Betsy Whitt

So I finished the edits on the paper and sent it off yesterday. Picked up a new batch of books at the library, and my momma flew in to baby me after I get my teeth ripped out this morning. Matt will be helping, but he has a full load of work and […]

Dear Betsy,
Please double or triple check that you’ve entered your express bill payments online in the right rows. Otherwise, you may misplace four thousand dollars and trigger a money meltdown the next month.
Tell yourself all you like that it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t tuition-paying season. You still have […]

I can spend hours–days, even–with my niece and nephew and be appropriately taken in by their adorable cuteness, willing to make a fool of myself in public making funny noises and faces to make them laugh, and be perfectly happy to hand them back to their owners and walk away with nary a twinge of […]

I’ve been thinking and talking about various aspects of decisions and commitment and expectations and guilt with several people today, and I’ve been reminded of one of my favorite quotes, by a woman named Anne Morriss, though I know nothing else about her:
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating - in […]

One of the things I make a point to do when I visit my parents in Ohio is to drive on the country roads at night. It’s not so much to see the sights (after all, how much can you see at night?) as to revisit bits and pieces of the past and, little […]

I came thisclose to hyperventilating when I saw our credit card balances this month. In a panic about the amount of money we apparently let flow like lifeblood in the month of January, I issued a household moratorium on buying anything not immediately related to the continuance of life (i.e. food and medicine), conveying […]

I’m at work.  Do I post blog entries while I’m at work more often than not? Hmmm… I think I might. There haven’t been updates lately because although I’ve been getting things done, none of them have been terribly interesting. I mean, I folded four loads of laundry, but that’s not really […]

Yeah, love and lists. Let’s get the icky love stuff out of the way first.
I have mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day.
On the one hand, it’s a commercial scam to get people to buy chocolates and out-of-season flowers and jewelry and go out to dinner. It usually ends up making people […]

What a fantastic way to spend a day.
Immediately when we returned to out car from the ski hill, I had serious trouble getting my boots off because between bending over and tensing muscles to pull my foot out of my boot, it seemed like all the muscles in both my legs cramped up […]

What is the deal with giving presents?
I’m not saying I don’t like giving gifts. Or getting them. What I don’t like are all the darn rules around giving them. The following are the rules I have a problem with. Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition, and […]