Rainy Birthdays

It always rains on your birthday. It rained the day you were born.

My mother tells me this every September. I grew up with this concept that it just rains on my birthday, no matter where I am. This feeling continued while living in DC.

This year, I wanted to see if there was any actual truth behind this feeling.

Since 2007, 8 out of 12 of my last birthdays have been rainy. However, only a single birthday before college was rainy, so I don’t know exactly where my mother got this idea of constant rain. The data doesn’t support her comment.

I think it’s one of those things where if there was rain in the forecast, or rain on one of the surrounding days, or rain on the day that I was having a birthday party, it got generalized into “it always rains on your birthday”.

I’m still going to believe it’s likely to rain on my birthday. It’s made me fond of rain, and I always bring an umbrella or some rain boots with me on September 29th.

Source: Weather Underground historical data for September 29th

Flower dot plot

Wedding budgeting + DayDohViz. Purple roses are totally below expected range and pink are somewhere in the range. 

Data from Brides.com and my wedding spreadsheet

Too much play-doh

This #daydohviz project had taken over my life. And part of my living room. I live in 700 sq ft with my partner, a 50 lb dog and FIVE AND A HALF POUNDS of Play-Doh.

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Play-Doh smell

The smell of Play-Doh is now trademarked. https://mashable.com/2018/05/19/hasbro-play-doh-smell-trademark … Maybe it smells like vanilla and cherry, but mostly it smells like childhood memories to me.

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New dog, so expensive

Costs over time of new dog ownership over the first 2 months. Dog-doh-viz!

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Total costs by category of dog ownership over the first 2 months

Behind the scenes, the making of the bar graph.

Estimated future monthly costs

detail view

Dog participation

Financial waterfall

April got EXPENSIVE. Waterfall graph of some of the biggest expenditures and income for the month.

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Dumpling tour

Dumpling adventure in Flushing, New York visualized. This is how the day went. Projected and actual dumpling consumption. And everything we ate over the course of the day.

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The good and the bad

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Today sucks. This is why. At least the left half of this Cartesian coordinate plot will disappear by tomorrow. In the meantime I can make my feelings into play-doh and graph them as a way of processing

Instacart costs

Is Instacart worth it? It’s about $35 more expensive for my average grocery run, but saves 45 minutes of time.

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I love liquids

I love liquids. The size of the dot is the amount I want to drink. The proximity to the top is my enjoyment level. Ok, now I’m going to go get a drink.

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Birthday partying

Saturday involved going to 2 birthday parties. Of very different sorts. When the little ones crash, they crash HARD.

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Freelance Feasibility

Thinking about the minimum expenses I would need to cover if I decided to freelance full-time.

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Splitting expenses

It’s always hard to split living expenses with a partner. It’s especially difficult when there’s an income disparity. This is a look at how we handle it.

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The income disparity

We each take half of our income

We combine that income to pay for nescessities

We split that combined money across our necessary expenses, and still manage to have some leftover.