Derek Ward

The Wife and I went to Disney Springs last weekend. There will be more about the trip in tomorrow’s post. This scene needed its own post.

We went to a store that is kind of a high-end Bath and Bodyworks. While perusing through the wares, we came across little packages of “solid shampoo”.

Me: These are interesting, particularly if we use them for packing for air travel.

The Wife: Those are supposed to be good for your hair, but I’ve never used them.

Me: I’ve used regular bar soap to wash my hair, but nothing like that.

The Wife: There are times you make my head hurt.

How is it the end of October already?

Day Job Happenings – I am now firmly ensconced in the old/new job. We have a new supervisor who was hired during my interregnum from the team. It’s fun when he explains something the team does that I helped start up before I left.

The other fun was I put in an IT ticket because a piece of software was having an issue. In return I was told my laptop was out of warranty and I needed to come in to swap it out. Grumble. My team uses some non-standard software. Plus, getting everything back would be a pain. On top of that, the day job is about fifty miles north of Ward Manor. Anywhoo, I went up, found a place to work for an hour until I could go down to IT, and at the appointed time went down – to be told there were no laptops to be had. Oh, and do you need yours to work? So, I guess I need to make the 100 mile round trip again at some point.

Drink Happenings – The Wife and I picked up bottles of the new Oreo flavored Coke Zero. Okay, not horrible, not great. Also, not something I would go out of my way to get again. I think that kind of sums up the experience.

Cat Tree Happenings – The cat tree we kept out on the back porch was finally deteriorated enough to toss out. After much deliberation, The Wife found one on Amazon that was wood and rope – perfect for outdoors. When it arrived, the wood was, shall we say, very naked. Dang. Run up to Lowe’s for stain and assorted items. I was told by The Wife to stick to staining the small pieces. Assembly didn’t go too bad. A couple of frustrations. Then some rearranging the back porch.

Voting Happenings – The Wife and I did our early voting. There was a small hiccup but went relatively smoothly.

Grill Happenings – It looks like I’m going to get a new grill. The Wife’s nephew is looking to offload some floor models from his day job. Plus, the old grill was getting a bit “dilapidated.”

The Wife loves her TikTok. The algorithm fed her up a guy named Caleb Hammer, who is kind of like a foul-mouthed, very confrontational Dave Ramsey. Not my cup of tea, but i can see why he would be popular.

Anywhoo, it led to a discussion between The Wife and me about how glad we are that we agreed early on money, spending, and budgeting. It also got me thinking on some of the financial reps – the financial muscles I had to build.

The beginning exercise was to pay cash for stuff. I really believe this was such a foundational financial rep. Because when I got used to paying cash for everything, I learned to pay for only what I could afford and budgeted to spend. This was the strength I needed to go to using a debit card. I could spend in more areas, but I still was doing the financial reps of staying within budget and keeping with what was in my account. This meant I had that discipline when The Wife and I went to a credit card. We already had those financial reps to treat the credit card like cash.