the unexpected
My folks are visiting over the next several days. They’re not visiting me, they’re visiting my family member, who has colon cancer. My family member is making it through her treatments as well as can be expected. But it will help her to have more family around, so my parents are coming up.
Two things:
First, I miss my mom and dad. I haven’t seen them since summer, and when I passed the bar, I couldn’t even share the good news in person. I missed the looks on their faces. I haven’t gotten my hugs yet. It’ll be great to have them here.
More pertinently, this will affect my purse. Even though I’ve known for some time that they were coming to visit, we have no definite plans for how we will spend time together in those snatches of time when I’m not at work, and they’re not with our family member. At some point, we will probably go out to eat, or drive somewhere, or go shopping or something. Events like these are the kind that make you wonder, at the end of a month, what phantom it was that snuck up on you and stole your money while you weren’t looking. In an instant, while you’re caught up in the moment, you could drop $50 in a snap - and not feel the pinch until a couple weeks later.
I’m going to be very careful over the next few days. It’s hard to expect the unexpected, but I will try to keep my spending under control. I have to, because my budget is ti-i-i-i-i-ight.
