Once again, we have a small tree in the house. This year, it’s next to the piano in the dining room. This costs us the use of a doorway (from the dining room to the office) rather than the usual sacrifice of massive amounts of floor space in the living room. We’ll see how it goes.
Sat down and made a budget together. Interesting experience. It’s telling that it’s taken five years of marriage, and ten years of dating with some level of pooled resources, before we were willing to bite the bullet and do what they tell you to do in home-ec in 9th grade. Interesting to see, at least in big, broad strokes, where the money goes. Maybe the most interesting innovation was mapping out non-monthly expenses (car insurance, annual fees for the gym, and the like) and deciding that we’re going to put the appropriate monthly amount into what amounts to an escrow account. I.e: All payments are monthly now. Hopefully that will even out some of the bumps.
We’re trying to tap into the obsessive compulsiveness, as well as the desire to use the computer for everything possible.
I installed plastic on the windows on the porch, and on two in the living room. You know, the ghetto-plastic that you put up when your storm windows suck? The kind you smooth out with a hair dryer, except that it never really smoothes out … and you end up shrinking it so much that it pulls the adhesive off the window frames and you have to start over? Yeah, that. Except that now it’s all mainstream and available at Home Despot. Home Despot spending is in the budget now. Have to add those receipts to the budget tracking system. I think that’ll be “home improvement”. The christmas tree is “entertainment.”
Went to a very pleasant cocktail party last night, put on by one of redmed‘s classmates. She made tons of glorious food, served us a variety of wine I had never heard of before (“Pinotage?”), and generally threw a wonderful party. Sadly, only about a third of the people she was expecting actually showed. This is one reason I don’t do parties as much as I might otherwise. They end up being wonderful, small gatherings of friends … where everyone feels a little bad for the host because they overplanned. Why not just go for the small gathering up front?
Yesterday I installed an exterior electrical outlet, and fixed the lamp-post by the driveway. The lamp-post was funny. I turned off the breaker, opened up the top, and started chipping away. Turns out that the old socket for the light was held in place with large quantities of rubber cement. Yay. After that was gone, I grabbed hold of the wiring and started pulling. The guy had decided to make little patch cables out of crappy, stranded wire, rather than attach the nice solid core stuff to the light socket. Thus the flaky behavior. Put a new socket in, attached directly to the good wire, and now it works like a charm. I could get into this electrical stuff. The exterior outlet was textbook, except that I wired it backwards because I assumed that things were done correctly rather than measuring before attaching it. Duh. I should know this by now.
So now I have a fire in the fireplace, a tree in the house, and a belly full of pizza. Not bad.
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