Neverending loop

Sometimes life feels like a neverending series of meal plans, budgets, washing up, worrying about money, procrastination, worrying about all the stuff I'm not doing (but should be) because of said procrastination and feeling bad for not being the kind of person I should be/want to be/wish I was. That's kind of where I'm stuck at the moment - keeping on keeping on but feeling like it's all pointless.

Given that I haven't written a meal plan for weeks and that definitely doesn't improve my life in any way, however, I do need to at least try and get back on the merry-go-round as far as useful things are concerned. After the Tupper party last week and having invited a friend to dinner yesterday evening, as well as having been unwell and not eating much for a couple of days, I'm in danger of soon needing to throw out a whole lot of food if I'm not careful. So need week will need to be a week of meals made using the bits and pieces leftover from the past week or so. I do need eggs and butter, so will head to the market for them on Saturday. The strawberries are great at the moment, so I'll be buying some of them, too, perhaps even enough to make some jam. Otherwise, I'll be trying to just look straight ahead and not notice any of the other wonderful things on offer at the moment.

I had a phone call from my brother today, who needs some money for rent, as his landlord had phoned the agent because he was late. He had apparently been planning to pay it next week but presumably has been late once too often and so needed enough to be able to pay it today. After the electricity bill last year I really thought he was getting on better with budgeting properly although it is true that a couple of months after that, he did stop talking about it. He has agreed to sit down in June when I am there and talk properly about a budget, so we'll see how that goes. I have mentioned to him before that he needs to get his act together particularly because if I change jobs next year as planned, I will be earning far less and just not able to help him out. I said that again today and he sounded as if I had never mentioned changing jobs or any of it before, ever, in any way. That smarted a little bit, I have to admit as I've been talking about my plans for well over a year now.

At any rate, I have a couple of weeks to try and figure out how best to convince him to start budgeting properly. I was wondering if an app like YNAB might work for him but he has only a basic phone and although he has a laptop he doesn't have internet access (unless he goes somewhere with free wifi) - once you have the app I don't know that you really need to be online to use it but I'm not sure. And it may be that old-school on this one would work best, with a plain hardback notebook and columns laid out. It's kind of hard to know what to do as I know that budgets will always work best if they're what you yourself find useful and my way of thinking is not necessarily going to match is. On the other hand, I also strongly suspect that if I could just hand him something and say it's all prepared, all you need to do is use it, there's a better chance he actually would. It's hard to know.