Money Monday: March 26, 2012

This is probably going to be the shortest of these posts ever. This is the last week of this contract, and I’m probably going to be AWOL yet again all this week. There’s just way too much to do, and I’m way too agitated / tired / cranky / etc. to write much.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering What’s Next over these last several weeks…but to be honest? I’ve been trying not to do that.

My brain is overloaded with all the work-related chatter going on inside it; all the shoulda-woulda-coulda crap that insists on playing through no matter how often I shout, “NO TIME! TOO LATE! QUIT IT, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT NOW!”

It keeps me up at night, which leads to exhaustion (go figure), which leads to crankiness and more brain-chatter.

This is not a good time to attempt to make balanced, reasonable decisions about what I want to do once this contract is over; history has shown me, again and again, that decisions I make when I’m emotionally or physically off-balance – and I’m a bit of both right now, frankly – tend to be bad ones.

Not to digress, but I feel like I need to say this: I’m not being abused by anybody but myself on this deal. Nobody is being “mean” to me, or anything like that. What has got me so worked up isn’t my situation, but that of the people I’m leaving behind – who are damned good people that I like an awful lot. I don’t like what I’m seeing ahead for them, which is taking a whole lot of blame for a whole lot of stuff that they are not being equipped to defend themselves against.

And that’s got me irritable and upset, because it hits my ‘that ain’t fair’ button.

ANYWAY…I’ve been spending a lot more time playing video games than looking at spreadsheets or doing feasibility studies. Which I feel is a much better use of my time than coming up with “great” ideas that start off like, First, we buy a really big used motor home…

The one thing I’m pretty sure of is, I won’t want to stay home for long, if at all. We still have way too much that we want to get done, the husband’s pay is still a good 15% below what it was five years ago and there’s a lot more coming out off the top – the health insurance premiums alone are almost triple what they were five years ago. Combined with the cost of Everything Else going nowhere but up, retirement funds that are deflated like flat tires, woefully inadequate college funds for the Denizens and still being upside-down on the Den – which essentially hamstrings us when opportunities that would require relocation come up – we’d just really like to keep the double-income power-lifting going for a while yet.

But for right immediately now…I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to get this last week done, and get as much put to bed as I possibly can before I go.

And then I’m going to take a week off from Everything.

And then, I should be ready to actually get moving on something…something that doesn’t involve motor homes and a live-off-the-land lifestyle.

(…which has seemed a lot more tempting than you’d think lately…except I still haven’t come up with a good solution for the Yarn Stash Storage Issue yet…hmmmmm…)