Things I would like to discuss with the universe

(And, before I start: yes, I am trying to take these things up with the people who might actually give me answers. They just haven't got back to me yet and this makes me feel tense.)

Problem: Why didn't Amazon use my gift certificate that I had thoughtfully saved in their little save-yer-gift-certificate thing? Did I fuck this up somehow? Why did it charge me money? Why wouldn't it let me cancel the order once I twigged to the fact that it was about to charge me?

Preferred result: Amazon staff will reply to my e-mail saying "Goodness gracious, something went wrong there. Why, we'll refund your money immediately." And then I can use that money for my sister's birthday present (which I foolishly agreed to pitch in for, $50 worth, and which I won't be able to afford if Amazon keeps charging me, ACK).


Problem: I can't remember which of the windfall checks we deposited last January is from X, and which is from Y, and frankly that does mean a lot because of taxes, and I would really rather know this before we go to see ye olde financial advisor (sigh) tonight.

Preferred result: Magically, the information will appear on my desk. Alternately, I'll remember where we deposited the checks, because apparently I need to know that information in order to get someone to tell me. Alternately, our financial advisor will be willing to throw together some kind of tax estimate based on both versions.


Problem: I think I may have run the car out of gas, and it's (badly) parked a block south of our apartment. It had a quarter-tank of gas when I got there, and then when I re-started the thing in order to park it somewhat closer to the curb, it suddenly started flashing the GAS light at me and the needle was pegged near the zero mark, in the red zone. I'm baffled as to how I lost several gallons of gas, or possibly broke the car. (Eeeee.)

Preferred result: Everything will be fine and we'll have enough gas to get to the gas station. On Tuesday, that is. No money in the budget for gas until Tuesday. I have no bloody clue how we used it all up, although my Hub driving to work four times in two weeks (one week having two days of work as we were just back from vacation, one week having three days of work as it involved New Year's) may well be a clue.


In other news...

My Hub has got the hang-- kinda-- of Mvelopes. So far he does not blindly hate it. So far he does not mind having eight different totals for his checking account versus just plain looking at his checking account. The main problem thus far is getting him to check the damn thing instead of looking at his bank account. He forgets.

He did, however, make the decision to move money over from one envelope to the other, sacrificing his video game money in order to go out to eat. I'm kind of satisfied; he had that moment where he had to think about it, and that's a big step. He also realized that while he doesn't have a video game per se that he wants to buy, he does want to throw more money at X-Box Live points, in order to buy more content, since he's burning through his current balance like WHOA. And he's pleased that he doesn't have to remember not to spend his NPR money or the Yahoo money (automatic payments every month), since those are tucked into their own little envelopes. I totally understand that one, since I had the same reaction of "WHEW, there's a layer of stress I didn't even realize I had, all gone" when I first set up the household budget on the thing.

He might get the hang of this. I think it might work. He doesn't have to do any math or any upkeep (I'm handling the which-envelope-does-this-go-in maintenance, since I'm already doing it for everything else) and just the fact that the money is in seperate piles, piles with names all symbolizing things he wants, is already much different for him than just looking at the single nameless mass of money in his checking account. Looking at the names means that every time, he remembers that he might not want to spend $20 on [random item here] because that'll take $20 away from something else he really wants.

It's all about names. He laughed at me when I said that I loved knowing that all the money had names, but really, that's the thing that makes it work-- that moment where you look at it and remember "Oh, right, that $50 is earmarked for Mom's birthday gift," and then don't spend it on something else. It's magical.

Also, it is Thursday, and we have not driven to work at all this week. My Hub has a $0 balance in his "parking" envelope in Mvelopes. Coincidence? I hope not. He hasn't said anything, but then again we haven't had cold/wet weather in which to walk to the El, only chilly/dry and warm/wet. He may start bemoaning his fate when the weather starts acting like proper January again.

I really, really wish we could telecommute during the winter months... well, I probably could, with a slight upgrade on my laptop. My Hub, on the other hand, needs to be at the office. And since I don't mind dealing with the weather half as much as he does (or perhaps I'm just more determined to not pay the $14 to park downtown), that pretty much ruins the whole point. Oh well.

We've eaten salads or at least mostly-veggie dinners for three days straight now, and I think we'll end up with at least one more salad dinner tonight, since we have chicken breasts and from-scratch croutons already made. All I have to do is slice up the pears, wash and spin the lettuce, have my Hub make the dressing (he's good at it, hence his eternal fate), and chuck lettuce, dressing, chicken, croutons, pears, goat cheese, and chopped walnuts together. Instant-ish awesome dinner!

You may have noticed I'm slowly adding tags/labels to my posts. It's slow going, since I have to go back and read all the damn things, but I will get organized. More or less. I'm not sure what good this will do me or any of you darling readers, but all the cool kids are doing it, so I feel strangely compelled to keep up.

Cut for length-- click to read more.

And now, some actual weight-type news.

I continue to eat only when I'm hungry (next step: figuring out how to stop when I'm full, which I'll get to as soon as I can figure out how to tell when I'm full), to calm myself down via other means, and to dutifully log my weight every morning. I'd been kind of worried that this would turn out to be an exercise in futility, but on the other hand, if it's gonna work, it's going to be slow and long-term, right?

So, as of this morning, I've been doing that for two weeks. Not counting the short time that went totally whackjob via my period (having never recorded my weight daily before, I'd never realized that my weight goes up a good five pounds the day before my period starts), the results are in: it appears that I'm losing about a pound every week.

!!!

Well. I hope it keeps up. I suspect that I may have to battle my two other behavioral issues with food, "eating more mindfully" and "stopping when I'm full", in order to keep things going, but right now my body is responding peaceably enough to my switch from food-as-stress-relief to relaxation-as-stress-relief. All I'm doing besides that has been a moderate amount of exercise, three or four times a week. Haven't gone back to sugary soda (never intend to), but I'm pretty much eating whatever I want to. Bacon has occurred four times in one week. (PMS, what can I say?) I'm trying in a vague way to get healthy meals on the table, but I'm not stressing about it, I'm not measuring portions.

My theory is that for some folks, like myself, weight gain occurs on a moderate scale because of the usual factors (portions too large, eating too much junkfood, beer & soda consumption, etc.), but the majority of the pounds are associated with stress. (Note, once again: SOME folks, not all.) Food = stress relief. Entering a traditional diet means not only depriving oneself of that stress relief, without finding any replacement, but it also means more stress on top of that because diets are stressful, for pete's sake. Lots of extra work, lots of new rules, lots of new activities shoved into an already-busy schedule, an overwhelming sense that if the scale doesn't move YOU HAVE FAILED; all of it, very stressful. It becomes a huge relief to cheat on or to outright dump the diet, just because of the extra stress it causes and the way that it blocks you from your one source of stress relief, the bastard thing.

Therefore, in this case, I'm taking care of the first issue first. Make sure that I have a functioning non-food source of stress relief, solidly establish the new source of stress relief so it's not new and weird and untested, then switch over the stress relief to the new, non-food source. All of this before any futzing around with the food itself actually occurs, which, as we all know, is a stressful thing to introduce to one's life. And... so far, so good.

Hilariously, I've also developed a weird new hoarding habit. It hurts my soul to give up free candy, and then watch it disappear without having partaken, so I will grab a mini-Snickers from the bucket in the mailroom... and then put it in my desk drawer. Haven't eaten any of it. I've got a little stash now, and in a strange way it brings me a sense of comfort and stability. I can have it if I want. I can have it if I get hungry. I'm just not hungry now. And, since I bring real snacks with me to work, I still haven't come to the point where I'm actually hungry and out of food and so must resort to the candy stash.

I suspect this will come in handy as Halloween approaches.

On the financial front: I know I've talked a lot about Mvelopes, but there are other programs out there. PearBudget is an Excel sheet thing-- they're working on a Web 2.0 verion-- and free. Expensr works in a similar manner to Quicken or MS Money (you know, the traditional options), but is online, and free. (Not my thing, 'cause the budgeting options it has right now don't, for example, require that all the money that you budget actually add up to the amount you take in, which I'd think would be required for a budget, but hey, whatever.)

Most interesting of the non-Mvelopes options I've come across is Wesabe, which is to personal finance what Flickr is to pictures and what del.icio.us is to bookmarks. Very Web 2.0. Your personal info is personal, no question, but your participation builds the application-- de-coding your bank's cryptic "description" of a transaction to something that humans can use ("084 TRADJOE CHICAG IL 773549", for example, could be "Trader Joe's, Lakeview Chicago"), or tagging it with your rating for the company, or tagging it with your own notes-- into something that could eventually become seriously amazing. Think of it: you enter your own experience with a mechanic, and somebody else in your neighborhood who's looking for info on local mechanics can find it later. You put up your own helpful hints for lowering your grocery bill, and it goes up with a bunch of others so that you end up with a big page of helpful grocery hints, some of which may be dumb but others of which could be fantabulous. And the more people participate, the smarter it gets. It lets you-- nay, encourages you to-- put up your goals, with pictures, right there on a sidebar where you see them all the time. That, right there, is awesome. The creators of Wesabe have said in their blog that what they really want this to be is a way of letting people get the most from their money that they can-- the best quality, of course, but also a group support for paying off debts and starting to live inside the constraints of what you earn.

And it's free. So... awesome.

I'm kind of an early adopter on these things... not really early, but earlier than the other folks I know. Flickr, Gmail, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Napster (the real version, back in the day), blogging; I tend to discover these things a bit after the real crop of early adopters has started to wax lyrical about them, and adopt them about a year or so before they become totally normal. The problem there is that some of them don't end up normal; my poor beloved Webvan went broke in 2001, and another dot-com startup, Kozmo.com, that would bring me food and a movie within an hour of ordering it on the web went belly-up around that same time (and since I was single and living alone at the time, Kozmo was very much missed every time I got sick and didn't have anyone to bring me hot food and fresh movies). So I could be wrong on this one, but so far I haven't seen it go wrong.

In OTHER other financial news, our car has gone wrong. I lost the battle of do-we-accept-your-mom's-old-car-or-not, and my Hub is sentimentally attached to the thing since it was his mom's, and so there's no getting rid of it. That said, I long for the simple days when we had no car. True, this meant a lot of walking in horrible weather, and true, this meant that we had to rent a car to get out to see the in-laws for Thanksgiving, and true, this meant that we didn't have the questionable luxury of driving to work and paying $14 for parking under Millennium Park. That said, not-owning is a simple state, one in which I understood what was expected of me, and one which brought few surprises to the table which could run us untold hundreds of dollars in repair fees. Owning a car, on the other hand, means taxes and insurance and gasoline and parking and new tires and repair work and a bloody city sticker which we must purchase annually to prove our right to park on Chicago streets, and we still use the El nine times out of ten, so in my mind we're paying for something that we don't need and making ourselves psychologically dependent on owning.

ARRRRGH, cars.

In other other OTHER financial news, we have a meeting next week with our financial planner. This should be fun. I'm in a much better mood now that I've publicly fumed and now that I feel in control of the situation; we're going to turn the variable universal life policies into term life, and drain the mutual funds in order to kill off half the student loans. That'll leave us with disability insurance, term life insurance, and Roth IRAs, all of which are good things, but which I'm going to start checking into to see if we could switch over to other kinds that a) aren't under the Ameriprise banner and b) might be more in tune with what we need. I've got another financial planner lined up, a fee-based one (and yes, referred to from Dave Ramsey's site) who would be unconstrained in choice of product and whose loyalty would not be under question; as time proceeds we'll move things that direction.

Happily, we're not out that much money; we're not going to have to pay anything on my Hub's insurance policy even if we just drop it (yay) and for all things I seem to have caught it early enough that, at the most, we're $2K behind where we ought to be. That's a lot better than it could be, and a relatively cheap price for the resounding wake-up call that this has been. It could be much, much, much worse. I'm going to focus on that, instead of on the parts that make me very very angry.

Also, a wee story that comforted me when I was in the midst of kicking my own ass over having not checked these things out before (yes, that was stupid; anyone who is not clear on the fact that I had already realized that, and who thinks that I need it explained to me again, or who wishes to rub more salt in my wounds, you may want to check that impulse rather than testing my dearly-won zen). Once upon a time, scientists hooked a bunch of people up to machines to scan their brain activity and then had them do a test. It was structured thusly: first, the question, then a space for them to answer, then an indication of whether they were right or wrong, and then the correct answer would be given. There was a space of time between each. They ended up having two distinct types of people: first, the people whose attention remained rapt up until the point where they got to find out if they were right or wrong, and then slagged off for the real answer; second, the people whose attention remained keen all the way through the process, because if they got an answer wrong they became really curious about the right answer. On a re-test, the people who were curious about the right answer were the ones who scored higher the second time around; the other folks just stayed static.

Moral of the story: being wrong doesn't mean bugger-all except a chance to learn a new answer, and if you only care about if you're right or wrong, you're not learning. It's kind of a cold moral and ignores the fact that it sucks wretchedly to be wrong about something when you've stupidly put your trust in someone whose loyalty lies elsewhere (as is the case this time, and on lord knows however many other occasions, since I never lack for naive trust), but at least it's something.

The other moral of the story, although not that story, is that although I always think I want more to eat after I get done with lunch, and always think I want a treat, within half an hour of lunchtime I'll end up with heartburn or other proof that my stomach has different ideas than my head, so it's a very good thing that I just hopped right on the internet and ignored the yen for a treat.

Cut for length-- click to read more.

Bacon + chocolate = pure evil

I walked home from the doctor's last night (I'm fine), for the sake of a little time to clear my head. Walked by Whole Paycheck Foods and thought, "Well, I'm out of awesome chocolate, I should pick up another bar."

Lo and behold, I came face-to-face with this.

Yes, that is what it looks like. It's a gourmet chocolate bar made with bacon.

I stared at it for a while, and then, because my Hub has often claimed that there is nothing, nothing that cannot be improved by adding bacon, I bought it to bring home to him. (And a bar of Green & Black's Maya Gold, because there was no way I was staking my entire week's chocolate future on something that looks like a photoshopped joke idea.)

He was astonished. And intrigued. And a little scared. He made me take pictures of the entire process of him tasting a piece of the chocolate, and the faces he made were just priceless. I asked him how it was, and he just kind of blinked at me with this blank look on his face and shook his head. "I don't know. The chocolate was good, but it was... I don't know."

About an hour later, he convinced me to try some. This was a mistake. You know how the taste of bacon kind of goes up in your sinuses and lingers? Imagine that, plus salt, plus milk chocolate. If you can imagine that, you're a brave one, and you're also short of the mark because it was SO MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. On the one hand, there was nothing wrong with any of the ingredients. Good bacon taste, good chocolate taste, but as Xander Harris once said, "THESE ARE UN-MIXY THINGS." It made my brain hurt. It wormed its way into my sinuses and stayed there. I couldn't stop tasting it. I had to drink some hideously dry wine to get some other kind of taste up in that region, because the longer it stayed with me, the worse my brain-pain became.

People: don't do this. Just don't. Vosges does some awesome mixy things, but this is not one of them.

In other news, I kept my equanimity all the way through my doctor's visit, which was good. Then I went home, which was likewise good. Then I called my parents, and that's where things went haywire.

People in my family are under a lot of stress these days. There's a wedding that may or may not happen, and the open-ended question there is dragging all of us through a lot of tension, along with trying to figure out where the line is between "helpful advice" and "pushy busybody". There are several family members-- not immediate family for me, but close enough for my folks-- who are having a lot of health issues, so there's a lot of guilt and exhaustion flying around, along with the worries about care and money. My folks are within a few years of retirement, and of course the stock market promptly started going haywire-- hopefully their financial advisor was following proper procedure and had them in low-risk bonds and whatnot, because otherwise this is going to be bad-- and some serious bad drama is happening at my dad's workplace that is making him seriously consider turning in his keys and never going back. Which, frankly, I'd support, because he'd probably make more money going full-time with his much-beloved side gig, but the idea of such upheaval is making my mom's gray hair even grayer.

In short, these are not soothing conversations, and I never come out of them well. There's something about parents that will push a child's buttons, no matter how little the parents intend to and no matter how old the child is. When my parents are tense, I get tense. It has a lot to do with associating that tone of voice from my father with bad news for Meg, like I've disappointed him, or I've crossed him, or he's just generally pissy and is going to take it out on me. (Ah, childhood.) I ended up in knots by the time I finally prised myself out of that phone call, and it took a lot of deep breathing, a little bit of crying, and some quality cuddling to undo most of those knots.

I'm still kind of tense, and I'm recognizing the particular brand of tension as my "What? What did I do? How am I not good enough now?" tension. It sets me up to overreact to everyone else and feel like the world is out to get me, which is really not the case. Well, not so much "out to get me" as "vastly disapproves of me". So I start withdrawing and avoiding contact with people, which... is not good. Ah, fragile self-esteem, complicating everything. Yeowza.

Also, saw a picture of myself which I did not like. My Hub said, "But, you're gorgeous!" and I said, "Yup, no question about that, but there's a bit more of my gorgeous self than can fit into most of my favorite clothes, and this is photographic evidence which I cannot deny." I'm trying to hash out what to do about that, because I am not down with the idea of going whole-hog on a diet, and to add to the fun my Hub is still on bulking rations and eating hamburgers twice a day. Difficult to live with that. Also bad timing by falling in a budget-tightening time. You'd think that since both budget and diet = belt-tightening of a sort, that this would match up well, but that's... well, it's never been the case for me in practice. Hoping to change that by doing a LOT of deep breathing. A LOT.

Sigh.

Well, on the up side, tests of the Mario Badescu Drying Lotion have been done, since my Hub had a lovely pimple appear over the weekend and I pounced on it immediately (much to his horror). Seems to reduce inflammation and take care of the juicy white center of the whitehead overnight, leaving a lurking red spot in the morning. I could not get my Hub to agree to a second treatment, so I can't speak to whether a second shot of the stuff the next night (or, under makeup, in the morning-- it is pale pink and definitely does not blend with most people's complexions) would eliminate the red spot over the next eight hours. Further tests to come! Onward and upward!

Cut for length-- click to read more.

Money may not make the world go around...

...but it does just fine at brewing a shitstorm here on the home front.

I've spent three days uploading our financial histories for the year into Mvelopes, a fine bit of online financial software which I highly recommend. It's like Quicken and that sort of thing, but it lets you divvy up the cash per paycheck before you spend it and keep track of how that budget works for you-- including which Peter you end up having to shortchange to pay Paul, as it were. I've divvied up everything into specific "envelopes"-- categories, such as groceries, rent, yadda yadda yadda.

Ran some reports.

YEOWZA. OUCH. OH, BUGGER.

Well, that explains why we keep running out of money. That lovely budget that I put together works very well when it comes to some things, but others-- like groceries-- it does not. After some scrutiny and discussion, we've concluded that it's because some stuff is just not a monthly expense, it's a weekly expense, and that budgeting for being paid twice a month is not the same as budgeting for being paid every two weeks. There are some things that we need money for every weekend, such as grocery shopping and quarters for the laundry, and there are many occasions when we end up having three weekends in one pay period-- which is one weekend over the budget.

Also: a short rant. Here's the thing: both of us have a certain amount of "fun money" per paycheck. My Hub gets twice as much as I do, which happened not so much because I am a self-sacrificing sap but because I'm trying to keep him from going into debt. If he gets X amount per paycheck, then he can put some into savings and then when the next big thing comes along (and it will always come along) that he desperately MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW, then he can take money out of his savings account instead of putting it on a credit card. So this is an improvement over before, really.

Currently, in order to deal with stress, he comforts himself with driving to work instead of taking the CTA a few times every week (absurd parking fee every time), frozen pizzas (which is a large reduction in expense from when he used to order out all the time) and beer (or, more often, diet soda with a shot of liquor in it, which he deems more financially prudent), and more occasional things such as purchasing video games, books, and whatnot. This is where finances get dicy, because any reduction in his "fun money" amount per paycheck means that he either goes ahead and puts expenses on the credit card (TOTALLY NOT WHAT I'M GOING FOR, ARGH), or is sad, and miserable, and broken, and pissy, and cranky, and altogether not a joy to live with, and there's really only so much of that I can take before I can't stand seeing him like that and give in, as I always do, and fund these things out of my accounts or the shared accounts.

We just can't fucking well keep this up, you know? It's not a major financial issue at the moment-- we're not going into debt, at least, but this stagnation is not good-- but we absolutely can't add anything more. Like, say, kids. So that makes it an issue. More importantly, though, this is really not a healthy way to deal with stress.

I know well the way of external-object-based stress relief. Bad day at work? Pizza for dinner! Cranky at the Hub? I deserve to buy a bag of baked Doritos! (Which is sad because they totally taste like cardboard with Doritos dust on them.) I deserve to go out with my friends and get plastered! I deserve to go shopping (oh, Ann Taylor, why must you have sales? why must your store be located between me and the El?) and get a new outfit! I deserve to go wacky on Half.com and order an entire set of mystery novels from an author I just discovered! I deserve this bag of mini-Snickers! DAMMIT, I AM STRESSED, I NEED THIS.

...Which, wait, hold on. "Need" is a very strong word. Seriously, do I really need this stuff? I can't fit any more books in our apartment, I really don't feel like working off the extra calories of the Doritos or pizza or mini-Snickers, and while I do kind of require new clothes, it's not exactly prudent to go and spend $45 when that means I'll have to avoid spending any more money until the 15th, just so I can afford to go out to eat with my buds on Friday. It is not cool to be desperate for some object that I feel will soothe my problems. Particularly when I'm pretty sure it's not so much the fact that these are great things to have, as that I want them, I'm cranky, and the act of buying them somehow proves my worth. Today, I am worth the extravagance in money and space and calories! Today, I am so important that my whims mean more than the budget, or the meal plan!

Well. That's just not healthy. It's also not as effective as you'd think.

I'm starting to break out of this, I think. I've been able to recognize those moments for a while now, and I'm trying to combat them by giving myself other ways to calm down.

Which... okay, I can remember very clearly that back when I first started this blog, I was trying to figure out this sort of thing. And, in retrospect, it was pretty funny. I would read how a nice-smelling candle would make me feel better, or a nice bubble bath, and I would march out and buy candles and bubble-bath liquid; I have a very clear memory of stoically soaking in the tub, covered in bubbles, lit by candlelight, still tense as a board and wondering how long I was going to have to do this stupid pointless shit in order to feel better. Shortly thereafter, I recall, I ended up weeping all over my Hub. This period of time was also when my binge-eating kicked in again-- shocker. I could not fucking well relax. I didn't know how. I read all these articles on how to relax, and I tried out tons of stuff, but nothing ever really worked and I'd end up binging some more.

That was the summer of 2005, which ended with Hurricane Katrina, my catastrophic meltdown spurred on by seeing something so horrific happen, my diagnosis of depression, the Zoloft, and therapy. Now that I'm off Zoloft (one week and two days and nothing bad has happened; huzzah!), I'm pretty clear on one thing: relaxation is crucial for my mental health. Cruicial.

Budget-wise, I'm also clear on one thing: if we don't find some relaxation techniques that aren't tied to spending money, we're in trouble.

I think I'm improving on this. The first step was being able to recognize that I was having those moments, AS I was having those moments; the second step was to develop a way to deal with stress without requiring external input (for me, it's meditation, but as they say in fandom, your milage may vary); the current step I'm on is being able to recognize in those stressful moments that I do have a choice in what technique I use to deal with it, and that one version is totally free. I don't hold any illlusions that I'll get myself into a 100% healthy stress-management level, but I'm shooting for about 75%. Also hoping that, over time, continued mindfulness practice will lower my overall stress levels so I don't hit quite so many "peak moments", but instead will be able to dissolve little pockets of stress along the way.

The problem is that I'm not there yet, and the much, much bigger problem is that my Hub isn't there at all. Okay, that's not quite true; he's taken the first step of realizing that there are other ways to deal with stress, thanks in part to me using him as a sounding board about my meditation project. He has, on a few stressful occasions, asked me what he's supposed to do in this situation; I talked him down and got him breathing and rubbed his feet. Lately, I've been trying to explain that it's a long-term project-- that meditating every night is, literally, practicing for those moments, getting it ingrained as a reflexive response the way that fighters have to get moves into their muscle memory so that they don't have to think of what move to use to defend themselves. So... I gotta remember, these are big steps forward, and modern boys are not known for introspection. This is going to take some time. Lord knows, I've been working on this since March and I feel like I'm still scratching the surface.

So as things go, I feel like I've got kind of a plan. I want to get my Hub to have-- and manage-- his accounts on Mvelopes, so at the very least he's assigning his transactions to the appropriate envelope and will get a basic knowledge of how much he's spending each month. And I want him to start investigating alternate modes of relaxation, at times when he's not stressed, because trying a new form of relaxation in the middle of a stressful moment is just not useful at all. Which means that for the forseeable future, he'll still be responding to stress with money, and will still be spending that money... so I must be patient and not flip out over that.

On a side note, I was on the phone with my sister for two hours the other night and read her the chapter on demand-sensitivity and demand-resistance from Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out Of Control, because some stuff she'd been saying led me to believe that her fiance' is very demand-resistant, especially considering that his mother is one seriously pushy broad and any sane human being would need to develop demand-resistance to survive her presence. She's written down the info for the book and is going to check it out. She's also concluded pretty much what I did-- that our family, both sides, is riddled with obsessive personalities, and the problem is that they feel very justified in being so, because of THE DEPRESSION. Seriously, it's 75 years later and any "why/why not" argument about obsessive traits like frugality and cautiousness is automatically won by somebody talking about "well, back in THE DEPRESSION, this and that, which is why I'm right." Most of these people weren't alive during THE DEPRESSION. Including me, because I've used that argument. It's like my family's version of Godwin's law. Gads.

Anyway. More later, probably; it's been too long and I have much built up. ;-)

Cut for length-- click to read more.