It wasn’t quite as cold as I was expecting this morning, just below 60°F, but it was misty and…I guess the word is “blustery”! So I bundled up and Keely pranced around excitedly and we were out for our walk before 7:00 am.
Which is to say, this photo is from a couple of days ago when we were out later in the morning and the winter sun was blazing. Not technically a great photo but I like the way the light was crisping the edges of the trees. Anyway, this is how flat Florida is:
Lately I’ve been struggling; money is tight and that brings up all kinds of rancid memories of my youth. Ironically (sadly) my parents had a decent income due to my father’s military retirement, plus the fact that he held other jobs after he retired. The problem was that Mother wanted an expensive life and Poppa wanted a simple one, and while I think they could have managed achieving a combination of that…well no, I don’t think that. I think it’s possible to achieve that, but my parents were never going to do it. Lack of financial literacy and a doubling up on mental illnesses for them both meant they instead never planned for anything, never set a common goal, never handled their money in a responsible, mature way.
They lived in a constant state of “it’s going to get better soon!” while actively working to make it worse. As a child, it just felt inevitable that money would always be “a problem.”
This has left me with the life-long struggle to get over my fear of money management and the self-defeatism that comes with that fear. It’s…not fun.