I’m in the computer lab of my hometown library, the Ventura County library, facing the restroom doors. My stepdad threatened to kill my family two days ago and is currently locked away in a hospital. Before he was carted away, he dumped water on the family computer and smashed everyone’s phones.

I came to the library almost reflexively, even though I haven’t been back here since the day of my eighth grade graduation, the year my family was homeless. We spent that time learning what public spaces had free restrooms no one would question you bathing in. The library’s was the closest to my middle school, and so it’s where my mom took me to freshen up that afternoon, laughing as water splashed down the front of my pants as if we were on some fun adventure.

To be fair, we technically had a house then. My mom and stepdad bought a property with three units in a poor neighborhood. The idea was for my stepdad, a contractor, to fix up the units and then rent them for more money than probably anyone would be willing to pay in that part of town. This was their “get rich quick” scheme of the week. (Prior to that, their dream life involved living like gypsies on the beach, but my two younger siblings and I were not too keen on sleeping in the dirt while my stepdad passed out drunk on a mattress in the bed of his pickup truck. And prior to that, they hoped I would become a famous child actor, only to become very disappointed in and disgusted by me when a casting agent told my mom I didn’t smile enough and wasn’t thin anyway.) 

My stepdad gutted the inside of the front unit until it was just a shell. My parents moved their truck bed mattress inside while my siblings and I still slept on the floor. We had no running water, no electricity, and no walls. When we had to use the toilet, my siblings and I went to the meat market down the street while my stepdad urinated all over the fence and pooped in a bucket he would later toss in a neighbor’s trash bin. When a quick splash in a sink wasn’t enough to clean up, we went to the YMCA. When my siblings and I had to do homework or otherwise get some space, we sat at rickety desks we found in the units’ backyard, a literal landfill.

My family claimed bankruptcy that year and the property was taken by the bank; my stepdad was too drunk and abusing too many painkillers to fix up anything.

My parents then bought a yacht through some sort of complicated loan application lie, I presume. We moved into another house that would also eventually get taken by the bank after I left for college (and after my stepdad had torn up the walls and floors during meth-induced rages). My mom bought a Lexus and a Mercedes during those times, both of which were also repo’d.

I’m sure there are countless profound life lessons I could take away from my upbringing. However, this is the only one that sticks: I need to do everything in my power to not be poor.

Yes, my family is one big mentally ill ball of dysfunction, and yes, I should probably be more focused on how I can help my (now three) younger siblings survive the financial and emotional mess my mom and stepdad have created through their sociopathic disregard for other human beings.

But all I can think is: How do I make sure I don’t wind up in debt like my mom–ever? The answer is seemingly simple: Don’t finance someone’s addictions, don’t ignore your problems by buying into a lifestyle you can’t afford, and don’t think you can outrun your debts.

If I’m being honest though, I don’t just want to scrape by; I want to live comfortably always and I don’t ever want to feel bad about that desire. I believe I deserve a nice life. I don’t want to think about how that sounds like something my mom might say.

I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country. I don’t want to move away from it, which is fine because right now, I can afford it. But when I consider possible scenarios in which my seven-year-old sister might wind up living in my apartment, my first concern is how that will ruin my life.

How will I be able to keep up with after-work happy hours and simultaneously pay for her to join a gymnastics team so she doesn’t feel totally uprooted from her current, “normal” life? I’m also unsure as to how often you have to buy growing children new clothing, and if that is my responsibility or something another financially independent sibling should offer to cover? Do I have to buy special food for her, or can I force her to eat whatever’s in my fridge like I often do myself? Perhaps most pressingly, what am I to do about all my therapy bills and the electric shock treatment I sometimes secretly fantasize about having so I can just forget everything altogether instead of accidentally sobbing uncontrollably in library parking lots?

I don’t know the cost of any of this, and I don’t think that I’m the person who should have to figure it out. I’m already the one who has to call the mental hospital where my stepdad is currently 5150′d to, against my mom’s wishes, beg them to keep him forever because I’m afraid he’s going to finally murder us all. I think if I have to make that phone call, someone else should do the math on the rest of it.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Rebecca Pederson?

Downtown Santa Cruz, Calif., $730/mo.
My junior year of college, I moved off campus and into a former bed and breakfast with 12 other people. It was dubbed the “Green Monster” because it was green and monstrously big, and also because the landlord acted like a troll you’d find hiding under a bridge. She’d stop by every Wednesday to tell us we were terrible human beings, as well as to make sure we were all complying with her very lengthy rental contract. I didn’t think the “absolutely no personal belongings in the communal areas” clause was to be taken that literally … until she threw away all my refrigerator magnets a week after I moved in.

West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif., $0/mo.
I spent the summer between my junior and senior year of college living in LA on my best friend’s dime. The plan was to write a Gossip Girl spec script that would jumpstart our soon-to-be prolific writing careers, but instead we wound up fighting viciously for three months. When we weren’t on each other’s last nerves, we were avoiding our super creepy downstairs neighbor, who would always try to lure us into his apartment with promises of “good wine” and episodes of that John Adams HBO miniseries. Against all odds, we actually completed the spec script. It wasn’t very good. We don’t speak much now. 

Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, Calif., $750/mo.
I lived in an apartment across the street from a seedy motel where the local prostitutes sometimes knocked on room doors to solicit their services. I shared a wall with an obese woman named Lori and her equally obese dog named Florie. Lori would sit outside my window at 6 a.m. and blow cigarette smoke into my bedroom while having yell-conversations with the neighbors under our balcony. On the other side lived an emancipated minor who threw nightly, Popov-fueled parties that often ended with me using a hose to spray down 16-year-old boys as they puked on the hood of my car. I had a headache for nine months straight.

Seabright, Santa Cruz, Calif., $400/mo.
My dog and I moved in with my boyfriend, his three housemates, and their three cats after I graduated. My presence messed up the house feng shui; the cats peed all over everything, which my dog responded to by pooping in the kitchen every day. The cats also all had fleas, which gave my allergy-prone dog a horrible skin condition that triggered her epilepsy, so we spent a lot of time and money at the vet getting steroid treatments.

The Mission, San Francisco, Calif., $725/mo.
The first apartment my boyfriend and I moved into solo! It’s really a two-room studio, and there are a few dime-sized holes in the floor so you can see directly into the garage below. Also, some of our neighbors are a little weird and possibly have unchecked mental illnesses—one of them stole the battery out of our car because he incorrectly thought we had vandalized his crappy beater—but we have a backyard that’s big enough for chickens, so it’s cool.

Rebecca Pederson is an editor at Yelp. Her Aunt Leslie loves her blog.

Dear Stock Options,

Please do not take this the wrong way, but you terrify me.

When I took this tech company job two years ago, I had just graduated from college and moved to San Francisco on a whim. I had less than a hundred dollars in my bank account. I was living in my boyfriend’s parents’ basement that doubles as an antique Jewish bookstore, where I slept on a lumpy mattress between the washer/dryer and last year’s sukkah.

Before I met you, I didn’t know stocks existed for people like me. I thought they were only for red-faced Wall Street guys in dress shirts with rolled up sleeves, high on obscene amounts of wealth and cocaine. So when my HR department told me my new job came with an “executive compensation package” full of “non-transferable employee stock options” I could “accrue” more of over time, I said, “Neat!” and then promptly forgot the conversation because I had no idea what that meant. 

But now I’m more of a grown-up, as you can see by the fact that I moved out of my boyfriend’s parents’ basement and have a dog. I think that, as a grown-up, it’s time I address the confusing nature of our relationship.

The thing is, I don’t understand you at all. You are like Monopoly money to me. In theory, I can use you to buy all the railroads, gleefully tax everyone into the poorhouse, and then laugh about it later with Thimble and Top Hat over cocktails in our high-rise on Park Place.

But the reality is, I went to UC Santa Cruz, where I majored in Modern Literary Studies with a concentration in Smoking Pot In The Woods. Economics courses were not a part of that curriculum.

I guess I’m just looking for some advice on how to handle “us.” I feel like we’d appreciate one another more if I could turn you from hypothetical money into real money I could spend on a plane ticket to New Zealand. You’d like that too, right?

So, humor me: What does it mean to “exercise” you? I just don’t know what I need to do to make you happy.

I think we need to open up our relationship and invite a financial advisor into bed.

Tied to you forever,
Becky

I’m not a scientist, but I support a theory shared by many people who are also not scientists: Kombucha is super good for you, and you should drink it every day. Kombucha is a fermented tea drink full of floating particles that are cultures of bacteria and yeast. I’m certain that the more I drink these cultures, the closer I am to becoming the person I want to be (which is to say, Lena Dunham’s writing partner/best friend/muse).

I swear I am physically and mentally unhealthy if I’m not constantly ingesting it, so when GT was forced by the FDA to take their Classic Raw Kombucha off the shelves because of the “alcohol” content (there are trace amounts from the fermentation process), I was devastated. The ban was a joke, considering you’d have to drink tanks of kombucha that would lead to regretful diarrhea long before you got drunk off it, but I digress. Classic Raw is the brand I love—it gives you a slight buzz that makes you feel like your blood is being detoxed or whatever it is that kombucha allegedly does to your body. Kombucha costs about a billion dollars a bottle, which I was happy to pay to feel like I was floating, and less happy to pay when I had to go with a subpar, less-”alcoholic” brand. So, I decided to start brewing my own.

The way you make kombucha is by combining the aforementioned special bacteria culture with tea, a little bit sugar and then letting it ferment. You only need six things:
1. Water

2. Tea you like to drink

3. A dish towel/some sort of porous cloth

4. A large rubber band or tie

5. A boyfriend who is thoroughly amused by your ambitious plan and willing to procure your big glass jar…

6. …and who will also find you a SCOBY and starter tea!

First, some background: SCOBY is an acronym that stands for “Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast.” This culture looks like a tan portobello mushroom cap and is what gives your kombucha the tangy, vinegar taste that makes your eyes water. (Fun fact: You’re eating a SCOBY cousin every time you eat sourdough bread!) The “starter tea” is just previously brewed kombucha the SCOBY sits in to keep hydrated.

Obtaining your own should not be difficult. SCOBYs multiply all by themselves because they are secretly little alien hermaphrodites, so those who have a SCOBY mother always have unwanted babies. People often give theirs away on Craigslist—though to be honest, that sort of scares me. Where has it been? What have they been brewing with it? What if they put it in their bathtub?!?! If you, too, have these irrational fears, ask your hippie-est friend (preferably the one who homebrews everything with an aura) and see if they have one. Or stop by a farmers’ market and ask those hippies. I guarantee someone will have one!

Whatever you do, do not pay money for a SCOBY. There are websites that try to trick you into doing this, and they charge upwards of $100! Scam alert! In my opinion, SCOBYs should always be free, and I think most people who brew share this opinion.

Now that you have your SCOBY, pick a tea you really like to drink. Caveat: It must be a black, green, oolong, red, or white tea. More simply: It must not be an herbal tea. If you use an herbal tea, your SCOBY will hate you and make you pay, but more on that later.

Onto the fun part—brewing! First things first…

1. Grab your kitchen’s biggest pot and bring four quarts of water to a rolling boil.

2. Add one cup of white sugar and let it boil for five minutes.

3. Turn off your stovetop and add your tea—7 tea bags or 4 teaspoons of loose leaf tea. Let it steep for 15 minutes.

4. Pull out your tea bags and let the tea cool down COMPLETELY to room temperature. This will take at least an hour, so go catch up on a couple episodes of Game of Thrones and then come back.

5. Once you’re extra super sure your tea is at room temperature, transfer it to your glass jar and dump in your SCOBY with its starter tea.

6. Seriously, don’t do step 5 until the tea is cool! SCOBYs are very sensitive about their temperatures and if they get too hot they will roll over and die.

7. After you’ve successfully not sent your SCOBY to a fiery grave, secure your dish towel to the top of your jar with your rubber band, then shove the jar in a cabinet and forget about it for one week (though if your house is really warm, you should check on it after four days).

8. Pull your tea out of its hiding place and taste it using a plastic or wooden spoon. Not enough tangy bite? Put it back in the cabinet for a couple more days!

9. Does the taste burn so good? Grab two Ziplock bags and pour one cup of this new kombucha (which is now acting as starter tea) into each. With clean hands, take what should be your now very swollen SCOBY and gently pull it apart – just like that, you have two SCOBYs! Put one in each bag, making sure they are completely covered by tea. You can throw them in your fridge, or start another batch!

10. Drink your kombucha; revel in delight.

(Sort of) easy, right? Of course, I encountered some trials and tribulations while figuring this process out. Firstly, I bought way too much ginger peach loose leaf black tea. By the end of my umpteeth batch, I was so sick of it I wanted to puke. I was determined to make a new flavor without abandoning (then inevitably forgetting about and thus wasting) the black tea, so I creatively mixed it with some Earl Grey herbal strawberry something or other. This is when my relationship with my SCOBY turned sour—literally. I found out later that herbal teas do not provide SCOBYs with the nutrients they need to survive, and that when SCOBYs are dying, they become toxic. But I didn’t know this and still stubbornly drank half of the batch before giving up because it tasted so bad. In short, I unwittingly drank half a gallon of poison! Which brings me to…

How to make yourself kind of sick and also kill your SCOBY: Furious my kombucha did not taste like GT Kombucha and even more furious I had to buy Pepto Bismol and Preparation H for chafing (yes, it makes you that kind of sick, ya’ll), I threw my SCOBY in the fridge to wallow in noxious juices. My boyfriend found it stuffed behind the Brita filter months later, grown to the size of a small pizza and covered in mold. I tossed it disgustedly into our green waste bin, where it was carted away to the San Francisco Recology Center. I’m not sure what my SCOBY is doing now, but I imagine it is still multiplying into more alien hermaphrodite babies that will certainly come after me to brew my blood when they’ve built a strong enough army.

No matter how hard I tried, I was never able to recreate the same buzz from my homebrew (even when I was slowly poisoning myself). When GT re-released the Classic Raw Kombucha, rebranding it as a 21 and over drink, I starting paying for my buzz again. Did I save any money during my homebrew stint? Hard to say with all the Pepto, Prep H, and time logged in the bathroom.

Photo: flickr/brockamer

Rebecca Pederson is an editor at Yelp. Her Aunt Leslie loves her blog.

When my boyfriend proposed we raise chickens in our San Francisco Mission District backyard, one of his persuasive arguments was that we’d save a ton of money on eggs. As someone who consumes more scrambles than is probably healthy, I thought it was a genius money-saving plan. This actually (surprise!) did not turn out to be true; funding a chicken setup cost a little more than I had anticipated, and the idea that we’d be spending significantly less on groceries was obviously laughable.

That said, owning chickens is really fun, worth the investment, and totally doable if you know what you’re getting into. Before you decide to tackle this daunting task, ask yourself the following questions: Do you mind getting up early … like, sunrise early? Are you okay with being dubbed the crazy house on your block? And most importantly, how much do you like eggs?

If you answered “not really,” “sure,” and “I’m obsessed with them,” you are ready! Here is a play-by-play of what we did, complete with price points—though of course, numbers will vary depending on where you live. Follow in these sometimes-misguided footsteps, and you’ll hopefully end up with only a few gray hairs. 

1. Read up on your city’s ordinance laws, because there would be no bigger bummer than going through all the effort only to get a fatty ticket. The City Chicken is a good starting point. But since you should never fully trust the integrity of a website made in MS Frontpage, check out your city’s municipal codes on the official government website as well. We learned that in San Francisco, each residence is allowed up to four small animals without a permit. Chicken coops can be built as long as they are 20 feet from all windows and doors, though you probably want to build at this distance even if it isn’t your city’s law—chicken funk is icky.

1a. Get permission from your landlord, dummy! Our conversation more or less went like this:

Us: Hey, Landlord! Can we put a chicken coop in the backyard? We’ll keep it really clean, we swear!
Landlord: Um, what? Oh, ha ha. [sarcastically] Sure thing, you crazy kids! Ha ha.

Two weeks later:

Us: Check out our coop!
Landlord: Oh, you weren’t kidding? Well, I guess it can stay.

2. Obtain that chicken coop your landlord very nicely approved. My boyfriend wanted the “full experience” of building a coop by hand because he is macho. I wanted to just buy one off Craigslist because I am lazy—so lazy I couldn’t be bothered to argue, so my boyfriend got his way. All in all, the building supplies cost us about $400, though it can be done way cheaper, I’m sure (check Craigslist)—we waterproofed the roof, built it high enough off the ground that we wouldn’t have to bend over to clean, and also made it large enough to house a family of six chickens.

3. Adopt your chickens! This is the most exciting part, especially if you decide to get them as cute baby chicks so you can raise them yourself and teach them to love you (spoiler alert: this doesn’t work). Chickens only thrive in communities; you need to get at least three so they won’t be so depressed they won’t lay eggs. Also, one of them might die—because circle of life—so prepare for that potential tragedy. Chicks are cheap; we bought ours for $5 each.

Keep in mind that buying babies means you have to get special food pellets and build a small incubator with a heat lamp and thermometer to monitor temps since they won’t be able to live outside until they have all their feathers. It’s extra work and a little more money (about $60 for everything), but it is the only time in their lives they will be soft and let you hold them, so … worth it. Definitely.

4. Start eating your fresh eggs! Okay, your chickens won’t actually start laying until they are about six months old. And when they do start laying, their eggs taste a little funny at first, like how their pellets smell. But then they start to taste really amazing! And the yolk is so yellow! And you know exactly what you are eating because you are the one feeding them! And when you crack one open in a pan you are like, “I am responsible for this meal! I am powerful! I am a woman of the earth!”

Our three hens yielded anywhere between 14 and 18 eggs a week, which was more than the two of us could eat. We used the extras as hush money so our next door neighbors wouldn’t call the cops when the chickens got into heated arguments at 5am. We also pawned off the chicken poop to our neighbors with gardens, which made us really popular. Another unexpected perk was that you can pretty much feed chickens anything: moldy bread, rotten fruit, whatever. In addition to it being good for their diet and saving you trips to the garbage bins, it helps cut the cost of buying new bags of feed (the cheapest stuff, found at feed stores that cater to farmers, is $15/50-pound-bag).

Getting a noise complaint was my biggest worry, since sometimes our chickens screeched so loudly I was convinced our entire block would band together to get us a $100-300 fine (kill me) or evicted (please, seriously kill me so I don’t have to deal with this stress—eviction notices are devastating everywhere but especially here; San Francisco apartment-hunting is basically like The Hunger Games).

I was so stressed out that my boyfriend eventually MacGyver’d a coop nightlight that we kept on until about 10 p.m. The chickens would idly stand in this pool of light, sometimes chirping preciously; when we turned it off, they would waddle themselves to roost like a bunch of drunk babies. For the most part, making them stay up past their bedtime (sunset) kept them quiet until a reasonable daylight hour.

If they got loud during the day, I would either: put an ice cube in their nesting box to confuse them (they think their eggs went bad and it stuns them into silence) or put the noisiest one in a box and sit on it for about 10 minutes, or until she screamed herself to sleep and the less noisy ones get bored.

So there you have it—almost all you need to know about raising backyard chickens! Your final task: Learn a helluva lot of egg recipes, because you will need to eat them at least three meals a day to get your money’s worth.

Rebecca Pederson is an editor at Yelp. Her Aunt Leslie loves her blog.