All grown up

We dragged out the budget spreadsheet again today.

This is something we do when we start to feel that expenses have gotten out of hand. You know, that moment, often after vacation, when you think, "Oh my God, what are all these bills?" It's hard to realize, when you're back at your desk, that you still have to pay for that plane trip that's now over, or the pile of clothes you bought, or all the dinners out. Ahem.

So the budget spreadsheet is, as you may have guessed, oh so much fun. We keep track of every single little penny that we spend, and each gets categorized and recorded in the spreadsheet. Even coffees and movie rentals. We do this for a couple-few months, and then we look hard at it and see if we really are overspending and where. Often the process of recording everything itself does the trick. I'm much less likely to buy an extra coffee if I know I have to fess up about it; it just makes me aware of what I'm doing and why. (I blame all this money-awareness on my Norwegian genes, by the way. I have no idea what my husband's excuse is. {g})

{sigh} It's also much less fun when you're keeping a budget. But you know, it's not always fun to be the adult, is it?

There was a related quote in "The Weatherman", which we saw this weekend, that was particularly memorable for me: "Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. "Easy" doesn't enter into grown-up life."

Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life. I feel like tacking that up on my wall. {s}

Medieval Word of the Day: chine: An open fissure or crack in a surface; a cleft, crack, chink, leak.