People here tend to have a low opinion of my girlfriend, because I normally don't mention her here unless we have had a big fight. So I thought that it might be worthwhile to post about our relationship when things are okay. I still don't feel like posting about the relationship when things are great, because that just seems like boasting.

Anyway, we've been getting along really well lately. She is taking two summer school classes right now, Managerial Accounting and some kind of art class. I'm an accountant so I'm tutoring her in the accounting, and that's been going well. She has been conditioned to believe that she is bad at math, but I keep telling her that most math in accounting is stuff she learned in grade school: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. So she has gradually built up some confidence and is getting better at handling the homework problems. And in accounting, the homework is really crucial. Do the homework and the exams are reasonable. Skimp on the homework and the exams are brutal. She thought that the art class would be easy, but any class is harder in summer school because it's a semester worth of homework and learning compressed into about a month. Despite the constant homework deadlines, we have been happier lately, laughing and talking easily about everything.

The biggest improvement has been my attitude. I wish that I could take full credit for that. I have been working at, reading some great books on conflict resolution and trying to practice what I learn. But really the difference has been that two other ongoing sources of worry have been easing. The big one was my job. I've been there for over eight years, and six of those years were profitable. But our investors pushed us to do some aggressive expansion two years ago, and instead of investing more money to help us grow, they made us drain our cash reserves on the construction and hiring. During that expansion, our sales faltered and then weakened, until finally we laid off half our employees early last year. We have just barely managed to survive since then, but we now have a new investor who is ready to buy out our existing investors and take over the business. Our CEO personally recruited the investor, so we know that this is somebody who is serious about bailing us out and financing our expansion into some related fields, building upon our already strong reputation.

The other big change is that I got more involved with my mom's finances and found that she is going to be okay. She has been suffering from Alzheimer's in recent years, and my sister has done a good job of taking care of her. But I got worried because my sister isn't good with money, and I had reason to believe that she was going broke taking care of my mom. In reality, my mom still has a respectable quantity of money in a savings account that is managed by a very responsible financial planner that my dad picked out while he was still alive. My sister's financial problems will be easing now that she sold off her house and moved in with my mom. Also, I gave my sister some money to help her with a car problem, and made sure that her debt management plan was legitimate and not some kind of ripoff. My mom has some bad times now and then when she becomes really frustrated with her memory loss, but most of the time she is very happy. And as a nurse, my sister is great at handling the whole situation.

So I'm not under as much stress, and that makes it much easier for me to get along with my girlfriend. For her part, she is working at making some positive changes, too. She has finally realized that she needs to get her sleep cycle in synch with mine because she wants to be working at a comparable white collar job a year from now. And she has always been late for everything, but has vowed to change that this year. She got written up for being at work last month, and the following week they fired one of her co-workers for the same thing. So she asked me to help her pick out a self-help book on the topic, and she has been reading that. I know that she won't change immediately, but the fact that she is making a serious effort is great.

There are other good things that I could say about our relationship lately, but I promised no bragging.