Pat myself on the back

I would like to give myself some public praise - that I have gone an entire month without buying new clothes for Paige - not one single thing! That is an enormous accomplishment for me and our family's budget.
I was convinced for awhile that I had a problem, so I had to prove to myself that I could overcome it without SA (shopoholics anonymous) meetings and intervention.

Speaking about shopping - I am curious how the sales numbers will add up for this years christmas season. Montana will probably still do ok, but some other states will be interesting. I am surprised that Bush didn't try to heroically squeeze out one more stimulus check to everyone to boost holiday sales. ha-ha. Adios dude. Those stimulus checks were the stupidest idea ever - seriously, they barely boosted our GDP enough to make a difference for one quarter. Anyway, I hate our tax system - I know the new won't be great, but the old one had worse consequences - I liked Ron Paul's idea about taxes. Do away with the IRS. If I thought he had a chance to win I would have voted for him. Anyway - besides taxes, I think our new President will do a fine job and I'm glad he won. I wrote up a posting quite awhile ago about the presidential election, but decided not to post it because I know that most of my readers for some reason or another didn't like Obama. I also went off on a few tangents and probably would surprise a few people. Regardless, I hate politics because some people let it get in the way of personal feelings about each other and I just didn't want to go there. I guess I have gone there now - but I'm not going to post my old write-up because it would be silly now - I mean it'd be like posting Happy Thanksgiving 3 weeks after the day. But put it this way, I'm glad that we have a President who is willing to ask questions to all the right people, surrounds himself with diversity, and is passionate about hope and will use hope to lead the people instead of fear. The other option was a President who had nothing to brag about except for his heroic military years, which there is something to be said for, but does not even come close to making him good President material. Oops there I go again...