End of 9th Month - Happy Birthday Me!

 Wow, so I caved on a couple of things this month.  I had debated for a while how I was going to handle my birthday and if I was going to allow myself to "treat myself" to something.  The decision got taken out of my hands a little bit.  My cell phone has been slowly dying, and I was hoping it might last until the end of the year.  I already started my depth year with a new computer for working from home (old system being about 10 years old), and what a depth year with both a new computer and a new phone!  But a cracked screen wasn't the only issue, for some unknown reason, it started kicking me off wifi every 10-15 minutes, and the only way to reconnect to any wifi was to do a hard reboot.  A couple of weeks of that, and I was ready to justify a brand new smart phone.  We are definitely calling that a necessity! 

The other big lapse was a mattress topper.  I have been debating whether or not I should buy a new mattress for at least a couple of years.  I'm pretty slow with these upgrades when what I have is "fine, I guess." I think I bought my current futon mattress (with springs!) from a local furniture shop, probably around 9 or 10 years ago.  In the end I decided that a brand new mattress was just too much of a headache and expense to deal with, and instead just did my research to find a gel-infused memory foam mattress topper meant to help with old mattresses that are too close to slabs of granite.  It was the trip to Connecticut that did me in.  I slept in a real bed, a very nice, real bed with a real mattress; and when I came home and tried to sleep on my Vulcan resting platform, it was way too painful.  So, that's debatable on how needed it was, but I'm putting it in the "I'm getting too old for this daily back pain" necessity column. 

My actual gifts to myself ended up all being edible, including a fancy box of Chocolates out in CT, the trip itself, and some nice bottles of local cider.  The S/O did well enough on his own so I got a couple of dearly wanted items (he gave me a cookbook! I am a cookbook HOUND and I haven't bought one, new or used, all year!  So him giving me a cookbook from my wishlist was perfect!).  Him and another friend also both bought me more books (graphic novels, actually), that is another guilty pleasure that I haven't allowed myself all year, so it's been nice to get to read some fluff instead of the usual more serious library fare I've been downloading to get me through COVID isolation. 

Between the mattress topper, the vacation, the new phone, and getting the S/O his own birthday present for October, I didn't have to worry much about buying myself any non-edible "treats" because I over-did my spending for September on all that, and I did splurge out on myself in the food department. But now summer is over, and there's only one big spending holiday left at the end of 2020, and the way things are going, I don't even know if I'm going to be able to go home - and besides, we already clarified that gifts for others don't count.  9 months down, through time of COVID, and only 3 more to go!


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