Father's Day

My wife asked me if I wanted an iPad for father's day. I was a little surprised.

While we've almost never denied ourselves something we wanted, we usually wait a fairly long time before getting it, and almost never get the shiniest, newest item. Thus, I'd like to have an iPad, but to fork over six hundred dollars -- no, not worth it. It's nice, but not nice enough. The best analogy that I can think of is the Microsoft troubleshooter that you can invoke when something goes wrong with, say, your network connection. I've never had that thing actually provide any useful degree of support. It seems to check some things that I could have done myself -- and usually did -- but nothing else; no magic, no hey, that's pretty slick. And the extra money for an iPad would only come out of my wallet for that level of magic.When I was semi-forced into using Quicken, and found that it could be made to go out to financial institutions and automagically download transactions, I thought hey, that's pretty slick. That MoneyDance and other products can do it too didn't really matter. I hadn't seen it before, and it made me feel as if it was worth the money. iPad? Not slick enough. Not worth the money.

That we even contemplated it is pretty odd for us. I think that some of that comes from overflow due to the France trip. Once you've forked over six thousand dollars for airline tickets, and contemplated another two thousand for hotel reservations (Paris probably has cheaper hotels, but this one is nicely situated, and we're talking four rooms, four days), it's fairly easy to say well, what's another one or two or three or four hundred dollars? I recall once talking with my wife about how much money could one of us spend without clearing it with the other? I had something on the close order of 50 dollars in mind -- and that, something that you could do once a month, perhaps once every couple of months. My wife thought that the occasional expenditure of 20 dollars would be legitimate. So neither of us thinks of ourselves as a big spenders. For us to think hey, want to spend six hundred bucks? There's got to be a reason. And I think that France is a large part of it.

Part, too, I think, is a feeling of control. I don't like admitting this, even to myself, but sometimes, if I feel like things are a little out of control -- either I'm pissed at the credit union (which I currently am; they switched processing companies, and , oh yeah, they decided not to convert any history; you didn't want to be able to search history, did you?) , or I'm pissed at how stupid many Republicans and not just a few Democrats are, or whatever -- then somehow, being able to spend money makes me feel better. I usually am able to restrain this impulse, or limit it to something like buying Wolfermans muffins instead of Thomas'. But still - the impulse bothers me, so I try to remain aware of it. Do I want to spend this money to get something we need, or something that will improve our lives, or are you just ticked because people take Gingrich, Palin, and Trump seriously?

So, I think, this Father's Day? No iPad for me, thanks.