Oops.

I got paid on Monday. My plan was that this paycheck would go pretty straight to paying off the credit card that paid for most of our fun on the honeymoon.

When I did so, I noticed some discrepancies between the bank's estimate of my funds and Quicken's, and I decided to track that down.

I'm glad I did. I discovered that for some reason, I had paid August's house payment twice. Oooops.

I'd love it if I could just consider that an extra payment; it's more than all the principal we pay in a year. But I rather need that money. At this moment, that house payment would represent about a quarter of our liquid funds. So instead, it will just have to mean that I was extremely prompt with the September payment.

On the plus side, though, I can work this out. I can move a little money around, and mid-month expenses shouldn't be too bad, and the August 22 paycheck should reconcile everything.

In the meantime, I'm delaying paying some bills until the next paycheck, the way I was delaying the credit card bill until this paycheck. Feh. I hate juggling bills like that. Oh well.

Minor Goal

At last I have made enough entries to have a non-trivial second page of journal entries.

Wealth again

Gee, I really seem to be obsessing about questions of money and the emotional meaning of money. I suppose it's no surprise where that's coming from.

Anyway, I realized another thing for which I say "I could do this if I were just a bit richer": Charity.

For the year 2000, I gave a full 1% of my income to charity, and I was very happy to do so. I said to myself, "I'm pretty darn well off. It should be totally feasible for me to give 1% of my income to charity every year."

But this year, despite the fact that I have a lot more income than I did in 2000, I am feeling much less able to give to charity. This makes me sad.

(A side note about the question of charity: before we were married, Lori and I had a few awkward discussions about charitable causes. She would urge me to give to some cause, because she is generous beyond words. I would agree with the desirability of giving to charity in general, but I would angst about whether any particular cause was the best use of my charity money. We resolved this tension by me deciding on a charity budget for the year and giving it to Lori to spend as she saw fit. I think it made us both happier to do it that way.)

Meyers-Briggs

Since I am a sheep (baa...) I took the Meyer's-Briggs test that Jude mentioned.

I am an INTJ (moderate on every axis), which probably surprises no one. This is the type that gets called "Mastermind".

But I was surprised and amused by how much the two writeups pegged me to a T.

Particularly apt phrases from Keirsey's description::
"They are the people who formulate coherent and comprehensive contingency plans."
"INTJs are natural brainstormers, always open to new concepts and, in fact, aggressively seeking them."

From the INTJ type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss:
"INTJs have also been known to take it upon themselves to implement critical decisions without consulting their supervisors or co-workers."
"many also find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality."

And especially this one:
"Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense."
Oh my, this is so dead accurate about my problems with the world as a whole.