Mouse Buys a Hard Drive

Dear Friends and Family,

Wow. This is feeling impossible.

Our hard drive light is blinking and we're getting warning emails that it's on its last legs. That means we need to buy a new hard drive. Fortunately, I'm 100% fine with billing that to the house budget and not to my $100 budget. Let's be real, I have three years worth of photos of P backed-up on that drive. Even if it's a back-up, I'm not going to let that light blink for long. That's not the point of this budgeting exercise. But, that's the kind of thing households with real budgets deal with every day.

And, squarely within my budget is this week's activities downtown are throwing a monkey wrench into my commute. Really, it could be a family of screaming mutt monkeys coming at me tomorrow, but suffice it to say, I am thinking about alternatives. The easy answer is to take P out to dinner and then avoid the traffic. And, money enables that. But, that's what I'm trying to solve with my budget this week.

So, I guess I have a couple of options.

Option 1: Tough it out. I'll get home sooner or later.

Option 2: Go out to dinner, make up the money elsewhere. Like we could do a picnic brunch on Saturday where we take food from home and go to the park and eat outside. Or I can push my manicure to Monday which isn't as convenient but within the spirit of the budget.

Option 3: Cut myself some slack and go over this week. While obviously the easiest answer, it's the one I like the least. It's pretty lame if I can't manage to a budget for a single lousy week.

I think I'll float the idea of a picnic brunch to P and see if she's excited by it. That'll be the easiest. If I can't get her jazzed about that, then I guess the next most palatable option is to push the manicure out to Monday.


Cheers!
mouse