Movie Review: Firebrand - Great Performances Ruined by Historical Fiction

I was interested in seeing Firebrand, as I'm a fan of both Alicia Vikander & Jude Law who were terrific in the lead roles of Queen Catherine Parr and her third husband, King Henry VII. Most of the movie was quite good, until about the last 20 minutes, which goes way, way off the rails.

Catherine Parr was a well-educated, twice-widowed young woman who caught Henry's eye after he'd executed his fifth wife, Catherine Howard for adultery. When Henry pulled England out of the Roman Catholic Church (after the Pope had refused to annul his marriage to his first wife), his new Church of England was basically "Roman Catholic Lite" and not particularly Protestant. But Catherine leaned, mostly quietly, towards being a Protestant. WHen Henry asked her to be his wife, Catherine married him.

I know movies about historic figures are often not at all accurate. This one was very frustrating as it was careful with things like costuming, music, lighting and messy facts around religion in most of the movie. I couldn't quite understand how this movie could only have a 6.5 in IMDB ratings until the movie started to diverge from the facts.

[[spoilers]]

While there was a warrant for Catherine Parr's arrest for heresy, it got lost in the shuffle of papers and she was never arrested, never imprisoned, and certainly never had to prepare to be executed. But certainly she feared she might be arrested on heresy as an old acquaintance of hers, Anne Askew, had already been executed for heresy.

Catherine was kept away from Henry while he lay dying. So the scene with Catherine at Henry's deathbed, breaking his neck (I kid you not) was complete fiction.

[[spoilers]]

Two minor complaints about casting - it looks like they based the casting of Prince Edward on a famous Holbein painting of him when he was a chubby toddler. But by his early childhood, he was somewhat sickly and serious (he died at 16 probably of TB). And Princess Elizabeth was cast as a bit old, she was closer to 13 in 1546 when most of the movie was set.

So Firebrand could have been a stronger movie except that it was ruined by historic fantasy.

Movie Review: The Dead Don't Hurt (Directed, Written, & Music Composed by Viggo Mortensen, Who Also Co-Stars)

I really don't like Westerns. A few exceptions:

• The old TV show The Riflemen starring Chuck Connors.
• The Emigrants and The New Land (early '70s), a pair of movies starring Max von Sydow & Liv Ullman as a Swedish family who settle in Minnesota in 1850.
• Heartland (1978), starring Conchata Ferrell and Rip Taylor, about a widow who goes west to manage a household for a taciturn farmer in Wyoming.
• The Unforgiven (1992), starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman (directed by Eastwood) except that the violence was extreme.

These Westerns focus more on families.

The same is true of Viggo Mortensen's second movie as a writer/director, The Dead Don't Hurt. While it is violent in places, the focus is on the family.

This movie stars Vicky Krieps (Vivienne), Solly McLeod (Weston), Danny Huston (Mayor Schiller), & Viggo (Olsen). The movie is loaded with immigrants from Europe - Olsen is Danish. Vivienne is French via Canada.

The Dead Don't Hurt starts very quietly. A woman, Vivienne dies, a man, Olsen, holding her hand. At about the same time, there is a shooting spree & a person is accused of the murders, tried, convicted & hung. Olsen lives nearby & seems wary about the verdict but doesn't say anything.

The movie jumps around and goes back in time to the childhood of Vivienne. She grew up in a cabin in Canada; her family don’t like the English. Her father disappears; the audience knows he'd been captured and executed by the English. The little girl Vivienne grows up to be a young woman in San Francisco. She’s with an upper class twit type but sees a man who introduces himself as Olsen. They chat & find out they’re both immigrants. They rapidly hook up. She goes off with Olsen into the wild. It turns out she can shoot, a useful skill in the wild. There’s a funny scene about how to have sex in the wild while wearing layers of clothes from the 1860s. After a few days in the wild, they arrive at property Olsen had leased. It’s in the mountains in a desert-like area & it includes a delapidated cabin and no garden.

The movie jumps between the "present," as Vivienne adjusts to living in the middle of nowhere, and the future, a trip Olsen takes after her death. The scenes in the town can be violent—-mostly due to Weston, the man who actually did the shooting spree near the beginning of the movie. He does every ugly, violent thing you can imagine. Some of the violence happens when Olsen has gone off to fight in the Civil War so Vivienne needs to handle things for herself.

The photography throughout is lovely; Marcel Zyskind is a Danish cinemetographer who captures the "splendid isolation" of so much of the West.

The production design is all very raw and western. One minor issue - western buildings at that time (1860-1865 for the most part) were a big mix of old and new construction, but almost everything in this movie looks old.

The music sounds like it was all played on old instruments evoking the feel of the place where the action is taking place--mostly old fiddles & a piano. Viggo also wrote the music & it works very well. Using old instruments like this was a good effect in two of John Hillcoat's movies - his western The Proposition and his dystopic The Road in which Viggo starred. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis wrote the music for the two Hlllcoat movies.

The movie was mostly shot in Mexico, with a few scenes shot in Canada.

I enjoyed this movie very much. The performances are all excellent, and the script works, though I have some quibbles around the climax.

Gender Assigned at Birth

I remember learning about trans people in the late 1960s in Time and/or Life magazine.  It made me think that they were talking about me.  After all, I was a loud, large, competitive, argumentative girl who loved reading and chemistry sets.  Within about a minute, I realized no, there was no reason those characteristics shouldn't describe a girl.  My issues over gender were never about the biological parts, they were over how SOCIETY dictated girls and boys should present themselves.  Particularly through the '60s, society obsessively pushed girls towards marriage and motherhood, and men towards careers with much less involvement in their children's lives.

In college, I fell in love with a smart guy who was funny but generally quieter and less assertive then I was.  Over time, he's become more gregarious and more assertive.  He's also a much better cook than I, something he enjoys flaunting now as he's retired and has more time to cook.

We raised our daughter to let her know she could do whatever she wanted to do so long as she went to school.  Like us, she gravitated to computer work and is an avid online gamer (with a gender-neutral name online).

I have mixed feeling about the very technical term "gender dysphoria," as it sounds too much like an illness. Given the extremely complicated issues around gender and genes for some people, it's not an illness but it is a difference.  With a small percentage of babies, it's impossible to immediately assign a gender at birth.  Instead of only having female and male on birth certificates (and many other forms we fill throughout our lives), there should be at least a third choice.  "Other" isn't the best name for this.  "Intersex" is accurate for some infants where the sex cannot be immediately observed. But many intersex children eventually do adopt one gender or the other seeing as our culture is so rigidly defined by two genders?

We do we have to have two genders?  This notion has really upset a very loud minority, especially in the south.  Many people in the south have always been rigidly attached to old ideas.

If people want to adopt their own genders, why not?  I know "they" is becoming more common as a pronoun, but it mostly seems to be used by people assigned female at birth.  In some ways, I should adopt "they" as my pronoun as I believe we over emphasize gender.  There is way too much fussing over it.  BUT, I don't want to see "she" become invisible either.

It probably would be better to worry about gender less often.

Adventures in Customer DisService

Spent most of today beating my head against a wall over bad user interfaces online.

Allegheny County Real Estate - their database on properties, assessments and taxes is very good and easy to figure out. But if you want to actually talk to anyone, you're screwed. Went to different phone numbers, and the first real estate number I reached said that the person hadn't been in since April 5 and no you could not leave a message. Really helpful. On a fairly random page, I found the phone number that should've pointed me in the right direction. But no one answered and there was no way to leave a message.

Yes, I know that agencies/companies really don't want to talk to customers. And this would be OK if they had a lot of useful information online that was searchable. These days, they just add "AI" to the end of a search as if they were really using Artificial Intelligence. The two "AIs" I've used recently (Meta AI on Facebook and the one on Ancestry.com that writes your life story based on genealogical facts a few weeks ago) were worse than the existing search and, Meta AI chats endlessly to you. AncestryAI can't figure out the difference between facts and errors. At least you can turn Meta AI off if you want and AncestryAI is optional.

So on the Real Estate questions I had, I had to open an account in order to send them a question. Also documented the many problems I had just getting that far. [[A month later - I still haven't heard back from them.]]

Next issue - my bank. Again, no real search online, but also no claim that AI was available. Found a number labelled CONTACT, used it...and, within a minute, had suspended access to my account because it said I gave them the wrong info. Tried again but pressed 0 right away. Got a nice guy and we chatted about my frustration. It turned out there was another page of phone numbers beyond the CONTACT Robot (and it sounded like he was getting a lot of complaints about that). But he answered my question and removed my suspension from my account. Two problems solved reasonably quickly!

I've used Quicken for nearly 35 years, mostly because I hated mailing out checks and wanted a record of where our money went. It's pretty easy to attach banks and other financial institutions to Quicken...except for the company that holds Jim's 401k. I went to their Website and found info about attaching the 401k account to Quicken. But following their instructions did not work. I called one person and made the mistake of calling the account an IRA account. That took me around in circles for a while with a guy who insisted they knew nothing about Quicken. Tried again and got a person attached to 401ks. He, too, knew nothing about Quicken. I was extremely unhappy and sad I could not hang up on him as definitely as we could back in the old phone days. For this one account only, I have to manually update the amount in the 401k in Quicken every few weeks.

Yes, first world problems. But computers and the online world have been available for over nearly 40 years now. Why can't online customer service improve????

Why Can't Death Certificates Be "Partially Completed" Before We Die?

 I was reading Shaina Feinberg & Julia Rothman's excellent New York Times article "I Asked My Mom if She Was Prepared to Die."  It had a lot of practical information on "getting ready for death," like making sure your financial accounts have other signatories, and reminding the survivors to order more death certificates than they think they'll need.  Yes, you will need more than 10, trust me.

 Which made me wonder - why can't we complete our death certificates with all that family information in advance?  Granted, we don't know when or how we'll die, but most of us know our family information better than our significant other might.

A few years ago, after our father died, my brother completed the death certificate.  Except...he listed the wrong state for where our grandmother was born.  This error, though minor, will drive future genealogists nuts.  I actually added a note to my Ancestry.com record for our father saying that his death certificate had this error.

Many decades ago, after my husband's grandfather died, his grandmother listed the wrong country for his birth.  He was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she listed his country of birth as Germany, since he came over speaking German when he was a boy.  I added the same note to my grand-father-in-law's Ancestry record - wrong country on death certificate.

The notion of filling out a death certificate in advance may seem macabre but we all will need one some day. Collecting this information, which is later certified by a doctor or funeral home after death with information around a death, should be reasonably trivial due to the World Wide Web.  Each state can set up the appropriate online death certificate online. I believe every state has a different death certificate format. Each person could set up a death certificate account for the state in which they live, fill it out with the accurate info while they're alive, and tell their next-of-kin that they have such an account and how to access it.

And even if this information can't be immediately imported into an actual death certificate, when the doctor/funeral home goes to complete it, they could have all the accurate information for that person readily available. 

I tried to find out what a current state of Pennsylvania death certificate looks like.  I could not find one at the Pennsylvania records Web site.  I've seen recent Florida and Massachusetts death certificates, and many old death certificates as part of doing genealogical research. I understand the reluctance to not display an entire current death certificate online (fraud) but why not display the portions that could be completed before death?

Let's use the Web for some useful record-keeping for survivors' families by letting people partially complete the "life" part of their death certificate while they're still with us.  It'll save their next-of-kin hassle when they have to complete someone else's death certificate.

Body Breakdown...

 

Well, as we get older and our bodies break down, things happen we don't expect.

I've been a fat person most of my life, and took up walking seriously about 10 years ago. While it didn't really help me lose weight, I wasn't gaining weight, my back improved dramatically, and it gave me a lot more confidence about what I could do. I walked 16 miles in a day on two different days in 2015, and at least 10 miles a day a few dozen times over the years. My average was 4-5 miles a day over 10 years.

 

The last few years, I've not had the energy to walk as much as I'd like. My legs hurt or just felt funny. 

 

The first few times this happened, it seemed to be due to being on statins for a long time. I was on statins for 11 years without any side effects, and then started taking statin breaks. After a few weeks, I'd start feeling better and I could increase my walking. But then my cholesterol would zoom back up again so I'd go back on statins.

 

Yes, I have improved my eating habits. But that's no enough.

 

Anyway, last year when I took a statin break, it took 4 months before I started feeling better, which was weird. I also had very severe pain in my legs at night a few times. My old doctor sent me for some testing (including a nerve conduction test, yuck). Everything came back normal. 

 

I felt better in September and October, got a new doctor, and went on a statin-like drug (Xetia) which is supposed to not have the side effects that statins have. But within a few weeks, I was having trouble with my legs again. At Boskone, I could not keep up with a group walking a few blocks away for dinner one night and I had leg pain all weekend long.

 

After dithering, I went back to my new doctor, complaining about the problems I was having. She wanted me to have another nerve conduction test which I resisted since the one last year added up to nothing. But she told me to get a spinal X-ray and a bunch of blood tests. And then she said she didn't think I was having side effects from the drug, she thought I might have spinal stenosis.

 

Got my blood test and my X-ray. X-ray confirmed spinal stenosis. It basically means some nerves to other parts of my body are getting compressed by the vertebra. It's degenerative, but for severe cases (and mine is just mild), sometimes they do surgery. A hallmark of this condition appears to be back pain, which I haven't had; so far it's mostly been leg pain. All the blood tests came back fine, so the constant fatigue seems a little odd - my sleeping has generally improved over the last 2 years.

 

This is a very odd condition, because some days I feel pretty good. But just 2 nights ago, I had pain bad enough I couldn't get out of my chair to get aspirin, I had to ask Jim to get it for me.

 

Just 5 years ago, we hiked for 3 days on the Dingle Penninsula. I'd hoped I could still do hiking like that, but since the fall, I've been having trouble standing for 2 hours of volunteer work.

 

The good news is, we have excellent insurance and a house where I can mostly avoid stairs. But I would rather spend our retirement money on travel than on rehab.

 

Today I'll be calling the physical therapy folks at the nearby hospital to set up some PT sessions.

Barbie vs. Bella. (Spoilers Galore)

I saw Barbie last summer and really enjoyed it.  It was charming, delightful and a bit threatening.  It had the production design of a Malibu Barbie Dream House. Margot Robbie gave an excellent performance.  It had two very touching moments - the famous America Ferrara speech (which most women were silently cheering as she spoke) and the "Blue Fairy" scene with Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, made Barbie a real, live person.  As I was never a Barbie kid, I didn't expect to like it as much as I did.

The ending:  Funny, Barbie makes the choice to be an utterly mundane women.

I saw Poor Things last fall and really enjoyed it.  It was sometimes charming, fascinating and very threatening in places.  It had the production, costume and make-up design of a crazy child, as if Bella herself was designing the movie.  Emma Stone gave a very raw performance.  Poor Things wasn't touching in the way the Barbie was, but it was much more dangerous.

The ending: A bit creepy but mostly uplifting.  An average rich Victorian afternoon with overtones of The Freaks.

Both movies have a very similar theme - a woman creating herself.

Poor Things was a better movie as it's much more audacious than Barbie, but Barbie was very enjoyable and much more accessible.

Post 2024 Oscars:  I predicted Poor Things would win Best Make-up, Best Costumes and Best Production Design.  I really enjoyed Emma Stone's committed performance in Poor Things, but thought Lily Gladstone would win for her very quiet performance in Killers of the Flower Moon.  But the Oscars followed the BAFTAs in almost all ways and Emma Stone won.

Even though it won only 1 Oscar, the cast/crew of Barbie made the Oscar Ceremony more fun than it had been in years.  Ryan Gosling's "I'm Just Ken" was an absolute riot and it was great to involve the audience the way it did.

A Long-Ago Death Too Soon...And One Lucky Woman

I just cried over a relative I've never met.

Been doing some genealogy, and found a relative I was particularly fond of had no mother listed in his records (haven't found his birth records, but she doesn't appear in later census records for his family). I thought that was strange and perhaps she'd left the family and that was why she didn't exist on paper.

Nope.

Just poked a bit and found her death certificate. She died leaving young children.

She died before WWII of staphylcoccol septicemia. This was not a terribly uncommon thing to die of before there were antibiotics to fight blood poisoning. 

But...there was also this phrase "septic abortion - natural."

This meant, she'd had a miscarriage, but not all of of the embryo or fetus was expelled as part of the miscarriage. It's the sort of thing that American women generally haven't died from in 50 years, between the availability of antibiotics and the fact that most doctors check a woman who's had a miscarriage to make sure whether there's any pregnancy-related tissue remaining in the uterus. Because if it isn't all expelled or removed, the woman can die of blood poisoning.

As this relative did.

She had a miscarriage on about 8/22. I don't know when she first went to a doctor (again, she had young children at home and I don't think the family had much money). Her death certificate states that she had an operation on 8/27. I'm guessing by that point, a doctor could remove an incomplete miscarriage without being accused of giving her an abortion. But it was too late and she died on 9/8. Just 16 days from miscarriage to her own death.

We're in a situation in some states where more women will die like this again, making doctors fearful to check whether a woman has had a complete miscarriage. At least women in those right-suppressing states in that horrible situation might be able to get antibiotics and pain pills and might get to live.

My own mother was in a similar situation decades later. After three miscarriages and three children, the fetus she was carrying died five months into her pregnancy. She went to her doctor who told her "I can't do anything until you go into labor."

My mother, being overly polite in 1960, did not scream "What do you mean, there's nothing you can do? The baby is already dead." but went home to wait.

She had to care for 3 children under the age of 4. She had to tell people who congratulated her on her pregnancy that her baby was already dead. She had the risk of going septic while she waited.

She was lucky - she went into labor five weeks later and delivered her stillborn baby. She did not go septic and leave three young children without a mother. 

 

 

Improving Your Investments: How NOT to Be Dumb Money (Usually), Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

By 1993, we had lived in Massachusetts for 11 years, had investments in stocks and 401ks and had bought our first house.  But, we felt we needed a change, and Jim had an opportunity to work at a small software company in Pittsburgh.  Our challenge in early June of that year, just after Leslie had finished 7th grade, was to find a house in the Pittsburgh area, then pack and prepare our Massachusetts house for sale.

We gave ourselves one day to find the new house so we could return to Massachusetts.

Since Jim had grown up in the Pittsburgh area and I'd lived there for four years, we knew we wanted to live in the South Hills.  We wanted to be close to mass transit since Jim's new job would be in the city.  We made one decision that was simultaneously good and bad.  We had savings but not enough for a house down payment.  So Jim chose to cash out his 401k which would give us about $40,000 for a house down payment, some new home fix-up, and for the extra taxes we'd have to pay the next year on cashing out the 401k.

Pittsburgh houses were cheaper than Massachusetts houses, so we knew we could find a house for less than we'd paid for our first house.  I'm not sure how many houses we looked at that day; at least 6 and maybe 8.  We looked at houses in Mt. Lebanon, Upper Saint Clair and Bethel Park.  Our agent kept driving by a little house for sale which was across from the high school in Mt. Lebanon.  We finally looked at it late in the afternoon, a bit reluctantly as it looked too small.  It turned out to be larger than we expected - the attic was finished and it had a master bedroom addition off the second floor.  While it was about a 70 year old house, it was in reasonable shape and shouldn't need too much work.  We put in an offer for full price which was accepted.

Three weeks later, Jim moved to Pittsburgh to start his new job; he lived with his godparents for a few weeks until he could start to move into the new house.  I remained in Massachusetts, working on packing and getting our house ready for the market.  Once Jim closed on our Mt. Lebanon house, I put Leslie on a plane to Pittsburgh so she could adjust to her new home.

In 1993, the usually hot Massachusetts housing market had cooled a bit.  We got an offer on our old house that was a little low, but we took it so I could move to the Pittsburgh area.  The inspection found a couple of minor problems - we needed to rebuild the wooden stairs into the house.  I hired a friend to rebuild the stairs, then quit my job and moved south.

But...almost as soon as I got to Pittsburgh, there were more problems with buyers.  Now they were demanding cosmetic changes.  It was one thing after the other and so...we pulled out of the deal.  That was a risky decision - we now had two mortgages to pay.  We thought the Massachusetts house would sell pretty fast.

We were wrong.

There weren't a lot of tech writing jobs available when I got to Pittsburgh.  I think I only sent out one or two resumes, and I needed a job immediately so we could cover two mortgages.  It turned out, we were only 2 miles from a Borders Book Store that was looking for a new bookseller.  I did the math and realized the Borders job would just about cover 1 mortgage each month.  I aced their test and found out they really wanted someone with computer experience to oversee their computer book section, so I was hired and started the next day.

We were very cautious with money during this time.  Since I got a book discount, we bought more books.  And we went to the movies.  That was about it.  Jim's new job had a 401k so we started investing in that as soon as we could.  We still had some Stratus stock, but I learned I was a terrible market timer.  We held onto our Stratus stock until it fell to $2 a share - way too long.  Eventually, the company was bought and disappeared.  But because we were very careful, we managed to avoid adding non-mortgage-related debt at that time, even if we weren't expanding our investments.

Eight months after we pulled out of the deal on our Massachusetts house, it finally sold but for even less than we expected.  The new price covered what was left of the mortgage; I think we got a check for about $500 after the mortgage on the old house was paid off.

I stayed at Borders about a year, then found another tech writing job.  It wound up being kind of an odd job with very strange politics.  When my boss and his assistant quit a few months later, I decided to leave with them.  I'd had an introduction to the World Wide Web at that job, and learned HTML right away,  I started building Web pages.  For a few months, you could make $30 an hour if you could code HTML, so I made a little money at that.  Soon, there was software that would edit HTML for you, so HTML coding quickly became a minimum wage job.

Found another tech writing job with a miserable commute.  I only lasted there about six months as the commute was pretty wearing.

Finally got a tech writing job that I liked at an interesting company called ANSYS.  The pay was good, and the company had a stock purchase plan as well as a 401k.  I was able to invest in both.

After about four rocky years, we were able to save and invest more seriously.  We started to travel and set money aside for Leslie for college.

I remember in the 1970s there was a book called something like "Your Wealth-Building Years."  For us, our wealth-building years were finally starting.

Improving Your Investments: How NOT to Be Dumb Money (Usually), Part 2

Part 1

Part 1 was basically "try not to live beyond your means."  I think if there had been cheap ways to invest in stocks to the early '80s, we might have opened our first stock account then.  We had a little savings when we moved to Boston, and strongly considered getting rid of our car since we were on mass transit again.  But, we felt a car was useful, particularly since we had a child.  For the next few years, Jim took the T to downtown, and I had a car during the day.

After about 18 months in a Boston apartment, we moved to Newton Corner to rent a very old "town house." Basically, we wanted a yard which we got.  Almost as soon as we moved there, a friend told me about a job at his computer company.  I had an interview with a manager and wound up with a part time job as a support person in a hardware department, helping out with databases.  Leslie was almost 3, and had her first experience in day care.

The next few years, as I became a full time worker in the computer industry, most of my salary went to day care.  But, a few months after becoming a full-time employee, I could buy company stock at a discount and start a 401k account.  The more traditional company Jim worked for did not offer either benefit. 

I worked for Stratus Computer full time from January 1984-August 1993.  Since 401ks were pretty new at the time, when people were eligible for 401ks, we had a training session.  The most important thing I learned was to diversify your 401k portfolio.  Invest in big company funds and small company funds.  Invest in domestic company funds and foreign company funds.  Invest in high tech funds and traditional funds.  In short, don't put your eggs in one basket - spread out the risk.

Remember Enron?  Here's the detailed scoop,  When you invest in a 401k, you are normally given a number of different mutual funds/stock funds to invest in.  Enron's corporate 401k pretty much limited its employees to investing in its own stock and nothing else.  When Enron collapsed, not only did its stockholders lose a lot of money but its employees who were investing in their 401k lost a lot.

I started off investing very little in stock purchase or the 401k.  Even if you think you can't afford it, always invest something in the company stock purchase program and in the 401k.   Even if you work for a great company with an ever-rising stock price, you want to have a variety of stocks in your portfolio and a variety of mutual funds in your 401k.  You may start small at first, but the money usually grows.

Within 18 months of my going to work full time, Leslie was in kindergarten.  We decided to send her to a private full-day kindergarten that was on the way to work, but it was a little cheaper than full-time day care had been.  And as my salary was increasing, we could save and invest more money.  We bought a second car, Jim also went to work at Stratus, and we moved out to the suburbs.  We didn't have enough money for a house down payment yet, but we rented a very nice duplex in the country that was closer to work.  If you ever take the train from Worcester to Boston, you've seen our duplex - in the 1990s, the Westboro train station was built right across the train tracks from the house we lived in during the mid-'80s.

We were fortunate as Stratus stock price increased during the mid-'80s.  We invested more in the company stock account, but also sold a little to buy other stocks.  I think the next stock we bought was pretty far away from a high tech stock - Ford.  Our 401k accounts also grew.  By 1987, we felt we could afford a house, and, after some searching, bought a Cape Cod with a great yard in Northboro, a small town with an excellent school system.

During the late '80s and early '90s, we saved money, paid a little extra on our house and continued working at Stratus. Paying down a mortgage is almost always an excellent investment.  It's shocking how people don't care about the importance of having equity in your investments, especially in your house any more.  We also kept our debt low.  Much as I love to travel, we didn't travel much outside of the northeastern US.  We did take a 13-years-late honeymoon to Florida, where we had an unplanned expense - we bought two years in a time share company.  We always knew we'd only keep it for two years; we mostly bought it as we were planning to spend extra time in Orlando in 1992 and liked the idea of having a condo for part of the trip rather than just a hotel room.  And this company let you rent condos in many places for a week, so we reserved a condo for a week on Cape Cod for 1991.  Normally, time shares aren't a great idea, but if you find a company that lets you test the experience for a year or two, that's much better than being tied into a long term contract.

By 1993, we felt we needed a change.  Jim sent one resume to a company he'd heard about back in Pittsburgh, they had him down for an interview.  They hired him.

We had one weekend to buy a new house.

Part 3

Improving Your Investments: How NOT to Be Dumb Money (Usually), Part 1

I've always been interested in investments and sometimes been interested in economics. I've written two blog postings about these issues in the past: 

• Economics Isn't Physics:  What Politicians Don't Get About Recovering from a Severe Recession (2009)
• Things I'm on the Fence About (2013)

I've been thinking about writing about investing for a long time.  We are reasonably comfortably retired for four reasons:

• At least one of us (usually my husband) has been gainfully employed throughout our marriage
• We always had health insurance when we needed it
  
• We always worked to pay off debt and have basically had no debt for over six years
• We started investing once we both had good jobs and diversified our investments as soon as we could

And, I also have to admit it - we've also had plain dumb luck.  Sometimes life goes way beyond your control.  While that's happened to us in some ways, it hasn't happened that much with finances.  And when finances got ugly (and they have a few times), we were able to adapt to the situation.

We got married in the late '70s just after my husband Jim graduated from college.  Lots of people started getting married when they were older in the '70s. We wanted to be together whether we had money or not.  My parents threw us a fairly simple wedding (no limos, limited flowers, nice reception, no matching tuxes or dresses).  We borrowed a car to drive our wedding gifts back to Pittsburgh as we didn't have a car of our own. Our honeymoon was two nights in Washington DC, where my brother picked up the car to drive it home. We were both unemployed the first few weeks of our marriage, but, luckily, had wedding gifts to buy groceries and pay rent.

But this was all OK.  We were together and we learned a very important lesson over those first two years of marriage - we learned how to live poor. We learned how to be adaptable. It was news to me as I'd grown up very middle class.  But it wasn't news to my husband, who'd grown up fairly poor and had been a scholarship student in college. He'd taken the bus about two hours every day from his home across Pittsburgh to get to classes.

Soon after we settled into our first apartment, I got a job as a waitress. Jim got a job as a school teacher meaning he'd continue to be unemployed for another 2 1/2 months.  I was hoping to return to college in the fall, but the money just wasn't there so I worked at various jobs (I really hated waitressing) a found a job I generally enjoyed - working as a floating sales clerk in a department store.  I landed in the book department which I enjoyed the most.  We were extremely cautious that summer as we had no health insurance.  The birth control pill pack was $10 a month in those days and that was probably the expense we were the most religious about covering.

Jim's introduction to teaching was walking the picket line his first weeks of  "work."  Luckily, the strike only lasted for two weeks.  That year, we made just a touch over the local poverty level but at least we had health insurance.  We were able to get a Sears credit card, which we needed as we moved to a better apartment but one without a refrigerator. MasterCharge turned us down.  About the only other thing we bought on credit that year was a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas which Jim got at a discount as he was a teacher.

The main surprise the first year was I needed surgery.  The excellent health insurance paid for everything, but I had to take a month off of work. Still, we were able to come up with enough money so I could return to the University of Pittsburgh the next fall.  I worked part time at the Burger Chef in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning while going to college full time. MasterCharge gave us a credit card that year so I was able to charge my college textbooks.  Jim continued teaching science.  He also made some extra money by tutoring some of his students.

And then...Jim did not get tenure at his teaching job.  I encouraged him to look for a non-teaching job - he'd been a physics major in college but was a good writer.  Relatively quickly, he got a job at a plant in Ohio.  But since it was a uranium enrichment plant, he had to get a security clearance, which meant we were without health insurance for a while.  While I'd finished my junior year, I was pretty sure we'd be in Ohio by early in the fall, so I didn't try to stay in Pittsburgh to finish my senior year.

We both worked the same full time temp job that year - reading newspapers and recording keyword searches for a legal case.  Simultaneously interesting and boring.  But we were able to save enough money to buy a car, which we knew we'd need.  It wound up taking nearly six months for him to get his security clearance, and then we were on our way to Ohio.

Since he was now making twice as much money as he did as a teacher, we found an excellent apartment - the first floor of a large old house near downtown Chillicothe, Ohio.  We suddenly had huge rooms and even separate offices.  There was a porch, yard and a detached garage!  Our bedroom had a bathroom with a shower!  Such luxuries!  I got a job for the 1980 census, helping to administer census taker tests which would be full time until September.

We felt rich.

So we decided it was time to start our family.  As I'd had ovarian cyst surgery two years before, I figured it could take a while to get pregnant.  Surprise - I was pregnant the next month.  Yeah, I guess you're near peak fertility when you're 23 and your husband is 25.

Much as we were happy about the baby, we really didn't care much for Chillicothe.  We met a few other couples around our age...but...it just felt dull.  After we had our daughter, Leslie, in the fall of 1980, we were very busy with her, but...we really didn't like where we were.  Just after Leslie's first birthday, Jim started looking for a new job.  I don't remember now how he found a job, in those pre-World Wide Web days, up in Boston, but it was exactly where we wanted to be.  By February 1982, we were living in a small apartment in Boston and we were city-dwellers again.

I haven't started talking about investments yet because the first few years of our marriage, we had virtually none.  I knew a little about stocks and bonds - my grandfather had given each grandchild 6 shares of AT&T stock.  We got something like $16 of dividends a quarter. We sold that stock before we left Pittsburgh.  I think Jim was on a pension plan for his first few jobs; not sure the term "401k" even existed yet.

But even though we didn't have investments, we understood how to live within our means.  I don't think we left Ohio with more than $500 in consumer debt and maybe $2,000 in car debt.  Our main "optional" expense were books.  We really loved to read and had probably 4,000 books (mostly paperbacks) by the time we moved to Boston.

Things were different in the 1970s and early 1980s - you could get an apartment without bringing in extra roommates if you made little money.  More jobs offered decent health insurance.  College loan pay-off was easier - college was cheaper and the special college loan interest rate was around 3%.  Financially, it is harder for most people today than it was 45 years ago.

More next time!

Part 2