Six-week-a-versary

Tomorrow, June 6th, marks the close of the 6th real-time week of the Mayday Financial Challenge. Since I actually started a few days over a full year, we still have those few extra days before we can say only 46 weeks left. Even still, this is still just the beginning. It's been rough getting this all started. You can pump up your enthusiasm easily for a week or so, but when you have things like birthdays and graduations get in the way, the temptation to drop some dollars is very tantalizing. At the end of last week, Naginata and I attended a birthday party for a friend of ours. He's into music and computer games, like us, and it would have been easy to give him something from either of those catagories for a gift. But I took a cue from my partner in life and took the extra time out to put together a piece of art for him, instead.

Well, it's not as noble as it originally sounds. I promised him and some of our gaming buddies to do a round of character portraits way back at christmas, so this has been a long time coming. However, I'm looking at it positively, trying to draw inspiration from my efforts. [1] I did finish it on time and gift it. [2] It was well recieved and personal in a way that a CD or game can only hope to be. [3] It was rewarding for me to work on some art and complete a section of my long-overdue xmas* project.

A lot of this challenge already parallels this story. We don't have any extra money, still, so we're going to have to be creative and think outside of our normal methods of solving our problems in order to be satisfied. To be honest, this is the second time (the tail-light being the first) since the challenge started that some effort and creative thinking has given me more satisfaction than simply spending money ever could have.

I put $35.87 worth of gas in the Budget-mobile this morning. I am now taunting Naginata for not posting her expendatures.


*whenever I write christmas as xmas, I always think the x stands for EXTREME! Extrememas just has such a clever ring to it. When I say it out loud it sounds like EXTREME ASS, which makes me laugh with juvenile glee.