Budget Of a Dozen Change Purses

I owe the squirrel four dollars.

I had to type that. Because I could.

See, I'm playing budgeting games. Part of the plan is to give myself a monthly allowance of pocket money, in cash, so that every casual penny I spend feels real. I can't spend cash online, of course, so when I spend money online or use a credit card I move the same amount of cash out of my wallet and into a little leather change purse decorated with a squirrel. Isn't he cute? The squirrel money, of course, belongs to the bank account that will eventually pay the credit card. Since the bank account also produces the pocket money, it will just be the starting point of next month's supply. Whee!

Then there's jellybean money. No, I don't have a purse decorated with jelly beans; the jellybean purse is decorated with odd little rolling hills.  The term comes from a Dagwood comic strip in which Dagwood came home with his paycheck and handed out the allowances and the grocery money and filled the envelopes for all the bills, and had enough left for a bag of jelly beans for himself.

So it's for fun things. I won't be buying jelly beans. I'll be buying perfume. Among other things.

Jellybean money is an older convention for me than the pocket money or the squirrel. It comes from a variety of sources, mostly unexpected modest windfalls. ("I never cashed that check from selling my bike at the bike sale two years ago? You're sending me a new one? Cool!") And gifts. Larger windfalls (tax refunds, say, or if I had the type of employer inclined to give bonuses) mostly go into savings or proper un-jellybean expenses, but I tend to kick a percentage into jellybean money. And now any leftover monthly pocket money will also go in the jellybean purse.

Jellybean money is like a little prison with flexible walls--if it's too small I'll just burst out of it and spend regular money on fun expenses; if it's too big it negates the goal of saving more. All my jellybean funds are in cash, because, again, cash feels real. I rather doubt that I'll save enough to get to a "wow, that's a lot of cash to keep in the house" situation. There are too many perfumes out there. And scarves. And books. And fabric. And patterns.

This is, yes, one of those diary-like posts where I babble about things that have no particular use to the reader. It also gives me a post to link to when I say things like, "...I spent half the jellybean money..."

An added budget rule is that I'm only allowed to spend jellybean money on Last Saturday. (See? Linking!) Otherwise, it will always be there to rescue me from mismanagement of pocket money.

I was thinking of requiring that jellybean funds follow a rule that I've occasionally seen for children's allowances--a rule where they have to save a certain percentage of their allowances and then spend that saved money only on purchases above a certain value. I think that the idea is to ensure that they get the experience of saving up, rather than spending their entire childhood frittering every dime on candy the instant they get their hands on it. But, really, how many little frittering purchases can I make in one day a month? I'll think this one over.

Of course, today is last Saturday, so any new rules will be applied next month. I already bought three short cuts of gaudy silk that I hope to successfully make into scarves with the serger. We'll see how that goes.

Um.

That seems to be all.

Photos: Mine.

Rambling: Weekend Sloth Update, or Digressions Galore

It's Last Saturday and Black Friday Weekend. I'm watching movies and shopping for perfume. War of the Roses just ended, and now Blast From the Past is on. And I finally agreed with myself that of all the perfumes I haven't bought, the one that I would most regret missing, if it went away, is Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose. So I just sent off for it. Bwahaha.

(By the way, Josephine, I just went to look at my post for that perfume and saw your comment, and I wanted to mention that I miss your blog. I hope that you're being refreshed by the blog break.)

Digression: I should be focusing on my BlogAWriMo, or whatever one might call it, but I'd have to blog slightly more than thirty-four thousand words to get there by the end of November, so, well, no. I've decided that what I'm going to get out of my NaNoWriMo Rebel experiment this year is (1) experiencing a higher blog frequency and a freer "ah, just go ahead and post it" attitude and (2) increasing my blog post length. Those are rather mechanical goals, but I think they're valuable anyway. The first ties into a life philosophy of anti-perfectionism, and the second I burbled about here.

Digression: Longer and less edited burbling is making this blog a bit more like a journal, except, of course, for the part where it's not the least bit private. That makes me curious about the practice of "journaling", and exactly how it's described and why it's recommended. So, of course, I Googled. Websites claim that journaling exercises or left brain, frees up your right brain, and improves your immune system. I'm eyeing these claims skeptically, and am tempted to make a sarcastic remark about floor polish. But I do see a mention of a specific study where a group of students was asked to write about plain old stuff, and another group was asked to write about traumatic events, and the trauma group had a higher immune function response, based on, er, some measure.

This suggests that not just writing, but writing about all my worries and deepest undisclosed thoughts, would be useful and help with my immune system and psychological state and all that. I'm not going to be posting a great deal of that on the blog, though, and I find that I'm just not that interested in writing nonfiction off the blog.

Digression: For that matter, I'm finding that I'm not all that much interested in writing fiction off the blog. I was just looking at a thread about "why do you write?" and realized that I write fiction because I want to have written it, while I write nonfiction because I want to write it. This strongly suggests that whether I like it or not, I am a nonfiction writer.

I have trouble entirely accepting this, because I've been creating fictional scenes in my head all my life. But I rarely if ever string those scenes together to form a story. I can create situations and trigger a beginning, as I used to when I gamemastered Call of Cthulhu adventures, but I rarely create an entire story, characters and situations and plot and sequence, from beginning to end. This might just be a roadblock that I need to plow past a few times until it's flattened, but I suspect that it may be a fundamental lack of either capability or inclination.

Digression: On the other hand, I very much miss those Call of Cthulhu adventures. And Shadowrun adventures. And online roleplaying on MUDs. It may be that I want to create fiction, but in a roleplaying context, which is a context that was never all that widespread and seems to be less and less popular every day. All the new online games have little to do with roleplaying, based on my definition of the activity--any setting where a computer or a predefined set of possible events limits what the characters can do is not, IMO, roleplaying. And face-to-face roleplaying...

Actually, I don't know if face-to-face roleplaying is fading. I'm reassured to see that Chaosium,  the company that created the face-to-face Call of Cthulhu game, is still selling gaming modules and has in fact branched out into some "basic roleplaying" thingie that apparently applies the same roleplaying system to a variety of different settings. I always liked Chaosium's roleplaying system, both of the variants that I experienced; the mechanics were simple enough to get out of the way of the roleplaying itself.

I loved roleplaying. Did I mention this? It's absorbing, it's exciting. I give it credit for bringing me out of an isolated shell and into the world--something about interacting with others as a person that I wasn't, allowed me to interact with other as the person what I was. I miss it, a lot.

Himself and I and some friends have discussed getting a roleplaying group together, and now that we live in the same place all the time, the idea is more plausible. But while I love roleplaying and miss it badly, the thought of digging out the books and writing a scenario and restarting my gamemastering career gives me qualms. I tell myself that I'm too old and that I'll make a fool of myself. I tell myself that adults might write novels, but they don't create character sheets and throw dice. But, really, either you're too old for Let's Pretend by around age twelve, or you never get too old--I'm not all that much older, mentally, than I was in my late teens and twenties.

It is Last Saturday. I could buy myself a shiny new Call of Cthulhu module, for inspiration. I went browsing, and I realized that what I'd really like is a combination of Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun--Cthulhu cyberpunk, essentially. I Googled that phrase and found that I'm not the only one who's this crazy; in fact, Steve Jackson Games produced a book called GURPS CthulhuPunk. Sadly, it's out of print.

Have any of you folks ever been into face-to-face roleplaying games? Are any of you still into them? I don't know what it's like to play at age thirty and beyond--does it work? Is it possible to maintain the excitement and the suspension of disbelief, or is the brain just too far past childhood?

All righty, that's my digression quota. The next idea that I have will be a new post. And Hell On Wheels is on. I didn't think I'd like it. I was wrong.

Image: By Rama. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Last Saturday. Well, Sunday.

I bought girly sandals.

Full price.

This doesn't, I realize, sound like a big deal. Not like, say, "I bought a pony cart" or "I bought a hobby farm". It's just girly sandals.

And they're not all that girly. They don't have a dozen little strappy straps, or glitter, or beads, or heels, or any of those extra girly attributes. They're just a nice little pair of flat black strappy sandals.

But, see, I never bought real girly sandals before. I usually buy shoes that cover my whole foot. The one pair of clumpy, practical sandals that I do own were purchased just to have shoes that I could wear with a skirt, without socks. They fill a functional checkbox category.

But I got these sandals yesterday because they look nice. They're an entirely fashion-based wardrobe purchase. And that's not normal for me.  I've discussed my lack of talent in the girly world. And my recent reaction to a book about (gulp) clothes.

And there seems to be a slow change happening. Linen shirts. Bangle bracelets. And a shell, of all things - I bought something sleeveless?! Oh, and a pretty little purse. No, two pretty little purses. And I intend to look at winter skirts when they come in, rather than when they go on sale. (Unless it's already too late?)

And now girly sandals. Things are changing. Maybe the aliens are taking over my brain.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

SOTD: None, and Last Saturday, and The Mall

Himself and I have a custom known as Last Saturday.

The idea is that discretionary purchases - DVDs and movie posters and murder mysteries and soap dishes and big-screen televisions and scrunchies and, yes, perfume - must occur on the last Saturday of the month. If a proposed purchase isn't basic groceries or an otherwise immediate need (like, say, the rainy season just started and we've discovered that all appropriate shoes have become worn and leaky), it waits for Last Saturday.

There are two reasons. First, the requirement to put off these purchases for a few days or weeks increases the likelihood that we'll decide that we don't actually need whatever it is. Second, when a month's worth of discretionary purchases are all piled up in one day, purchasing them all looks like financial suicide, so we're likely to do some cutting.

Today is Last Saturday.

Bwahaha.

Actually, no, so far it's been a very small Last Saturday. I say "so far" because there's one hour left, and the whole wide Internet is out there. But I was surprised that even though we stopped by the mall, on Last Saturday, very little self-control was required. I think that this is a sad, sad commentary on the state of department store fragrances. Actually, on the whole mall - they don't even have a bookstore any longer! - but I'm talking fragrances right now.

I ended up coming home with only two small perfume-related purchases:

A mini roll-on of the new L'Occitane Paeonia Eau de Toilette. The Nice Salesperson offered me a test strip of this, and I liked the grapefruit in the top notes, so I bought the mini with unseemly haste rather than wait until the next Last Saturday.

Fragrantica says that the notes for this one are bergamot, grapefruit zest, peony, rose petals, sandalwood, and musk. I mostly get the bergamot and grapefruit, which is just fine with me, though I'd be happy if the sandalwood came forward. It's a friendly little perfume, low projection, not too sweet, not too aggressively "fresh". I'm pleased that I bought it, though I think a mini is just about the right portion for me.

Speaking of minis, I very much like L'Occitane's choice to offer mini sprays or roll-ons or tins of many of their scents - that decision is responsible for almost every L'Occitane purchase that I've made.

The second purchase was a mini roll-on of Kiehl's Pear scented essence oil. Yum. When I first sniffed this I thought that it was a little cartoonish, but as time goes on it smells increasingly like a real, slightly overripe, pear. It's a note more than a perfume, but it's a very nice note.

And that's all. I did do my usual check on Tom Ford Velvet Gardenia, and it was gone. My thrashing around about this has been endless; I've wondered if I'd be relieved or dismayed if this disappeared before I bought a bottle. Turns out that I'm relieved. Whew.

And I tried a spray of Guerlain Jicky parfum. I can never resist an unexpected pure parfum tester, and I wanted to try the civet classic. Sadly, I don't like this any better than the Shalimar parfum that I tried a while ago - though this time Himself didn't threaten to evict me from the car. There's a common element in both - Guerlinade? - that I don't like at all.

So that's Last Saturday. So far.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.