Blogger lives?

Sorry about the long silence. Between being busy and stressed and Blogger's on-again, off-again thrashing, I haven't managed the will to update at an available time for awhile.

I had a nightmare Friday night. My dreams are usually more along the lines of working for the rebel underground or spelunking on Mars than anything to do with real life, so this one was surprising for having an obvious rl trigger: our CFO is resigning.

I dreamed that my boss quit. Not only would this be depressing in general (he's a good friend and the best boss I've ever had), but with the logic of dreams, they chose not to re-hire his position. I was left in charge of my side of the IT department, and my networking counterpart in charge of her side. This is yet another variation on my place of employment having me over a barrel (one of the reasons I left my last rl job).

Now, at this point, I think this must have kicked the actual stress chemicals in my brain, because the nightmare suddenly cascaded into everything I presently stress over in rl: Because I was freaking out from not having an IT director, I started eating cookies. I have recently promised myself that I will do 1200 calories a day from now thorugh January 9th (with the exception of Thanksgiving--I'll be out of town and have less control over that, so I won't set myself up that way). So then I was stressing about having broken that promise. Because I don't break promises.

Then I did the second freak-out about the cookies, which was, "Oh my god, I'm eating cookies--I have to fit into a wedding dress!" At about this point, I managed to peel myself out of the dream.

So of course, I woke up stressing about a wedding and spent most of the day in that mode. On the plus side, this finally resulted in something constructive. I have spreadsheets, now. And I discovered I could open a savings account online, without ever going into my bank, as long as I set up an automatic monthly funds transfer at the same time. So I opened a wedding account, and I'm going to try to do a small amount each paycheck. That way, I'll have some extra saved up for either the wedding or the honeymoon, wherever I need it.

I also realized that there are two fundamentally different ways of coming at this whole planning-a-wedding thing. One is: "We have $xxxx. Let's throw the biggest party we can for $xxxx." The other is, "We have $xxxx. Let's put everything together on the smallest possible shoestring and save the rest for the honeymoon." If we favor the second philosophy, we will have to do the wedding in the spring or fall. Period. By renting any kind of an indoor venue, we automatically lose most of the flexibility that you can put into budgeting on a shoestring.

There is a third possibility, and I think it's the one that's been causing so much stress: "We have $xxxx. What things do we want to do ourselves, and what things is it worth paying for to avoid putting that kind of time pressure on ourselves/our friends/our families?"

Must discuss with Pete. This is becoming a fundamentally important question, as I now have enough realistic options in my hands that it is becoming time to invoke my sister.