Temperatures are supposed to drop into the 20s tonight, after a cold and blustery day. Plants are covered, as best as they can be covered while the wind fights to carry the old sheets and drapes to California. The big old-fashioned environmentally obtuse Christmas lights festooning the lime tree are turned on, in hopes of sparing the tree’s canopy this winter. And under the bedcovers, the heating pad is tucked where my feet go and turned to Day-Glo Blast.

Indoors, though, it was a nice warm Christmas. M’hijito was thrilled with the KitchenAid stand mixer and not bothered at all that it had gathered dust in my hall closet for several years. So I felt good to have found something to share with him that  pleased him so much . . . and decluttered my life handsomely, too.

M’hijito was also pleased to announce he has succeeded in paying off all the credit card debt that accrued between the time he started his Arizona job (at much less than he earned in San Francisco) and his latest raise, which puts him back in the middle class. He now intends to snowflake down the remaining credit union loan that covered his costs during the year of unemployment after the dot-com bubble burst. Since he’s been paying that down steadily anyway, he should soon be debt-free (mortgage excepted). My son, the chip off the old frugal block!

Meanwhile, unless something’s totally awry, it looks like my scheme to deal with biweekly pay by setting up a weekly spending budget is working. Just paid the AMEX bill and found $399 left in the credit-card piggy bank, plus around $150 in the account devoted to recurring monthly bills.

Hot diggety! This means I’ll have a couple hundred bucks to spend on some decent office clothes at the sales tomorrow and still have two or three hundred dollah to apply to the Renovation Loan principal. Dance to spring!

Tomorrow: How to pay monthly bills on biweekly pay.

budgeting, family, frugality, idle essays