Today I start writing down everything I spend money on.

It feels good to have a month's planned expenditures in a chequing account.

Yesterday I told the lads that we are scrimping $500/month to be set aside for the purchase of a recent vintage automobile. Our car is now exactly at 130,000 mi. We've owned it for nine years. Contrary to my born-again "green" attitude, I am considering, among the Toyota Prius, a Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Volkswagen Passat 3.6, or a BMW 325i, as we have several low-fuel or no-fuel commuting options: carpool, flexcar, motorscooter, bus, bicycle. I want an automobile only because we do get foul weather on occasion--it snowed here today--and I have a small child who justly does not feel safe riding behind us on our scooters, and there are times I tote more than just drycleaning/librarybooks/3bagsgroceries. I'm not going to keel over and die in a messy pool of guilt because my car gets only 24 mpg when our other self-commandeered options get 80 mpg and 55 mpg and more use out of them -- we don't drive our kid to many places other than friends' birthday parties, appointments outside the city, or roadtrips.

My husband was asked why we don't have two cars. Since 2001 we've been bouncing around from having one to two cars in our driveway: I don't really buy cars, I just 'rent them' or 'maintain them' while their owners are overseas. They're expensive to insure, feed, park and maintain.Driving is actually more pleasant now, because I don't have that defensive "everybody hates me and my fuel efficient freedom, I must protect myself from jealous killers who pretend to be oblivious with their Blackberries and cellphones" mantra behind the wheel that I do on my scooter.

Today also in earnest I start planning for what could be the first and last major roadtrip we take as a family this summer: a cruise down as much of Highway 101 as we can. I'm budgeting $3400 for twelve days. It'll be like Steinbeck's 'Travels with Charley.'

I will buy the Consumer Reports April Auto issue, or look at it in the library.

I am $900 away from maximizing my Roth IRA contribution for 2006.

I ordered seed catalogues from Landreth, Seeds of Change, Territorial Seeds, Abundant Life, and Heirloom Seeds. I saw an article on MotherEarthLiving.com about the ten best beginner crops and really just want to stick to herbs and a handful of vegetables: green leafy sturdy varieties; tomatoes if I can.

My wackiness for this week is 'how to apportion out the overage to crawl toward my individual savings goals.' Better than last week's quarterly neurosis of 'I am going to live my life in poverty'. My husband said I should be happy that I fared better than my parents but gee, isn't faring better than dysfunctional high school dropouts who spent most of their lives in the poverty line a low expectation?

I saw that the energy credit for windows tops out at $200. Not quite the heftiness of the solar energy credit. I know I've posted before about the question of energy savings using solar energy. Now, I am concentrating on windows. We'd been wanting to finish up our windows replacement from two years ago.

I must remember that if I sink because of deflating home equity and mutual fund NAVs, so too do my friends and associates.