The photo has nothing to do with the entry whatsoever. I just really think my dog is cute. When we decided to start living more frugally sometime last year, one of my thoughts that I used to push away the little poor girl’s voice in my brain was this “That’s ok, you already have everything you could possibly want to be happy.” And that’s true, I do. I already have an amazing husband and friends and family, sure, whatever, but I also already had the important things too, like a 60 gig video iPod or a stable of designer purses waiting patiently for the correct season or a pile of unread books that ensure I could develop a black hole in my brain and no longer recognize the names Amazon, Barnes nor Noble for the next three to five years and I still wouldn’t lack for reading material. The universe decided that maybe I needed to feel my frugality a little more earnestly. First, I left my iPod in the pocket in seat 2A on a Virgin America flight between LA and SF. Two weeks later, I was getting out of my car and my iPhone slide gracefully out of my hoodie pocket, dropping a span of 28 inches to the ground, where the screen shattered as though it had been dropped from the Space Station. Then I left pottery class one night and realized on the way home that I had left my Coach sunglasses in the studio, but when I returned two days later, they were gone. A few days after that, Esteban was walking past my car and noticed three very deep verical scratches in the back hatch and window, as though I had been keyed by a very anal-retentive vandal, or perhaps it was the mark of the X-Men’s Wolverine. The damage was so extensive that needed to replace a faceplate and the curved back window of my car. When you aren’t trying to be frugal and these things happen, you just don’t sweat it because it’s not a big deal. It’s just
stuff. Stuff that you will replace. But when you’re being frugal, you have to determine how much you really use that stuff, how much you care about that stuff, whether there is less expensive stuff that can fill the hole left by your lost or broken stuff and you might maybe possibly even want to stamp your foot a little bit because damn it, you want your OLD stuff back, please, just as it was before the bad thing happened. Esteban loaned me his iPhone for a few weeks and then watched prices until he got a deal. I happened to be on Woot when they had a $99 iPod sale, so got a smaller version of my old, lost Bean (this one is called
Sprout. The iPhone is still
Recherche, because I just restored the old one’s brain onto the new unit. Handy, that.) The car damage was the cheapest to fix: we just called up the insurance guy and dropped the car off at the auto body shop for two days (and by
we, I mean Esteban) and I am too cheap to buy myself a new pair of Coach sunglasses, because really. Really. Also, Jake bought me another pair of sunglasses that had arrived a week before I lost the pair at the pottery studio (or it was stolen, whatever). But this last thing really fucking hurts. You might even say it stings. Ricky Fitts seems to be experiencing demensia. Longtime readers will remember that Ricky Fitts is my Series 1 Tivo that we bought in, oh, 2001. I named him Ricky Fitts because he shows me everything that is beautiful. He lives in our bedroom and has a glorious 8 hours of storage, but only if you record on the Medium Quality setting. We were too cheap to buy Tivo’s lifetime deal for Ricky, thinking that he wouldn’t survive, so we’ve paid an egregious amount of money over the last 8 years to subscribe to Tivo’s schedule, but I just don’t care. I love Ricky Fitts and Ricky Fitts loves me. And now, Ricky Fitts is silent. We can play the few things that are recorded on his storage banks with no problem, but we can’t get our TV to play anything else. It’s possible that the cable is toast in the bedroom but Esteban is convinced that the more likely scenario is that Ricky Fitts has had a long and wonderful Tivo life but it’s time to take him to a farm where he can run around and be free, playing in the long grass with other Tivos. A farm that we can never visit because it’s far far away. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed, but damn it, Ricky, don’t you give up on me! You’re a fighter, not a quitter! Come back to me, baby! In other news, I got a job and my stint as an unemployed person has come to an end (although the frugality won’t), but that will have to wait until the next update.
