vicious cycle

Spending money always seems to make me want to spend more money. For example: a couple weeks ago we had a really hot weekend and Fans were on sale at Home Depot, so Tony and I thought it would be a good idea to buy a fan for the guest room before my parents came to visit... in case it was still really hot when they were home... and while we were at Home Depot we thought, why not just buy a fan for the office too... THEY'RE ON SALE ! ... so we bought two fans... and the wires and what not to hook them up... and a trash can... the office NEEDED a trash can.... never mind the fact that we had gotten along without a trashcan in the office since we got our house... at the time when we were at Home Depot and I was standing in front of the pretty new plastic rubish bins, the five feet between the office and the trash can in the guest bathroom at our house just seemed to be a riddiculous distance to have to walk with a torn envelope that needed to be discarded... so I decided to buy a trash can with some of the money we were SAVING buy buying the on sale ceiling fans . The ceiling fans that we bought, by the way promised us EVEN MORE SAVINGS because they were going to save us money on our energy bill... I didn't really understand how putting a fan where there was no fan before was going to save us money in the long run... but the box said it was true, so I figured it must be. Boxes are usually pretty honest people.

Anyway, even though we bought the fans on sale and saved a bunch of money it still seemed to my bank account that we had spent about $250.00... but they are nice fans and anything nice that is attached to our house will make the house sell better whenever we sell our house, so it was ok.... A funny thing happened though... a few hours after the fans were up in the office and the guest room Tony figured out a way to put a fan in OUR bedroom. I had never even considered putting a fan in OUR room before 'cause there was no ceiling light, we just used the bedside lights to illuminate our room... but Tony is quite the electrical wizard and he could tell just by looking at our wall and our ceiling that he could somehow fish an electircal line up the wall and slap some kind of brace up in the middle of the room and Viouala we would have ourselves a ceiling outlet to which we could attach a fan.

At first I thought we should stop spending so much money, but then I thought... "you know that was really nice of us to make sure our guests stay cool when they spend the night at our house... but we dont even have guests that much and WE LIVE HERE ALL THE TIME... DON'T WE DESERVE TO STAY COOL TOO? After all we are a couple of nice considerate folks"... so within a week Tony was back at Home Depot buying all the fixins to put a fan in our room... It wasn't on sale... but it was still a good deal... and I must say, IT IS A GLORIOUS FAN !

So that is the story of how we spent a couple hundred bucks a couple weeks ago... and then spent a couple hundred more last week... this week we decided to take on a plumbing repair project... and then had to call Roto Rooter... so that is where this weeks couple of hundred dollars went. I think once I see how easy it is to just shell out a bit of cash and get a bright shiny new whatever it makes me want to get more whatevers. Plus people will often give you a coupon to get a discount on your next purchase when you buy something and coupons seem like a horrible thing to waste, so why not go online and see what else the store sells that you never knew you needed.
Yeah capitalism has woven a pretty sticky web around me. If I go long enough without buying things (other than food and stuff that I really do need to stay alive and whatnot) I find that the desire to spend kind of goes away or at least gets smaller... but it can never last too long 'cause there is always a birthday or holiday just around the corner which means I will have to buy gifts. It's all such a vicious cycle.

I used to be pretty good a saving money in spite of all of the holidays and coupons and everything, but since Tony and I bought our house it seems so easy to justify spending. Anything that goes towards the house becomes an investment and so its not really like SPENDING at all... its INVESTING... so it will come back to me X10 right? Hopefully... but there are so many INVESTMENTS that I want to make on the house that I don't see myself really being able to save any money for 5 or 6 years... and in 5 or 6 years I plan to be moving out of this place going to Arizona and starting a bakery... and maybe having kids sometime before all that... so I am always worrying about how I can cut out costs from day to day expenses and what I can do to earn a little extra money and I find that I am SPENDING way too much of my TIME thinking about SPENDING MONEY and not spending money.

I used to think about more creative interesting things, but lately I feel like just another cog in the great economic world that we all live in... oh and by the way the economy is failing and so if I am chained to that wheel I really should be worried... and I am a little, ahhh... I just want an extra day or two of not work per week so I can get around to thinking about and doing the things that I would rather be thinking about than money... stupid money. I'd much rather make everything that I buy, but I don't have time... I have hardly any time to MAKE anything because I'm too busy THINKING about how to MAKE money... VICIOUS VICIOUS CYCLE. I really don't like capitalism... I think there should just be good person points that you earn for being a good person and then you can trade those or not with people for things... I don't have the finner details of the good person points economic system worked out just yet, but that is the kind of currency we would have in my Utopia.

Blah... anyway enough rambling about the vicious cycle... I've still got a little weekend left so I think I'll go live a little.

a party at our crib... and other randomness

Wow... it has been A WHILE since I've cranked out a blog entry... I hope I still know how. I used to always write these things while I was at work, but since they let go of my one and only co worker in the office just as we were starting to come into our busiest season of the year I have had more work than I can get done in 9 hours... which means I've had zero blogging time : ( I've worked an average of about 48 or 50 hours a week since they let Theresa go, so that has been kind of stressful... and being stressed out makes me feel less jovial... and it wouldn't be fitting of me to write an un-jolly "Jolly Jilly" entry... although looking back on the earlier entries there was a lot of Blah Jilly getting put out there. WHAT WAS I THINKING WITH THAT?

Anyway, It is a beautiful Sunday morning and I'm sitting in my gorgeous back yard amongst all of my tasty fragrant herbs and corn and other wonderful plants and I just feel happy and inspired so I thought I'd take a moment to record... the moment... ... ok, so that's done...that was nice. Hmm I don't have anything in particular to say other than that, so I suppose I shall ramble...

Last night Tony and I finally had a "house warming party" I don't know if it still counts as a house warming since we've lived here for almost a year, but we referred to it on the email we sent out as a "be lated house warming / poker game" and everyone who came brought us a gift (which was un expected and very appreciated) ... and also it was very hot yesterday and we don't have AC at our home so in a literal sense we did have a "warm house" which was made warmer by the additional body heat of our guests , so I guess it counts as a house warming.

Somehow Tony and I managed to entice 11 friends (including 3 kids) to show up at our house ! I couldn't believe it! We got more guests to come to a party at our house than Anushka did... (WOW... EVERY THING IS a competition with me huh...? )... it was a very good feeling.

Lately I've been feeling like a lame ass... only 2 people came to my birthday party that Tony organized a few weeks ago and I had texted Anushka's friend Marlin hoping that we could hang out and be friends and she didn't write back nor did she answer the last 2 emails I sent her so I guess I probably won't be friends with her, which is very disheartening... and Theresa isn't at work anymore so I spend most of my time alone in a quite office, so it gave me a very welcome bit of an ego boost that this many people were willing to pay a bridge toll to come and see us last night.

I am very grateful to feel like I finally am fitting into a group of friends here like I had in high school... and I have really missed having a "group" since high school ... Last night I felt like maybe I'm not as weird and lame as I had thought... Although I gotta say I am really awful at giving tours of our house... I just like open the door to each room and am like" this is the master bedroom" and this is the " guest room" etc etc. I'm pretty sure that's not how a tour is supposed to go... although I have no idea how it IS supposed to go, so maybe I was doing ok... I was trying to remember what they say on Cribs that makes the tours of houses seem so interesting... but I couldn't remember a damn bit of commentary from those shows... it's mostly about the sweet ass expensive houses and cars and amenities that all of the rappers and actors and whomever have... Actually no wait... what they do is they show a room and then they have the rapper or whatever say "this is my man cave this is where me and my boys hang out and watch our Blue Ray Videos on my giant movie sized screen..." So I guess they talk about something they do in the room... I should've been like "Yo' this is our guest room... this is where I go to watch episodes of Daria on my old Desk top computer from college. Back in the day I illegally downloaded every episode of that hysterically witty cartoon"... and this is the office this is where I take a trip to the past and watch VHS tapes and play scrabble on the computer and sometimes read... I like to think of it as my zen gallery"... damn where was this stuff last night when I needed it... I guess I'll have to bust out that shit next time I give a tour of our house to someone... oh oh and then they do that thing when the go from one room to another (on Cribs) and they like cock their head to one side and motion for you to follow and their like "Let's go check out my back yard with my infinity pool and view of the ocean"... the head cocking and come hither arm waive are essential. I've gotta work those into my tour... hmm who's the next person that will be here for the first time. I guess Michael... I think he would appreciate a cribs tour of our house...

Ok, well I can't think of a nice final thought to tie everything together from this entry, so I'll just say Jill + last night + this morning = Jolly.