Rising From the Ashes

I have had an intense month since my last post. Here's the short scoop:

1) For whatever reason, the person I thought was going to be my ex-best friend reappeared in my life and acted like she hadn't been totally AWOL for 6 weeks. We've been out for coffee and we're chatting by phone again. It's not what it was -- I can sense a distance that didn't used to be there -- but it's not gone forever as I'd feared.

2) My husband's company announced that they would NOT be laying anyone off for 6 months. This was initially good news, but we've seen some other things that they're doing that make us wonder if they're going to lay off in good earnest when those 6 months are up. This has made us take stock of a lot of things and has led to...

3) Weight loss of appreciable proportions. Am I super model thin? No. But I don't have Christmas Cookie Butt any more and I am feeling better about myself than I have in a while. This is partly from the stomach-churning anxiety over #2 which made it hard for me to eat, and partly because my response to any kind of serious stress is to exercise myself into oblivion. Instead of stomping down to the treadmill like a sulky child, I've embraced it as the exorciser of my stress demons.

4) Budgeting. This has always been a bugaboo for me. Just say the word budget and I get all cranky and indignant. I mean, there is math in this whole budgeting gig. Math. But with the possibility of a job loss ahead of us, we had to take a long hard look at our finances and what we could sustain in the event of...an event. One of the things we have decided is that we need to get off our credit card. Now, we always pay off our balance each month, but it struck us that with the credit card we are always a month behind on our expenses. When we pay it off, we're using our money to pay last month's expenses while we rack up new ones on the card. Thus, if we no longer had income, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pay off the outstanding expenses and still have money for current expenses. So we have begun to transfer our expenses to a cash or check outlay. This means I am shopping for groceries with cash. Actual money. Weird. I'm not sure how long it's been since I used cash for large purchases, but I want to say...high school? Seriously, I think I haven't used cash like this since I wadded up my babysitting money and ran down to The Limited to see about getting some acid wash jeans.

And though I'm really only 2 weeks into this process, I have to say, I really like it. Handling actual bills makes me think more before I spend and it's made me think about conserving my resources differently. My goal is to shop once every two weeks and then only go to the store for milk and bread in the interim. So far it's working; I even came in $6 under budget for the first 2 weeks. Score!

5) My nest: Something has happened to me in the last month with regard to my house. When we first moved here, we hadn't sold our old home, so we had this spectre hanging over us from the get-go that if the old house didn't sell, worst case scenario we'd put both houses on the market and move back to the old house if we had to. Since that was a possibility, I felt like I couldn't paint or even hang too many pictures for fear of damaging its resale value. We did finally sell the old house, but that feeling of not being able to change anything has persisted. Until now. My first real act of possession was painting my oldest daughter's room pink. PINK. Not a neutral; not an anybody-could-live-here color at all, but a little girl color, a color that says in no uncertain terms that a 7 year old girl lives in that room. It empowered me and I am full of ideas and plans for the rest of the house and the landscape. No more over-trimmed Stepford shrubs. I'm going to start ripping things out and planting me some flowers. Already the daffodils I planted last fall are poking their little green tips through the crappy rock.