I hate it when Daylight Saving Time begins. I'm robbed of an hour of sleep and these days, a billable hour as well. Suddenly I'm supposed to get up an hour earlier and be tired an hour earlier. Another brilliant government takeover of some aspect of everyday life gone straight to hell. They need to stay the hell away from my clocks. Sleep habits are personal. Next they'll be telling me when to go to the bathroom.
I've never, ever liked this particular weekend of the year. Never. Although this year there is a bright spot to the time change that I've never had before. Now it will be light enough when I leave work that I can go home in relative daylight. That means I can start riding my bike to work and maybe actually see what's in front of me when I go home.
I want to start tomorrow but there are two problems with this. One is that I don't have a backpack big enough to carry all my bike gear (mainly extra lights and a tire repair kit) and a change of clothes with me. It's a ten mile ride. I've done it before but it was on a weekend when I didn't actually have to see anyone who was close enough to smell me. It's still cool enough in the morning that I won't be sweating that much when I get there, but I'll be wearing something suitable for riding and not working so I'll need to take better clothes with me. As the weather gets warmer, I'll probably bring some extra stuff so I can take a shower at the gym before work, so I want to plan for that too. The second problem, and probably the biggest, is that no matter what enthusiasm I have for this idea right now, it's going right out the window when my alarm clock goes off. Poof! Gone. I know me pretty well. I'll be going back to sleep right after I feed the cat.
To do this ride I have to get up an hour earlier than normal. Now that the time has changed, that's two hours earlier. I can't even go to bed on time because as far as my body clock is concerned, it's an hour too early. Put that together with my usual Sunday morning sleep in that I definitely enjoyed today and I'm screwed. Tomorrow morning is going to suck. So I'm thinking one hour early is enough to start with. Get used to that and then we'll talk one more hour for the ride.
It's going to happen though. I'm going to do this. Tomorrow night on my way home from work I'm going to stop at REI and see if I can find the backpack I want. And once I adjust to the time change I'm going to get up an hour early and do this. I've been wanting to do this for months now. It will be nice to have something to look forward to when I get up in the morning, for however long it lasts anyway. When I thought I was going to start tomorrow, I was actually excited about getting up in the morning. Then I thought about how miserable I'm going to be and how working 15 hours this weekend kept me from getting to REI to find that backpack. Oh well, one more day. I hope.
That's right, I said 15 hours. Now that I've done my taxes, it's become clear to me that I can only keep 55% of every dollar I make on the second job. Roughly 20% federal tax, 10% California tax, 15.3% self employment tax. Yep, that's pretty much it. Ridiculous and painful. Very painful.
The real problem here is that my hourly rate is way too low for being self employed, and even lower for being self employed in California. I got this job partly because the person who brought me in lowballed it, expecting we would make our real money on maintenance fees after the site was up. Well that's great except we can't seem to get there from here. They have very little time to test it, we keep adding stuff to it, I have a 50-hour-a-week day job that sucks up all my time, and so it never goes up. We never get to the phase where I get paid a flat fee every month to maintain the site and then renegotiate my hourly rate for new features. I don't do well with things that never end. Not well at all. If I don't see an end in sight I lose my motivation. That started happening to me about a week ago and it was getting really bad really fast. I had to do whatever I could to get off the treadmill.
So realizing earlier this week that I don't do well without a goal, I set a goal. I want to get the site finished (at least as it was originally agreed upon) before I start doing overtime on the day job. At least anything after that will be gravy and maybe I won't be coming home late at night with the weight of knowing I haven't fulfilled the original obligation yet. As it is now, I've put in the new requests as I've gotten them and have yet to reach the end of the original plan. That was mainly out of necessity, as every little thing in the site affects every other little thing and some things just need to be done before others if it's going to work correctly. A lot of new features needed to be done before we went forward with some of the original ones they affected. I need to reach the end of the original plan before I can relax, and I really need to relax. REALLY.
Except under the best of circumstances I can only relax so much. $30 an hour was great in Texas when the taxes were half and I could put in 40 hours a week. That was enough, even though it was far, far less than the low end of the going rate (which is about $75 to $80 an hour). I wasn't in it to get rich. I had what I needed. Out here, I need to make $900 to put toward my rent every month. That means I have to work 60 hours a month to be able to keep $900. 60 hours a month is very hard to do on top of about 220 for the day job. Given how limited my weeknights are, that's a lot of weekend time disappearing. But it's not really the fact that I have a second job that bothers me, or even the hourly rate. It's the fact that there's a quota, that I need to hit a certain number of hours every month to stay afloat. That I need a second job at all or else I don't make the rent. It's the pressure of needing something, of not being able to live comfortably without it. I didn't actually realize this until today when I got on Craigslist and started looking for a new place to live, and I saw things that were cheaper than my apartment. I could actually imagine not needing the second job... and then suddenly I wanted to get to work on it. Because for a fleeting moment, it wasn't rent. It was gravy. It was fun again.
Now granted I didn't find much that was cheaper without going down to an outhouse. But I did find basically two things that would get me out from under the Riverdance family without having to put even more stuff in storage. One, the townhouse. Roughly the same price for the same space but with side neighbors instead of above and below neighbors. Two, the house. In some cases a little more for the same space, in others a little less, and some with less space altogether. There's a lot more work to be done there. But it gave me hope. The question is, am I going to end up cheaper or the same? I guess it depends on what's available in August when my lease is up. Cheaper would be stress free. Smaller would be next to impossible, so cheaper is not likely. But I'm holding out hope.
I did see a lease-to-own three bedroom house for $1399 a month in San Mateo. That's insanely cheap out here. That's a price that would make the second job gravy. There MUST be something wrong with it. There has to be. Probably black mold or a car-sized hole in the roof or something. But hey, it gave me hope. And the motivation to keep working through my weekends, because now I need to pay for another move. At least this one should only be across town. And hopefully it will be the last for a very long time.
It's after 2am now. Morning is going to suck. I'll say hi to the bike on the way to the car.
I've never, ever liked this particular weekend of the year. Never. Although this year there is a bright spot to the time change that I've never had before. Now it will be light enough when I leave work that I can go home in relative daylight. That means I can start riding my bike to work and maybe actually see what's in front of me when I go home.
I want to start tomorrow but there are two problems with this. One is that I don't have a backpack big enough to carry all my bike gear (mainly extra lights and a tire repair kit) and a change of clothes with me. It's a ten mile ride. I've done it before but it was on a weekend when I didn't actually have to see anyone who was close enough to smell me. It's still cool enough in the morning that I won't be sweating that much when I get there, but I'll be wearing something suitable for riding and not working so I'll need to take better clothes with me. As the weather gets warmer, I'll probably bring some extra stuff so I can take a shower at the gym before work, so I want to plan for that too. The second problem, and probably the biggest, is that no matter what enthusiasm I have for this idea right now, it's going right out the window when my alarm clock goes off. Poof! Gone. I know me pretty well. I'll be going back to sleep right after I feed the cat.
To do this ride I have to get up an hour earlier than normal. Now that the time has changed, that's two hours earlier. I can't even go to bed on time because as far as my body clock is concerned, it's an hour too early. Put that together with my usual Sunday morning sleep in that I definitely enjoyed today and I'm screwed. Tomorrow morning is going to suck. So I'm thinking one hour early is enough to start with. Get used to that and then we'll talk one more hour for the ride.
It's going to happen though. I'm going to do this. Tomorrow night on my way home from work I'm going to stop at REI and see if I can find the backpack I want. And once I adjust to the time change I'm going to get up an hour early and do this. I've been wanting to do this for months now. It will be nice to have something to look forward to when I get up in the morning, for however long it lasts anyway. When I thought I was going to start tomorrow, I was actually excited about getting up in the morning. Then I thought about how miserable I'm going to be and how working 15 hours this weekend kept me from getting to REI to find that backpack. Oh well, one more day. I hope.
That's right, I said 15 hours. Now that I've done my taxes, it's become clear to me that I can only keep 55% of every dollar I make on the second job. Roughly 20% federal tax, 10% California tax, 15.3% self employment tax. Yep, that's pretty much it. Ridiculous and painful. Very painful.
The real problem here is that my hourly rate is way too low for being self employed, and even lower for being self employed in California. I got this job partly because the person who brought me in lowballed it, expecting we would make our real money on maintenance fees after the site was up. Well that's great except we can't seem to get there from here. They have very little time to test it, we keep adding stuff to it, I have a 50-hour-a-week day job that sucks up all my time, and so it never goes up. We never get to the phase where I get paid a flat fee every month to maintain the site and then renegotiate my hourly rate for new features. I don't do well with things that never end. Not well at all. If I don't see an end in sight I lose my motivation. That started happening to me about a week ago and it was getting really bad really fast. I had to do whatever I could to get off the treadmill.
So realizing earlier this week that I don't do well without a goal, I set a goal. I want to get the site finished (at least as it was originally agreed upon) before I start doing overtime on the day job. At least anything after that will be gravy and maybe I won't be coming home late at night with the weight of knowing I haven't fulfilled the original obligation yet. As it is now, I've put in the new requests as I've gotten them and have yet to reach the end of the original plan. That was mainly out of necessity, as every little thing in the site affects every other little thing and some things just need to be done before others if it's going to work correctly. A lot of new features needed to be done before we went forward with some of the original ones they affected. I need to reach the end of the original plan before I can relax, and I really need to relax. REALLY.
Except under the best of circumstances I can only relax so much. $30 an hour was great in Texas when the taxes were half and I could put in 40 hours a week. That was enough, even though it was far, far less than the low end of the going rate (which is about $75 to $80 an hour). I wasn't in it to get rich. I had what I needed. Out here, I need to make $900 to put toward my rent every month. That means I have to work 60 hours a month to be able to keep $900. 60 hours a month is very hard to do on top of about 220 for the day job. Given how limited my weeknights are, that's a lot of weekend time disappearing. But it's not really the fact that I have a second job that bothers me, or even the hourly rate. It's the fact that there's a quota, that I need to hit a certain number of hours every month to stay afloat. That I need a second job at all or else I don't make the rent. It's the pressure of needing something, of not being able to live comfortably without it. I didn't actually realize this until today when I got on Craigslist and started looking for a new place to live, and I saw things that were cheaper than my apartment. I could actually imagine not needing the second job... and then suddenly I wanted to get to work on it. Because for a fleeting moment, it wasn't rent. It was gravy. It was fun again.
Now granted I didn't find much that was cheaper without going down to an outhouse. But I did find basically two things that would get me out from under the Riverdance family without having to put even more stuff in storage. One, the townhouse. Roughly the same price for the same space but with side neighbors instead of above and below neighbors. Two, the house. In some cases a little more for the same space, in others a little less, and some with less space altogether. There's a lot more work to be done there. But it gave me hope. The question is, am I going to end up cheaper or the same? I guess it depends on what's available in August when my lease is up. Cheaper would be stress free. Smaller would be next to impossible, so cheaper is not likely. But I'm holding out hope.
I did see a lease-to-own three bedroom house for $1399 a month in San Mateo. That's insanely cheap out here. That's a price that would make the second job gravy. There MUST be something wrong with it. There has to be. Probably black mold or a car-sized hole in the roof or something. But hey, it gave me hope. And the motivation to keep working through my weekends, because now I need to pay for another move. At least this one should only be across town. And hopefully it will be the last for a very long time.
It's after 2am now. Morning is going to suck. I'll say hi to the bike on the way to the car.
