in my heart of heart

Now entering hour three of categorizing my purchases and expenses for 2015 to try to make a grown-up budget for next year. For years, it's been a huge joke in my family, how tight/frugal I am, and it's true! I pinched pennies and wore the same pair of sneakers for seven years, because I was putting all my money into my loan payments. But when I was closing in on paying off my student loans, I definitely noticed loosening the reins with my spending, and I need to take them back in.

I don't know things about horses; I hope that metaphor was sound. You may be pleased to learn that I recently purchased two new pairs of sneakers. My mother certainly was.

It was also a pretty good excuse to indulge in one of my favorite obsessive activities, color coding. I bought a pack of magic markers, printed out all my credit card and bank statements for the past year, and color coded each transaction. While wearing a sweater and drinking hot tea. I believe I have crossed over into that final frontier, old-as-balls. I'm entering all of them into a Google spreadsheet, just in case there was any financial information about my life they were missing, so I can figure out how much I'm spending, on average. I had some expensive car repairs and a bridesmaid dress to account for this summer, which I think is artificially inflating my monthly totals. I'll adjust for that in the 2016 budget.

A few days ago, I read the first Rivers of London novel, which Goodreads insists on cataloging as "Midnight Riot," what the hell? It was brilliant; I'm about halfway through the second novel, which is still pretty great. After reading the Dresden Files, these novels, and Game of Thrones, I think I've determined the only type of fantasy I really like is urban fantasy, where wizards have to deal with magic accidentally exploding their cell phones. kita0610, I think you would really like Rivers of London! Peter is like a young Harry. Does LiveJournal still notify users if you mention them in a post? KITA. KITAAAAAA.

Okay. Time to stop looking at vintage watches on Etsy and get back to the damn groceries column.

I was wracked with anxiety for about an hour last night, thinking about my student loans/savings goals. I've been saving really aggressively since August, but I'm so, so tired of carrying these loans. I figured out (thank you, unbury.us) if I apply about half of what I've been saving, plus the payment for the loan I just paid off by cutting my savings in half, I can be through with this by April of next year. April, April, April. I can do this. I just have to not freak out.

Hopefully this will assuage the feeling of being stuck in place that I've had the past few months. I love my job, but it's been pretty bad. We're adding a new staff person and tackling some new initiatives, so I'm looking forward to that. The fact that fundraising is so cyclical might be the issue. I have the schedule down, I feel like I'm on top of it, so now it's just, "Oh, that again." I'm not going to cut and run.

Today I started reading The Worst Journey in the World, about an expedition to the South Pole. The author has a really wry voice, which I appreciate; in his introductory paragraph, he says,

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised [...] As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the trenches of Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.