quicken for Mac, clicking on "other" brings up another chart. In iBank, it just reveals smaller slices, so you can't really tell what those slices are. That makes the chart seem more like an inconsiderately designed afterthought. It's not really useful for looking at your spending in your smaller categories.

The budgeting feature in iBank is also very rudimentary. You can't plan for changes during the year to your monthly expenditures. (Our utilities vary from $25 a month in the summer to around $100 a month in the winter). And two months out of the year, there is an extra pay period. You can designate income as "every two weeks," but it just gives you a higher average monthly amount. It's basic, and a little bit annoying because of that.

Other small things that annoy me keep cropping up. You can't perform calculations in the amount field. There's no calendar view. You can set the program to backup the database automatically, but only at startup, and it ties up the software for a couple of minutes. It would make more sense to me to backup the database at shutdown -- then your changes would be automatically backed up. There's also the fact there is no "restore" command that I can find. It looks like you have to manually retrieve and unzip the database from Mobile Me. To have a backup but not a restore command just seems sloppy to me. I keep reading that reconciling is more of a chore than in other programs. I haven't reconciled an account, so I can't report on that.

So my positive review for iBank boils down to this: It works. It downloads transactions the way it should. It allows you to enter transactions on an iPod Touch and synchronize them with your computer.

Do I enjoy using iBank, (all questions about the sanity of enjoying financial software aside). No, I can't say that I do right now. A large part of the blame falls on the program's poor visual design, but as noted, there are small functional issues that might possibly be addressed in future releases. I don't know if the aesthetics will ever improve. I imagine it looks the way the software writer wants it to look, and I am sure it is beautiful to him. I recommend they hire a designer. Hey, maybe I could make a living as a software aesthetics consultant!

Close on the heels of iBank, and possibly overtaking it for me, is MoneyWell. I'm running the test version right now. They claim to be working on an iPod Touch/iPhone app, but I haven't tracked down when they expect to release it.

Moneywell is much nicer, to me, visually. It's also focussed around budgeting, replicating the renowned envelope system. In MoneyWell's case, your categories are represented as virtual buckets on the left side of the screen. You allocate your budgeted amounts to those buckets, and when your income comes in, it flows into the buckets. You can see, at a glance, when you open the program, how much money you have left to spend in your buckets per category. That, to me, is the main reason I use financial software. The fact the bucket tips over if you empty it out seems a little cutesy, but it's in a way I enjoy but would never admit in public. Yes, this is financial software that's fun! The amount in your bucket also automatically carries forward to the next month, and you can reallocate amount the buckets if you have a bigger expense in one area. (You could send money from the savings bucket to the financial software bucket, for example, if you have a tendency not to remain faithful to one brand of software). You can also specify different amounts for different months.

The report function still seems a little rudimentary -- it goes straight to printing but you can, of course, choose a PDF preview rather than to print -- but at least the "report" button is right there on the toolbar and not buried in charts as it is in iBank, and you can specify a date range.

Beyond that, I haven't used MoneyWell much. I have seen some reviews that say they don't handle investment accounts well, but "investment" is a choice in the account setup. If I explore further, I'll report back. (I checked. It doesn't seem to support Portfolios. You can enter a dollar amount in a retirement account, but you can't keep track of shares owned and share prices).

I keep returning back to the question of how I use financial software. At a certain point, the number of categories you have begins to eclipse the usefulness of having categories. At the simplest level, is splitting everything into wants, needs, and savings. I keep tending toward a minute accounting. Accounting for Laura's paycheck falls into this tendency. I itemize all the payroll deductions, though that information is not important -- state tax, federal tax, medicare, worker's comp, etc. They're all consistent amounts that we have no control over, and they appear on the W-2 at the end of the year. "Why," I ask myself, "don't I just enter the amount of take home pay as salary?" That would work for the purposes of banking and budget keeping, but I have some strange inner compulsion to have our banking software match the pay stub. The same type of debate rages for me as to whether I need to include our retirement accounts in my financial software. It's not money we use. I can watch the value go up and down, but I can't do much about it. But since I track the money going from the paycheck, I also need to track the mutual fund purchases, and so on. While I have a complete financial picture, down to a very detailed level, I also spend a lot of time at it. It feels good to keep all the details straight, but I wish, at the same time, I could keep it simpler. MoneyWell has a Mortgage/Rent bucket as a default. When I pay the mortgage, I don't think "I'm writing a check for principal, interest, and escrow," I think "I'm paying the mortgage." But I keep track of the details. I track the escrow account. I track the taxes and insurance paid out of escrow. I make sure I have the mortgage interest entered correctly every month. I wish I could just lighten up and lump it all in one bucket.

It would be nice, with future releases of MoneyWell, to have a deeper layer of minute information, (Taxes:state, Taxes:federal, Self Employment:Beekeeping:Bee Removal, Self Employment:Beekeeping:Honey Sales, etc) that would appear in the bucket list in simpler buckets, (Taxes, Self Employment, etc.). Right now, my impression is that MoneyWell is a simpler financial software package, and my impression may be a wrong one from the small amount of time I've spent with the program. Particularly, as someone who is tracking small business income and expenses I want a detailed level of accounting, but I would like the surface appearance to remain more simple.

For now, I'll keep using iBank, but I'm going to continue testing MoneyWell. It might ultimately serve my needs better. It certainly is nicer to look at, and performs the important job of budgeting infinitely better.

Quicken, I'm abandoning as a matter of principle.

Pandora Internet Radio

I wanted to put in a plug for Pandora. I was searching for streaming radio apps for the iPod Touch, and I stumbled across Pandora Internet Radio. It taps into the Music Genome Project. You type in a song, artist, or composer in the search box, and Pandora builds a radio station around the attributes identified with that search item. I've been able to listen to lots of music I love but no longer own. The iPod app, at least, stores your "stations." It's easy to get carried away with it. I have the following stations: Pete Townshend, Gerry Mulligan, Sarah Vaughan, Begin the Beguine, Yma Sumac, Bert Jansch, Duke Ellington, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, and I'm just getting started.

My only complaint is that some of the stations created play songs that are a little too narrowly defined. There is a "Quick Mix" button on the iPod app that stirs things up a bit.

I'm not sure how they license the music that is broadcast, and I'm not sure what their business model is. There is a little banner ad on the screen, but I've never paid any attention to those banner ads.

Still, it's worth logging in and checking out. Type in "Indigo Girls" Nora!

Cash, Credit or Debit

Wisebread had an open thread on the cash, credit, debit debate recently. I've been struggling with those issues myself.

In the past three years or so, I've been abandoning the checkbook in favour of using the debit card. The debit card is just so darn quick. I am acutely aware of holding people up when I'm writing a check at the grocery store. That probably goes back to seventh grade when I had a social studies teacher, Mr. Manus I believe, who would write notes on the board and then erase along behind himself. He also gave timed essay tests. My handwriting has always been slow. Maybe it's because I taught myself to write before elementary school, and I don't follow the standard way of handwriting letters. Or maybe I'm just slow. Whatever. I just know I never was able to complete timed essay tests, and I made bad grades, in spite of the fact that I'm a fair writer, and I knew the material. At any rate, whenever I'm standing there at the checkout counter writing a check, I feel like I'm trying to finish a timed essay test rather than merely purchasing groceries. I hate it.

So I've been using the debit card for almost everything. The argument for the debit card is you're less likely to buy that $75 bottle of wine because, what the hell, you won't be paying for it until next month, and who knows, maybe a television deal based on the blog will come through by then.

I'm hyper-paranoid about money. As far as I can remember, I've never bounced a check or missed a bill. I don't know what put that particular fear-of-God into me, but it's there.

The problem with the debit card, of course, is that the money is siphoned straight out of your checking account, and this siphoning happens almost immediately. If someone were able to use your debit card number, then the money would be gone from your account, and the onus would be on your to cover your expenses until you proved it was a case of fraud and the bank put the money back in your account. Is this likely to happen? After all, you generally have to use your PIN with your debit card. The answer to that, for me, is "I don't know."

This spring, some fraudulent charges appeared on one of our credit cards. The fraud alert system caught it. The situation was a little bizarre. One of the items fraudulently charged, a Nokia communications device, showed up at the house. What's even more bizarre is that I looked into the Nokia stuff many months ago because of a post on Kent Peterson's blog. There was also a charge from Skype, and a charge from some freight company. Could it have been some crazy internet error rather than out and out fraud? Who knows? But my account was charged over a thousand dollars that I had not, personally, charged. If it had been my debit card number, that would have been money out of our account. If you've been imagining me with tens of thousands of dollars in my checking account, god bless you, but you're wrong. That would have been a debit card disaster.

So, I've been using the credit card a little bit more. I do feel more protected with the credit card. Are credit cards an evil plot to get people to spend more money than they make. Yes. Have I spent more money than I make in the past? Maybe a little bit, but I've never been too bad with my credit cards. Currently, we haven't carried a balance for several years. But I'm paranoid about credit. I'm not perfect. I like to eat out. I want a new laptop. It's been a while since I've been to Key West, and the winters here are so cold. We could homeschool in the Florida Keys during the winter thanks to the fact our credit equals or exceeds our annual income, and then I could write a book about it and pay it all back before paying too much interest! Oh the rationalizations I can create!

But I don't do those things because I'm paranoid about debt. Still, I don't like paying credit card bills, even when they are for things I would normally buy, because it feels like I'm paying for stuff twice.

So, I'm swinging back toward cash. I've long claimed that cash just flows through my fingers like water, but I think I might actually be more responsible with cash now that I'm 43 and not 16. Many people claim that using cash cuts down on the amount you spend. I honestly don't know if that applies to me. If I have a pocketful of cash, I feel like I'm ready to head downtown for breakfast and maybe a spin through the thrift stores. But I track my expenses more closely than I ever have, so maybe cash is the way to go. At any rate, the Farmer's Market is up and running on my end of town, and my honey sales pull us into the cash economy. Last week I sold eleven pounds of honey -- all I had -- and I should have about the same amount this week, or a little more. A few of the hives are set to produce a lot of honey soon. Other bee colonies are still focussing on raising babies. That's a little bit of a problem. I'm going to have to split them and sell the splits. While I have honey flowing through the Farmer's Market, I have cash flowing through our personal finance picture, so we buy most of our groceries with the honey cash and build up our checking and savings from Laura's salary.

How do other people keep their spending on track? Do you use your debit cards without worry? Do you use credit cards responsibly? Does cash keep you on the straight and narrow? Money and economics are such strange issues.

Indulging in Camp

After the five-hundredth, "I'm bored," from Zeb, I broke down and enrolled both Sadie and Zeb in the day camp at the local recreation center. They are there from 7:30 to 5:00 every day this week. I've been able to go out and check the bees without interruption, go down to Java Joe's to read, and go grocery shopping without having to field requests for ice cream and jelly beans.

I really needed the break. More importantly, the kids are having a great time, though Zeb is a little wiped out and cranky by the time I pick him up.

I suppose it's not the most frugal thing to do with the summer. The cost is $135 each for each week. I'm thinking about adding one more week for them if they want it, and if I can swing dropoff and pickup times by bike, I might enroll Sadie during Zeb's week of science camp and Zeb for Sadie's two weeks of circus camp at the end of July. We'll have to have a family discussion to decide if that's a good use of our savings account. If the bees get busy on the honey, the summer honey profit will just about cover it, and I think that would be a good destination for my beekeeping money.

Boring, Boring, Boring Summer

Summer’s coming on, and once again, I find myself struggling to balance being an at-home-parent with also being a beekeeper and a writer. I would love to spend long mornings hanging out and making notes downtown, or sketching leaves by the river, or simply reading and daydreaming. That’s how I imagined my adult life, though now, with kids, it seems more and more naive. I was in highschool when John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came out, (or maybe I was about to enter highschool, was he shot in ‘80?). I have various images that I draw my writer’s fantasy life from. I remember one photograph of Leonard Cohen with a cigarette and a coffee cup in a diner somewhere. In another corner of my mind is Jack Kerouac lugging a suitcase full of manuscripts, John Gardner on his motorcycle in his leather jacket. There’s Edward Abbey in his study, with a black cat wobbly poster and his typewriter behind him . . .

Somehow, I never became dedicated enough to be a hardcore writer. Or maybe I’m not enough of an egomaniac, or perhaps I just don’t have the skill set I need to carve out the time it takes to write. I haven’t completely given up, mind you, but I’m trying to shift my perception of what a writer is around from my adolescent understanding, though I did recently see “Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen,” which was made while he was still making the rounds as a poet, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. That’s still in line with my adolescent, “that’s what I want to be when I grow up,” understanding. And a part of me still wants that late night bar and coffee shop, bare hotel room, sort of writing life, but it’s not the direction my life has gone in, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever find myself with a house on a Greek island or a room at the Chelsea Hotel.

I am lucky enough to be a paid writer at this point. I just had an article come out on honeybees in a children’s newspaper. It was nice to see it in print, and I did get paid for it, though they did some sloppy editing resulting in some false information, and they got my middle initial wrong. The same publication wants me to write an article about being carfree.

Somehow, that’s where I have ended up. I’ve done three unusual things in my life: I’m an at-home-dad, a beekeeper, and carfree. That’s my entry into the writing market, (and into the blogosphere). I need to start thinking about how I can parlay that into more serious writing, and to do that, I need to learn how to bring a little more balance into my writing in general. That means more writing and less sitting around worrying about it. Writing is work. If I try to write about “darker” issues, I just end up spewing bile about how hard it all is, and no one wants to read that. I am in a humorous position, and I have put myself there, and I can learn to write about the darker issues with the humour it deserves. And who knows, maybe I can even work my way back into fiction and poetry.

Right now, though, it’s the same old stress. I wake up, have my coffee and read the paper. Then Zeb wakes up. I read to him for an hour or two. We have been reading the Peter Pan prequels that Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson wrote. They are reasonably good, and I enjoy reading them. It’s a welcome break from our years-long stint of reading all seven of the Harry Potter books over and over. Right now, we’re reading one of the Molly Moon books, which isn’t too bad, but it still tends to put me to sleep after about an hour. So I read to him for an hour or so, and then his sister wakes up. They all eat different things for breakfast, but they pretty much fix their own stuff, so that’s not such a big deal.

Then I start thinking, “hey, I need to check the bees. I haven’t been over to the Colin-and-Michelle beeyard for two weeks. I need to make a split from the full hive over there or they’ll swarm. Maybe I can sneak into my office and read a bit. Should we go to the pool at eleven? Maybe we can all bike down to the outdoor pool. Man, this house is a f***ing mess. (I’m not being delicate, I just want to avoid certain Google searches). Maybe I should start working on writing about being carfree. Should I make another pot of coffee? Man, there’s a lot of dog shit in the back yard, and the rabbit's litter needs to be changed. Look at all those dirty dishes. I really need to check my bees here too. The farmer’s market starts in two weeks, do I have enough jars? I should scrub the toilets and walk the dogs.” Other at-home-parents know what I mean. And all that time, Zeb is following me around, “Dad, play tickle monster. Papa, read to me. Papa, bring me a glass of soymilk. I’m going to melt candles on the stove Papa and use them to make a sculpture.” I try to accommodate him a little bit, and I snap at him a little bit.

“Why the hell does it feel like I’m the only one who cleans things up around here!” I scream to no one in particular, the kids being involved in playing Dizzywood. “Man, I can’t even write a blog entry,” I think, “the kids are always on the damn computer.”

And I go about being the only person cleaning up.

Or I reach a critical mass of worry about the bees and I go out and take care of them hoping the kids don’t get into too much trouble while I’m away. I do carry a cell phone now, though I seldom use it.

My daughter tries to read, and when she settles down to read, I make a little Bialetti pot of coffee and sit down to try to read or write myself. Then Zeb, goes over next to Sadie and starts shouting, “Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me? Sadie will you play with me?” Then she screams, “Zebbie, leave me alone, I’m reading!” Then Zeb will shove her chair, and she’ll hit Zeb, and I’ll have to put down my book and straighten everything out, which usually means that I play with Zeb while Sadie reads. It must be so hard on him to be the only hyper-social person in a family of readers. I try, harder than it might seem in my writing, to take care of him and put aside my own needs to take care of his. Theoretically, I’ll still be here after he has grown up and gone off on his own. I’d rather accomplish nothing in the next ten years and have my son look back on his life with fondness, than publish a Pulitzer prize winning novel and have my son remember his life as one of dreary solitude and a cranky Papa.

I am, however, often a cranky Papa, but I try my best.

I work best on an Entire Day basis. This day is the day I’m beekeeping. This day is the day I’m taking the kids swimming and off to the park and out for an Italian soda and maybe a bus ride downtown. This day is the day I spend sitting in the easy chair reading a novel. This day is the day I spend rifling through cookbooks in the library looking for easy Thai recipes. This day is the day I work on poetry. This day is the day I train the dogs.

I don’t know why I work that way, but that’s the way I’m hardwired. It’s not particularly compatible with parenting. I can announce, “this day is the day I spend reading,” all I want, and I’m still going to get interrupted every five minutes.

So I end up with “This day is the day I want to spend reading, but the kids are here staring at me and fighting with each other.” So we exist in a kind of stalemate. Lately, I’ve been trying to spend the morning doing stuff with the children, (except when it’s a beekeeping day, which is best done in the morning when it is still cool), and then spend the afternoon doing my own stuff. That kind of works. They do, however, like to use their hours on the computer in the afternoon, so I can’t sit down and do the introverted computer things I need to do, like write, do our accounting, order honey jars, or just waste time on the internet, though I have heeded Nora’s warning and have stayed off Facebook. I’ve been thinking about ordering another laptop -- I’m forever snarking at the kids for getting this white MacBook covered in dirt -- but I would much rather have the money in the bank. But I end up hovering around in the afternoon cleaning and fetching drinks and grumbling about how I’m not a f***ing servant.

Soon, however, I can tell that the difficulties will come to an end. They’re at an age where they’re beginning to go out into the neighborhood on their own to play with friends. In four years, my daughter will be a teenager. In nine years, they will be eighteen and sixteen. In a little over ten years, they will both, hopefully, be in college. That’s mind boggling. Are they really going to grow from these two lovable kids who are fighting with each other behind my back and grumbling because I’m writing and they want to watch a movie on the laptop into college students?

So I’m taking deep breaths and trying not to shout and taking them swimming and playing frisbee in the park in the mornings and taking them to the library and overlooking all the cardboard they’ve cut from the cardboard boxes to make windows. I’m still sick and tired of hearing how bored everyone is as soon as I start to focus on something that is not THEM. I’m tired of the shouting and the hitting and the maniacal laughter and the loud whistling and the constant complaints about the food in the house.

Other parents have lived through it though. I suppose I will too.

Technology I Like

I know that I spend a lot of time critiquing technology on this blog. I'm still not sure, for example, that Dizzywood is the best use of my children's computer time. Computers can be a good tool, but so often, we, myself included, just pour our time into them to no good end.

Before our trip, however, I bought an iPod Touch, fully expecting to experience buyer's remorse. But my mother-in-law wanted to buy the kids iPods to keep them entertained on the plane, and when I was buying theirs, I went through all those rationalizations you go through before buying something expensive that you would normally scoff at.

I thought it would help me keep in email touch with everyone, and it served that role well. I also have all my CD's loaded onto it. I've slowly been transferring my CD's to iTunes, and recently, because our CD player is on the fritz and our turntable's stylus is broken, I've been using iTunes to listen to music. I've successfully avoided MP3 players for several years in an effort not to put all my eggs into the home computing basket. iTunes, however, has grown on me. I miss having access to it when my kids are watching a movie or using the internet. Now, I can plug the iPod into the stereo system, and I'm good to go.

The iPod is really a mini-computer. On our trip, it's most important function was keeping track of our expenses. I downloaded QuickBank from the app store. There's lots of finance apps out there, and I'm going to avoid the temptation to try all of them out. Since the applications typically cost .99, it's tempting to download them. (Yes, I paid .99 for a virtual Koi Pond). QuickBank does what I needed it to do -- it kept track of our expenses and it exported them to Quicken when we returned.

I can use the iPod touch to read blogs, check email, and track expenses. That's pretty much what I use the laptop for. Because of its size, however, it also can serve purposes that would seem silly to use the laptop for. It makes a great digital alarm clock when it's plugged in. I bought a .99 white noise generator, loaded Shakespeare's complete works for free, and bought the "Classics" application for .99. That's a lot of free or cheap reading for the plane. I also loaded a free meditation timer. Until now, I've just set the stove timer. It would have seemed silly to use the laptop for a meditation timer. Having the iPod Touch next to me doesn't seem so out of scale.

I do have to restrain myself when it comes to purchasing music. I had pretty much fallen into not listening to much music over the past fifteen years or so. Occasionally, I would put some of our old Neil Young albums on the record player, or maybe even a thrift-store purchased Carole King, but I haven't really been excited about music.

Now, I find that I want to buy some of the albums I used to own but have lost along the way. And I've bought a few albums I didn't even know were out there, like Donovan's album of the songs from the movie "Brother Sun, Sister Moon." (That's a good one). One thing I wish the iTunes store would do is give you credit for the individual songs you buy if you decide to purchase the entire album later. Maybe there's some setting like that somewhere -- I haven't looked too far into it. As I understand it, if I buy a couple of songs off, say, Pete Townshend's Another Scoop, and then think "hey, I should just get the whole album," then I end up paying the full amount for the whole album. That's not right. And if you buy an album that has an exact duplicate of a song that you already own, then the computer should give you credit for the song you already own. I don't think iTunes does that.

Edited to add: I looked into it, and there is a "Complete my Album" button on the iTunes store, so you do get credit for songs you buy. You can't, however, order say, Bob Dylan's Collected Works and get credit for all the albums you already have.

So I have to admit that this is a piece of technology that does seem to simplify life. It serves multiple functions in a very small package. I could back up two whole shelves of CD's to two DVD's. That frees up a lot of space.

So, in spite of myself, I'm now on the iPod bandwagon.

Maryland/Virginia Cousins

Virginia Cousins
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

In the beginning of May, we flew east to visit relatives. Laura stayed behind because of her massage school program. We went to visit her family anyway, and here are all the nephews and nieces -- plus Zeb and Sadie -- on that side of the family. May is not the best time to leave the honeybees to their own devices, but I wanted to get down to my own family for my birthday on May 21. I haven't celebrated my birthday with my family since 1986.

It was good to see Maryland in the spring. We're usually there in December when we do visit.

We spent a couple of days visiting the Smithsonian. That seemed like a good homeschool actiivity, and the kids turned out to be at an age where they really enjoyed being there. I couldn't read through everything as I would have liked, but I'm sure the exposure was good for the kids. Zeb particularly liked the rocks and minerals in the Museum of Natural History. Sadie loved the mammals. I wanted to look at the dinosaurs. We'll have to go back.

From here, we rented a car and drove down the coast. We started with a stay in Chincoteague, VA. We went out to Assateague Island to see the wild ponies. Sadie had read Misty of Chincoteague. It seemed like a good homeschool plan.

We didn't get near any of the ponies, however. We saw a few from a distance. Zeb was most interested in swimming at the beach, which we did for a little while. Then we hit the hiking trail that was supposed to take us near the ponies. We didn't see any ponies, but a large group of mosquitoes chased us around the trail. They drove Zeb absolutely crazy. He was screaming and flailing his arms as we made our way around. Near the end of the trail, we ran into a couple on bikes who had a can of OFF which they shared with the kids. They told us the ponies had been moved to another part of the island because of a broken fence. So much for the pony part of homeschooling. Our next stop was Kitty Hawk.

In the Outer Banks International Hostel

In the Outer Banks International Hostel
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

I thought it would be fun and frugal to stay in hostels when we could. The Outer Banks International Hostel was a pretty nice place. The have both rooms and camping. I'm not sure if it's that much less expensive when you're traveling with a family, (our room was $65 for the night), but it was a fine adventure.

Zeb Operating the Controls of the Wright Flyer Replica

Zeb Operating the Controls of the Wright Flyer Replica
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

The park ranger at the Wright Brother's Memorial allowed Zeb to operate the controls of the Wright Brother's Flyer replica. Both of the kids went through the junior ranger program, and they are now Junior Flight Rangers. Zeb really wanted to go to the beach, but I was determined to have a homeschooling component to our trip down the coast.

Playing in the Ocean Near Kill Devil Hill

Playing in the Ocean Near Kill Devil Hill
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

After I forced Zeb to endure the junior ranger program at the Wright Brother's Memorial, we went to the beach on the Outer Banks. The ocean seemed a little rough, and it was still a little cold out, so I didn't go in, and I limited the kids to knee-deep water. It amazes me how much fun my kids can have in the ocean on a cold, cloudy, windy day.

When we came down the Kill Devil Hill public access walk, we found a wedding taking place. I didn't take any photos of the wedding party, but I was tempted to. There was something beautiful about a wedding on the beach on a wild stormy day.

At the Boathouse of the Meher Spiritual Center

At the Boathouse of the Meher Spiritual Center
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

Here we all are at the boathouse of the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, our last stop before we headed inland from the coast to see my mother. The center is an amazing 500 acres of pristine land in the midst of really outrageous development. It's officially in North Myrtle Beach. I had not been there since I left South Carolina for the southwest in 1986. North Myrtle Beach seems to have developed along the same lines as Myrtle Beach. It's a nightmare of tourist traps. It's so nice that there are still 500 acres that are virtually untouched. Much of it is wetland behind the dunes, and the boathouse is on Long Lake. We went out rowing, and saw the alligators that live there. Sadie became very nervous once we spotted the alligators and insisted that we turn the rowboat around and head back in. We also saw lots of deer while we were there.

If I look a little strained, it's from my constant efforts to keep Zeb a little quieter than normal. It was Bhau Kalchuri's last visit to the center, and there were lots of people around, trying to enjoy the peace and quiet.

Behind a Wave at Myrtle Beach

Behind a Wave at Myrtle Beach
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

Here's Sadie rising out of a wave at Myrtle Beach. It's been so long since I've been to any beach but the one at Manomet, MA, that the warm temperature of the water was a pleasant surprise. I spent several hours playing in the ocean with Sadie and Zeb and doing some body surfing. It took me right back to childhood. We used to spend a week or so every summer at Myrtle Beach when I was growing up. I had forgotten how much I love to play in the ocean when it's not freezing cold. I hope that we can all return to the spiritual center at some point in the near future.

Visiting Granny

Visiting Granny
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

We visited my mother in Columbia, SC. She had not seen Sadie and Zeb for over two years. We celebrated my 43 birthday there. In the middle of our stay, we drove down to meet our friend Christine at the A.H. Stephens State Historic Park in Crawfordville, GA. Christine had been living in Boston, and we would see her when we went to the beach up there, but her job with the park service has taken her to Atlanta. The historic park was about halfway between Columbia and Atlanta.

It was all a lot of driving for a carfree family.

10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget

I've been reading a review copy of 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget, put together by the writers of Wise Bread. The website offers short essays on how to save money. I have the RSS feed bookmarked on my browser, and I check it every day to see if anything I want to read has showed up. It's a great site, well worth checking out.

The kids and I have been traveling for the last three weeks, by plane and by rental car. Admittedly it's not the most sustainable use of our time, but my mother had not seen her grandkids for over two years, so it just seemed like time to get back East.

Originally, I thought I would read the book straight through in order to review it. It begins with a great premise -- you can save money and have a great time. As if to prove the point, one of the first essays is how to find great deals on wine. "Hey," I thought, "that's my kind of book."

It's not, however, a book you can read straight through. Mostly, it's a collection of numbered bits of advice. Often, the same advice will occur throughout the book inhabiting various lists. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It drives home the point. Drinking water, for example, improves your health, your beauty, and cuts down on your expenses. I am a sucker for narrative, however. The lists are fascinating, (did you know the toilet tank is a good place to hide money?), but I have been unable to read every single list. Some, like how to have an inexpensive wedding, no longer apply to me. Early in our trip, I put it aside, and I haven't picked it up again.

We did, however, pull from the advice on traveling while we were out and about. On our trip down the coast, we stayed at the Outer Banks International Hostel in Kitty Hawk rather than staying in a hotel room. It was not as cheap as I expected, ($65 for a private room for the kids and me for the night), but it did add some variety to the trip, and I didn't have to put up with the kids wanting to sit on the bed and watch television because there wasn't one.

We also carried more of our own food than we usually do while traveling. We had granola with a little box of soy milk for breakfast every morning and ate lots of PBJ and fruit for lunch. I LIKE eating out, and sometimes that's one of the nicer things about traveling. With the kids, however, it's expensive, and they don't eat all their food, and Zeb usually finishes before anyone and announces, "I'm ready to go." It was both cheaper and less stressful to eat what we could carry. I did, of course, already know that was a good strategy, but having the book's advice certainly served to remind me of that.

For what it is, I would recommend 10,001 Ways to Live Large On a Small Budget one hundred percent. I can see snatching a look at the lists throughout the week, for weeks to come. There's something in there about almost everything.

Sometimes You Do Your Best with the Bees . . .

I spent six hours yesterday balancing on a ladder that in turn was balanced on a two-story scaffold trying to remove a bee colony from a woman's house. I had loaded up my beekeeping equipment on the bikes-at-work trailer and biked over there at ten in the morning while our good friend Roxanne kept an eye on the kids.

The first difficulty was putting the scaffolding together by myself. Those metal sides are heavy. The elderly lady for whom I was doing the removal called her handyman, and he came over to help, though, of course, by the time he arrived, I had wrestled most of the pieces into place. I'm not one to sit around with an unsolved problem.

Once I was level with the entrance to the bee colony, I couldn't see where they were going. They just disappeared between two planks. I climbed down the scaffolding and borrowed a flashlight. Once the interior was well-lit, I could see the bees where along the other side of the roof. Our scaffolding was 90 degrees off. I finally exposed the comb by prying off a board just under the roof, but I couldn't reach any of it. I tried to vacuum some bees off the comb, but that didn't improve my access, and it made the bees angry.

I took all my equipment off the scaffolding, removed the platform on top, and wrestled it around perpendicular with the colony. Once I was back on top, I could brace a little ladder against the side of the house. It was a little precarious. The bees weren't happy. I wasn't happy. I tried to keep vacuuming off the excess -- it's a bee vacuum that traps them in an inner box, it doesn't kill them -- while I cut the comb. I still got stung about fifteen times. I kept pulling out comb after comb, and, at one point, almost fell into the yucca plants below because a bee got inside my veil, and I grabbed to smush it before it stung me in the eye. I lost my footing and smashed my shin into the ladder. After each comb, I expected the comb behind it to have the brood nest, but the comb kept going further and further under the roof until finally I couldn't reach it anymore. I tried using my crowbar, but it was too far in to use it effectively, and I kept making a gooey, honeyed mess, that was killing bees. Finally, in the late afternoon, I had to admit defeat.

The only way to remove the rest of the bees was to go in through her bedroom ceiling. We discussed that option, but, after I conferred with several fellow beekeepers, it looked like I had reached the point where there really wasn't any shame in calling in a pest control person to poison the rest.

You do your best. Still, it's hard to admit defeat. It was a failure of the circumstances rather than a personal failure. They were just too far up and too far back in under the roof.

Normally, also, it is possible to remove bees from a house without making them very angry. My friend Heather, who does an excellent job removing honeybees, told me to remove the comb and bees first and only use the bee vacuum to gather up the stragglers. If you don't kill any of them, and if you don't alarm them with fast, jerky movements, they tend to come along quietly. I was in too precarious a position up there on the ladder on the scaffold to do a good, careful job, and I was leaning too heavily on the bee vac. I think that's what probably upset them most, though I couldn't remove the comb from the tight space it was in without pulling it over onto its side to slide it out. It was a traumatic day for both the bees and for me.

Doing bee removals is something I need a lot more practice in, but my bee yards are already just about full for this year. Now I'm facing the "do I expand to five more hives in one more yard" question. Right now, I would say "no." Taking care of my kids takes too much time. When I work with my bees, I have to leave them with friends or leave them with a DVD and hope they don't fight with each other the entire time I'm gone. Fifteen hives is just about the limit in terms of running a business that takes only a reasonable amount of time away from the kids.

It's all a juggling act I haven't quite mastered.