You might, if you knew I had just paid off my credit card!
Mission, as they say, accomplished.* Hooray!
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* No, really.
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It's the end of Frugality!
Posted by AnneZook at 01:58 PM | Comments (5)The forecast was for cooler temperatures this week, with rain showers starting this evening. So, naturally, it's snowing.
I am not mentally prepared for snow yet this year and, okay, right now it's rain-mixed-with-snow and not accumulating or anything but still.
I feel very huffy about it.
Nice weekend and considerably less expensive than last week, what with not buying a new computer or two new pairs of shoes.
I did go into a shoe store and saw the Most Beautiful Shoes Ever, but I resisted buying them. There comes a time in your life when you have to admit that you're just too old to wear a three-inch spike heel, no matter how heartbreakingly gorgeous the peep-toe black suede and patent leather upper is. (I can live with getting older, mostly, but I'd sure like to have my 20 year-old feet back.)
Sigh. I bought sensible shoes last week. Today, as the rain-mixed-with-snow falls, I'm sure I'm better off in a closed-toe, moderate heel pump.
Bleah.
I have an appointment with Hairman this afternoon and need to sneak out of the office 30 minutes early, so naturally I overslept this morning and was almost 20 minutes late* getting in. I can't make it up during my lunch hour (assuming I was in the habit of not working through lunch anyhow) because I have an errand I need to run. It's very complicated to me be some days.
I don't know why I didn't get up this morning. My alarm went off, but I think I curled up to wait for sunrise or something. Sunrise didn't happen, and I didn't get up....
I wish I'd taken a picture of those shoes. I'd like to be able to post it and ask y'all if you thought I should go back and buy them, regardless. Just because owning something that fabulous would be good in and of itself. I could always carry them around and show them to people....
It's snowing. That's so wrong.
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* "Late" is kind of relative around here. I mean, it was 8:20 and in theory I should arrive at 8:00, but since only two people made it in earlier than me, it's hard to feel that it's a big deal.
Life continues.
The R.C. is recovering from her head cold and seemed to enjoy her birthday largesse very much. She's working her way through the new DS game. She hasn’t said much about it, which might mean she's completely absorbed in it or maybe she's not having fun, but whatever. I also got her a couple of new Giant Bug Movies and someday, when we're both home and not busy in the evening, we will watch them.
I've been doing a bit of work from time to time and she's learning Spanish. A second language is always good. I enjoyed both Spanish and French when I studied them, but never learned to do what you might call speak either language. (One year of Spanish in Junior High wasn't really designed to confer that level of confidence.) The R.C. is determined to learn, though, and has been studying hard.
At moments, I feel a bit guilty and slothful because I'm not learning to communicate with the rest of the world, and then I tell myself I learned to speak Computer, and that should be enough.
The new computer is still a sweet dream to play with. Fast and shiny! But.... When I got it operational on Saturday, I generously let it install 32 software updates that it insisted were really, really, really important to its happiness and future well-being. I did understand--it had been in the box for a while and the software world had moved on. It needed to catch up.
I was not at all pleased to sit down at the keyboard four days later, yesterday, and find it demanding to be allowed to download and install eight more updates.
I suspect most PC users just tell the bloody OS to download and install whatever it wants, whenever it wants, so they aren't driven psychotic by the relentless demands for attention. I am not that type.* Updates are allowed to install if I want them. Not otherwise.
My biggest annoyance, so far, is that I can't find any way to tell the stupid OS to stop showing me updates after I've rejected them.* * You used to be able to do that, but I haven't figured out a way with this new system. What I really want, of course, is an option that reads, "shut up and go away" but you never get those.* * *
Oh! I almost forgot!
Today I am wearing a rather drab brown ensemble that it amuses me to refer to as "champagne beige" and which I purchased so I'd have something to wear with my Most Fabulous Shoes, and I got a compliment. From a man who actually noticed the shoes! In fact, he liked the whole outfit and asked if I was dressed up for a special meeting! NewBoss Anais occasionally mentions it if she likes a blouse I have on, the women in the office are pretty much in universal agreement over the fabulousness of the Most Fabulous Shoes, but other than that, no one really comments on what I'm wearing and, okay, I can go six or seven hours in this office and not actually see or be seen by another human being, but still, it's nice to be complimented.
There were other random things happening but it turns out they're all so boring I can't even be bothered to type about them.
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* I will admit to minor fantasies about a room full of M*cr*s*ft programmers and me with an oversized fly-swatter....
* * I have a perfectly good, up-to-date virus program. I don't need M*cr*s*ft deciding what software is "malicious" and removing it for me. Heck will freeze over--or several months will pass, at least--before I download the latest bloody version of blasted IE. The only reason I don't delete the program completely is that I have one site I use for work that won't function with any other browser.
* * * Unless you use Webstrainer, of course. On one of their suggestion pages, if you click, "this isn't relevant at the moment" you get an "oh, drat" sort of image ( :-\ ) and it you click the "this is completely irrelevant to my entire life and always will be" option, the little image is red-faced and shouting. It's so adorable I don't mind at all when 85% of the suggestions are ridiculously off-target.
Hey, I meant to blog today! How did it get to be 4:45 already? For a Monday, today whizzed by pretty quickly.
First, let's wish the R.C. a happy-happy-happy birthday today!
Hooray!
Aside from that, if I'd had time, I'd have blogged at boring length about these things:
#1 - Gidget signed on another location for one client, so we both got a tiny free-lance income raise this month. Hooray!
#2 - Apparently Bernie is serious about wanting me to quit my job and take on free-lancing full time, including a lot of work for him. He paid the rest of the balance on the outstanding invoice!
#3 - Shopping! Last week I dared to walk a whole half mile or so (in the entire day) in my newish blue sling-back pumps and wound up with bandages on my poor toes for the rest of the week and the weekend. Thus, this weekend's haul - two new pairs of shoes. I bypassed the fabulousness of the Zappos site in favor of two pair (black, blue) of plain pumps for half the price or less at DSW. All I want out of life (at the moment) is shoes that don't hurt my feet.
#4 - At 4:16 a.m. last Friday morning, we had a power outage. It was the last straw for the ancient (6-7 years old) desktop in the living room, and nothing we could make it do would get it to boot up. Saturday morning, the R.C. and I took the old box to Micro Center to see if any data recovery was possible,
#5 - I drone on and on about the whole Six-Month Frugality Plan quite a bit, but it feels like I also blog quite frequently about shopping splurges. In the not at all a splurge category--an additional weekend investment was a new keyboard and mouse. Strangely enough, when I opened the packaging for these new peripherals, there was a new computer in the box! (I wonder how that happened.)
Computers aren't that expensive any more if you don't need a monitor and we didn't. And while we bought 'up' somewhat from the bargain basement model the R.C. was inclining toward, I don't regret it. Computers are practically obsolete in a year these days and since we do tend to keep our home desktops for half a decade or more, I think it behooves us to spend a few extra bucks for a higher-end model. (rationalize-rationalize-rationalize)
Anyhow. Between the shoes and the PC, I think I spent all of the free-lance money I was paid last week.
It was a good weekend.
Lovely long weekend. Back at work today. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
I'm still trying to keep my mitts off of the 'Nut campaigns for long enough to see what kind of fallout there is from the massive changes I've been making. Today I'm managing, but only by dint of staying out of the campaigns entirely. Thus, it's 2:00 in the afternoon and I'm bored out of my gourd.
I ranted on the politiblog--not because I care or because I think anyone is listening, but just to kill time. I answered all of my email. I ate breakfast. A few hours later, I ate lunch. I went out four times to walk around the building.
I could do some work on Bernie's campaign, or on Gidget's stuff, but I'm really trying to avoid doing free-lance work on 'Nut time. (I don't know why. On days like today, it would be more honest than sitting here reading blogs. Or, at least, no less dishonest.)
It really was a lovely weekend. On Saturday, the R.C. and I did very little, slowly. We ate lunch. Browsed Ulta (a lotions-potions-makeup store). Spent an hour in a bookstore. Wandered through Target (for light bulbs and cleaning supplies). Stopped by the grocery store. All just leisurely, you know? Calm. Restful.
Sunday we spent a few hours in the mountains. It rained on us, but just enough to be fun, not enough to harsh the weekend's mellow vibe. We came home. I made soup. La-la-la-la-la. So peaceful.
Yesterday, the usual "Sunday" round of house cleaning, preparing lunches for the week, and doing laundry. (And, yes, not a couple of hours spent with the DS--feeding my chickens and harvesting crops. Why is that so amusing?)
And bugs! The R.C. ordered, and received, and Universal Pictures compilation of creature features, so we had a lot of giant bug movies all weekend. There was a giant mantis. A giant spider. (The R.C. narrated the spider parts, since I refused to look at the screen when the bug was shown.) A movie that advertised a giant leech but delivered a strange plot about how an old woman could be young and beautiful for 24 hours if she killed a man.
Last night we tried a televised offering that promised both a giant shark and a giant octopus--a two-fer! That one was a failure, I'm afraid. A giant octopus sinking a floating oil rig might be pretty standard fare, but I lost faith when I saw the giant shark leaping three thousand feet in the air to eat a jumbo jet.
As we all know, there's a level of stupid I'm just not prepared to deal with. The Science Fiction channel, irritatingly renamed SciFi and even more irritatingly rechristened ScyFy or somesuch stupidity, is responsible for a lot of really crappy stuff. I live in hope, though, because every now and then, quite by accident, they produce something watchable.