Connie's World, or, How fast can one go through several thousand dollars of Social Security settlement?
All the credit cards are gone, paid off, out of here. I can answer the phone with impunity now, and odds are it won't be ringing nearly as much. Yay.
But, damn, my husband can shop. If anyone is monitoring our bank account and computer usage, it looks like we're about to ship off in the middle of the night for a secret South American location or something--spare clips for his no-longer-produced German Lugar, bids on PropertyRoom.com for seized gems and jewelry (which we lost, thank heaven for residual frugality), the practice at the shooting range, the new .22 pistol--I expect ATF to show up when we start putting together the trip to Vegas. Hopefully the X-Files Ultimate Collection and the Firefly/Serenity purchase I made from Amazone will convince any observers that we're not putting together something clandestine.
The vast majority of the money has gone to ancient bills that have haunted us. The rest of the purchases are going towards Hubby's feelings that he's Done Me Wrong all these years. I was on the phone with him when he was going through PropertyRoom.Com (where police departments etc. put their seized property, the collection is amazing), and he was saying, "Do you want a diamond watch? What about those ruby earrings?" Fortunately he has a self-imposed limit of $50 on stuff like that.
I tried to tell him last night that I much preferred cash in the bank to jewelry I'm never going to wear, but he looked me in the eye and said, "I've never been able to give you the things you deserve, I'm making up for lost time." How the heck do you tell a man, "No, you may not be the man you've longed to be for ten years and show your wife how much you appreciate her"?
I wish I could claim it's frugality and not massive distrust of fate that makes me leery of the spending", but I'm more than capable of frittering money away. It's the chutzpah of putting a couple of hundred dollars at a time down for something that makes me twitch. I love that he wants to get me stuff, but a diamond watch is not really something that fits into my lifestyle.