Investments.

When RJ and I first got married, we were poor.

Dirt poor.

Like, I worked at Wendy's 25 hours a week, we lived over a grocery store and stole our cable, we shared our one and only toothbrush, we only had one car, and we mostly ate the $5 pizzas you could find on special around campus poor.

Ok, I made up that toothbrush part.  But still, damn poor.

Luckily for us, RJ's mom's family came through with wedding gifts in the form of cash.

It may have been a total of $3000 or so, which seems like a lot now, but then, we were pretty sure we were rich.  Seriously, that would have covered all our living expenses for at least six months.

Being young and incredibly stupid somewhat fiscally irresponsible, we spent that money in our heads a million times.   We finally narrowed it down to two options.  We were either going to buy some cheap-ass inexpensive pressed wood bookcases, or we were going to use some of the money to invest in a small start-up company that we both had an interest in... called Amazon.

See, I loved books, and RJ was a technology geek, and this was going to be a revolutionary meeting of both our passions.

I remember we had enough to buy around 100 shares.

Guess which one we decided on?

Yeah, since I'm not blogging from my summer home in the Hamptons or wherever, you guessed right if you said: Cheap-ass bookcases.

They lasted through one move, then fell to pieces and had to be broken apart with a hammer and shoved into about a million trash bags so the garbage company would haul them away without charging us an "oversized item" fee.

I started to do the math one time to figure out how much our little 100 shares of stock would have been worth today if we had purchased them then, and somewhere around a quarter million dollars, I stabbed myself in the eye and drank a pint of gin straight out of the freezer.

Whatever.

Being independently wealthy has lots of pitfalls, too, I guess.  Like, ya know, the maid is always in your way when you're trying to lounge around, and sometimes the cook forgets that you prefer your  eggs scrambled instead of fried and you have to send them back.  Sigh.

Anyway, there have been a ton of things over the years that I probably should have invested in but did not.  Like AA batteries.  Pretty much every toy in this house requires somewhere between four and six AA batteries.  And since my kids leave every toy in the house in the "on" position most of the time,  I have to replace the batteries in every toy every time someone wants to play with it.

"Mama!  Can you put batteries in this?"

Seriously, kid?  Go make a mud pie or something.

Mama's just going to be online spending her imaginary money.  Again.