Company lounge new hotspot

Why is it that stability attained in any area of one's life is a sure sign that something's about to go wrong?

For instance, when you couldn't feel more secure in your romantic relationship, that's the time your boyfriend tells you he's feeling crowded or your husband has a "friendly lunch" with his high-school girlfriend.

Or maybe you're feeling really good about your job. That's the signal for your boss to descend from on high and talk about "new paradigms" and "thinking outside the box."

For me, it's finances. I've been feeling pretty good, planning a trip to New Orleans, wiping my brow that my 401(k) hasn't yet been decimated, thinking about retiring at age 65 instead of 80.

Then those insidious dots of oil appeared under The Other Half's car.

Yep, the car we purchased slightly used in 1994. The car we lovingly cared for all these years. The car we spent $1,000 repairing last year even though the blue book value is only $2,500.

THAT car.

Add that to all those other irritatingly unpredictable expenses, and suddenly there's no comfortable savings account. No trip to New Orleans. No early retirement.

It's all slipping away in favor of reliable transportation for my spouse. That calls for a little belt tightening.

In our budget, the most obvious change is to reduce eating out.

Is it weird that the majority of my meals are consumed in restaurants or in my car or out of grease-stained paper wrappers? With no children to feed and Mr. Half working nights, there's not much motivation for me to rush home and cook.

So there's always that irritating pre-dinner conversation.

ME: Sweetie, what do you want to eat?

MR. HALF: I don't care. Just something cheap.

ME: Come on. You must have a preference. Pasta? Sandwich? Burrito? Chicken?

MR. HALF: I really don't care. Really.

ME: OK. How about (fill in any restaurant here)?

MR. HALF: uhUHuh! Not there!

But no more of that. These days, we've taken to packing our dinner. We both work here, my day is ending about the time Mr. Half has his dinner break, so there we are in the company lounge, quietly heating something up and congratulating ourselves over how much we're saving.

Have you ever noticed how appetizing microwavable dinners look on the outside of the package? Take lasagna. The noodles are firm, the ricotta is fluffy, the mozzarella is sprinkled to perfection.

Now consider the finished product, microwaved for the recommended length of time. There's no china plate with a parsley sprig. There's a cardboard box with the top pulled back. The noodles around the edges are hard and inedible. Everything else is still frozen or swimming around in a watery pool.

Of course, put that on the outside of a box, and you're not selling much lasagna.

Perhaps the most depressing part of this poverty spell has been Mr. Half's emergence as the superior chef. When we got tired of "just add water" and "peel back plastic to vent," he started cooking. It was fresh baba ghanouj last week. This week, he made blueberry muffins for breakfast, chicken salad for lunch and pasta with pesto and sundried tomatoes for dinner.

This is the guy who mistook flour for just-add-water pancake mix just last year and made four of the most disgusting flapjacks known to mankind before I could stop him.

So our food has improved, but still, there has to be a way to make this packing dinner thing more mentally appealing. A CD player with some soft rock in the background? Candles? A plastic box we could pretend to shout our orders into?

Maybe we should just become a one-car family.

Heidi Hall is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.