The Narrative of Kurt & Becky

Becky and I are attempting to get serious with our finances. We do alright, but we know we could do better. Inasmuch, this past weekend we sat down and hammered out a budget. We’ve done this before, but it normally gets abandoned as soon as we see something shiny.
We are trying again. The first budget cut was dining out. We dine out a lot. Pretty much every night. It’s not that neither of us enjoy cooking, it’s more that we don’t enjoy planning and the overall time it takes. But that will stop. We will cook.

To accomplish this, we had to go to the grocery store. We complied a list that I wrote in my little pocket-sized notebook, grabbed our personal effects and headed out. At the grocery store, we got some ingredients for specific meals as well as some general items that are always good to have on hand.
While shopping, Becky looks up and spots our sister-in-law: Christie. We chat it up for a bit and are on our merry (get it? It’s Christmas) way. We finish our shopping and navigate our full cart to the checkout isle. After a fairly short wait we start to pile our items on the conveyor. I reach in my pocket to get my wallet and can only find the pocket notebook. I ask Becky if she has any method of payment. She recalls asking me when we left the house if she needs to bring her personal effects, to which I replied, “No, I’ve got it all.”

So here we are next up to be checked out. There are three people behind us, and we have no way of paying for these groceries.

Becky, thinking quickly, tells me to go and find Christie. I turn to the cashier and tell her she might want to stop ringing us up, I need to go find my wallet. She tells us that she can ring the whole thing up and suspend the transaction. I take off in an attempt to find Christie. I search half the store, unable to find her. I come back to Becky, thinking maybe I could run home quickly. Becky tells me she thinks she saw her in one of the other isles waiting to check out. I dash over to where she was last spotted, and sure enough find her. I ask if we could possibly impose upon her, and explain what we have done. Christie kindly agrees to have mercy on us and pays for our groceries.

It was really embarrassing. While I was searching for Christie, Becky had nothing to do but stand there while the cashier and customers behind us slowly lost patience. We drove our groceries home, and immediately drove out to the bank, wallet in hand, and got the money to drive over to her house and pay her back.

Thank God for helpful sisters-in-law.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 13:19 and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.