When I was young (yes, it happened) I worked at McDonald's Hamburgers in Decatur, AL.

My friend Alan was my boss at the time; he was very Mc-literate, and knew a lot about the fast food business. He used to say that the double cheeseburger was the best value and the best tasting sandwich that we had, because it had the "best meat-to-bread ratio".

Well, Ethel has been on a budgetary binge lately; she's realized that we're probably not gonna be able to retire while we're still alive (after we're dead, though, the financial projections look real good) so she's cut out any and all "frivolous purchases". "Frivolous" in this context includes such things as "full sized hamburger buns" - Ethel's gone on a binge of buying the 8-packs of buns for 99 cents.

But she's still making our hamburgers the same size. This results in monstrosities that look like this -


                              

...like somebody took a Triple Meat Whopper and put it on a Krystal/White Castle bun.

When you eat a burger like this, you do so with your fingers curved like the St. Louis Arch, so that you can hold the bun without rubbing against the burger; first you have to nibble your way around the burger to get it trimmed back to the bun, and then you can actually take a regular-type bite.

We're also cutting costs a lot of other ways, as well - buying the store brand sodas (N.B. - Diet Dr. Thunder, from Wal-Mart, is indistinguishable from diet Dr. Pepper), placing a moratorium on ANY purchase that isn't pre-planned (but she didn't object to my getting season 4.0 from Amazon when she found out that it was available) and turning off the secondary refrigerator that we had running in the garage (which is supposedly saving us thirty bucks a month, but has caused quite a bit of overflow into the regular fridge and the deep freeze). I have to admit that her measures have been effective; she's doing very well with the money. It only bothers me when I walk out into the garage to open the fridge to get a soda...whups.

I sorta hope that she stays on this kick - I prefer living lean, and I'd rather have more money than less money. I'm just naturally cheap - I've never had to worry about compulsively shopping or Debtor's Anonymous or getting a gambling habit - I simply find letting go of money to be a painful experience; I don't think of it as recreation.

I have trouble taking vacation, because I tend to think of vacation as spending money, and then, when I'm on vacation, I tend to want to pressure myself, thinking that I have to have enough fun to justify the wasted money. It's hard to have fun when you're thinking "yeah, laying on this beach is costing me X dollars per hour, plus overhead".

Plus, I like having Ethel handle the bills, rather than me - it's much easier having her tell me "no" than it used to be when I had to tell her "no" - Ethel's a natural at the "no" thing. You might say that she comes by it easily.