"Television – a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done." - Ernie Kovacs

PAM'S HOME!
We went out for dinner, but she let me choose where to go so I picked somewhere that I knew would NOT have lasagna on the menu.
She's on Michigan time, and was up early even by Eastern Time Zone standards so she could catch her 7:30 a.m. flight. But as evidence of just how nice a wife she is, brownies are baking in the oven as I type.

Which, of course, nobody does anymore. Typing is done on a typewriter, not on a laptop. But some of us still talk about dialing a phone number and that's been impossible for at least as long as typewriters have been gone.

Jose Molina, the Yankees' catcher, wears white nail polish on the fingers of his right hand. I've never seen that before. But it does make it easier to see his fingers as he flashes pitch signs.

We talked about it at dinner. It feels dangerous and almost un-American, but we're not going to keep a check register anymore. The only debit card receipts we'll save are those that are required for tax purposes - my housing allowance and professional expenses. We'll basically do no bookkeeping on our checking account. None.

I thought about this while Pam was gone. As counter-intuitive as it seems I think it'll work, because:

• the whole reason for keeping a register was to know how much we had in our checking account at any point in time. Now I can check it online any time of day or night.
• We were supposed to do a statement reconciliation once a month to make sure our balance matched the bank's. Two problems with that: a) we'd save up a stack of 6-8 months (or more) of statements before I'd get around to reconciling, and b) neither of us trusted Pam's math because the register almost always had several errors. (My math is so bad we never even considered having me keep the register.) So we ended up accepting whatever the bank said. Hey, in 39 years of marriage - and lots of irreconcilable differences - we never found the bank to be the one in error. On too many occasions I took everything in, only to have a bank employee spend 10 minutes looking at things and say, "Sir, here's your problem...."
  
• Things got so bad so consistently that when I was doing my infrequent reconciliations I'd get to the end, see the difference between our balance and the bank's balance, and write "ESP" with a number in the checkbook. That stands for Error Some Place, and the number was whatever it took to bring us into alignment with their balance.

So, call me irresponsible, but we're done with balancing the checkbook. Like typing blog posts and dialing phone numbers, that miserable aspect of life is obsolete, gone the way of the Dodo bird and state's rights. If you say we're foolish for accepting the bank's numbers as accurate and authoritative you clearly have never seen our checkbook balance. Trust me, in the worst case scenario we don't stand to lose enough to worry about.

I feel better already.