Vindicated

I knew I wasn't THAT out of date in reconciling the checkbook. I promise it's only been a week or two. Definitely, because remember that day that I spent hours inputting receipts into Quicken? Ok, maybe it's been a month since I really did it good, because that day of receipts was just that, receipts. I never bothered to check if the bank thought I had as much money as I thought we had. And then I went merrily on my way, spending willy nilly, consciously ignoring my blatant fiscal immaturity.

I sat down today, denying myself of all ME time while the babies are napping, foregoing any book reading or stained glass building or house cleaning (hey, it could happen), with big plans of balancing the checkbook. An hour later, I'm still at it. I'm currently back to early October and am still finding purchases that the bank said I made but that I have no record of. There is a big space between mid September and early October where there are no transactions, which is cosmically impossible. Because there is no way I stayed home for two weeks with nary a trip to the store, let alone Wallies for some milk and chocolate.

And then it dawns on me. Wasn't that the time that the good old reliable PC went down? And I was forced to eke out my e-existence on the aging laptop that takes 5 years to download a single page? Yup. No PC, no Quicken software, no balancing the checkbook until the cd is found and the program installed on The Beast and receipts are entered and balances found. Because we do have some sense of financial preservation in there somewhere.

The bad news is that somewhere in the e-file shuffle between dead PC and laptop and new PC, the interim receipts were lost. Or purged. Or digested by The Beast. Hence, 2 full months of no financial data where thousands were made and spent and supposedly tracked. Oh, well. I didn't really have any plans for the afternoon.