the road is paved with good intentions

i just read on someone’s fb status that they went for an evening workout and i was taken aback to my days of OU glory when i would take a jaunt over to ping for a quick run and lift. just like that. you get up and go. then when i was in upper i took part in similar activities. i would run up to US fitness, push a weight or two, then jog on home. on the really cold days i’d drive up and utilize their treadmills. then i’d go home and have dinner. it really required little foresight other than when dinner would be ready and if i needed a second shower that day.

when we moved to the grand metropolis, the price for a Y membership didn’t change too much from what we were used to (i think?) but we had a lot less money, so it got ganked from the budge. i know, your health shouldn’t be the first thing out, but in all actuality i can run outside for free and largely only used free weights so a couple of 5 lb’ers at home did the trick. and i was pregnant – how much was i really going to use the gym anyway? jj lived out his workout aspirations at the gym on campus and we we able to pinch pennies.

but now the prospect of him having a job with a paycheck (that is the same every time) will be happening about the same time i’m recovered from birth #2, i was quite tempted to see what it would take to have our membership make it back into the financials. oh, the high hopes. but alas, the price is a bit high and i would still have to pay $2 every time i wanted to leave a kid at the babysitting center (and is that PER kid?!). i’m just not sure we can do it. but i had to see for sure.

so i start doing my financial reporting. the great thing about moving and starting new checking accounts is that they’re fresh and they match what you have in the computer. however, sometime around march, something started not matching. and sometime around april i stopped importing those important docs into my handy quicken so that things would stay on track. and so, yes, this evening’s daydream of future memberships rapidly became a quicken nightmare. night. mare.

i am so saddened… now my checkbook shall never match again because, no matter what, even when you start fresh with a “new account”, it just doesn’t cut it. i think if i were to use the past 6 months of data and divide it, i might get a fairly accurate portrait of where we’re at, but it’s just not the same. and did i mention i hate math? hate it. and i’m a little too detail focused, so that i can’t be ok with just rounded numbers. i need exacts.

so here i am, rounding out my year and importing months upon months of data and i still don’t get a true portrait (months march through june are lost forever, according to the bank website). but i strive onward toward the goal. *sigh*.

on the upside, we did make more money than we spent this year, which i consider a victory. someday that gym membership shall be within my grasp. i suppose as i start composing my list of ways that 2010 will be better than 2009 keeping on top of financial records should probably appear somewhere. either that, or “delegate to husband.” but then we have to start working on trust (that things get done the way *I* want it) and other character issues. let’s just stick to a few practical things and keep the image alive, shall we? 🙂