Okay, now – so it goes in which column?

         It is a good thing to remember to eat your fruits and vegetables.  If you don’t, you’ll be forced to fill in the deficit with chocolate.  In this cheerful season of diversity and culinary debauchery, you can hardly help but fill just about every part of you in with chocolate: dark chocolate peppermint bark (food of the gods), chocolate covered pretzels, peanuts, pecans, walnuts, coconut blueberries, cherries with liquor of some unnamable and fatally sweet kind, nougats, creams of orange, lime, lemon, raspberry, mint or even more chocolate, truffles, bars, sprinkles, dribbles, wafers, milk – hot and cold.  So much chocolate, so little time.  So much of me, so little left of any waistband I own.

         Sorrows drowned in.  Spirits raised by.  Table covered by.  Guilt over.  And all of it will hit the trash Friday morning because there will be no holiday left with which to excuse gluttony any more.

         Not that real life hasn’t already raised its ugly head.  Did I want to spend all day yesterday at least trying to do the year end accounting?  But I had to sit on the other side of Curt’s desk and show him numbers that actually made sense this morning.  So I planned it carefully: one day to make up for an entire year of being really, really flighty and oblivious.

         Okay, really I am a very responsible person.  Serious bookkeeping goes on here.  I have been mocked to tears because I used to have to sit down with the bank statement the minute it came—and it always came on Saturday, which is why G was able to mock me, because he was home to see me ripping open the envelope and tearing out my hair for an hour afterwards.  Now, I just reconcile every week or so.  Or usually, I reconcile every week or so.  Other years I have. Honest.

         I learned money from my mother who kept hers in a very complex notebook, all entries made by hand.  She kept every receipt, neatly clipped to the correct category page, wrote every amount in a clear and no-nonsense hand.  She knew every penny by name and had plans for its future.  I had to find my own way of doing this because the notebook didn’t work for me, and finally ended up using the computer(oh, I love, I love, I love computers), which never did appeal to my mom.

         But she was the one who taught me to take care, to plan, to budget—and to make sure I was in a position to pay off debt and help my kids when I could.  And so I have done for three decades, meticulously.  Except sometimes.  When I hit an idiot year.  Which I do every so often. Like this year.

         There’s this old story about Hugh Nibley who once sat down on his couch with his coat and hat on one Sunday evening, ready to leave for some fireside he was supposed to speak to and whiling away the last few minutes with a twenty pound tome of Sanskrit he’d just cracked for the first time.  His kids said good-bye to him, headed to other places.  And when they got home, hours later, found him sitting in the exact same spot on the couch, coat and hat on, with the exact same block of book in his lap.  “How was the fireside?” they asked him.

         He blinked, looking up.  “Oh,” he said.  “What time is it?  I hope I’m not late.”

         And that is pretty much my last year in a nutshell, except I don’t read Sanskrit.  A little Old English, maybe.  And some Middle.  But no Sanskrit and no Coptic.

         So here I was, yesterday, with my church offerings report in my hand—which had errors—and my breakfast cooking, staring at a Quicken screen I had pretty much forgotten how to understand. 

         It had been a long year.

         I had one whole day to work through all my numbers, line by line.  And then Geneva called and needed help.  And while I was waiting for her to be ready to need me, another friend called for assistance.  Half of me pulling my hair out, the other half piously delighted to be of service somewhere far, far from this desk.

About the time I’d settled in to one particular investigative Quicken probe, Geneva was ready.  She does this treasure hunt for her riding students each year, and it’s almost a tradition, me showing up to slog through hip deep snow (okay, shin deep)on foot to plant the clues and prizes for the riders.  We must have tramped five miles back and forth across that pasture.  But heck, it was nearly forty degrees out there, and no wind coming off the lake.  Just like Florida.  Would I rather be tramping through the snow (got it packed into my boots, which was interesting), laughing with Geneva than doing accounting? 

Uh.  Yeah.

But good times can’t last forever.  So I got home, dried off and plunked myself down again.  It turns out that bookkeeping is actually easier to do if you reconcile all your accounts first.  Which is easy unless you have somehow changed something that you’d already reconciled so that your old reconciliation doesn’t balance anymore.  Then you have to retrace not only your money steps, but your state of mind – what the heck, in other words, could I ever have been thinking when I did that???  And what, exactly did I do?  And wait – why did I do that?

Hours later, it’s like I’ve worked through this huge gordion knot of sticky twine—kind of like trying to straighten out twelve strings of last year’s Christmas lights.  And things kept changing – like, G came in and asked me a question, and I said, “Just a second – I’ve got to follow this line of – wait.  Wait.  Now it doesn’t balance.  (voice rising) It was balanced.  Now it’s not.  I didn’t touch anything. (screeching) How did this happen???? AHHHHHHHH!!!”

But G was long gone and nobody, not even the heavens, had an answer.  A moment later, the program wouldn’t even let me enter a statement ending date.  Or a statement amount.  Nothing.  Dead data fields.  It had freaked out.  Had I freaked it out?  Or the other way around?  Restart.  Restart the reconcile.  Four times.

But I did finish.  Sort of.  Not really finished yet, but I can do that next week.  This was just to pre-pay state taxes.  Good-bye money; I knew you well.  But at least, at this point, I think I know how much money is left after this really strange year—Gin moving to the east, M going to Argentina, Scooter born, Mom in the nursing home.  I finally have a sense of the shape of our money as it is now, at this second.  I’m not sure how it got there, and where the rest of it (I really thought there was supposed to be more) is hiding.  But hey, it’s only money, right?

Uh-huh.

Resolved: pay attention to what day it is.  Never fall for the: “I don’t have to write it down; I’ll remember” thing.  Hire a bookkeeper.

          P.S.  Has anybody else noticed that some comment of theirs has disappeared?  Sometimes WordPress freaks out and eats things, and I’ve lost at least some of one person’s comments.  I love love love the comments.  I don’t want to lose any of them.