The Sallie Mae Pay-Off Cake (This Year's Best Accomplishment)

After sixteen and a half years making payments toward one of my student loans, I finally paid it off last Friday morning.  

And made myself a celebration cake to beat all prior celebration cakes.  :)  A glittering rainbow,  some shiny coins, a goodbye scroll, a few smiley faces, a bluebird of happiness?  OHHH YEAAAH, it's got it all.  :)

I first took out this student loan in the summer of 2000, a month or so before starting grad school at New York University.  That is so many lifetimes ago now, it seems, so all the better to have all the payments for it finally completed.  

Even with jobs, grants, and scholarships, the student loans were also always necessary for me throughout college and grad school, but the debt is quite a burden to carry, and as with everyone after a certain age, if I knew then what I know now and could redo it all, who's to say. . . .And I still have an insane amount of student loan debt, but let us celebrate today what we can, right.  Never again having to pen into my journal my new-and-improved Sallie Mae balance is an accomplishment. 

I have been keeping diaries and journals since I was nine, and while looking through some of my old ones late this summer, I soon grew tired of seeing how many times I'd written "My Sallie Mae balance is now down to $[whatever-amount]" or "Another payment today.  New balance:  $[whatever-new-amount]."  Blah blah blah, entry after entry, year after year. . . .When I was twenty-three. . .Thirty-three. . .Thirty-nine. . .Until I got sick of it late this summer and sat down with pen and paper to figure out how much I'd have to work to pay it off by the end of this year.  THIS year, finally.

I calculated my wages, my usual number of hours/week and hours/month, what overtime would maybe be available throughout the fall, and how much extra I'd need to do in order to make the final payment on this loan by New Year's Eve.  I came up with the number of extra hours I guessed I'd need to work--and I worked them.  And worked them, and worked them. . .days and nights, going back to work after just a few hours of sleep from the shift before, giving up days off to get a few more hours. . .the past three months. . . .And I ended up working only one hour more than I'd estimated that I'd need to and actually paying it off two weeks early, so all my estimates were spot-on.

I gave up what was to be my second visit to Boston, in October, for this.  I had already booked the flight and gotten the days off work but decided to be a grown up and do this instead.  'The  right thing to do, but I so wanted to be there in the fall. . . .It was to have been the weekend of David Ortiz's final game with the Red Sox and of an Oktoberfest-themed 5K race I'd intended to run.  My designated "Boston days" found me back at work here instead.  Life goes on, and I'll get back to Boston sometime, and now the loan is paid off. . . but the trip would have made for some sweet autumn memories. 

I made the final payment last Friday morning, hours after returning from a week of "merry early Christmas" with my family and set out for the grocery store for cake-baking and cake-decorating supplies soon after.  ♥  The cake was the classic Hershey Celebration Cake but with hot coffee and buttermilk replacing the hot water and milk per an Ina Garten recipe.  Candy-tape made the rainbow, I dolled up a few yellow gumballs for the smiley faces, the coins were easy to find with Hanukkah candy this time of year, and I crafted the bluebird and scroll out of homemade marshmallow fondant.  It is not the most prettily-frosted cake, but I was too tickled by the cause for celebration to care.  :)

And I called my dad--who had warned me in summer 2000 not to take out this loan in the first place, but I had just turned twenty-three so knew everything and didn't listen to him, of course--to tell him the good news. ♥ 

Stuffed was unimpressed and remained on his warm radiator-perch all afternoon.

I should have followed his lead, as it turns out, for I came down with the flu Friday evening and was sicker all weekend than I'd been since early 2012.  But until then:  happiness and cake!  :)

Even if fatigue ultimately caught up with me, I reached my goal and have kissed this debt goodbye.  And the fresh new journal I begin next month will be the first in almost seventeen years that won't mention it.  And the flu has now mellowed into a cold, and there are still two slices of cake in the fridge.  :)

♥

Seven Nice Things

I was nursing a headache most of yesterday--yes, my turn, Lisa!--but am feeling better today for Day Off #2 and have gotten a lot done.  And am just enjoying myself.  Seven sweet things this week:

1.)  'Am still working on my 80s childhood memoir.  Loving!  It!  ♥  That pile of paper scraps in the photo above is all the remaining notes that need to be turned into index cards--which will later be turned into "real" writing.  The pile has shrunk so much since I started this in earnest earlier this year.  My goal for the rest of today is to get as many scraps onto cards as possible so I can move on to the filling-the-notebooks-with-rough-drafts stage of things.  Progress!

2.)  The building manager and a plumber had to stop by earlier this week for routine winter-prep radiator maintenance, and as I welcomed them in,  the plumber glanced around and unexpectedly greeted me with "Oh, I like it in here!  It's very family-oriented!" and moments later commented, "It smells really good in here too!" as he left.  I hardly knew what to say besides thank you, but both remarks made me laugh.  A sweet encounter.  

3.)  A coworker left a thank you on my note that accompanied the cookies I'd brought into work last week and later thanked me in-person.  A day-brightener for me. 

5.)  Chicago Cubs in the World Series playoffs!  I'm not wildly enthusiastic about any one team--I tend to wish them all well--and it would have been a treat for Dad if his Pirates had advanced in the playoffs, but how fun to see the Cubs and their fans having such a great ride this fall.  

6.)  This pup, an English Yellow Lab--

--is now my younger brother's dog.  So sweet!  ♥  My brother, his wife, and somehow-almost-two-year-old Bianca have all wanted a dog for ages, and this one looks so dear. 

7.)  Chilly fall weather has returned, and with it, a pot on the stove here of simmering cinnamon water.  Today's mix is simply cinnamon with vanilla, but as I finish my iced teas while I write this afternoon, I'll throw in the lemon slices too.  Snow flurries and a frost warning are in the forecast for the next few days.  Oh, fall!  Love, love, love.  

'Back to the index cards.  'A sweet weekend to you all. 

First Game at Yankee Stadium

Mike and I took a bus to Yankee Stadium this weekend, Mike's first time in New York and my first visit to the Bronx.  The Yankees are Mike's and his dad's team, and since my mom is from New York, more than a few people in my family are Yankees fans, so it was especially sweet to see the stadium finally.  I thought the six-hour bus trip would find me and Mike featured in a "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" magazine column, but we experienced both the travel and the heat-index-of-103°-temperature and lived to tell the tale. 

Mom made up a gift basket and this cute Snoopy card for us and arranged to have it waiting in our hotel room.  The card was one of the first things Mike unpacked when we got home this afternoon.  :)

 We got to visit with both my parents this weekend, as well, so it was a sweet weekend all-around, with Dad loading up our rental car with vegetables from his garden before we got back on the road. 

Mike got to see Alex Rodriguez warming up for the game.  This was the only player we saw signing autographs for the kids before the game too. 

In my favorite photo from the game, Yankee Stadium's rooftop lights and flags are reflected in Mike's sunglasses.  A happy accident.  This trip was both our vacation-ish thing this summer and my birthday present for him, so to look at our pictures later and see Yankee Stadium in his eyes was great fun. 

And as a final sweet post-game surprise, we discovered while looking up video online of one of the game's home runs that we can be seen in one of the crowd shots that aired on TV after the game, since a guy sitting in front of us caught the ball.  'Not bad for our first visit to the stadium.  :)

And another two days off before I have to go back to work.  'A most refreshing and much-needed break.  Next on this summer's to-do list is painting the bathroom and bedroom.  Yes, the building manager gave me permission to paint!  Onward and upward.  :)

His Eye Is on the Sparrow

I was living in New York City as a first-time grad student in the fall of 2000. It was a discouraging semester, and times only got tougher as the weeks went on. On the way back to my apartment one afternoon, I decided to pop into a sandwich shop for a takeout lunch. I can’t remember now why I (ever) chose that place. It consisted of the counter and a narrow galley space with an exit at either end, it was always raucous and jam-packed with people pushing their way toward the counter and then to the exit, and I always emerged from it feeling annoyed and disheveled, like I’d just survived a skirmish. It was close to my apartment, though, and on some days, maybe that was enough.

That afternoon, after minutes of being pushed and shoved to the middle of the shop where the counter was, I was suddenly stopped by a huge black man in a business suit. He was built like a linebacker and was easily 6’8”. How I hadn’t noticed him in this crush of people was beyond me. I’m 5’2," and to be approached by anyone in this city of strangers was so unexpected, I could only stare.

Not put off by my mute staring, The Linebacker in a Business Suit bent his head down toward me and smiled. ”I just want to tell you it’ll be okay.”

“What?”

He kept smiling and nodded as if to acknowledge that he understood my startled and rude response to him. “I know things are hard right now,” he told me, “but it’s going to be okay.”

Before I could reply, I got jostled by the hordes of students packed around me. When I looked up—maybe two seconds later--he was gone. The man who had been standing at least a foot above the head of even the next-tallest person in this tiny space was nowhere to be seen. That familiar tingly feeling that always marks these kinds of moments for me was already setting in, but I maneuvered myself enough to turn around and look for him anyway. When the place was that crowded, even a paper-thin man would have had to push his way through the mobs of students and book bags-thrown-over-shoulders for a full minute before finally reaching one of the two doors at either end of the shop. The man was just gone.

When I got back to my apartment and shared the story with my roommate, she shivered and crowed, “You have the weirdest experiences!” And I do, I suppose, but I had walked away from The Lunch-Hour Skirmish Sandwich Shop that afternoon believing all the more something I’ve really needed to hold on to ever since: The Universe is aware of Little Old Me and is sending me a sign here. I believe in holding on to hope, I don’t think we’re ever alone or unloved, no matter how lonely or unlovable we may feel, and I trust that the Universe is always somehow aware of us as we plod our way through it. It's going to be okay.