the baby budget

How much for bananas?
We got back, just in time to leave again. Gonna spend these precious three days I have in town trying to cram in a month’s worth of work. Will it work? Likely not. Do I care? Ehh.. maybe a little, but definitely not as much as I should. I’m signed off for the month, I really am.

Starting upon our return in January, I’ve told Sharaun we’re going to begin the “baby budget.” What’s the baby budget, you ask? It’s simple, we’re going to try and live our last two non-baby-havin’ months as if we didn’t not-have a baby. Got it? A kind of “breaking in” to the money situation we’ll be adapting to when Lil’ Chino gets here. Beginning January, Sharaun’s paychecks go wholly into savings, and we subsist solely on my earnings. An end to my daily going-out-to-lunches with the boys from work. Less Friday night eating-outs with cronies, more dedication to not having fun. The way I look at it, it’ll be good for us to get an idea of just how tight things’ll be as a one-income family, and, hopefully, we’ll realize that a few adjustments here and there will make things easier to get used to. Sure, we won’t have true baby-expenditures until the true-baby actually gets here – but it’ll at least be a good measuring stick. Baby-budgeting, oh joy.

Pitchfork’s got a great read in their feature this week, a look back on a 1980s-era documentary outing the Satanic evils of rock music. I remember a little bit of the so-called Satanic Panic, the Salem Witch Trials of the ’80s. I can remember watching Geraldo interviewing scuzzy metalheads with O-Z-Z-Y tattooed across the joints of their fingers who claimed to be Satanists, being afraid of the “Night Stalker,” Richard Ramirez, etc. Those things stuck with me, made an impression on me, even influenced me. I remember once, after my high-school “discovery” of Christianity, the preacher of our small church in Florida asking me, who he knew was a devout Beatles fan, if I could print him the lyrics for John Lennon’s Imagine. He told me that, before he’d been converted, he loved that song. Recently, however, someone had told him how sacrilegious it was, and he wanted to check it out for himself. God and popular music will always be at odds. Anyway, anyway… back to what the heck I was talking about – read that Pitchfork feature, it’s a good one.

That’s it for this evening folks, ‘night.


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