At any rate – here we are, on the day after the blizzard.

This was the first storm like that that I’ve experienced on my own. I felt like I was okay. I stocked up on important things like Diet Coke and knew that I would be grateful for my seasonal snow plow contract. I’ve been home for a few days with a bad back anyway, so I looked forward to the opportunity to continue to nurse my aching back and get another day or two off from school.

Wednesday I kept getting phone calls from people wanting to make sure I was okay. It kind of made me feel like I was in a Cormac McCarthy novel… single woman, two dogs, trapped in a house waiting for the snowplow…

My aging border collie has been sick, too, so, alone in my bed hearing the wind whip I started to obsess about that a little. Interesting word – aging. Why do we use it to talk about those getting old? Aren’t we all aging starting at day one? You never hear anyone say “the aging three-year old struggled with toilet training…” Sorry – I digress.

Back to obsessing over the dog. What if she passed during the storm? What would I do if I couldn’t get to the vet with the body? Would I put it in cold storage of some kind? That just made me feel like I was in a novel by Stephen King.

In the morning, in the aftermath of the storm, I watched my neighbors outside digging out. Families, husband and wives, moms and dads, kids. Shoveling, clearing paths to mailboxes, playing with the dogs. It definitely fell into one of the moments of feeling alone.

Snowbound makes you feel alone. Alone like vulnerable, alone like “I wish I had someone here to drink a hot cocoa with,” alone like “there’s nobody here who cares that we’re stuck in the house.”

Some days feel more divorced than others. Like when I had to put Ben Gay on my own aching back. Or when the vet says “I think her liver is more enlarged.” And when the weatherman says “it’s going to be one for the history books, folks.”

Are you kidding? Does that work?

I’m committing to posting at least once a week. I really want to post more than that, but daily isn’t going to work, and my choices for the WordPress challenge are once a week or once a day.

For more information, visit The Daily Post

Wish me luck!

Anyway – check out their list. I’m liking many of them, especially #5. Give up self-betrayal. That was a huge one for me after the divorce… I don’t want to go, but xxx is depending on me, or expects me, or how would it look? Of course, #6. Give up the victim role should resonate with many of you post-divorce, as well as #8. Give up blame.

Happy 2011. Check out the list: Eleven Things to Give Up in 2011.

AT&T had a little bundle they pitched, which involved switching from Dish Network to DirecTV. That’s cool. I’ve had Dish for a long time and I knew that by switching I’d be saving some serious cash for the next year.

So, DirecTV was all installed yesterday and I called Dish to cancel. Or, at least, I tried to call Dish to cancel.

Sorry, Mr. Ex needs to call. The account is in his name.

I replied, “Well, it’s been billed through AT&T for years, and the AT&T account is in my name…”

Dish: We’re sorry, Mr. Ex will have to add you as an authorized user.

Of course, the easiest thing to do is to email Mr. Ex to ask him to do it, which I’ve done, and I’m sure he will, but this is very frustrating. We never ordered the service through Dish, we’ve never paid for the service through Dish, and it shouldn’t be my problem that AT&T didn’t change the account when we changed the AT&T account to my name.

I hate bureaucrats.

And then, when the vet went over the results with me, recommending an ultrasound to see if what looks like an abdominal mass is on the liver or spleen, was one of them.

And then, coming home and sitting looking at these sweet dog who’s been with us – and now, me – for almost 13 years is one of them.

I have wonderful children and friends who are only a phone call away, but, in the end, the decision is mine.

And I’m not loving making it by myself.

I decided to boycott Target because of that whole “we took your money and made a giant donation to an organization that you would NEVER support if you had the choice thing.” Check it out here.

Truth is that I’m totally sure Whole Foods could care less, considering that I never liked the feeling that I had to refinance my mortgage in order to shop THERE anyway. Target, though – well, now, that’s another story. I was surprised that the first month I didn’t drop at least $100 there that I would get a “we miss you” postcard. I used to joke that I should have a portion of my paycheck direct deposit there.

The problem, though, is that I buy stuff there. Lots of it. Makeup, food, toilet paper, you name it.

To start with, I buy 6 Luna Bars a week there. They’re cheaper at Target than they are anywhere else. I’m sure, too, that when I pop in there to buy the weekly Luna Bar stash (and they get kind of stale, so I buy them once a week) I spent at least another $30 on impulse purchases – stuff that I used like, well, food. But impulse purchases nonetheless.

Target’s not stupid, of course.

So – now that I can’t shop at Target… what to do? I actually kind of panicked for a while. Then I realized that, well, there are other options. I know Target’s the closest (I could walk there if I wanted to. I don’t, of course, but I could), cheapest and all-around most convenient.

Here’s what happened in the last two months since my own little boycott began:

School supplies. Now that wasn’t hard at all. In fact, it was easy. Staples? Hello? Back-to-school supplies sale? Cheap cheap.

Food. Back to the grocery store. Not my favorite by a long shot. I hate grocery stores – the big ones. I hate the lines, the parking, the people (I mean the other shoppers who leave their damn carts in the middle of the aisles and talk for hours to neighbors). I did, however, discover that grocery stores can be pretty affordable if you do two things: read the ads instead of recycling them (since I don’t get a daily paper I don’t get them that way but I realized that the newsapery stuff that comes in the mail every week is actually useful if you plan to do grocery shopping) and only buy stuff on sale. There’s lots of it. I buy soda, um, kind of frequently and it’s almost always on sale somewhere.

Luna Bars. Know what? They’re like a dime more expensive for 6 of them at Trader Joe’s than they were at Target. And I pretty much hit Trader Joe’s once a week anyway for my lunch provisions.

Toilet paper. Two words: plan ahead. Bought it at Sam’s Club (yes, I know that Sam’s Club is just Wal-Mart in disguise but there are some things that I just have to buy there like the super-cheap chicken that’s probably hormone-laden and will eventually kill me, and the cheap-cheap (ha ha) eggs that thankfully didn’t kill me). I bought a giant package of toilet paper there that, considering I live alone, will probably last me 2 months or more.

And, finally, make-up. I’m not a big make-up buyer, but there’s stuff I do use. Well, now, have you considered drugstore.com? OMG… here’s where being generous paid off as well. I had a boatload of cash left in my FSA this year and encouraged younger daughter to use some FSA money at drugstore.com to buy her first load of over-the-counter meds for her new apartments. Anyway, that earned me over $6.00 in drugstore.com money that I could use starting this month. That, combined with free shipping and some sales got me the following for just a little over $30: foundation, powder, blush, mascara, eye shadow and a new hair brush. Are you kidding? That would have been at least $20 more at Target, not to mention the five other things I would have bought on impulse.

Socially conscious and frugal? Can be done.

Yesterday I was in the Ikea neighborhood and headed there for a desk. A simple desk. No drawer, no keyboard drop, no hutch. Essentially a tabletop with legs. Nothing too deep, nothing too long. Ikea had just the thing, I discovered via the Internet, and the price was right. I also wanted a small nightstand lamp, and we all know that Ikea can’t be beaten for cheap lighting.

So I went there. Alone. I think I was the only single person there.

First, it’s the choosing. To be honest, going to a grocery store post divorce was kind of weird too. I looked with sadness at the old people strolling the produce aisles holding hands. I couldn’t get used to buying food just because I wanted it. No reading labels to make sure it was suitable for Mr. Ex the vegetarian to eat. No thinking about what the kids would eat for lunch or what the family would share for dinner. Nope, just me. But I got over it. And, to be honest, there are always lots of alone people at the grocery store.

At the grocery story, though, it’s not like you see a bunch of people standing around discussing the relative merits of Gala apples over Honeycrisp.

Not Ikea. Everything at Ikea is a discussion. White table legs or silver? Red bowls or blue? And everywhere you look there are couples and families trying to figure out if it will fit, get home in the car and if it’s really that easy to put together.

And then there’s the pulling off the shelves and getting the item into the cart with nobody else to hold it steady. I bet you never appreciated that extra person before, right? Go ahead and do it yourself without looking like your cart was taken hostage by Candid Camera. Whoops – there it goes down the aisle while the divorced lady chases after it with a tabletop in her arms.

Then it’s the buying. They don’t bag at Ikea (they don’t even give you bags – you have to buy them now). They just take your money. And since most people use plastic in some way, they really just scan and give you a slip of paper with numbers on it. So you’re stuck bagging after you’ve paid, if you’re alone. While the people behind you stand tapping their feet because you’re now in their space.

Then there’s the dreaded holding area. The pickup zone (I don’t mean that in a good way). The leave-your-cart, get-your-car zone.

I may be overly suspicious, but I’m not happy about spending a lot of money for stuff and then leaving it alone so I can run and get the car. And I didn’t do it yesterday. Luckily I know I’m suspicious, so I planned ahead (I do that occasionally) and chose a parking space that was fairly convenient to the pickup zone. And my purchases weren’t that heavy (and, of course, I had my new, 59 cent Ikea bag), so I grabbed them out of the cart and carried them to the car myself. And even got the 48-inch tabletop in the trunk first try.

All-in-all, it was a pretty miserable shopping experience. The exciting news is that I got the purchases home and managed to put everything together from the no-words, goofy pictures instructions.

But I’m not excited to do it again any time soon.

As I looked at the tree this morning I noticed the spot on one side where a very large branch had to be cut away. Very large. It was literally pulling the tree down, making it lean dangerously toward the house. I remember watching them cut the branch away, wondering if that was all it needed to make it strong and straight again. Wondering if the tree would look the same, still be my favorite.

Today the tree is gloriously straight and tall. You can see where the branch was severed, but it doesn’t mar it.

I guess sometimes you have to make a drastic change and get rid of what’s weighing you down to be straight and tall again.

Now that I’m mowing my own lawn, I’ve developed the mantra “it’s not a golf course.” In other words, so what if there are a few stray blades that didn’t make it under the mower this time? So what if I don’t trim the edges? If there are weeds? My favorite sister-in-law, by the way, tells me weeds are necessary for a healthy lawn. And she’s an environmentalist, so I trust her.

Since having 100% responsibility for the house, the car, the dogs, I’ve had to learn to silence my inner perfectionist and let some things go. It’s been hard. For much of my life, good enough was never less than 100% perfect.

Not too long ago, I had a lot of work done in my house. I had ceilings replaced, the entire house painted – expensive stuff. As soon as it got warm and humid, I noticed some nail pops in the newly-done ceiling in the living room. I was devastated. Okay, I was devastated as soon as I got over being worried that the house was going to come down around my ears. But I was devastated – here I had just spent all this money on the work, and it wasn’t perfect any more.

Unperfection happens.

And I’m gettin’ okay with it.