How to blow $99 in a weekend

Step 1: Decide to go see your boyfriend Friday night.
He was working for his parents last week, and you go have dinner with them. Buy gas and chewing gum before heading off on the two hour drive. His parents are kind enough to take you to dinner at a very noisy pub so you barely talk. Two and a half hour later, he goes home and so do you.

Step 2: Have a spending-free Saturday.
Sleep late, make waffles for your roommate, read, and enjoy the day. Over waffles, decide to go see a movie with the roommate the next day.

Step 3: Give the roommate money for gas.
She's the most frequent driver in your group since she has the most fuel efficient and newest car. Get gas and pick up one of your friends on the way to the city a little over an hour away.

Step 4: Have breakfast out.
The waitress is excellent so leave a really nice tip.

Step 5: Go to Target.
Consider buying a $10 shirt that would be perfect for one of the theme days of spirit week, but decide against it because short sleeves aren't practical for fall. Do buy a friend a roll of dental floss. (Long story.)

Step 6: Go to Old Navy.
Find an equally good shirt with long sleeves in the men's department. Pay $15.

Step 7: See a movie.
The Invention of Lying is moderately funny, but $7.50 for a matinée is highway robbery.

Step 8: Work for a while in a Starbucks.
Everyone else feels compelled to get a drink since they're using the space, so go ahead and give into peer pressure and get a tall hot chocolate.

Step 9: Buy unattractive costume jewelry.
Spirit week and peer pressure combine.

Step 10: Have dinner out.
Choose one of the cheapest things on the menu. Do leave a decent tip because it isn't the waiter's fault you're broke.

Step 11: Return home with $1 in your wallet.
Be happy you have plenty of bread, peanut butter, jelly, oatmeal, apples, ravioli, and frozen vegetables to get you through until Friday.

I once again resent my budget.

I have $7.91 to last me until Friday afternoon, a need for modeling clay for tomorrow's lab, and a bad case of the I wants. I knew that spending over the weekend meant a leaner week, but I'm feeling very grumbley about not getting to buy a school mascot hoodie now that the weather has turned cold and rainy, to go out to dinner on Thursday, to grab a few more groceries that aren't strictly necessary.

I can do this. I should do this. $100 a week should be plenty to cover groceries, household and personal items, gasoline, and fun if I just prioritize correctly. Self discipline is good. Houses are nice. Being able to send hypothetical future kids to college is important to me. Everything has an opportunity cost. Tell me to snap out of it and just be more careful next week.

Life happens.

I haven't had electricity in my bedroom for about a week now. I think it was last Monday night when I flipped the light switch, heard a pop, and stood in a dark room. (The days of flu blur together a bit.) My clock was dead as well so it obviously wasn't the light bulb. The breaker is conveniently located directly above my bed so I tried flipping it, but it felt floppy and wouldn't stay in position. I tried unplugging my clock to ensure I wasn't overloading the circuit; still nothing.

This would have been a good time to call the landlord, except for the minor difficulty that the only thing I know about him is that his name is Larry. I talked to my roommate, and her old roommate used to have his number, but she lost it some months ago. My roommate does, however, know both his name and where he lives. She was expecting him to come by that weekend to collect October's rent since he always shows up within a couple of days of payday so we decided to just wait and tell him then. It was a bit of an inconvenience, yes, but I can get my work done in the living room and now have an excuse to wear this cool headlamp I bought a year ago and pretend I'm spelunking even as I type this post.

The weekend has come and gone with no sign of the landlord, and I'm a bit less charmed by my electricity-free quarters. It's time to either get serious about fixing the circuitry or buy a kersosene lantern. I'm about ready to take matters into my own hands. After talking to my favorite former apprentice electrician, I now know that the place to start is to replace the breaker and see if that fixes the problem. It sounds simple enough, and it'll probably be safe as long as I cut off power to the house, invest in a circuit tester to be doubly sure, and get my roommate to stand by with a broom handle. The prospect of moving on from fixing our toilet to doing our own electrical repairs is pretty exciting, actually.

There's just one teensy problem. A weekend visit to see that former electrician and his family has left me rather low on funds for the week. I have $8 cash plus $13something on a Wal-Mart card for groceries, gas, and school supplies. I suspect that won't get me a breaker, and I am loath to wait until I collect my Friday afternoon allowance to try to restore power to my room. I think it may be time to break into that $1,000 "life happens fund" sitting in savings. Based on the cost of bills for the past two months, I'll certainly be able to replenish whatever a breaker costs by the end of the month. It doesn't really matter whether I just take the money out of checking instead, but I'm more likely to take it seriously if I treat it as a debt to myself.

I do not have swine flu. I do not have swine flu. I do not have swine flu.

I've been telling myself that since Sunday evening. So far it hasn't been helping. I haven't been to the doctor to confirm flu since the symptoms have been fairly mild, but I have been staying home from school to avoid infecting anyone. I figured that something that gives flu-like symptoms and a fever wouldn't be nice to spread around whether it is technically flu or not, plus I've been feeling the need to sleep twenty or so hours a day. At this point, I'm not so achy anymore, but I still want to sleep all the time.

I guess this means I won't be getting my security deposit back after all.

As I mentioned, I moved at the start of this school year. My old roommate would really have preferred to live alone, but since she has such large student loan payments, keeping the $650 house herself would have been prohibitive. She felt that she needed a house with a fenced yard instead of an apartment for the sake of her dog, and she also didn't want to move because she owns a lot of furniture and it would have been a hassle to move all of it. She also made noises about not wanting to live with a first year teacher because they are "too much trouble to support emotionally", but none of the second years or alumni wanted to move in so she didn't have a lot of choice.

It looked like she wasn't going to find anyone at all, but eventually "Guy" wound up in search of housing after a last minute switch of district and subject. He asked my new roommate about my old roommate, she said something vague along the lines of, "All of my interactions with her have been positive," he decided he could live with her crazy dog, and he moved in. I was a bit relieved he didn't ask me anything because, although I hadn't loved living with my old roommate, I didn't want to make it more difficult for her to find a new roommate.

When he moved in, I offered to wait to get my $300 security deposit back until after he got his first paycheck since most first years are in fairly dire financial straights until then. Shortly thereafter, he started pondering moving out. He discussed this with everyone besides his roommate and began seeking other housing options.

Most of his complaints sounded awfully familiar. My old roommate isn't mean or a bad person, but she can be difficult to live with. She takes over not only her room and the office, but the entire living room as well with her projects, spending almost every hour of every evening camped out on the couch working in front of a dvd. She expects others to follow her rules, not opening the blinds in the living room ever because someone might look in and see that she owns a stereo and a television, consuming seafood only on weekends she was out of town because she didn't like the smell, informing me when I was moving out that whoever was moving in would not be allowed to get cable, and if he or she did, it would have to run directly to that person's bedroom and not the living room. I always got the feeling that I was living in her house, at least in her mind. She tended to express frustration on the occasions that my weekend plans conflicted with her hope that I would once again watch her dog while she went out of town to visit her boyfriend. She didn't interact much, often treating a roommate as an annoyance to be endured for the sake of rent money. I think we might have been better friends if we hadn't tried to share living space.

Guy found all this hard to come home to after long days of struggling at school, and yesterday he moved out. My old roommate is venting her frustrations in her facebook statuses about being unable to trust anyone's word and needing to look into small claims court. Guy wasn't on the lease, they had no written agreement, and he paid his share of rent and bills every month. Does anyone know if she has legal grounds to sue him?

This cannot be a fun time for my old roommate, but I also understand why Guy decided to move out. I'm planning to stay as far from the drama as possible. I'm a little frustrated that I won't ever see my security deposit or any reimbursement for my half ownership of the washer and dryer that my old roommate kept, but I don't see any way to pursue it that wouldn't cause a scene.

My cards are on house arrest.

My debit card and credit card are going to stay locked up unless I have a good reason to use them, such as going to the ATM for my weekly allowance or paying a bill online. I guess they will get to travel with me, but in an envelope with a note across the seal reminding me not to use them unless there is a real emergency.

Either I'll end up planning more purposefully and making better use of the cash in my wallet, running out of money and having to say no more often, or breaking into my lockbox to increase my allowance. Obviously, I'm hoping for outcome one. If that isn't what happens, I'll have to monitor and adjust.

Please talk me out of my new bad habit.

My grand plans of living on the contents of my wallet until next Friday have already fallen by the wayside. Some of the spending was justifiable. I'm pretty sure getting a new flapper valve to fix our leaky toilet was ok even though we could have technically just kept turning the water to the tank off in between uses for a few more days. I'm also comfortable with purchasing a new bottle of bathroom cleaner so I can clean this weekend. It needs it, plus scrubbing bathrooms can be oddly therapeutic.

You'd think that budgeting this year would be easier because I moved to a new place where rent is $87.50 lower, but it isn't. My new roommate is terrific, and having a friend and fellow science teacher to come home to at the end of the day is doing wonders for my sanity, but living here isn't cheap. Some of the savings is being eaten up by the cost of cable television that my roommate already had, but spending large amounts of time with someone who seems to like going out and doing things with me is proving even more costly. Plus, now going out and spending money whether roommate is involved or not seems to be becoming a habit.

Wednesday, Roommate and I had quiz bowl coaches training in a town half an hour away, and afterward she suggested we take advantage of the rare opportunity to have Taco Bell for lunch. Taco Bell bean burritos have been a weakness of mine for several years so I agreed, and we had an enjoyable meal together before heading to the hardware store for our toilet part.

Next I decided to ignore the budget and go to the traditional gathering Thursday night gathering of TFA teachers at a little Mexican joint in our town. The food's mediocre, but the company is good. I'd be just as happy if we could start a bring your own peanut butter sandwich gathering in someone's living room, but I suspect it might be a hard sell.

Today I carpooled to the professional development session over two hours away. The junior high teacher drove to this one, and I'll do the next one. This cut gas costs and added sociability, but after spending the whole morning with her, I opted to continue hanging out over lunch. The sandwich I bought was tasty, but I wish I'd had the guts to just eat the Clif bar I'd packed, especially since we ended up eating on a bench on campus anyway.

My new social spending trend is likely to grow even worse this weekend. Most TFA folks are recent college grads who're trying to some extent to replicate a few aspects of their lives before they were teachers. Getting out of the house is a high priority for a lot of people. In the north delta, there's a fairly robust potluck culture that helps with that, but there isn't a potluck this weekend. My roommate and a couple of other friends are talking about heading to Tunica to go to the Paula Deen buffet at a casino today, and I said I might go even though I'm already over budget and my eating habits have been atrocious lately. Could someone please give me the speech about how succumbing to peer pressure is bad?