A Challenge Lurking in Our Stock

                 A couple years ago, I worked on a production of West Side Story.  It's a fabulous show, with much to say for every generation, and the songs have every right to be as iconic as they are.  We had an amazing cast with unstoppable dance skills and theatre-packing vocals.  We did the whole show, including the often-cut or shortened ballet, and it forced us, as the costume team, to face some truths about our industry's current conundrum.

                Like every costume stock, ours has a huge amount of what is called "true vintage."  It's not a reproduction.  It's not retro style.  It's not from a recent style revival (like the '40s redo in the 1980s).  It's legitimately from the era.  These are amazing garments, built to last, with fabulous prints and all the little period details we love.

                Many theatres still use their vintage clothes in shows, repairing them to keep the costumes going for the run of the show.  It was originally most of our plan to utilize our healthy vintage stock for the show, until we remembered what the choreography would look like.  West Side Story is one of the most athletic shows in the musical theatre repertoire, and the dance at the gym in the middle, one of the few places we would see half of the ladies' ensemble, is the most active of all.  As much as we all want to believe that 1990 was ten years ago, it was thirty years ago now, which makes the 1950s...eligible for Social Security.  There was no way we could send out our aging stock to have a mambo dance-off for a brutal tech week followed by a five-weekend run.

                We breathed into paper sacks for a few minutes, then regrouped.  The designer wasn't hugely fond of buying stacks of cheap retro stuff on the internet, but that ended up being the requirement for the show.  We combed multiple sites to find the best variety of pieces to prevent that weird bridesmaid feeling, and we added trim to make the dresses feel a bit less mass-produced.  The dancers appreciated not having to worry about ripping clothes older than their grandmothers, and the stretch fabrics were also enjoyable.  The men's ensemble also required a lot more shopping than expected, as no one is used to dancing in non-stretch jeans anymore.  You could find us in various department stores, testing the give across the thigh of every pair of jeans and chinos (no pun intended) in our price range.

                We were able to sneak pieces from our lovely vintage collection into the non-dancing scenes, like the final scene (nobody kicks their own face while Tony dies), and a few other spots.  The true vintage added a nice feeling.

                The stretchy Mid-Century-ish costumes have had a good life after the show, going out to lots of dance-heavy productions, and we have been having heavy discussions about the future of the vintage costume pieces.  Many of the gorgeous items could be worn carefully by the right person, but theatre is rarely able to be the kind of careful these costumes require, with quick changes and active physicality for multiple performances.  We regularly sell parts of stock to vintage clothing dealers, who can sell them to enthusiasts who will wear them only a few times in ordinary circumstances.  Others are kept for research or to pattern for reproduction, but as a professional shop with no institutional backing, we cannot afford much space for this pursuit.

                The other reason we don't get to put our vintage stock onstage much is that much of the vintage clothing is shaped differently than the actors we costume.  That is not to say that our actors are too fat for the clothes, or that "people were just smaller then," which is a common refrain repeated by many vintage shoppers. 

                It's a two-pronged issue.  The first prong is that we have different body-shape expectations than previous generations.  We don't wear clothes with rigid waistbands daily anymore.  Most women don't wear belts, let alone the boned cinchers and girdles our grandmothers donned every time they left the house.  As we in historical costuming learn year after year, the repeated pressure on the waist causes the body to reshape itself to mimic the shape of the corset.  At Dickens, we encourage performers to measure themselves in their corsets at each lacing to ensure that the waist is the same size each day, lest they over-tighten and shrink out of the costume, tripping over hems of skirts and petticoats sagging from a loose waistband.  Our exercise routines today focus on core strengthening and flexibility, rather than waist whittling. 

                The average body nowadays is much closer to the natural shape of the human body, but the clothing of the midcentury is built to be worn over a girdle by a woman who wore girdles regularly, starting as teenager.  While it was wildly celebrated that corsets went out of style in the 1920s, it's worth remembering that many women continued to wear restrictive foundation garments throughout the century.  My grandmother still has one of the corsets her mother-in-law had in a drawer when she died in the 1960s.  Great Grandma wore corsets at least into the 1950s, because it was more comfortable for her--she has been described as "a bit pigeony," polite code for a large bosom.  As many corset enthusiasts will tell you, one of the best benefits of a corset is bust support from underneath, which puts less strain on the back and the shoulders than the modern bra.  All this to say that, for good or for ill, women's bodies were shaped differently sixty-five years ago, due to fashion.

                The second prong of the issue is survival bias.  Only the clothes that haven't been worn much in the last six decades have survived to be worn today, so most 1950s vintage clothes are really small.  Despite the protestations of many, there were larger women in every era.  Lane Bryant expanded from maternity clothing to plus size fashion before World War I, after all, and every era features photographs and paintings of generously curvy women.  In order for a 1950s dress to be wearable today, though, it had to escape being cut up to make children's clothes in the 1960s, being worn to costume parties in the 1970s, being reaccessorized by Madonna and Cyndi Lauper fans in the 1980s, being worn in productions of Grease! and Bye Bye Birdie in the 1990s, being further reaccessorized by Sex and the City fans in the 2000s and being revived as daily wear by followers of the historical living trend now.  It's also possible that the dress might have been tucked away in storage somewhere, waiting to be pulled out now, but that is pretty rare today.  We move from house to house more, and we can't afford as much storage room.

                In thrift shopping today, most of us either buy something that fits or something that is too big and can be recut.  The same thing has been happening for centuries, but previous generations typically had far fewer clothes than we do now, narrowing our chances of finding old clothes in good condition.  In order to make it down through the years, there had to be a reason why the clothes didn't get worn.  They were either special, weird, forgotten, or small, usually.  That's why there are so many vintage wedding dresses out there.  Think about your own closet.  What pieces are in pristine shape, and what pieces are well-worn?  Multiply that by generations, and I think you'll understand why there are far fewer pieces larger than a modern size six or so.

                As an industry, costuming is facing the fact that we don't have much more time left to use vintage clothes from the 1950s and back for theatrical productions.  We need to get used to planning to build or purchase more of those costumes, and we also need to manage the expectations of our producers.  Setting a show in the 1950s does not guarantee a low budget anymore, with more and more pieces being deemed too delicate to use, and the thrift stores are no longer full of 1980s and '90s fashions.

                Long story short, there are a lot of reasons we can't just use old clothes in costuming, and we need to start recognizing that we need to embrace some of the more work-intensive solutions soon.

A Gentle Dip into Cynicism

                 This week, I've been making a few skirts I cut out and boxed last year in a frenzy of efficiency.  This is actually very typical of my work style--cut out a stack of projects, then stitch a stack of projects.  It works well for me, as standing at the cutting table and sitting at the machine are two very different actions.  All the skirts are plaid.  Plaids have to be carefully pinned so the lines continue across seams, so it's slow going. 

                It doesn't help that the book I have been playing as I work is The Grapes of Wrath.  It's slow going, too.  I have committed myself to reading and listening to more classic literature, but between this and My Antonia, I'm feeling pretty cynical about human nature.  Any suggestions of classic novels in which no one starves?  I need some faith in humanity.  And some vertical stripes--I can feel myself aging.

                I followed a link on Facebook for a human interest type story today.  The story itself wasn't biased, but every link around it was, complete with inflammatory language.  No one needed to actually read the article to know what the website wanted you to believe, and I doubted the article would shed much light via reliable news sources.  No wonder we have so much divisiveness right now.

                I have a lot of wonderful people in my life, and I have spent a lot of time learning how to interpret their style of revealing news.  With one couple, we would wait to hear the update on his illness from both him and his wife.  He would mention things casually, not wanting us to worry.  His wife, a highly informed worrier, would lay out the scarier version of the situation.  Fuzzy and I would then lay out both views, knowing the truth was about 35% worse than the husband's version and 45% better than the wife's.  I have been doing the same with national news lately.

                I do my best to avoid pulling all my news from the same sources, and if I find that a website is confirming every one of my beliefs, I back up and start seeking additional views.  Nothing in politics right now is perfect, and no one should be blindly following one person's opinions.

                For example, I read an article yesterday that claimed that Marriott had cancelled all of Ted Cruz's reward points and banned him and his wife from the entire chain of hotels for life.  It was a very appealing story to those who are frustrated by his actions and by his reelection.  The article was gleeful in tone, so I started wondering.  A search of "Ted Cruz Marriott Points" yielded only this article reporting this tidbit.  There wasn't even a statement from Marriott concerning its own apparent actions.  That tells me what I need to know about this one. 

                At this point, I am doing things like reading the transcripts of White House press briefings.  The information is different when no one is telling you what to think about it.  It's also nice to see how the questions are crafted to create the soundbite the reporter wants.  It's also interesting to see how each outlet chooses to use the same bit of information to appeal to their own audience.  For me, I look at the ads around the story to get a sense of the politics represented by a news website.  A conservative website today attempted to sell me Hawaiian shirts, while the same advertiser offered sheath dresses on a neutral site and novelty leggings on a progressive site.  Early in the election season, I looked up Donald Trump's campaign site to confirm that he was calling his admirers an army, which had disturbing connotations for me.  If you think Facebook is not watching what you're doing, look up a couple websites very outside your norm, and watch the ads change.  It was like night and day.  I had a similar alteration in content the day I innocently clicked on Ben Shapiro's comment on something.  Social media is indeed an echo chamber, and advertisers like it that way.

                There's no easy way out of this.  We all are wrong at least some of the time, and our world is being manipulated to encourage us to blame others in order to make money for someone.  I guess the best I can do is keep looking further into what is being said and who profits from the view being offered.

                Until then, I have one more hour of sad migrant farmers on starvation wages.  I worked on a version in college, so I know what's ahead for me.  It might be time for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or All Creatures Great and Small or something.

Of Cookies and Chickens

                 Tiny's favorite show right now is Sesame Street, so she will sometimes present me with the remote and solemnly say, "Elmo."  Apparently, she is a fan of the red fuzzy guy.  It's been fun to revisit the Street as an adult, and to see all the changes that have happened.  I really appreciate that they have been helping to teach the littles good habits--the masks they all wore when chalk drawing in a special episode made Tiny understand wearing a mask herself (If Elmo can, she can), and Grover teaching kids to cough and sneeze properly warms my heart.  They also did a few animated shorts that appear in the commercials at the end of every episode about hand washing, reminding kids when to wash hands and how to do it (and the songs are the recommended length of time!). 

                In one of these, Elmo has hype chickens.  They raise the roof in the background before playing bubble-producing saxophones.  It's pretty fantastic.  I want hype chickens backing me up on various tasks, as I feel it would make a lot of things more appealing.  At the very least, I think hype chickens would prevent me from fantasizing about running away from home while I wash dishes.  Hype chickens need to be the new thing installed in all American homes.  I would also have them ride around with me as I do errands.

                I made a batch of cookies again this weekend, and I am always startled by how fast a single batch goes.  When I was a kid, my mother did not bother turning on the oven if she wasn't making a quadruple batch.  It wasn't like we weren't going to eat them, after all, and she could throw some in the freezer, too.  Cookies were a process that took most of the afternoon, as she often made multiple kinds of cookies as long as she was in the process.  A single batch of cookies takes less than half an hour, as long as you remembered to take the butter out of the fridge to soften.  It dirties two bowls (one for dough, one for combining dry ingredients), one spoon, two cookie sheets, and (I'm so fancy) the cookie scoop.  I don't usually make them unless we have a planned recipient for half of them, as my impulse control problems are shared by everyone in the family when it comes to cookies.  I'm not joking.  I caught Fuzzy munching on a cookie to tide him over while he assembled his breakfast--a bowl of cereal.

                It's heady to realize I have the power and resources to whip up a batch of cookies just about any time my family requests them.  It's smart that the girls don't know that.  I got bored waiting the eight minutes for the cookies to bake, so I wandered into the living room, where Fuzzy and Kiddo were watching Super Bowl halftime shows on YouTube.  When the buzzer rang, I thought it was too soon--must be the indicator that it's at the requested temperature--and idly considered waiting a bit.  I decided to just check anyway.  Nope.  Done.  Eight minutes is not a lot of time.  It reminded me that my mother would get bored in the kitchen and walk to the other end of the house to play on the piano a bit.  About three songs in, her head would snap up, and she would gasp, "The cookies!" before sprinting back across the house to fish the trays out of the oven.  These would be the cookies that we would be encouraged to scrape off a little.  This encouragement was not always successful.

                I haven't seen a cookie that's "a little done" from my mother since I gave birth to her grandchildren.  I'm not sure if it's because life has slowed down a bit, or because she now plays cards at a table within ten feet of the oven, but every cookie arrives golden brown.  My children will never believe that Grandma ever made "extra crunchy" cookies, and at some point, I am going to be accused of miserly baking (only two dozen?  Don't you love us?).  Fuzzy might call them off, but there's a good chance his mouth will be too full to do it.  This makes me wonder if my own grandmother might not have had as stellar a cookie reputation as I thought. 

                This was supposed to be about something else today.  I'm sure I'll think of it and write on that topic tomorrow.  If you need me, I'll be attempting to keep my toddler from flipping off of the furniture or attempting advanced yoga while leaning on my lap.

Survival Tips from the Frozen North

                 This week, we are going through the early "death wish" stage of toddlerhood.  Tiny is happiest upside down, preferably dangling off of furniture.  We are doing our best to keep her alive, despite her apparent wishes.  Meanwhile, Kiddo is helpful when the mood takes her, but is a bit sullen, too.  I wish both of them were as interested in sleep as I am.

                Fuzzy showed me a weather report from Cincinnati the other day, and joked about how happy I must be that we don't live there anymore.  To be fair, we would have found our way through it if we still were there, though I have to imagine the last twelve years would have had ups and downs.  I always joke that snow is the natural disaster you can shovel, preferable to floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and tornados, but I really feel for a good portion of the areas that are currently being snowed on. 

                We live in a magical part of California that has microclimates even within cities.  When Fuzzy went to school in the city, he kept an arsenal of warm clothes in his trunk, as it could be seventy-five and sunny at home, and fifty and rainy at school, twenty miles away.  In the Midwest, we joke that if you don't like the weather, you can wait five minutes.  Out here, if you don't like the weather, you can drive for five minutes.  As a whole, though, this is not an area that requires heavy-duty heating or warmth plans.  My mother notices it every time she visits--high ceilings, big windows, tile floors, slab foundations.  I have been in several homes out here with wall-unit heaters that would be hard pressed to heat a home more than about ten degrees.

                Many of the areas being hit right now have similar issues in housing.  The houses in my hometown in Michigan are built for the cold, with basements, large amounts of insulation, and mighty heating systems.  The houses I saw in Texas the last time I visited did not appear to have those things.  It reminds me of some of the warmth methods I taught Fuzzy when we lived in Ohio.

                When it's really cold, roll up a towel and shove it against the bottom of the doors to the outside.  Close all your curtains when the sun is not shining, and put something up over blinds to keep heat in--feel free to go tacky and use mattress pads, blankets, or towels if necessary.  Only heat your house to sixty-five or seventy, so the grid is more likely to have something for the people in your neighborhood who need more.  Wear a sweater and hearty socks in the house.  Make hot, heavy food like cream soups or chili to keep your insides warm for a longer time.  Drape a blanket over your lap when sitting.  Tuck your hands into the opposite sleeve cuffs to get your hands warm.  If you have forced-air heat, spend time in your smaller rooms, as they are more likely to have additional heat.

                Stay home if you can swing it, because inexperienced drivers in snow and ice conditions are hazards to everyone around them.  If you have to go out, clear off the entire car, including the roof, and don't move until your defroster has done its job.  Throw a blanket in, just in case you have to wait for help somewhere, and consider a small shovel and a bit of kitty litter to help you get yourself out of trouble (the litter is for traction, not potty emergencies).  Stick to the main roads, which are more likely to have had some maintenance, and don't do anything sudden--don't make sudden turns or stops, and accelerate incrementally.  Four-wheel drive is not four-wheel stop, and it can get you far enough in the ditch that your neighbors don't see you. 

                One of the real reasons that people from the northernmost parts of the United States are so friendly and community-minded is that they have to depend on each other, especially in the winter storms, when police will put out notices that minor accidents without injuries will have to be reported later, as all services are overwhelmed dealing with major accidents and other problems.  In small towns, the person driving by you in the ditch will often make the call to the tow truck for you once they get cell signal again.  If they recognize your car and they can safely stop, they'll pick you up and take you home. 

                My family has a blanket that has spent almost its entire life in cars.  It's made of quarter inch thick wool, is the kind of itchy that makes you reconsider all your life choices, and appears to have survived both World Wars.  It's a shade of grey-beige that brings the military to mind, and not necessarily our military.  It's more likely that it came into our lives via the Boy Scouts, but all my memories of it place it in the trunk of my parents' cars, just in case we got stuck in the snow somewhere.  We had stacks of blankets in the house, too, and we sometimes slept under four of them to keep warm, but that blanket was our lifeline if we got stuck in the car.

                This is not fun, but it's also not going to last forever.  For now, eschew dignity and fashion for warmth.  Wear the prairie nightgown you received as a gag gift, and wear a hoodie over it.  Go to bed early, so you can read a book under a drift of quilts.  Layer cardigans.  Wear two pairs of socks.  Try wearing leggings under your clothes.  Be safe, and we'll see you in warmer times.  Soon.  I promise not to mock you from over here, and I won't tell you what the temperature is.

It's Time for Tiny Entrepreneurs with Boxes of Carbs Again

                 It's Girl Scout Cookie time again around here, and I've had it on my mind.  I don't know if it's because I live in a different place now, or if the way things are done has changed, but I envy today's scouts a bit.

                Back in the early '90s, when I was doing my tour of duty, things were different.  It's worth remembering that the parenting motto of that era was "I love you and all, but let's not get weird here," so the selling method involved a child knocking on your door and adorably asking you to order some cookies.  It helped that it was February in an extraordinarily cold place, so we are talking about peak street urchin look, with pink cheeks and red nose and, further in the selling day, endearing shivering. 

                We were told to sell only to the people we knew (the whole neighborhood) and not to go into anyone's house (yeah, right.  It was twenty degrees out there, tops, and we knew these people, mostly.).  Some girls had the option of simply handing the form to their parents, who would gallantly hand it around at work, guaranteeing sales of at least fifty boxes.  We did not have those parents.  Mom might take it to her small office, but if you had an orthodontist appointment during the sales period that required you to stop by her work next door, you were required to come in with your own pitch.  Dad's colleagues downtown had all agreed that they bought from the kids, not from parents, so I would do a sales tour of all the downtown businesses. 

                One year, I was cold on my way home from downtown, so I stopped at the last office before the residential area started--an Edward Jones investment office.  It was clear no one had offered them the chance to order Girl Scout cookies recently, and the investor and his assistant pored over the form and carefully selected twelve boxes.  The next year, they called me to come in and explained they ran out partway through the year and had to buy directly from the council.  They doubled their order.  I admit that I still fondly remember them from that time, and that I totally told this story when I started investing with Edward Jones.

                Imagine my surprise that in recent years, Girl Scouts were lined up outside grocery stores and post offices.  Brilliant!  Even the girls who were new in town and didn't know everyone in a one-mile radius (Our family did the newspaper routes around our home.  We knew everyone.) could still be part of the sales!  And there were parents right there, so no one had to worry about that one ooky guy down the block!  And the cookies were right there, so you know there were tons of repeat customers, sometimes on the same day.  Awesome.  I suddenly wanted to go back in time and explain all this to my troop leader.

                This year, it's all online, so we are back to having our cookies delivered, but we don't have to pay the girls directly (they can learn cash handling next year), and our cookies will most likely be dropped at our door for contactless delivery.  We've come such a long way from the ten year old shivering on your porch to convince you that Trefoils are the lowest sugar, so they're practically okay for diabetics (I was merciless.  I wanted the 200-box prize so very very much.).  We have lost some of the independence that the old system taught our girls, but we are still teaching them paths to success, and that is worth a lot. 

                Now, I'm off to convince my husband that we are definitely freezing some of these cookies I just ordered.  It feels like a fool's errand.

How Can Sticking Stuff in Dirt Be This Hard?

                One of my goals for this year is to start gardening in earnest.  This goal scares me more than any of my other goals, simply because I have failed this one so many times.  I have come to the conclusion that I cannot keep things that don't yell at me alive.

                When they are hungry and you are holding the food, pets yell at you.  Babies yell at you.  Children yell at you.  Spouses yell at you.  You then startle, notice the food you are holding, and start distributing.  Plants flail around outside of your house and then die without even ringing the doorbell.  Something tells me Emily Post has a deleted chapter about this.

                It doesn't help that I am from a completely different place, planting-wise, than I live now.  Most of the seed packets I handled as a kid included the words "when the frost is off the ground."  Out here, frost is an unusual occurrence, not the official ground uniform of five to seven months of the year.  I joined a gardening group, and they started talking about microclimates and clay and I needed a cool cloth and a dark room.  From what I can see, it's always warm enough to grow something out here, and the big concern seems to be having too hot of a climate for some plants.

                A couple friends who reliably grow things and appear to have their entire immortal souls despite that have offered me their spare copies of the book that apparently has all the answers for growing things in California.  I am hopeful.  I wonder if I can install a buzzer or something to force myself to remember to water these poor plants that are going to be under my care.

                Then there was this lady at the community center last year, who suggested I get a tree trunk and bury it in my back yard.  Does anyone have a tree trunk?  Is this a legit thing?  Would this finally be what drives Fuzzy over the edge?  Was I just trolled by an older, vaguely European lady in the hot tub eleven months ago?

                Now I have to decide if I will grow food or flowers or a mix.  I'm the only one in my family who eats extensive produce, so I'd have to choose carefully or get a good salsa recipe to force on all my friends this fall.  The last time I tried to grow food, I acquired four cherry tomatoes, so this concern is probably premature. 

                Is there a gardening tutoring service, where they'll just spell "soil" in my hand until I get it?  Remember in elementary school, where they gave you dirt and a seed and just had at it?  Do they still offer that kind of gardening?

                I should delete this.  This is proof that I am knowingly entering into gardening despite my prior knowledge of homicidal neglect.

A View from the Other Side of the Coin

                 I'm going through a bit of a health scare right now, so I'm going to make this relatively short tonight.  I've been meaning to write about this subject for a while now, because it's at the heart of my financial goals.  I think you might understand my intentions a bit more after reading this.

                When you are a senior in high school looking to go to college, you fill out the FAFSA, the granddaddy of all financial aid forms.  Or rather, your parents do.  For those of us with reserved parents, it's a sudden unveiling of your family's financial life, which can be surprising.

                All of my college-bound classmates and I started getting our financial aid statements from the universities at the same time, with the attendant surprises that food was going to cost a lot more than a daily Little Debbie and that there was a blanket fee for campus activities.  It wasn't quite a meeting of the real world, but it was a rude awakening all the same.  We also met the concepts of student loans for the first time as well.  It looked like we could afford everything and more if we just got our parents to agree to these PLUS loans.  Nifty.

                My mother took a swift editing pencil to the paper.  "This is suggested.  You are not going to need that much.  You will not have a car on campus, so that fee means nothing.  I am not taking out additional loans so you can have pizza every week."  By the time she was done, I would be taking out the subsidized student loan for under $2000, but that was it.  There were no need-based grants offered, which felt like a badge of honor.  Everything else would be covered by merit-based scholarships and eventually acquiring a job.  Hooray!

                At an event later that week, we were chatting with a couple classmates' parents about the award letters.  One mother joked about how the expected contribution from the family seemed so high to her.  "Apparently, we are wealthy.  I had no idea.  I guess we're the wealthy destitute, because it says we have all this money, but I don't know where it is!"  Reality check:  this family had a decent income, a home in one of the most expensive parts of town, and a hefty retirement account.  They knew where the money was.  For good or for ill, the FAFSA took hard numbers and turned them into benefit analysis.  It didn't look at where your money was going, or if you had other goals than sending your kids to college.  It looked at what should be possible, and assigned money accordingly.  Her kid made it through college fine, with a stack of merit-based scholarships, and if there were student loans, they were not the kind that blunted his future plans.

                That concept stuck with me, though.  The wealthy destitute.  We have a lot of wealthy destitute people in this society.  I know a few of them, and I know also that there are a lot more of them who are not open about their situation.  There is a really nice income, but every dollar is spoken for before it enters the bank account--high housing costs, luxury vehicles, season passes to multiple amusement parks, high-cost kids' activities, multiple "once in a lifetime" vacations a year, and so on.  There's no room for error.  They live extraordinary lives, but they also live paycheck to paycheck.

                Quick test.  How do you know if you are living paycheck to paycheck?  Your employer's accountant makes a mistake, and your paychecks are going to be five days late.  What are you going to do?  If you now need to call multiple creditors and make deals, you're living paycheck to paycheck.  If you need to put everything on a credit card that you'll pay off when the check comes, you're not in as bad of trouble, but you're still living paycheck to paycheck--you just have credit.  If you can shuffle your emergency savings or even better, just hold tight for a few days, congratulations--you are out of the treadmill, at least a little.

                I figured out a long time ago that I would never make enough money to be the wealthy destitute.  We have always edited our expectations to at least somewhat fit our realities.  There is very little about us that indicates "high flying executive" to anyone, and we're okay with that.  We are attempting to carve out our own path, for the destitute wealthy.  According to our taxes, we don't have as much as many of our neighbors, but we are doing our level best to make every dollar do its work--staying out of debt, keeping our lifestyle simple, saving for our future goals.  At this point, if the hypothetical banking delay happened to us--as it did a year or so ago--we don't really have to do much of anything different, because every bill gets paid when it comes in, weeks before it's due.  We worked very hard to get ourselves to that point, and we feel unbelievably lucky that we have had that opportunity.

                The destitute wealthy don't look as cool from the outside, but we have a pretty good deal going on.  It's worth a try.