A husky man with a little dog walks past my back porch every night at 7:15pm. Sometimes he is reading a book, other times he is playing a hand-held video game which I know is not called a Gameboy, but I want to call a Gameboy because I was born in 1980. Usually he is wearing a T-shirt, flip-flops and baggy gym shorts. Regardless of his outfit, every night at 7:15pm I burst into uncontrollable giggles, because it is very odd to have a strange man who is oblivious to my existence appear within 3 feet of me and then disappear as quickly as he came. I almost expect him to stroll through the sliding glass door, look up in a confused manner and mumble, "How'd I end up in this lady's living room?" Then the cats would attack.

My new apartment has a back porch which faces the back of another row of apartments in the complex, divided by a stretch of grass which probably has a proper name defined in dictionaries, but I don't know it. This means I basically have a back yard now, a back yard that people traipse through as they please, usually with their dogs or baseball bats or Gameboys. I grew up in houses with yards and I remember school kids taking shortcuts past our statuary and I remember being a kid cutting through strangers' flower beds, but this was all many years ago. It is odd to have a yard again and to have people pop up and pop out of my line of sight suddenly, but it is just one new thing I'll have to adjust to, just as I am learning all the new sounds of the apartment, like the crunch of the ice maker and the dripping of the air conditioner and the thumps of our upstairs neighbors who sound like they are practicing for the International Clogging Championships.

I have done more stairs this week than Rocky.

It has been nice living on the second floor. I don't hear people scuttle around above me. I'm not distracted by people walking past my windows. But dear Jesus, all those benefits come at the horrible cost of having to move all my crap in small, box-sized portions, down a flight of stairs in the sun and 90-degree heat and then jog back up for another round of misery.

The moving dragged on forever and ever and ever. After moving all the large objects in a rental truck last Monday, I was left with all the remainder items to transport in car loads. Each time I'd look around the apartment and think, "Ok, this will fit in two car loads." Then I'd pack everything up and think, "Ok, I guess I actually have two more car loads after this." And then I'd drive and unload and come back and pack up some more and think, "Ok, this is the final two car loads for sure," but it was not. Eventually I wondered if I'd ever finish moving out at all, but finally, yesterday, I got almost all of my crap out of that apartment and just have to go back tonight to spackle some holes in the walls and turn in my keys.

So, if you are thinking of moving, imagine how much work you think it will be and then multiply that by 200% and then hit yourself in the arms and legs with a wooden spoon a few times to visualize all the bruises that will appear on your body after lugging boxes and lamps around, and then you might have a small sense of how much fricking work it is.

I resumed my Couch to 5K training on Saturday and was sort of worried I might not be able to do the run because I'd taken 5 days off to move things, but that was silliness. I did perfectly fine and felt good to be running instead of doing the equivalent of 15 flights of stairs. I've even lost a pound this week, despite eating a carton of ice cream, half a pepperoni pizza and an apple pie dessert pizza from Papa Johns. As I have learned from this experience and from my recent vacation, the secret to weight maintenance is that you can eat whatever crap you want as long as you work like a dog all day long. Construction workers may have tough jobs, but they must eat like I only dream I could.

After the plane ride and the metro ride and the bus ride, I drove my car home the final leg from traveling abroad. I waited at a stoplight next to the Fresh Market, a local grocery store. I gazed at the green glow of the sign spelling out the store's name and thought, If I were from France, that supermarket would be totally exotic. If I were a tourist in America, I would want to walk inside and take pictures of the labels on the chocolates. I'd want to gawk at the strange American foods that they don't make in other countries, just like I was fascinated by prawn sandwiches in London.

When I was walking around my city in the following weeks, I looked at every single statue or fountain or old building and thought, If I were from Britain, I would have to snap a digital photo of that. As a rule, when I was overseas I took a picture of every piece of statuary or art or plain old engraved boulder, just because I was in a foreign country and those things looked like culture.

It is odd to think that my life is exotic to someone else, just as it must seem odd to foreigners that I find their lives exotic too. Everything that is familiar to me is odd to someone else.

It's odd how quickly a word can dominate our shared vocabulary. In 2000 it was "hanging chad." In 2002 it was "post 9-11." This year it's "economy" and "recession" and "toxic assets." They might just be words, but they reflect the changes that are happening in my life and your life and your neighbors next door, who aren't going to live next door anymore, because they defaulted on their mortgage.

As much as people's lives are changing, mine hasn't changed that much. Sure, my job is as secure as a lockbox sealed with chewing gum, and I moved to a cheaper apartment to cut my living costs, but otherwise I'm living the same life I've always led. Financially speaking this means I save money, sock cash in my retirement accounts, and spend less than I earn. Evidently I was a radical ahead of my time for doing all these things.

I feel genuinely sorry for the suffering this recession has caused, for people who are stuck in houses that have lost value, for people who can't make ends meet, and for the retirement plans that have been torpedoed because the stock market went KAPOW!! I know that many people have done all the right things, handled their money wisely, and have still been screwed over by life circumstances. That said, I'm happy that the recession is making some people handle their money in ways they should have been handling it all along. People are saving more, spending less, and watching their budgets like never before. It sometimes takes a disaster to make you do what you should have been doing, and I only say this is because in my early 20's I learned the hard way how to manage my money too, which means I went SPLAT! into debt.

By the time I graduated college, I had about $5000 in credit card debt. I'd used all my student loans, but I could still use my plastic! I carried a balance for 3 months before I started playing a game where I would sign up for a new credit card that gave me 0% interest for 9 months. Nine months later, I'd sign up for another one and move the money again. I would not recommend this as a good way to handle money, since I have no idea what it did to my FICO score, but it did save me lots of money in interest. I was also fortunate that I'd never missed a payment, so I was approved for these cards.

Have you ever played the board game LIFE? Wasn't that game a lot more fun before it resembled your actual life? Over the next year I was hit with "Pay $7000 for gallbladder surgery!" and then "You owe $1200 in dentist bills" and then "You transmission breaks! Pay $2000 for a rebuild." I kept chipping away at my debt, but something always came along to bump it up again.

After two or three years of steady payments, I finally paid the credit cards off, leaving my only debt in student loans and a car loan. The number on those credit card statements had felt like the number of pounds weighing on my back. It was burdensome to be beholden to the credit card companies and to not have enough in savings to cover unexpected emergencies. That's why I bought some books on personal finance and educated myself about IRAs, compound interest, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market accounts, and figured out which places I should put my money first and in what amounts. It was a lot of information, and could be very confusing, but I never, ever, ever wanted to be in debt like that again. So I took the time to learn it myself.

When I bought my car I carefully made a budget and determined how much money I could afford to pay each month on the loan and purchased a vehicle within that price range. When I moved to an apartment, I determined how much I could afford, or what other expenses I would have to cut if I decided to move to a more expensive location. It wasn't fun, but it was necessary, so I did it.

These days, I use a simple budget program (called SimpleD Budget in case you were going to ask) to enter my receipts into every day. (Or sometimes every 3-4 days if I'm feeling lazy.) I can then look at the numbers and the graphs and get a sense of what I'm spending and if I need to pull back in one area until the end of the month. I've tried using more complicated programs like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but they have so many features that I feel overwhelmed. I just want to track my variable spending, not every single asset I have.

There are also free online programs that will help you budget and analyze your spending, like Mint.com or Quicken Online. I have heard great thing about these sites, but I am too paranoid to give a web site all my financial passwords. I've worked as a web developer at several companies, and I know how insecure some online products actually are, so no thanks.

If you are looking for more information on personal finances, Suze Orman's books and shows are extremely helpful and are targeted at newbies and women. I read a book called Girls Just Want to Have Funds simply because I loved the title, which taught me a lot of basics. Sites like The Motley Fool have loads of information, and a good blog on how to manage money is Get Rich Slowly.

Even though the recession sucks, I hope it helps people learn how to manage their money better, just as my young and stupid years taught me to open a Roth IRA and start taking advantage of compound interest. Hopefully we'll all keep our good "cents" even when this recession is over.