September and Everything After

Sheesh, times flies when you have way too little of it.

First, happy birthday to my sister Sarah! I totally missed mentioning Zach’s 14th birthday last week, didn’t I? Oops. I didn’t forget it in “real life” so it’s all good.

Things are better for the most part. Well the money situation still sucks. I think that’s going to be to the case for the next 2 years while I’m in school no matter what I do. Unless I win the lottery of course. But things have settled down with the kids’ back to school stuff. Routine, how I love you!

I think I have the schedule figured out for the rest of the year. It involves a lot less hours at the hospital but honestly I can’t see a way to work the weekdays when I have the kids without everyone being miserable and stressed. And then since LYC is only in town on the weekends, I don’t want to work every night of those too. So the compromise is one 12 hour shift on the weekends with no weekday work when I have the kids. On the non-kid weeks, I’m working three 8 hour shifts through the week and possibly a weekend night. Those weekend nights depend on how fast the wheels fall off the budget when I’m no longer “full time”.

College classes start for me next Tuesday. I’m in lecture Tues/Thurs 8am-2pm and then have clinical at a hospital on Wed 6:30am-2pm. I bought my books yesterday ($540, ouch), yearly parking pass, and picked up my new “free” dayplanner ($27,000 tuition “free”). All I need now are pencils and a new binder. I buy a new binder each semester, one because I beat the hell out of them over 5 months of classes and two, I keep all my old notes for the heck of it.

My motto right now is “with enough advanced planning, anything is possible.” And “I think I can”, repeated as necessary.

Let’s not talk about how my electricity was turned off briefly yesterday. (Yay for another $500 expense. NOT COOL.)

Instead I would like to concentrate on chopping down the To Do List. Today I crossed these items off:

• bought the “special” school supplies at the elementary school (“their” folder, assignment book, and calculator)
• took Ally to get her braces put on (at the original orthodontist, grrr…)
• copied and mailed the original tax return for my college’s financial aid office (turns out it’s federal law that they need the original. I still say it’s stupid)
• mailed an Etsy order (granted it was only a $10 item but whatever, it’s money)
• made and printed the August bus schedule for the Little 2
• copied twin’s immunization forms so the school nurse will quit bugging me about their meningitis vaccination
• wrote an $8 check for Zach’s new band book
• made a $2 bank deposit on the old joint bank account to keep it from overdrawing. I haven’t used it in months since I opened a new one in my name only but they keep taking out a $6 monthly fee cause G is too “busy” to go close it with me. (And yes, we both have to go in at the same time to close it and he WILL be paying me back.)
• stopped at the library to borrow personal finance help books (general consensus: spend less than you make. Huh?)

So that leaves me with like 5 sewing projects (a patch on LYC’s jeans, savage the quilt, redo the twin’s tote/school bags, patches on 6 or so Cub Scout shirts, and a project for my dad), a phone call to ask for a loan to cover 2 months of rent, and another phone call to deal with the electric company.

Me, putting off phone calls and sewing projects? Some things never change, I suppose.

(the rent is late…)

The van’s left front tire hub bearing went out. It’s fixed now. Yay for the $530 repair bill…

I kinda forgot to buy all the non-school-ish things on the kids’ school supply list. Like the 7 boxes of tissues, ziplock baggies, disinfecting wipes, etc. Those bug me, doesn’t everyone else in this town pay enough property taxes to cover that type of thing in the general idea of “we run the school and should plan to buy toilet paper in our budget”? By the way, school starts tomorrow…

Uh, what else…

Oh yeah, we now have 2 sets of scout meetings and 2 soccer practices on Monday night. All at 4 different places across town. Anything going on the rest of the week? No… Well except the Girl Scout meeting where I’m the troop leader and I wisely pick “NOT MONDAY NIGHT.”

At least I have my health, right? (Minus the sanity part)

So after my whine yesterday, I drank half a bottle of wine, the kids calmed down, and I goofed around on the internet for awhile. I decided to make a version of this quilt since I have lots of fabric laying (lying?) around the house. Cut and sew, cut and sew, the strips all came together wonderfully and it looked really great when I quit around 1 this morning.

Note that I did this all while buzzed on half a bottle of wine during the middle of the night and things went well.

I didn’t have batting for the middle or the muslin I wanted to put on the back and use as binding so I figured I could spurge and spend a little bit of money since the front of the quilt for the most part was free (scraps). $25 on both items at the fabric store and I was on my way to having a cute new quilt. Yay!

And then completely sober and during the daytime, I fucked it all up.

I don’t want to go into the gory details but a few bad decisions such as “a trim here, even up the edge here, I don’t need no sticking walking foot, and vinyl thread” and it’s pretty much unsalvageable. I’m not happy with myself at all…. I rarely screw up sewing projects this badly so the sting hurts. And I don’t have a cute new quilt either, let alone wasting a few hours of time and $25.

And the topper on this lovely pile of doo-doo? The van is making a seriously scary grinding/vibrating noise in the left front tire area. I was backing out of the drive to take Zach for 8th grade registration and it was like I had turned the wheel way too far. Only when I straightened out and drove to the end of the block, the noise got worse. Completely panicked I backed back down the street (one house, lol) and into my driveway. We walked to G’s and borrowed his car to go to the middle school.

LYC is going to look at it over the weekend. I thought about just towing it to the mechanics today but that’ll still be an option later. I technically don’t have anywhere to be until Saturday at 7pm for work (so much for going to Knit Night this evening) and there will be cars I can borrow to get me through the weekend. It’s just… WTF?!?! I’m *thisclose* to having a balanced monthly budget for once with everything paid on time and now I could be staring down a very costly van repair bill with no credit or cash available.

I’m really just kind of at the end of my rope with all the financial stupidity in my life.

2 days of having the kids back and I currently have a headache of monstrous proportions. Like a super serious headache, almost to a migrane, that makes me want to scream in agony when one of the kids comes into view. It’s like a Pavlov’s dog response because I know after I see the kid, the kid will start whining or complaining or making impossible demands. My head really hurts.

I was about to say “school needs to start already” but half the issue is school starting.

I think we finished up the school supply shopping yesterday. Although I know we really haven’t because the teachers always make additional weird demands the 1st week of school. Really if you need blue folders and 1″ white binders for “blah blah blah special project”, you obviously knew you needed them at least a month ago when you were planning the school year so why didn’t you tell me that when you sent out the school supply list that somehow did not include blue folders and 1″ white binders? I like to be concise with shopping and not waste trips to the office store for “one more thing” and this totally irks me. Every year.

I need to fill out paperwork and make copies of stuff and write up a bus schedule. Only the kids don’t currently have a bus stop at G’s cause apparently you have do “Alternate Bus Stop” requests every year. Except I didn’t have to do that last year… Plus their “online form” that you’re suppose to download, fill out, “save” and attach in an email does not “save”. I have tried on 3 different computers so I know it’s not me. I really hate “writeable” PDF files because they rarely ever are.

My university is annoying the crap out of me too. For the first time, they wanted a copy of my tax return to verify FASFA info. So I made a copy while at work and sent it in. It was an amended return because back in April, G pulled some weirdness while claiming my alimony amounts and hilariously enough (but really not so much) we use the same accountant and he caught the discrepancy and did an amended tax return for me. Except my university wants the original also to compare amounts. You have the correct copy, who cares what the old one says because my loan money is going to be off of the “correct amended return” that you have. By the way, they are withholding my loan money until this happens so now they are trying to bill me for a “late payment fee” (hello, classes haven’t even started yet!) while also enrolling me into a monthly payment plan (that has an outrageous enrollment fee). Headache-inducing-stupidity.

I kinda wish I had a copy machine.

Anyway I have a killer headache and I need to go make dinner and someone is going to complain and then someone will make a huge mess and then someone will chew with their mouth open and someone else will complain and then no one will put their dishes in the dishwasher so I will have to yell and I really just want to skip the whole process and go to bed…

The weirdest thing about working nights is that you start on one day and finish on another. And then you often go back in on the same day you just worked. So I did “3 twelves in a row” this week which was Monday night to Tuesday morning, Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, Wednesday night to Thursday morning. That’s like 4 days and then after you nap on Thursday, you wake up thinking it’s Friday and it’s still Thursday. Weird. But with the kids gone, I have to say this week wasn’t bad at all because I was able to get a full straight 7 hours of sleep between shifts. I usually average 5 broken hours when I have the kids.

Bonus 4 co-workers and I topped off this morning with a trip to a local Mexican restaurant for margaritas and breakfast. Tequila and eggs, yum! The hilarious thing is this place caters to the hospital crowd, they have drink specials for scrub wearing ID badge carrying people. And it works, I’ve only been at the hospital for 2 months but I totally recognized some of the respiratory team sitting a table over.

Let’s see, other randomness… Well last Friday I had a couple of very blonde moments. One that I didn’t even realize until Monday morning. Friday afternoon (after a 5 hour nap, ha) I lost my keys at the grocery store. At first I thought I locked myself out of the van and since LYC was on his way home from the airport, he swung by my house and picked up my extra van key (“Knight in a shiny white Trailblazer”). But after I got into the van, the keys were still missing and I noticed a hole in the pocket of my cloth grocery bag. Hmm. The keys were at the service desk in the store. Doh…

So after all that was straighten out Friday afternoon, I packed up some stuff to hang out at LYC’s house for the weekend and somehow I didn’t get the fridge door quite shut (it’s one of those with 2 doors on top, freezer on bottom type). Monday morning I came home to a room temp fridge and a melted freezer. Doh… Luckily the compressor wasn’t burnt out as LYC first suspected and I avoided a phone call to the landlord for a new one: “Hi I’m a dumbass and broke the fridge because I was channeling ‘space cadet’ last week.”

The fridge and freezer weren’t full so it wasn’t a huge financial loss (Really? Will I ever catch a break?) and so it’s mostly a pain in the ass to replace all the random condiments and cheeses and so on. I haven’t started that grocery shopping yet, right now I have a gallon of milk, small container of half-n-half (for coffee), bottle of wine, and some turkey lunch meat in there. Apparently that’s what I live on when left to my own kid-free devices (I did have a couple of pre-made salads but I ate them at work already).

But when I do go, I’ll make sure not to use the cloth bag with the hole in the pocket…

Hm, yeah so it seems that the 19+ days of my children without school to take the darlings away for 7 hours of the day plus lack of any um, alone time with LYC makes me a crazy person. The kids are safely in Myrtle Beach and LYC and I went to an awesome party of a friend of Sarah’s last night. The world is all right again. :)

Quote of the Day: “Some of the secret joys of living are not found by rushing from point A to point B, but by inventing some imaginary letters along the way.” -Douglas Pagels