So we're all just sitting in my room this evening and Pat says, "What can we do? None of us have money." Chris says, "Let's go to Half Price!" He's not a big reader, but he likes to browse the CDs and poems sections. I reply, "All I have is gas money. I'm budgeting now. I don't want to waste it." They laugh. Budgeting. Never saw myself budgeting. Suddenly Pat lights up. "Half Price! That's it! Dude! Let's sell all your dumb books!"

We emptied out my closet and some of my bookshelf. We probably had fifty or sixty books, no joke, mostly junk I've accumulated over the years. There were books on Christian fundamentalism to dinosaurs, to novels of all sorts, and some war history books. A whole bunch of junk that just took up space. We put them into clothes baskets, hauled them out to the Jeep in the rain. Ashlie drives up, and joins us.

The wait at 1/2 Price is excruciating. We agree to divy up the cash. We're expecting fifty bucks, you know, a dollar per book. What a crock. We got a check for twenty bucks and cashed it. Pat and Chris were ecstatic. I just thought of how I'd spent over two hundred dollars on all those books, and now, standing in the rain, all I have is a soggy twenty dollar bill. But then I smiled. Money is still money, and divying it up, I was eight bucks richer!

But how to break it? We fondled this question and decided on the classic place - Deals! We broke the twenty and I bought stuffed olives, jerky links, and a Jones soda. Chris bought a bag of fast breaks. Pat decided to save his money; he's investing it in his credit union.