Rapper Heavy D was found dead outside his home yesterday. I’m not a huge fan of rap these days, but he was one of my faves when I was younger, and it’s tragic that he passed at such a young age. His music was fun and positive, and songs like the one in the video above still put a smile on my face.
Heavy, I’m wishing you a peaceful journey.
I’m not dead and I’m not for sale
Hold me closer closer let me go
Let me be, just let me be
If you’re not a Stone Temples Pilot fan, that’s the chorus from Trippin on a Hole in a Paper Heart. It’s one of my favorite songs, but it describes my life much more than I’d like it to lately.
My mind is desperately trying to slip into the depression that it was in for such a long time. I’ve been terribly stressed out, much of it my own fault but a lot of it coming from sources beyond my control. And it just makes me want to go crawl in a hole somewhere until it all goes away.
I’ve got a new baby turtle that kind of has the same philosophy. When she’s feeling happy and ready to explore she’s always running around (well, moving as fast as her little turtle legs will take her) and exploring, but when it all gets to be too much, she crawls into her little shell until conditions are more favorable. Oh, how I’d love to have one of those shells of my own sometimes.
But I don’t, so I have to try to deal with everything as best I can. I wish my hardest decision this month was whether to buy the htc incredible s at the source or the Blackberry Storm from a local carrier, but sadly it isn’t. My worries are more along the line of how are we going to keep the electricity on since the electric company up and decided they want a huge deposit after we’ve been with them for ten years and how to clean up the mess made by a misunderstanding with the autopay function on our credit card.
On a good day, I could handle this no problem. But today is not a good day. The thought of picking up the phone and talking to one of those people makes me want to projectile vomit. No joke. But I guess I’m just going to have to have a trash can handy and get it over with.
If you don’t know what Swagbucks is, it’s a search site where you can earn points by doing normal web searches, completing surveys, and doing various other things. Those points can be redeemed for a variety of prizes. I’ve been a member for a while now, and I have earned lots of Amazon gift certificates (my prize of choice) through them. It’s a pretty cool program, so if you’re not a member, I encourage you to sign up.
I have very few complaints about my experience with Swagbucks. One thing that bugged me a little was one of their surveys. You can also earn points by taking those, but there was one in my list that rewarded participants with a chance to win an iPod Touch rather than the usual Swagbucks. Now, I wouldn’t mind having an iPod Touch at all, but if I’m going to spend my precious time completing a survey, I’d rather have a definite reward than a chance at winning something. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe there are plenty of other people who are more than happy to do a survey for a chance to win.
They have introduced some new ways to earn recently, which is cool. The more ways you can earn points, the more points you can earn, right? One way to earn points is by simply watching videos. I haven’t done much of that because it doesn’t seem like the few points you get are worth the time spent, but if you’re bored and have nothing else to do, then why not? They’re also beta testing a new games product where you can play online games and win Swagbucks. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a tester, and although I haven’t earned much from it, I like it. If you play online games anyway, why not work your way toward earning prizes while doing so?
Overall, I think Swagbucks is one of the best reward programs out there. Their customer service department is awesome, and while they do promote some of those programs where you have to complete this offer and that offer and give your email address to potential spammers to qualify (which I really don’t like), you can earn plenty without using those. In fact, there are enough different ways to earn that just about anybody can find a few they like. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I highly recommend them!
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.
