Pinching Pennies

Well, I'm feeling much better, but I unintentionally passed my stomach flu on to jb and she's been feeling under the weather the last few days. Oops. Sorry, my love.

I mentioned in my last post that we've been homebodies lately - this isn't just because of the awful weather, but also because money has been tight the last couple months. (Who's bright idea was it to open a small business at the dawn of a recession?) So in order to keep our expenses down we've been enjoying a lot of evenings in. This actually suits us quite well - we are big fans of game nights (our usual rotation includes scrabble, apples to apples and othello but we just got mancala, guess who, and a puzzle for christmas). There's someone else who is appreciating the extra couch time:



I'm sure our tight budget will get old very quickly, but right now it's reminding me of jb and I in our early DC days. We lived in a tiny one bedroom basment apartment that only had one window the size of a small microwave. We couldn't afford cable and couldn't get any reception on our bunny ears all the way down in the basement of the building, so since TV wasn't an option we had to get creative about entertaining ourselves. We did a lot of reading, game playing and cooking. We didn't only play board games - we also played a lot of computer games. Nowadays we each have our own laptop - but in those days we shared a desktop computer and downloaded games like bejeweled and snood and had heated competitions to see who could dominated the high score listings. Now that we each have our own computer and phone to play games on, that competition had disappeared - until lately. Now everynight before bed we pass my iphone back and forth trying to beat each others' high scores on games. Right now the favorite is spiderette - and I'm kicking jb's a**.

I really remember those times fondly - struggling together and getting by on a couple dollars and a lot of love. But of course, it wasn't all warm and fuzzy. There were days that we couldn't scrape together enough change to make up the bus fare to get to work. I must have read The Bell Jar like six times that year. We worked long hours. We fought about money. Still, we made it through and are closer for it.

Facing tough times once again doesn't bother me too much. My spending got a little out of control when we could afford it, so it's been a reality check. Still, in some ways I did think these times were behind us. I guess it never really ends. Six years ago we didn't have many expenses beyond rent - these days we have a mortgage, car payment, insurance payments, business loan, utilities, debt - and the list goes on. I'm confident that we'll come out the other side again - and rack up some crazy solitaire skills in the meantime.