Don't let them ride Rhode Island.

Last week I got the dreaded letter I knew was coming: "Your year of student loan deferral is coming to a close -- pay up!" Luckily, they did give me a couple months notice, which is nice so I have until October 1st to get it together. On my to-do list was the vague task of "do budget" which, I have one currently, it's just rather vague in the specifics of numbers (I round up to the nearest 50) and its been doing a great job of keeping me on time in paying everything and rarely going into the negative of my checking account because my timing was misaligned, but it hasn't been so great in actually making my credit card debt decrease. So today was the day when I pulled up every statement and wrote it all out and have a concrete figure as to how much consumer debt I actually have and it's not terribly pretty. But, there is a way that facing it is actually not as scary as the vague shadowy number in my head that I was only partially ignoring anyway.

Except as I was cleaning some stuff off the desk, I was flipping through an old journal from seven years ago and there's a random budget/money goal page and I found myself envying the amount of credit card debt I had. Oh, to be young again.

I had a pretty stellar weekend, the majority of which because I got to be out in the sun and talk and laugh with people I adore, whether it was while helping a friend move on Saturday morning, or during writing group, or in the park and coffee shops or lakeview, or during a two-and-a-half hour long phone conversation, or on the porch of friends. On the bikeride home last night, I got kinda sad, and I realized it was mostly because the weather was throwing me off. It had the coolness of September evenings, of summer fading away and coming to a close. Except, um, its July. So I have some time.