This morning's index numbers have crashed below my 'comfort plateaus': Dow now four digits, NASDAQ below my birth year. Just like 2001!

Gotta find and implement cost-saving moves. Not the ones where one invests 'only' $20300 for insulated siding for a big 2% reduction in heating costs (10% reduction in the gas you use, but not enough to offset the increase in the delivery costs or new taxes), but the ones where we can whack our basic budget down by 5%. Friends have been laid off, people can't even afford movies (what about DVD rentals?). What do I do? Take the kid out for food, and a play, and food again. Well, it's a birthday.

Why aren't foreigners and investment bankers throwing themselves at my feet in gratitude for bailing them out? I want my feet massaged and kissed.

How can you tell when someone approaches you for money that they're in sincere need, rather than hustlin' up tax-free income? Their acceptance of offered food? When they do it? Where they do it? I ask as I've seen people walk their wheelchairs in the early morning to downtown street corners and have read articles about people getting hundreds of dollars a day. In the summer on one block I have seen three people panhandling. I give only to local hunger agencies, the local Catholic charity and Real Change vendors but I'm wondering why more people don't sell Real Change.

Spending October 5:
$83.44 -- birthday celeb.
$5.00 -- parking

Incensed to read an article in the newspaper in which a woman who bought a $680K house last year was interviewed on the economy. She upgraded from a house whose $420K sale she grossed $46K in profit with her husband. Tell me I shouldn't be beating myself up for buying and holding a property we could comfortably manage living in on one person's salary for a few years. Tell me I don't have to have rich grandparents or generous parents or stock options or a six-digit individual income to live in Seattle. Or do you too feel like a suckah for believing in the index funds-go passive-buy-and-hold, buy-low talk not once but twice like me...