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Saturday was a pretty great day. I woke to the sound of heavy thunderstorms – in fact, the thunder and lightning woke me during the night, but I managed to fall back asleep. When it was time to really get up, I dressed in my finest yoga attire (yes, that’s sarcasm) and met my friend A. at my usual yoga studio. She hadn’t been to a yoga class in quite a while, but she liked the teacher as much as I do.

When I got home, I started the meat and beans for minestrone on the stove and mixed up the dough to make some Italian bread. Weird baking aside: I loathe the last batch of flour I bought. I always buy unbleached all-purpose flour, but this time I got a new brand that was on sale and sounded all extra organic n’ shit. It is horrible. The color is yellowish and it’s so heavy that everything I make comes out kind of tough. I don’t remember what brand it was, but I’ll know it when I see it and I’m going to stick with brands I recognize from now on. Now I just need to think of recipes I can make to use it up that won’t be ruined. Maybe cookies. But anyway…

Around the time I shaped the bread into loaves and readied it for its second rising period, my husband woke up. I decided to make a skillet of potato cubes, ham, green pepper, onion, eggs and cheese. It turned out to be a delicious breakfast, particularly with a little ketchup.

Earlier that morning, my dad had called to ask if I’d come by his office and do some work. I’d mentioned to him last week how broke I was, and I think he wanted an excuse to give me money. After I took the bread out of the oven, I went over and worked for about two-and-a-half hours and he paid me $100. Woohoo!

When I got home, I finished making the minestrone and ate two large bowls of it and countless slices of bread. (Hey, fresh bread is fresh bread, even if it is made from weird, icky flour.)

That evening, I went to a friend’s house for an informal game night. I brought a 6-pack of HardCore Cider because it seemed like a good autumn drink choice. It went well with the chocolate rice crispy treats he’d made with Cocoa Krispies and chocolate marshmallows. I ate way too many of them.

When I first arrived, I was looking around at all of the Halloween decorations and I kept hearing something that I took to be a motion-triggered evil laugh, "Mwahahahahaha." It had a gutteral tone, but at the same time was rather thin and not very loud. It turned out to be the sound that his beagle makes when she’s sniffing around for crumbs. My friends had heard it so many times that they didn’t even notice, but once I said what I’d thought it was, they found it hilarious.

We played Apples to Apples and Scene-It TV Edition until about midnight. I won one round of Scene-It and answered a lot of incredibly obscure TV questions, some from eras before I was born. It’s a wonder I can even function with all the brain space I have given over to useless trivia.

I got a good night’s sleep and I’m almost over the headache that’s plagued me all week. Today I’m making ham and onion omelets for breakfast with toasted Italian bread, and then a cheese ball to take with me to a book club meeting. It looks like it’s going to be another fun day.

Despite my efforts to cut costs and reduce my bills, I still keep running out of money every pay period. This time around, I’m already in the hole $500 worth of overdraft protection and I owe my husband $200 that I’m sure he could ill afford to give me. Being in the red at payday is probably what’s killing me – it’s hard to get caught up when you start out behind.

I need to get in touch with my mortgage company and see if I can shift the payment dates so that they fall after
the 15th and the 1st, rather than a few days before. That’ll at least
keep me from dipping into my overdraft protection so much.

The irritating thing about all of this is that I’ve been really good about cooking dinners at home and bringing lunches to work. Plus, I’ve turned into a highly efficient office food scavenger. If there’s a client or vendor in the office, chances are there’ll be leftovers around 1:30 or so. I’ve managed to score at least one free meal per week lately by just waiting and watching.

I have to pat myself on the back for the "fridge scrapings" dinner I came up with last night. I had some spicy tomato sauce left over from an earlier dinner this week, so I boiled some ziti noodles, mixed them with the sauce, added some quartered slices of pepperoni, topped everything with cheese and baked it. It was one of the better-tasting meals I’d had all week and I didn’t have to do any extra shopping to make it work.

Since I have two weekend days ahead before I get paid on Monday, my plan is to use up the other things that reside in my cupboards, refrigerator and freezer. I know I have chicken breasts, so this might be a good opportunity to fire up the grill. I have a ham steak, some eggs and potatoes, so there’s a breakfast or two. There’s still ravioli and pasta sauce kicking around. I guess as long as we’re not too picky about the kind of meat we eat, we’ll be good to go.

Beyond that, I don’t know what else I can do to scale back other than become a recluse. We’re already foregoing concerts, movies and most restaurant meals. Maybe I should use my free time to develop a more concrete marketing plan for my husband’s studio. It’ll give me something to do and perhaps boost our household income in the process.

If my mother were still alive, today would be her birthday. I won’t say which one it would have been; she was always touchy about her age. She’s been gone almost 10 years now, but I still think about her all the time. This year I thought I’d share some photos and anecdotes about her.

This first photo was taken when she was in college. She went to Purdue, was active in the theater department, and sang in a variety band. She also modeled, and this may have been either a modeling head shot or a publicity photo for one of the plays she was in.

She married my dad in 1965, and left for her honeymoon dressed in the latest fashion. I love the gardenia corsage and the hat box.

As a young newlywed, she worked as a newspaper reporter. After I was born, she stayed at home until my sister and I were old enough to start school.

Later, she ran an advertising and public relations firm with my grandmother. She had a long career in advertising, working both for other agencies and on her own, writing and producing television, radio and print ads.

When I was in my early 20s, my mother learned how to play bass and ended up touring with several different rock cover bands throughout the Midwest. I don’t exactly know how she made the leap from "Turn down that awful racket!" to learning bass, but she always enjoyed performing.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in the mid-1990s. She’d been a lifelong smoker and her addiction to cigarettes resisted all her attempts to quit. Even as she was dying in intensive care, she said she still craved nicotine so much that she thought about cigarettes constantly. If that isn’t enough reason to quit (or never start smoking at all), I don’t know what would be.

Our relationship was complicated. It’s occurred to me that I might never have started this blog if my mother had been around to read it. Still, I can’t help but be impressed by the job she did raising two strong daughters, succeeding in more than one male-dominated career field, and living life largely on her own terms. So, happy birthday, Mom.

Let me show you them:

Super Des
Suzanne
AMeadows

Congrats! I’ll get your prizes mailed out Saturday afternoon after I volunteer at a rabies clinic and attend a baby shower. 🙂