It’s the weekend, and that makes me happy. I’m rather bored at the moment, because Hubby is doing guy stuff in the garage with friends and Pumpkin is playing with one of the friend’s kids. But all in all it has been a pretty good day.
I managed to make myself get up fairly early this morning, and after I ate a bowl of cereal and got fully awake, I got the dishes done. I woke Pumpkin up a little bit later, then jumped in the shower. Around noon, we loaded up some laminate flooring we had sitting in the garage and took it down the mountain to one of our friends who is planning on redoing her floors.
I had never been to her place until today. The way she had talked about it, though, I was expecting it to be in pretty bad shape. Ceiling falling through, plumbing all to pieces, door knobs that needed to be replaced, and so on. But it was actually a pretty nice little place. You could tell that the floors needed some help, and the roof could use some work, but otherwise it was pretty cozy.
Anyway, we all went out to eat, and then we took her back home and Hubby worked on her lawnmower. It’s all fixed now except that it needs a new belt. She bought one for it, but it was too big, so she’ll have to exchange it for another one. When he did all he could do for it, we loaded up a dining room set that she was giving to Hubby’s brother and delivered it, then we headed back up the mountain.
Back in our neck of the woods, we did a little shopping. We took advantage of the sales tax holiday to get a few more school clothes for Pumpkin. Then we picked up one of Hubby’s friends and headed back home.
So there’s my Saturday in a nutshell. I hope to have even more fun tomorrow. I might be playing softball, and I might not. But if I don’t, I’m sure I can find something to get into.
I don’t remember…
(In case you think you’ve heard that before, maybe you have. It’s from the Chumbawumba song “Amnesia”.)
Actually, my long-term memory is pretty good. I’d even go as far as saying it’s very good. I can remember things that happened as far back as before I started school. I can remember my grandmother’s phone number, and she passed away when I was a young teenager. I can remember Chumbawumba song lyrics, and I haven’t listened to them in probably twelve years. I can remember catalog numbers of various things, such as 745928A or TM-T88IV.
But my short-term memory is horrible. I have a terrible time remembering to take my medicine. I’ve pretty much given up on taking it at the same time every day, and feel like I’m doing good to remember to at least take it every day. I often get up to do something, and by the time I get to the room I need to be in to do it, I forget what I was going to do.
I like to play sudoku, but I have a hard time with it because I forget which rows, columns and boxes I’ve already tried to figure out. So when I was playing online sudoku and saw a link to a site where you can play memory-boosting games, I clicked. The site is called Lumosity, and it has all sorts of brain games to play. It’s membership-based, but there’s a one-week free trial, so I thought I would give it a whirl.
Turns out my memory is worse than I thought. I figured I’d have an easy time with a game where you match faces to names, because I’m not too bad at remembering people’s names in real life. But I did horrible on it. As a matter of fact, I did awful on all of the memory games. And no matter how many times I tried them, I didn’t do any better.
I suppose it’s just as well. If it appeared to be helping, I would probably want to subscribe, and that’s not in the budget right now. So I guess I’ll just have to keep living with my bad memory.
Today Hubby called from his cousin’s garage and asked me if I would be interested in selling my truck. Apparently he knows of two people who are interested.
I was planning on taking the insurance off of my truck, but only because it needs work and can’t be driven right now due to the risk of damage to the bed. The plan was to take off the full coverage we have on it, pay the small amount of insurance that the loan company requires us to pay them until the loan is paid in full, and then use the money we were putting toward truck payments to get it fixed. It really doesn’t need much work.
Honestly, at this point in time, I’d rather sell my car. I’m afraid to drive it at the moment, because the throttle was sticking. What if I were to get out on one of these curvy mountain roads with Pumpkin in the car and have that happen? Hubby says it’s fixed, but I’m still pretty leery of it. And even if that is fixed, the windows won’t roll down and the AC doesn’t work, which makes for a sweltering ride in the summer.
But I know I can get a lot more out of my truck than my car. It’s newer, and it has 4WD (even though that part needs some work too, it still makes it more valuable). And cosmetically, it’s in great shape other than the dent in the bottom of the bed (which can be straightened out and is covered by a bedliner.) It doesn’t come with a Good Sam extended service plan, but it is a good, solid truck.
I guess I’ll probably sell it if the buyer will give me enough money. It would certainly be nice to be able to pay off that loan and pay Hubby’s truck loan down some too. We shall see.
Buying a house has been rather rough on our finances. When we had our mobile home, all we had to pay each month was lot rent, which was much cheaper than a house payment. And this house still needs a lot of work, so there are plenty of extra expenses in our future. But as stressful as it often is to scrape up the money for the mortgage each month and deal with the problems that come with an older home, I’m still glad we moved from where we were.
If you were reading my blog back when we still lived there (from when I started it to early 2008), you know that there was no love lost between us and our landlady. She was a major busybody who thrived on making other people’s lives a living hell, particularly her renters. Her family was all pretty much just like her, and they did their best to pull other people into the middle of their problems. Hubby and I had wanted out long before she told us we had to move, but we planned on buying some land and taking our trailer with us. I still hate that it didn’t go down that way, but at least we got out without having to take a chance on renting from some other evil landlord.
There’s always some kind of crap going on with that bunch. We heard last week that a female from that family was making some pretty serious claims about a guy she had been dating. You know, the kind of claims that can ruin a person’s life whether they’re found to be true or not. I don’t want to go into details because there’s a kid in the midst of it all, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe that she’s flat out lying.
It may have been a hassle to find a house, get financing, and find reasonably cheap home insurance, but as far as I’m concerned it was totally worth it. If we were still living in our old place, they would most assuredly be trying to find some way to put us right in the middle of the whole mess. And I’m perfectly happy to stay as far away from it as I possibly can.
For those of you who made New Year’s resolutions, I wish you the best of luck with them. As for me, I swore them off a long time ago.
When I was much younger, I made resolutions every year. And every year, I broke each and every one of them. So I decided to try making resolutions that were the opposite of what I really wanted to accomplish. For example, if I wanted to lose weight, I would resolve to gain weight. But that didn’t work out as planned, either.
So for the past few years, I haven’t made any resolutions whatsoever. No promises to myself to get in better shape, or get an online bachelor degree, or give more to charity. It has worked out pretty nicely, because I haven’t had to deal with the disappointment of not reaching my goals.
Yes, I know, goals are important if you want to get anywhere in life. But especially right now, I just don’t have the energy to even make them, much less try to reach them. I’m working on it, though. Really, I am.
We got quite a bit of rain yesterday. It rained pretty hard for a little while, but it wasn’t a total washout. So we didn’t think about checking the basement. This morning I decided to go down there and take a look, and guess what? It was flooded again!
At least we’ve got a pump to pump it out with now. It’s going to take a while to get all that water out, though. Every time this happens, I find myself considering just tearing this place down and replacing it with a manufactured home. I really don’t think that would be a bad idea at all, but I don’t suppose the mortgage company would like it very much.
I’ve got more than enough crap going on right now without this. Just gotta keep telling myself that things will get better.
I used to enjoy Christmas very much. Now, I kind of dread it. I still like decorating and having fun with the family, but the whole gift giving thing just stresses me out. I keep telling myself that I’m going to start knitting or something so that I can make gifts instead of buying them for most of the people on my list, but it hasn’t happened yet.
We had planned to go Christmas shopping today, but I’m pretty sick and Hubby is tired and has a pulled muscle in his leg. So instead, we’re sitting around the house all day. I was sort of looking forward to going, since Hubby and I both just got paid and we might actually have a little money to spend, but in a way I’m relieved. Still, I know that if we don’t do it now, we’ll just have to do it later.
Hubby insists that he’s going to buy me something this year. I keep telling him not to, but he keeps insisting. So I guess I’ll have to buy him something too. It’s not that I don’t want to get him a gift – he deserves the most awesome gift in the world. But we really can’t afford to buy much, and I’d rather just spend what little we do have on Pumpkin and a little something for everyone else.
Oh well. At least I’m reasonably sure that he’s not going to spend a lot of money on me. I don’t think I’ll have to run out and buy mounts for that Plasma TV I keep telling him I’d like to have. I just wish I knew what he had in mind. Maybe there’s still time to talk him out of it.
Things are looking a bit better than they were when I wrote my last post. Far from perfect, but better. I still don’t feel comfortable writing about what happened, and I don’t know if I ever will. Maybe someday.
I’m still under a great deal of stress. Maybe not quite as much as I was a few days ago – I guess instead of feeling like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, it feels more like a giant kettlebell now. At least it’s an improvement. And at least I’ve been able to get some writing done. I’m still behind, though.
I just hope things can get back to normal for my family now. Or better than normal. Whatever, as long as it’s not like it has been lately.
My husband is a great guy, but sometimes he drives me nuts. Especially when he gets fed up with his job and won’t listen to me when I tell him to look for something else.
We’ve been down this road enough times that I know what to expect. A job starts getting on his nerves, and he says he’s going to quit. I remind him that he needs to find another job first, and he says he will. Then he doesn’t even bother looking for anything else.
The problems keep building and building, until it’s so bad he can’t take it any more. Yet again I remind him that he needs to find another job before he quits the one he’s at, and yet again he says he will. Then he finally starts looking, and settles for the first thing he finds, even if it’s really not much of anything at all. This is how he ended up working for a guy who offered him a full-time job, worked insane amounts of overtime for a couple of weeks, and then disappeared and wouldn’t return Hubby’s calls.
It makes me so nervous when this kind of thing happens. I know that he means well, and that he wouldn’t intentionally do anything to put us in a bind, but he needs to start thinking ahead. If he would, he could find a decent job instead of ending up grasping at straws.
It’s hard enough for him to find a job that suits him. He doesn’t have any licensing or certifications that would help him find anything that pays really well. And besides that, he is really picky about what kinds of jobs he will tolerate. He worked in a factory for a while, but I know that he would go stir crazy if he had to stare at a rackmount LCD screen for a living again.
I’ve gotten mad and told him that he needs to just do whatever it takes to support his family, but I also know what it’s like to be stuck in a job you hate. It makes life miserable, and in most cases it ends up badly. All I can do is just keep after him to look for something else and hope it sinks in. Because the way the job market is right now, he won’t be able to find a job at a moment’s notice.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was already starting on my Christmas shopping, thanks to some free stuff I’ve scored. The only problem is that I’m running out of people to give it to!
My mom’s gift is already taken care of. The only other adults on my list are Hubby and his parents and brothers. He said he was just going to buy everyone in his family cigarettes, because they’re always bumming for them. Now, I’ve got a free photo book offer that I need to redeem, and I can’t figure out who to give it to. Hubby wouldn’t appreciate it, and I doubt my siblings and I will be exchanging gifts. We quit doing that a couple of years ago, when they stopped taking frequent Orlando vacations due to budget concerns. So I’m thinking about just getting one made for myself.
It’s not like I haven’t done it before. The one year when Hubby and I did pretty well for ourselves, I bought myself a stereo for Christmas. I wanted one, and he wasn’t going to shell out for it, so I decided I might as well go for it. I think I at least deserve a photo book this year, especially if it’s free.
I’ve also got some gift certificates for photo canvases that I need to distribute. I think I might have found one taker, but there are still four more left. Hmm, maybe I’ll have a giveaway. Stay tuned if you’re interested!
