For a couple of days, my beloved netbook has been driving me crazy because things were moving so slowly that it felt as if there were some kind of digital syrup clogging up the machine. I could- to pun on what I heard is an Indian greeting-almost say "ram ram" to every pixel appearing- before the next one appeared, that is. Yesterday, things came almost to a standstill. After fighting the settings for a whole day, uninstalling each and every program not absolutely needed, I managed to wrangle the most recent edition of the anti virus program I use on the machine, which I had intended to do anyway as the older one´s license was running out. Guess what, my little machine is back in working order.
What really has me p.o.´d is the nagging suspicion that the makers of that program have something inserted there which will slow down your machine should you chose to ignore the permanent reminders that your license is about to run out. I had been doing that for about two weeks because I wanted to use up every bit of time on my old license before installing the new version. Now, I had to give up on two whole days, but I have a working machine again. Oh well.
For the stainless steel pan dilemma, my parents called me yesterday asking me what present I´d like for my impending birthday.You can guess I had the description of a certain something on hand. I´ll see if I´ll get it. It would be free for me, and hopefully save me from being given something useless that is clutter from day one (they have been known to do that). As I have been flying circles around one of those pans for quite a while I think it´s a good application for a wish, if I have one free.
Of course, I will have to wait until my birthday to get it, which is something that I had, in the past, rarely done. If I saw something I liked, I had to have it, at once. Quite often, I carried the item home, stashed it away somewhere, and promptly forgot about it as fast I had seen it.
The only way to counteract this was to install a rule of never, ever, buying something at first sight. Only if I keep returning to something over a period of several weeks , or at the very least several days if it´s something cheap, will I buy it. I have found that these items, the ones where the decision to buy is fuelled by a desire going deeper than just the surface attraction of something glittery or pretty, the ones where the purchase has been thought about weighing the pros and cons, are the ones that, in the long run, give me the most satisfaction for my money. They are also the ones that get used instead of just cluttering up our flat.
Postponing my wishes is thus doubly useful. It´s frugal, and it keeps clutter out.
And seeing some pretty piece of bric-a-brac in a shop no longer means having to store that particular piece for the next years. I used to think I had to own such things in order to enjoy them. Today, I enjoy them when passing them by in a shop, I may have a good laugh at some particularly funny coffee mug, but I don´t have to take it home to enjoy it.
And not buying at first sight also keeps me from one of the more insidious shopping traps, namely, the trap of being in a foreign city not knowing when I´ll be back there. Quite often, I ended up spending more than I intended because I put myself in that "last chance to get this" mindset.
Actually, the internet helps a lot there. Knowing that I could order almost anything online, plus knowing that I could still do so after a waiting period, works wonders to take the urgency out of shopping. Nowadays, when I am window-shopping, I mostly use that as an opportunity to see what something looks like in real life so I won´t have to depend on an internet photo to decide whether to buy it.
This morning´s weigh in gave me quite a surprise because the whole gain of the weekend is off again, so, it definitely was water retention. Which gets me back to the fact that I had, over the weekend, eaten bread and potatoes. It seems my body is reacting ever more strongly to those, as everything else I ate were things I eat all the time without retaining several litres of water afterwards.
And today´s number is low enough that I can hope to reach the land of Just Overweight before my b-day yet.
Julia
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