Footprints on the Moon

My best friend Sarah and I generally have a standing “date” on Friday nights. Her fiance lives a couple hours away and can’t come up until Saturday night, and we all know I don’t have a man! So we usually get together, get some dinner, watch some movies or TV and unwind from long weeks. She’s feeling a bit under the weather tonight though, so I’m on my own.

Instead of trying to come up with other plans, I’m just kind of hanging out at home. I need to run out and run an errand before the end of the night, but mostly just catching up on some TV and vegging. I’ve also taken the time to clean my kitchen. I know, exciting Friday night, huh?

I’m also taking the time to sit down and go over my budget. I’ve been reading Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, and that’s the first step. I gotta tell you… looking at the money coming in, compared to the bills… the money that’s left when those things are covered, and the money I usually end up spending every month above and beyond that, it’s no wonder I’m broke! My church is launching a course of Financial Peace University on March 11th. I was really hoping to be able to do that, but looking at the numbers on paper, I don’t think I can afford the $95 fee. I’m disappointed by that, but since I have almost $400 to find to pay the government by April 15th, along with the normal bills, I guess it’s just not going to be possible.

So that’s where I’m at right now. And I’m going to run my errand before I change my mind, and get dinner! How’d it get to be 8:30 already? No wonder I’m hungry!

Wednesday morning we woke up to, you guessed it, more snow. This time though, we were getting lake effect snow so it wasn’t the fast and furious accumulating snow that we’ve been getting for the last month or so. Instead, it was big fat snowflakes just kind of lazily floating down and it lasted most of the morning. I can’t count the number of people who came through and said “At least the snow is pretty!” Okay, even I can begrudgingly admit that the snow WAS pretty, but I have hit my quota of snow. I’m just ready for the thaw, spring and warmer temperatures! What I told basically everyone that commented on the “pretty snow” was that all I wanted was sunshine, a blue sky and big puffy white clouds.
Well, I can only hope to do so well when it’s time for our performance reviews. Guess what happened by Wednesday afternoon?

I do believe that’s sunshine, blue skies, and big puffy white clouds! Not quite what I had in mind, but I guess I should have been more specific about the temperature LOL It was a very pretty afternoon, and not bitterly cold so I’ll take it for now! I took this picture with my cell phone out the front door at work before I left. If it helps put it in perspective at all, that’s basically the view I can see from where I’m sitting at my desk.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I hope your sweetie, if you have one, treated you very well! There were about 12 lucky ladies and one lucky guy to get deliveries at work today. I hope the rest of them are getting lovin’ at home! There were some ladies disappointed not to have anything arrive, and there were a couple who were completely ungrateful for the flowers that they got. I wanted to tell them that if they really didn’t appreciate the flowers that much, I was perfectly willing to keep them. The one that really got me was the girl who came down, took the plastic covering off of her beautiful red roses, and says “Oh, there’s only a dozen.” You’re welcome! Janette was joking that she went upstairs and yelled at her husband on the phone for not buying her a bigger bouquet of flowers than everyone else lol

I did not get a flower delivery yesterday, which is good as I wasn’t expecting one! I was surprised that there weren’t more deliveries though– we definitely got more on Administrative Professionals day last year (which my boss FORGOT). I wasn’t empty handed though… my friend Amy bought me a little personal-sized cake!

Isn’t it cute? It was cuter before I dropped it and it landed upside down and smushed the icing. I haven’t eaten it yet… hope it’s good, it’s from a nice bakery in town! But the icing looks suspiciously like fondant, blech. My mom also bought me dinner at Ponderosa, Grandma and I were their “Valentines.”

All in all, I had a decent day. I hope the “day of love” treated you well, and that you get just as much love every other day of the year.

I knew from the moment it began yesterday that my day wasn’t going to be fabulous. It all began with breakfast. I wasn’t up for Cheerios or anything else that might be substantial so I decided to mix up a glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast. And nearly poured the whole packet on the counter because I set the glass upside down when I took it out of the cupboard.
Then, since I left just a few minutes later than I needed to for work, nothing went quite right on the drive there. I still would have made it on time if it hadn’t been for waiting 10 minutes on a train that was barely moving. To add insult to injury, the particular railroad crossing in question is so close to my destination that I could SEE work from where I was sitting.

There’s probably only one thing that stood out as “off” during my work day, and after I cleaned my car out of the snow and limped home on slick, slushy roads, I finally made it home. By about 7pm, I realized that my head was really starting to hurt. I contemplated going to bed REALLY early, but I hadn’t had dinner yet. I started to put together a taco salad and decided I just couldn’t stomach it. So I had peanut butter toast for dinner just so I’d have had SOMETHING to eat, and then went to bed with a book. After awhile, I shut the book, shut off the light and laid there in the semi-dark (darn parking lot lights reflecting off of bright white snow!) thinking about how bad my head hurt.

I vaguely recall getting a text message… I haven’t figured out how to change the ringtone on text messages, so it just beeps once when I get a message. It took awhile for it to register through my brain fog that something had beeped. I’m fairly certain I responded, but it’s just as possible that I merely silenced the offending noise and went back to counting how many times I felt my forehead throb. But it’s a new day, my headache is almost gone and I was just as late to work today as I was yesterday. *sigh* But I am wide awake and fairly coherent, so if I get a text message this morning, I’ll know for sure!

The other day I was watching TV… well, that’s not exactly true. I was playing games on the internet while the TV was on in the background. There was a commercial that caught my attention though. A guy was on a sidewalk talking to people about his company while a truck rolled by in the background with his social security number emblazoned on it. I’m not sure I’d be willing to do something that drastic. One of my student loans uses my SSN as my account number, and I have argued with them about it in the past. When I had to send my first check, they wanted my account number written in the memo field. After scouring all of my information, I finally placed a phone call. “What’s my account number?” The lady on the other end of the phone cheerily informed me, “Oh! It’s your social security number!” I quickly informed her that I would not be writing my SSN on my check, and she says to me, “But you have to!” Well, sweetheart, you better come up with a better option because I’m not going to compile all of my sensitive information in one tidy envelope for the first person that wants it! She eventually conceded that I would be fine if I simply made sure that I included the stub from my statement with my check.

Apparently, if I’d have had an account with the company from the commercial, I wouldn’t have had to worry about it quite so much. That company is Lifelock, and the CEO is so confident that their system works that he’s the one who published his SSN on the internet, on television, and on the side of a truck. That’s a lot of confidence. Obviously, I had to find out HOW they propose to keep his identity safe.

It costs $10 a month, and as soon as you sign up, Lifelock will request fraud alerts on your behalf within 24 hours. This IS something that you can do yourself, but fraud alerts only last 90 days at a time. Lifelock will do the work for you to make sure your fraud alerts are renewed every 90 days. This means that any time anyone applies for credit in your name, the creditor will have to call you and verify your identity. If you’ve requested the credit, no problem, the application goes through, but if it’s someone else, the transaction gets stopped immediately.
Lifelock will also take the steps to get you off of junkmail lists, and credit card pre-approval offers. So you’ll have less junk clogging up your mailbox, and reduce your risk of someone plucking your information out of your mailbox and opening new lines of credit. You’ll also get copies of your credit reports mailed to you every 12 months. AND if your wallet is ever lost or stolen, they’ll help you contact the right people to cancel and replace all of the cards in your wallet, everything except your personal pictures and cash. If your identity is used by someone other than you while you are a customer of Lifelock, they’ll spend up to one million dollars to make it right.

That all sounds great, but there is just one question left in my mind– how many times has the fraud alert been activated on CEO Todd Davis’ account since he started broadcasting his SSN because someone out there decided to “just see what would happen”?

Man, oh man… today just felt LONG. Mondays usually do, but with the bitterly cold temperatures, and what felt like a complete lack of sleep last night, I felt like it was never going to end. I woke up at 12:30 last night, wide awake. Managed to go back to sleep, and found myself in the same position at 2:20 or so. My alarm goes off at 5:15, and of course, I was sleeping alright THEN! Though, all three times I woke up, I was dreaming about being pregnant. Hmm… think I need to bust out a dream dictionary and find out what pregnancy means.

Anyways, once 4 o’clock finally rolled around, I made it home and found a box-o-love sitting in front of my apartment door. When I posted the other day about not expecting anything for Valentine’s Day, I was apparently wrong. Check it out–

It was exactly what I needed at the end of a long Monday! So Ted, Pete, Ashley, Britt, Trevor, David, the rest of the Izea gang, thank you and Happy Valentine’s Day! This one’s for you:

P.S. “Blowing kisses” with wax lips, while attempting to take your own picture is surprisingly difficult. LOL

When I think of Vista Print, I usually think of business cards. That’s what I have personally used them for in the past. When I graduated college, I ordered announcements online and literally the very next day, AU announced that they had made a mistake, and their commencement services were going to be at a different time than previously announced. Of course, the stipulation of the company I went through was that they’d only reprint or refund your money if the mistake was on their end. Somehow, AU’s mistake didn’t qualify for them, so I was off to look for a way to add the change in time to the envelopes while still managing to look somewhat professional. In other words, a piece of paper with a “whoops” on it was not what I had in mind. I ended up choosing a business card that had a stack of books on the side and entered all the relevant information to the change in time, and before I knew it, I had a professional looking addition to my graduation announcements, no harm done!

At the time, I didn’t realize that VistaPrint had anything other than business cards. But apparently, they fill all sort of printing needs– everything from personal checks, and customized invitations to save the date cards, and rubber stamps! Now, I don’t currently have a need for any invitations or personal checks, but I DO have a birthday coming up in six short months. I don’t know if I’ll have a party or not, but I’d like to… and they have an adorable froggy invitation available that I already have my eye on. I haven’t had a birthday party since my 18th birthday, and while it’s not the end of the world, I’d kind of like to make a bigger deal out of it this year. See, I’ll be turning 25, and to me, that’s a big birthday. Those of you who had to deal with turning a few digits older than that recently might not understand what I mean but for some reason 25 is a big number in my head. Kind of like, Hey you’re 25 now, congratulations, you’re officially an adult.

Anyways, I don’t know what I’ll do for the birthday… August is a bit away just yet, so I have some time to think about it, but in the meantime, I’m going to go sort through the invitation options. If you have a gathering a little closer than six months from now, and you haven’t gotten invitations yet, go check out VistaPrint. If you enter the code “BlogInvite10″ at checkout, you’ll get ten of those invitations for free. I like free!

I can’t believe my nephew is a year old! Where did the time go? His birthday is actually today, but if you read my blog yesterday you already know that his birthday party was on Saturday afternoon. He had a good old time running around and playing with the other babies there, and of course playing his favorite game – Pass the Baby. He’s just generally a ham. I didn’t get very many good pictures of the picture opening process because he was so busy running around like a maniac, but once he got strapped into the high chair for cake, I got some pretty good ones.

The majorly unhappy face in this picture is due to the party hat on his head– he does NOT like hats! And he’s looking at the cake as if to say, “Ooh, am I allowed to touch that?”

This picture was after he figured out he could touch it, but before he figured out he could eat it. The frosting on his mouth is from his mom sticking some in his mouth to try and get him to realize that it was something he could eat. He looks so unhappy because he doesn’t want the cake on his hands… he kept holding them up and shaking them to try and get the cake off.

Eventually, he got the hang of it. He finally stuck his cake covered thumb in his mouth and sucked on it. After a few seconds his eyes got real big and he realized “Hey! It’s sugary goodness!” After he sucked his thumb and his first finger completely clean, he figured out that he could grab big fistfuls of cake and shove them in his mouth too!

This one is probably my favorite… he’s happy as a clam, and completely covered in cake! It took awhile to get most of the cake off of him, and even then, he still had it caked in the creases on his neck and up his nose! All in all, I think Killian had a good birthday party. He certainly made out like a bandit in the present arena! I just can’t believe the birthday boy is a year old already… *sniff*

Happy Birthday, baby! Aunt Jennifer loves you!

This picture is from Killian’s birthday party yesterday afternoon. I’ve got more pictures to share of that, but I’ll probably get to that later tonight or tomorrow morning. For now, I just got home and I wanted to get this up. This was after the cake, and you can probably still see some of the cake remnants on him even though we scrubbed him down! As you can see, I’m wearing his birthday hat because he wouldn’t. That elastic strap is not so flattering on the double chin though LOL

Man it is NASTY out today. It snowed at some point, but I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not it was still snowing because the wind is blowing that hard! I knew the conditions outside weren’t great, but if I’d have known exactly how bad it was I might have chosen to stay home this morning. The wind was blowing so much snow across the road that there were times that I couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of me. I did stop at the grocery store since I was already out and well, I had no food in my house. Groceries are expensive though, so I still don’t have much!

Well, I’m gonna go get lunch started because I’m starving! When I come back, I’ll head over to DigiCass to see the other pictures from this week.

Do you ever feel like everywhere you turn, you’re getting bombarded with messages on the same subject. It’s like someone’s trying to get your attention. About a month ago, the message I was getting was church. I’ve started going back to church, so the message has changed. I feel like someone pulled up one side of my Bose headphones and yelling “take care of your money” in my ear. Everywhere I look, I’m seeing an article on finances. Hearing something on the radio.
I’ve been taking baby steps in the finance arena for awhile, but now I’m really feeling like I need to pull up my big girl panties, and really take care of this problem. Because it is a problem, and a pretty big one. The first step was to get it all down on paper, and that’s what I did. Looking at the numbers… the debt, compared to the bills, compared to the amount of money on my paycheck, there is only one word for how I’m feeling at the moment.

Panic.

Now I need to sit down and really hammer out my budget. Just as soon as I can breathe through the panicky feelings! Things have got to change though. I don’t care if I spend the next year eating Kraft macaroni and cheese or crashing dinner time at my mother’s house, it has GOT to change. NOW.