richer than I'd thought

Readjusting a budget downward after looking at your bank-account figures is never a good feeling. Not that I'm experiencing any sort of financial emergency, mind you: the downward adjustments I've made (mainly due to KMA cancellations) have all been above-the-waterline hits to my marvelously constructed budget, so I'm not worried. That said, watching your numbers go up is always more pleasant than watching them go down.

It doesn't help that, for the past month or so, I've been laboring under the delusion that I have less money than I actually do. This is thanks to a sort of scotosis (willful intellectual blindness—a term that's relevant to the recent US presidential election) on my part: I keep forgetting that I have two Korean bank accounts. Along with my primary Shinhan Bank account, I've got my old Daegu Bank account from back when I was a prof at Daegu Catholic. I dump a wee bit of cash into that account every month because that's the account from which my phone bill is debited (I got my cell phone in Daegu, back in September of 2013; never bothered to switch the billing information once I moved to Seoul), and it's also the account into which my KMA payments go. Whenever I teach at KMA, I have to force myself to remember to check my Daegu Bank account to confirm that I've been paid. It seems I've already been paid for my November work; my account currently shows around W650,000, which is W650,000 more than is reflected in my budget (which I've stored online as a Google spreadsheet). That's a good feeling, knowing that I'm not as far behind-budget as I'd thought. Forgetfulness occasionally leads to such pleasant surprises; I very much look forward to being senile.