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Gabby took Amy and me out for breakfast this morning. She keeps paying for when we go out to eat, and we try to pay, and Gabby insists. Okay, full disclosure, I didn't really try this morning. I thanked her at least a couple of times, though! The last time we had lunch I actually budgeted for paying and then didn't have to use it. This time I had not thought to put it in my budget and my budget's pretty tight at the moment.
A lot of this is Shobhit's doing, honestly. There's what I can really afford, and what I've budgeted for, and those are very different things. I'm divering something like 28% to 401(k) now, at Shobhit's urging; he's constantly pushing for that to go higher, and I always resist. I only agreed to the latest slight increase, as of this year, because we paid off the mortgage and that's significantly altering the budgeting needs.
Then, of course, there are budgeted payments to savings, and trying to siphon whatever I can to travel expenses—and because of other things I keep having to cover lately, my "travel expenses" budget line item is still $0 right now. That should change fairly quickly once I pay off my laptop in April, though, freeing up a good $258 a month.
Anyway. I really could have paid for my breakfast if I needed to. The honest truth, also, is that I was perfectly happy not to. So sue me! (Or maybe not. I don't have a budget line item for getting sued.)
Here's the other thing: I made a mental note last night
not to have cereal this morning, because I knew I was going out for breakfast. I only remembered that when I was in the shower, well after I had eaten a bowl of cereal, totally on autopilot. Goddammit, shit! I really considered not ordering anything. But then that goat cheese omelet called to me, I packed it in quite easily, and there you have it.
My weight has been going up steadily all week. It's going to be up notably tomorrow I'm sure, between this, and Action Movie Night tonight, when there is always too much food. Maybe it'll be one of those nights when all the other dishes brought have meat and I won't eat them. I always feel obligated to have some of any vegetarian pizza, which is always brought for our benefit.
Gabby drove us to breakfast in her car, to South Lake Union, and the Portage Bay Cafe up there. An interesting choice, as the Portal Bay on Roosevelt Way in the U District was where I used to go quite frequently when the office was right across from it, before we moved down here in 2016.
We talked shop some of the time, and about other things some of the time. At one point we all talked about wedding rings, and particularly those of our spouses. Amy got married, like, just weeks ago, so now all three of us on my team are married.
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— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ अठहत्तर —
There's little more to tell about last night, as a trip to Costco was the highlight of my evening. At Shobhit's request, after I walked home and fed the cats, I took the bus back downtown and then transferred to the Rapid Ride D bus, to meet him at Total Wine when he got off work at 6:30. He decided to go to the Shoreline Costco instead of the 4th Avenue one, which meant a solid half-hour drive up there. It took about 22 minutes to drive back once we were done.
At first I thought he wanted to go up there because they have more Indian stuff. But, we didn't get Indian anything. I asked why we went there instead of 4th, and the only thing he said was that the eggs are cheaper there. I thought about this later: I'm all for being frugal, but was it really worth the extra driving—and extra gas consumption—just for
eggs? Between the extra driving, I'm guessing there wasn't a huge amount of savings just for cheaper eggs.
That said, we got three boxes of Omeprazole for heartburn, which we both take regularly, and it occurred to him for the first time to try paying for them with the FSA card at the pharmacy—and it worked. I had budgeted $100 for this, and it wound up closer to $96
only because we used the FSA card for the Omeprazole.
We drove back, put the groceries away, and made veggie burgers for dinner—using refrigerated mushroom patties that I got as part of a gift bag from a broker. I really was afraid it wouldn't be that good, and it wasn't half bad. We ate while watching the new episode of
Shogun—not quite as great as the first two episodes, but I'm still all in—and then Sunday night's episode of
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
One of these nights we need to look into booking our flights to Toronto in June. Shobhit asked me to research it on Saturday and I found surprisingly affordable prices. We haven't had a moment to follow up on that together yet though. I'd love to have that done sooner than later.
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[posted 12:26 pm]
