Positively, pessimistically, practical....

Ruanita was home from work last night because she had hurt her back. She was laying on the couch on a heating pad...moaning...and I didn't feel like cooking, so I ran to Chipotle and picked up dinner. After gorging ourselves on Chipotle while the kids ate a combined total of maybe five grains of rice, we decided that we needed to curb our eating out habits. We eat out entirely too much. The amount of money we spent eating out this week alone was obscene...I don't even want to do the math. And the kids almost never eat their food....so that's money out the window. And it is so very unhealthy. It is bad for our waistlines and our checking account. So after dinner last night, I proposed an experiment. We are going to try to NOT eat out at all for one full month...no McDonalds runs...no soup from Turtle Bread...no Noodles & Company...no chips and queso from Pepitos. If we manage to not eat out for an entire month, we will reward ourselves by buying something fun. We just have to decide what our reward will be.

I was thinking we should reward ourselves with something recreational....something we normally wouldn't just go out and buy. Perhaps some new games for the Wii? Perhaps new shoes for both of us? I do so love shoes. Maybe new state-of-the-art speakers for the iPod? Ruanita, on the other hand, had an entirely different idea. She thought we should buy something for the house. Ok...I could deal with that. Being that she is the practical one, I should have known that she would have a different idea of what constitutes a "reward" than I did. However, I was blind-sided by her suggestion. She proposed that we buy a brand-spankin' new.......mat for the front door. A rug?? Seriously?? In her defense, she doesn't want just any old rug. She wants to buy one of those nice expensive waterhog rugs from L.L.Bean. I agree that a rug like that would be nice to have in front of our front door where boots get kicked off all winter long. However...it's a RUG. When I am craving Chipotle with every fiber of my being, a rug just really isn't going to make me stop and reconsider. I should have seen that coming though....

Ruanita is the epitome of the practical person. I tend toward frivolousness. She is eternally pessimistic. I always see the glass half full. Somehow, we manage to make a good team though. I force her to be a little less practical and think outside of the box a bit. She reins me in and forces me to look before I leap. We may be as different as night and day, but it is a formula that has worked well for 12 years...and counting.

On a somewhat related note, I just ordered my very first laptop ever. Ms. Practicality put up a good fight. We have a perfectly good desktop computer, so why do we need a laptop? I never use the computer, so it makes no sense to buy a laptop...you would be the only one using it. That's money we could put away for a rainy day. In the end, however, I wore her down and convinced her that I (I mean we) need a laptop. So...I have ordered a brand new cherry red 15" Dell Inspiron notebook. It will be arriving in 5-7 days. Woo-hoo!

Hmmm....perhaps I should let her have her rug...