Rambling On

I found myself shrinking something in my life because a friend responded negatively towards something I had done.  I bought a pair of shoes.  I am a believer that you get what you pay for in terms of shoes.  Spend little money, get a shitty pair of shoes that hurt your feet.  So I tend to spend money on shoes I can wear forever.  (I have a pair of Dansko shoes I’ve owned for 10 years, another I’ve owned for 8 years, a pair of boots I’ve had for 4 years.)  you get the idea. I spend a little more on shoes and I get every cent out of them.

I have been wanting a pair of Fluevog shoes for a long time.  They are funky and unique and artistic in nature.  They are also usually $400 or more.  I got mine on sale – for a fraction of that price.  Score!

She wanted to see what I bought. I sent her a link to the photo, not thinking the price was there, and her reaction to it was more around the price than the shoes themselves.  The negative reaction caused me to shrink – backpedal – justify to her why I was buying them and spending that kind of money.  Then I stopped.  Why was I doing this? It’s not like I do this often – maybe one spendy pair of shoes year or two.  I work my ass off and pay my bills and rarely splurge on myself.  Why is she making me feel bad about that?

Why? Because she feels bad about herself.  So, I mentally straightened up my shoulders, stopped apologizing for my state in life, and reminded myself how excited I was to get them.  Her negative reaction was a reflection on her, not me.

Work has been weird this week.  My project team has all been pulled back into their real jobs. Something I expected, but in a week or so — not this early.  So I have been pretending to work.  Let me tell you how hard it is for me to pretend to work.  If I have nothing to do, I’d rather just go home and do nothing.  But I have had to make an appearance of work.  Not my strong suit.

Yesterday, my boss pinged me kind of sheepishly. “I have these documents that need to be updated to reflect our company formatting and all.  You shouldn’t have time to do this stupid work, would you?”  Oh hell yes!!  So I spent the rest of the day playing secretary as I cleaned up the documents, put the company logo on them, put in our lingo, etc.  “Gee, I wish we had a template for X” from my boss was met with “what about one of these three? will that work??”  He felt so bad asking me to do this kind of work that at the end when I was done, he was telling me he owed me a day off of comp time or something.  Fuck, I’m not going to decline that offer – but also, he has no idea how happy it made me, giving me work.  I’ll just keep that to myself.

G and I have been looking for a condo to buy.  We have been spending money on a space in downtown that we have been using as a guest house of sort.  It’s worked out well, but with the raising rents – it makes less and less sense to do this long term.  So we have been looking at condos.  Wowza!  Not surprising, the ones we like the most are in the older buildings and have lots of character vs the cookie cutter feeling.  The challenge is to make the numbers work out.  They are close – but not close enough to make us take the plunge.  It’s frustrating too give there doesn’t feel like a lot for sale in the area.  Given we tend to be on the more risk averse side of things, it makes us wonder if we are expecting too much.  Sigh.

Oh, and I hate HOAs…..and getting a condo will force us into one. Blah.

All that aside, I’m looking forward to tomorrow.  SB and I are going to Seattle for the weekend.  We have a nice place to stay – in a funky neighborhood.  And we have tickets to see a local band perform – a band we both enjoy immensely.  It will be wonderful.  Given how little time we’ve had over the past couple of weeks, having this solid block of time together is most excellent.

Ok – back to pretending to work.

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