recap

This weekend was pretty good. I think all weekends should be three days.

Saw Hope Springs. Love Meryl Streep, and Tommy Lee Jones was perfect for the part.

We spent yesterday at my sister's house for a bbq. When I got there, I was really thirsty, so I grabbed a sprite. I went to help my sister assemble some jalapeno poppers, and took a big gulp. After I swallowed I realized that it wasn't sprite. I had set my soda down next to someone's beer, and started the party with a nice big swig of gluten!
Considering the last two times I was glutened, I expected the worst. But I immediately took some pepto, and started drinking tons of water to hopefully flush it out. I just ended up with some cramping and bloating. Crisis averted! It ended up being a really nice afternoon.
I was hardly in the sun, but still managed to get burned. Tried that thing I saw on pinterest about using tea, and I don't think it made much of a difference, in case you'd seen that and were wondering if it worked.

Have been struggling to get my complexion under control. I'm trying one more product/ system before I seek help from a professional. So far it seems to be working, but that's how they all start out.

Chris has been out doing some training so communication is sporadic. I have so many neat things to tell him, but when we finally do get a chance to talk, I know I won't remember any of it. That's how it goes.

restless & number crunching

I keep hearing everyone say, "Oh, it's September already!"

Good. September can come and go, October can fly by, and November can  c r a w l.

Because then Chris comes home and becomes my hubby and I get to squeeze him for a couple weeks.

Then he'll leave again, but let's try focus on the good parts. He's already got me checking out flight schedules. Gettin' my squeezing muscles ready.

Also, my life may not be ideal right now, but I'm absolutely over the moon for my sister and her developing family. I can live vicariously through her amazing life for a while.

Also, my brother just got a great new job and I'm so excited for him. It only stings a little bit that he will be making more money than me.

Makes me wonder, what the hell am I doing with my life??
I want to be happy. I want to make more money. I want something fresh.
It's about time for something great to fall into my lap, too.

I spent this morning crunching numbers.

I paid off the rest of my credit card again. I now have a balance of zero and my wisdom teeth and Hawaii trip are paid in full. And now I'm back on track. As I promised myself, I now have a balance of $50 on my amazon gift card. Yay, books!

Since I was already in the mood, I checked out my finances more in depth.

It seems that I've paid off roughly half my debt in two years. Using that logic, in another two years I should be debt-free. Actually, pretty good timing for our house-buying goal.

After re-evaluating my finances, and seeing as how I don't pay much in rent, I'm able to put more than half my income into paying off debt, and that will speed the process. As long as I limit my spending and stay faithful to paying bills first, I should be able to meet that goal. In fact, I've gotten used to being poor again so it won't be a lifestyle change.

Also, I feel like I need a jar of mod podge. Something needs to be ultra-glittered around here. But what?

WorkoutINE

I should work out.

I want to work out.

But it's too hot outside and, let's be realistic, there's no working up a good sweat exercising indoors under my own devices.

I think I'm going to drink wine on the back porch with my mom instead.

Cheers

cha-ching?

I should be in bed.

I want to be in bed.

I was in bed.

But I had to get up and make sure I wasn't going to overdraft on my bank account.

It's a crazy cycle. I drag myself out of bed every morning and go to a job that I don't like, day after day. Why? To pay my bills. So payday rolls around and the next day I've paid all my bills, put the rest into paying off debt, and I have a little left for things like gas and groceries. I don't go shopping, I don't go out to lunch, I rarely spend extra money nowadays. At some point nearly every month, I'm staring at a $15 bank account balance. And my debt is barely going down.

It's a very disheartening and slightly maddening thing to realize. That I work so hard every day for so little progress. Not that I'm going to stop. If anything, it makes me even more determined to put every spare cent into this mountain.

Debt is a very bad thing, people. At least, this much of it is.
I don't know exactly how much I have. The last time I checked was a few months ago, and it was more than I realized. Then, the Hawaii and dental bills didn't help, as all extra funds have been diverted to that.

Chris has offered to help with it, but I feel terrible letting him take care of debt that I've accrued. I'm supposed to be a successful, self-sufficient woman. I don't feel anything like that.

customer service sucks

Petco is getting on my damn nerves.

I ordered four cases of cat food from them three weeks ago.

I received 3 cases in a timely manner, but one case was packaged separately for some reason. Don't know why. I paid for it all on the same order. The tracking number told me it was at Fed ex. A week later it was still "at Fed ex," so I called Petco's customer service. Which of course is in some random foreign country. They told me to wait another week and see if it made it. If not, they'd send another one. Well I could have told you that I wasn't going to get it. And I didn't realize they wouldn't automatically send it when after a week it was still "at Fed ex."

It's been on and off my mind until today, so I called and they tried to tell me to wait and see if it ships again. And I was like, No. Send me my damn cat food. I have a case number from the last time I called and the lady said I'd have my cat food. And the guy put me on hold to "investigate" twice, which was some really bad music, and when he came back he was like, "Well I'm going to call Fed ex and see what's going on."

And you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking I don't give a damn about Fed ex. I think it would be much better just to send me another case of cat food and figure out the Fed ex mistake on their own.
Or at least offer to throw in a discount or coupon for my troubles. You know, since I paid for the stuff three weeks ago and, you know, I have a hungry cat over here who gets pretty damn annoying when she doesn't get her wet food.
And the whole point of ordering it online is that it's cheaper than in the store, and I don't have to put on pants. Jerks.

The part that really irks me is I really want a coupon! What happened to the good old days of customer service where if you inconvenience the customer, you compensate them? If I owned a business and a customer had to call twice and didn't receive the product until over three weeks later, you better believe I'd throw in some freebies.

I mean, that's just good business.

embarrassing

So I can't believe I'm about to tell you all this. I don't believe any of you know this story. To be honest, I'd forgotten all about it.

I was sewing up another batch of cat collars when I was suddenly reminded of one of my most embarrassing moments.

It happened in middle school, of course. Middle school was not kind to me. I had not quite figured out what a flat iron was, and insisted on brushing my curly hair every morning. Frizz city. I also had bangs. Oh, curly frizzy bangs. My solution to that was to hair spray them so that they stuck straight out in this awful stiff curled-under bang. To make matters worse, I'd grown C-cup boobs overnight, had big red zits that only seemed to pop up on my nose, and wore a ratty pair of adidas tennis shoes with a tshirt and ill-fitting mom jeans every day. What? Adidas was cool, right? I had a mouth full of bojangly teeth. I was loud. I was hyper. I was so, so very un-cool. I just walked around all awkward and tried unsuccessfully not to be a total spazz.

Well, early in middle school, I took Home Ec. Oh MY GOD I loved home ec. I was the home ec teacher's pet. I was the home ec Hermoine times ten. I was so damn good at home ec. It's embarrassing to think of how nerdy I was in home ec. Anyway, I think we've established that I really liked home ec and everyone was probably like, "Oh my god there goes the home ec dork."

One of our sewing projects in home-ec was a pair of flannel boxers. You know, the style in the 90's was to hang out in boxers, preferably rolled up at the waist band. I actually can't find any examples in google images, so maybe it was just our school. We rocked the 90's grunge look with plaid boxer shorts. So, in an effort to be cool and hip, our teacher selected that as one of our projects.

I, in my naiive little 10 or 11-year old brain, thought, "I already have a pair of boxer shorts."
But you know who loved hanging out in boxer shorts? My dad.
Oh, God. This is so bad.

So I figured it'd make a great Christmas gift to sew my dad a pair of boxer shorts. Kill two birds with one stone: complete a class project and cross Dad off my Christmas list. I got his waist measurements from mom, and proceeded to use those to make my project.

Now, this whole thing could have been avoided if I wasn't such a home ec snob. I was quick to point out when someone else was doing something wrong. My projects were always perfect. When the teacher wanted to use one of our projects to demonstrate something to the class, I was the first to raise my hand, so everyone could see what a great job I'd been doing. Sometimes she used someone else's, but of course this time she chose mine.

She demonstrated a technique that turned our one-dimensional shorts into something that actually resembled shorts, and all was going well until, in one swift move, mine were suddenly revealed as this HUGE pair of shorts. Now I was a little girl, barely 100 pounds at that age. My shorts should have been tiny. But when the teacher held them up, they looked monstrous. I swear to God the class gasped. I think -I- gasped. I wasn't prepared for the shock of how big they were compared to all these middle schoolers' shorts.

Everyone's natural assumption was that I had mis- measured. I wish, oh I wish that I had just let them think that. But NOoOoOOooooo.
I, the home ec queen, couldn't let them think I had done something wrong. So instead, I was very quick to say, before it registered in my head what I was about to say, "Oh I made them for my dad."

Oh, Oh, if you could see the looks I got. Confusion, disgust, amusement, a whole array of faces staring back at me, including the teacher. It hit me what I had just said, and I was mortified. I turned bright red and tried not to think about how I was the weird overly enthusiastic home ec girl who had just made her dad a pair of giant underwear in class. If I wasn't awkward enough, let's tack that on.

Needless to say, I kept quiet for the rest of that project.

makeup snob

I have a giant red rudolph zit on the tip of my nose. Ugh, those are the worst.

And I have to say, Chanel makeup really is a superior makeup. Even with my mediocre application skills, you can barely see my resemblance to the reindeer. Cover girl can't do that. Even if I could get it to cover with drugstore makeup and not look like a caked on mess, it would slide off within a few hours. It's been all day and this Chanel is still staying put.

Yes, I've been using this makeup for a while, but this is the first time It's ever been put to the Rudolph Test. I have to say I'm impressed.