Unintended Consequences

Sometimes there's a problem with super frugality: non-buyers remorse.

It's pretty much the opposite of buyers remorse in that you are sad because you passed something up that you really did want for reasons including cost or because you didn't think you'd need it and now you do.

A variety of things have fallen into this category for me recently. For example: white sugar (skipped it at the commissary because I thought I had an extra bag at home even though I wasn't sure. I was wrong ... and now my humming bird feeder is empty and I have not a single piece of cake. Tragedy.), that really pretty dress at the store (I thought what I already owned would work and, even though I had the money for it, I skipped it for what was maybe in my closet. Turns out already owned dress had a big hole in it) and a registration for the Army 10-Miler.

That's right, I want to run the Army 10-Miler and have for several years. But instead of just registering just in case I could make it and then making an effort to get to D.C. for it, I didn't spend the money. And now that I'm going to be in town that weekend anyway I really, Really, REALLY want to run in honor of our fallen soldiers.

But registration is full and closed. And the only way to get a registration is to buy it off someone else IF you can find someone to sell and HOPEFULLY at a non-inflated rate.

Because I want to run in honor of our battalion's lost, I decided to try an easier road to registration first: call the race organizers and tell them my story. A few weeks into pestering them I found out one of gold star wives actually wants to run too, as do a few other people. So I started pestering them for multiple registrations.

Yesterday they Finally Called Back and I found out that they would give us one registration for the gold star wife, plus one extra registration. The other two we were going to have to find another way to get. They assumed I, as the organizer, would take the plus one. I did not make an effort to correct them.

Since I've been working on getting registrations for a looooong time, I felt like this was completely fair.

Except how it looks to other people is that I was using this poor gold star wife to get what I want ... which is simply not the case ... but it doesn't matter what the case is, does it? It matters how it appears. And that is NOT how I want it to appear. I didn't do this because it would get me in free and I'm that cheap (it doesn't and I really am not that cheap).

And so I'm going to call the 10-miler folks back and let them know that the plus-one will be passed to someone else ... and I'll just deal with it. Meanwhile, if you know someone who is selling their race registration for about what it's worth, please let me know. I really want to run.

Incidentally, I was just reading about this in I Corinthians this morning as part of the From Garden to City reading plan. And, ironically, the verses I feel are relating here are the ones about running a race towards the end of the passages. Find them here. Holy sense of humor, anyone? Thanks, God, for that one.