pinkie promise pretty please

Pinkie promise. I don't know when the last time I heard that was, let alone when was the last time (if ever) I made a pinkie promise. Kind of like blood brothers? Or spit on it?

Have you ever noticed all of the weird rituals, sayings and practices we have invented and religiously follow in our lives?

Well, most of them I somehow missed when growing up and I am now "discovering" them later in life. Things like slug bug and paying taxes. I mean, somehow I managed to go for decades without paying Uncle Sam and now the IRS has me on speed dial.

Makes you wonder what I have been doing with all that extra money over the years, eh?

Well, back in the low rent years, when I was scrapping by with allowance, money from cleaning people's houses and various gift checks for birthdays and holidays, I burrowed it all away in various places, including under a mattress, piggy banks and even a snow bank once when I lived in Connecticut as a small boy. All of these sound financial investments I read about in the pages of Reader Rick and other well-respected journals.

But all of those habits would change once I left the make believe world of college and entered the world of full-time employment.

It made my money hoarding a lot harder to do. I had to work around W2s and 1099s. I needed to set up various Swiss bank accounts (after a horrible loss, not realizing that Swiss Miss was not a Swiss bank, after sending in all my money to the company) as well as set up various dummy countries in exotic and often tropical countries.

Paying homage to the 80s, I made sure to buy as many junk bonds as I could. I even got in the hostile takeover business when I grabbed one of those metal carts the parking enforcement people wheel around when they empty the parking meters. (Those things really roll going down the hills of San Francisco!)

But now that I am a married man, with three hungry cats to feed, I have to start thinking about retirement, perhaps buying a home, and other things that finally let the world know that your mature now (not that my voice still isn't changing as we speak.)

And I guess maybe I shouldn't be writing these things, but rather I should be working on paying, client work. I guess that would be the respectable, adult-like thing to do. But I guess the same streak of immaturity is what is powering your "break" from work or school right now to read this, so we're all even, right? Or did I just loose brownie points by calling you immature?

Well, I guess I'll be going back to work now....