how not to make a plan

Sorry! Its been awhile!
I haven't been excessively busy or anything, just giving in to springtime premenstrual malaise.
Oh, and also freaking out about money, but what else is new, right?
I had a minor car emergency: the 'ol dear decided to need a new exhaust system (among other things) in order to pass state inspection. So I had to fork over just over $2000.00 to make things right.
It was really painful for me. I had the money--I have been saving pretty aggressively-- toward the goal of purchasing a new-to-me vehicle sometime early next year--so I had about $5000.00 in an account called "the transportation fund". I did a big pro-con list and toyed with the idea of giving up on my car and trying to sell it for parts instead of fixing it and just getting by with a bike until weather gets bad again(I tried this last summer--gave my car to my youngest sister and took the bus / biked / walked everywhere until a car cut me off on my way home one day and I broke my wrist falling off my bike, so in theory this is doable, but it makes me slightly nervous given past events). My sister pushed for immediate car shopping and using the money I had as a down payment on something new-er, pointing out that the $600 + a month I had been putting aside would be less than a car payment on most things (also, she likes to go car shopping). And then I talked to the mechanic and voiced all of my concerns and he told me that the car looks to be in really good shape (other than the exhaust) and should make it to 300,000 miles with ease(it is currently at 220,000, so this is maybe two years away). So I took $2000.00 out of my transportation fund and had it fixed. And then when it came to $2300.00 I gritted my teeth and put the rest of it on a credit card.
This was an exercize in re-working goals. I have this tendency to get really driven toward a particular goal and to lose site of other stuff, and having to go in and evaluate where I was putting my money made me realize that my $500.oo emergency fund is inadequate, and that as much as I might want a newer car, putting nearly all of my savings into one goal / fund isn't the smartest way to make it happen. Because I do get really rigid about what the money is supposed to be for, and then have trouble with re-allocation and not thinking of it as a failure. So I've restructured my savings a bit: dropped contributions to the transportation fund back to 10% of my net income and increased contributions to my emergency fund to 10% as well. I'm also putting 10% into a "house" fund (that will be way more long-term: I don't even know what town I want to live in yet!) and 10% into a sort of "undeclared" (meaning I have not stated a specific purpose for it, not that I am hiding it from the government or something) playing-with-stocks fund (through Sharebuilder, divided among 5 different index funds) that, theoretically, I can to wherever I most need the money later on . Barring sudden crashes of the economy and my own ridiculousness regarding money.
I haven't changed my pre-tax savings at all; I am still contributing 15% (which still, sadly, does not get me close to the cap of $15,500/year) of my gross every paycheck to the company 403c (but they upped their match from 7% to 8%!! so there will be slightly more money going in there after June 1). This is money I never count, although when I get the biannual report it is always nice to see those numbers and think "someday this could be mine" Haha.
I feel better about it, though I am sad when looking at the considerably lower balance in my transportation fund especially when I think about how I only paid $500.00 for the car I just fixed for $2300.00!! My hope is that it will be money well spent though, and that I will have the car for another two years at least.

and she was

Home. Is where I want to be, lift me up and turn me round.

I listened to Talking Heads on the way in to work today, and it was so good--something to lift your spirits and make you think of things differently.

And then, of course, because this is a shitty year, I got pulled over.

I wasn’t speeding even! I learned my lesson last year, and got my one warning ticket. This time I got pulled over by an Officer Flint who meant business.

And he had noticed what I had been warned about--an expired inspection sticker.

It wasn’t my car, it was The Boy’s, and I should have known better I guess--I just figured that even though you imagine the worst happening, it doesn’t mean its going to happen that way. Only this time it did.

To the tune of $133. This is so not my year.

its not really a big deal. not really. just another setback. who would even notice, honestly? lately life is cluttered with them.
i'm trying to brush it off, let it go, get on with things.
so far, as you can see, that is working beautifully.
i did go to a really interesting lecture on happiness and coping mechanisms: apparently you can divide the world up into two kinds of people (can't you always?) one is strategically pessimistic (i.e. stressy about major/minor life events) the other strategically optimistic (i.e. totally laid back when it comes to the big &little stuff). and the woman giving this talk had done lots of different trials to try and make the stressy ones less stressy about things, and in the end it turns out: if the person is of such an inclination as to need to stress (imagine every possible worst circumstance, over plan and over prepare et cetera and so forth ) then even if you calm them down with soothing music or menial distracting tasks they will do poorly at whatever test you set them to because their physiology says they need to be stressing. i thought it was pretty interesting and telling--at the end she recommended ways to deal with each type (if you come from the other) and i loved that the main one for the strategic pessimist (which, hello, yours truly most likely falls into were the world to be divided as such) was give them more information so they can plan their doomsday scenerios in detail. yes please, i like my details. and i can also recognise that i have a habit of giving other people way too much information if they ask me for information (not in a TMI way--i do not share the gross minutiae of my life, but if you ask me for an article on lime disease you're likely to get three articles, a book chapter and a relevant web site).
Also today i ate lots of cookies and read about weight loss---hahahaha. i'll admit myself intrigued by this body for life thing which is similar and yet different from the fit for life thing i toyed with this summer. anyway all of my races are over for the season so perhaps i will make an attempt to shed the fluff instead of bulking up for the winter like i normally do.