Life. Blah.
Yesterday was a hard day to get through. R and I woke up to an already dreary day in a funk. We have put so much effort in the past 6 months trying to attain some personal financial goals. Spreadsheets have been created, budgets have been tightened, and you know what, we’re tired. Tired of putting things back on the store shelf, of foregoing dinner & a movie, of making any sort of self-limiting decision period. It is a daily struggle to make smarter choices with our money. . And we’re only 6 months into a 3 year plan. To top it off, we’ve made the decision to not buy a car to replace the one that unofficially died a few days ago. We will share R’s car and make it work (as I try to channel Tim Gunn.) We’ve also decided to move into an even cheaper place in the next town over. These are self-inflicted choices. So even though I know that I have a limited number of “I feel tied to this Quicken spreadsheet and so want to complain” cards to play, yesterday was a good day to use at least one. I mean, even our very last Consumer Reports magazine showed up, that’s how much we were slapped in the face.
On the plus side, we hammered out the travel portion of the budget and I’m pleased to say that there is major wiggle room where that is concerned. Life started to look up.
…but that came later on in the evening. Beforehand, we were grumpy. So I made R pick out a game to play. He chose, what else?, LIFE.
..here’s me: tired of brushing my hair, of putting on make-up, of reaching across the board game. R was tired of taking photos.
And so if we could have lived another life, if even for a half-hour, we would’ve. So we did. And we laughed and smiled and joked and it was the brightest spot of the whole day.
We both started out side by side. I pretended I was from England and could only drive on the right-hand side of the car…. driving to my new college. Coincidentally, both times we played (we had a back-to-back Life session), I landed on the “Study Abroad” tile. It made me smile.
We both married and ended up at the stop sign next to each other. R said he didn’t like the way my husband was looking at him and wanted to fight.
R picked his salary card and did really well for himself. He ended up having two girls and yelled at them in the backseat throughout the game. But the clincher was when he came upon a fork in the road and had to choose between taking his family to see a physician for $5000 or buying a high-definition TV for the same amount.
He chose the TV. And life was fun again.
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