The first week is easy

With typical first-week-of-the-year fervor, I throw myself into my new goals: home-cooked dinners, brown-bag lunches, three days in a row. The dishes, done at night, two days in a row. Don and I have set a mini goal-within-a-goal of no dinners out or meals brought home until my birthday on the 17th. As we usually eat out (or have take-out) two or three times a week, this is no small commitment. I would have tried to make it one month, but we always eat out on birthdays. It's tradition. It's a steakhouse. Come on. Don is the real winner in this deal, because I get off work at 4:30 or so; he gets off around 7:00-- if we're lucky. I go to the grocery store, I cook. He comes home to food. Also, since he pays for most dinners out, it's his bank balance that wins. It's not that he doesn't cook or can't cook, just that he does so on the weekends, if he has a day off. I start thinking about dinner in the morning, if I don't already have a plan. That way I can thaw something, hit the store, whatever, before dinner time. Don starts thinking about dinner when he gets hungry for dinner. I've seen him come home from work at 7:45 in the and take something out of the freezer to thaw... for that night. This is when I get pissy and insist that we go out, since who wants to eat dinner at 11:00pm? I don't know if this is a gender divide, or just a two-different-people thing, but it's easier to just take over dinner and plan the menus. I get no small comfort in knowing, for example, that we're having pancakes tonight, and that we already have all the fixings.

I paid the balance on my Discover card today, too. It's funny that I was complaining about not getting any benefit from these falling interest rates, because apparently, I am. I checked to see what interest rate I would be paying on the card if I didn't make the full payment, and it's a lot lower than I remember-- like 4% lower. So I checked my other card (which also has a balance, boo), and the interest rate on that one has fallen to less than the interest rate on our mortgage. You know how people take out home equity loans to pay off credit card debt? I'd be better off getting cash advances on this card to make mortgage payments! OK not literally, because the cash-advance rate is always higher than the purchase rate, but still, it's quite funny. The rate on that card has always been really low because it's an associate special through the bank, but I guess falling prime rates really do affect credit cards. Who knew?