Footprints on the Moon

Oh my goodness… lately it seems like I have been spending money like it is going out of style. While there have been plenty of unnecessary purchases, there have also been plenty of things I needed. Like jeans because the only pair I had that fit decided they didn’t need to be one piece anymore. And shorts because it was freaking hot and I didn’t have a single pair that didn’t threaten to rupture internal organs if they were zipped and buttoned. Then there were the bras and underwear. I have to be honest, I think I’ve probably spent upwards of $60-70 on underthings in the last week alone. But now I have a few cheap bras that aren’t on the verge of disintegrating, and some completely adorable undies. Cause I’m sure you all needed to know that!

Luckily August is my “extra” paycheck month so I’ll be able to do a little bit of “catching up” on all this money I’ve been spending, but suffice it to say, the budget was definitely blown this month. I’m sure that some of it has to do with having been so strict with purchases in the name of my budget for the last several months that I went a little crazy when I finally had a good justified reason to go buy things I needed. There’s got to be a balance there somewhere though. Sarah and I are headed to the beach after work this afternoon, and my boss couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t go to a particular beach, as it is “only $8.” Well, because that’s $8 that I don’t have, especially after spending the gas money just to get up there.

Or maybe that’s my motivation for really getting rid of this credit card debt once and for all… I would love to just go to whichever beach my little heart desired because $8 could be “only” $8. When you’re doing all you can to pay your minimum payments, rent, utilities, groceries, and still have a little money left to make forward progress… $8 is a lot of money. I just wish the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t so small… It feels like I’m scratching out progress with my fingernails, and yet the end is still so far away. I didn’t rack up this debt overnight, and it’s not going to go away overnight either, but sometimes it just feels so overwhelming. So if you ever wonder why sometimes you find links to things like Lipovox reviews or Dodge Charger car parts in the middle of my posts about Killian, or my trip to the beach– it’s because right now $8 can’t be only $8.

From the dentist that is. I had my 6 month cleaning this afternoon, which of course was the high point of my day. [/sarcasm] I am not a big fan of the dentist, and I felt bad today because I was 15 minutes late for my appointment. My appointment was scheduled for 4:20pm. I don’t get off until 4… I left work at ten after 4, had no choice but to run home before heading to the dentist office. Luckily, my dentist is only a block away from the apartment, but it still takes twenty minutes to get home from work most days. Especially when you hit EVERY SINGLE RED LIGHT on the way!

The worst part was probably walking in the door, and seeing them talking about the fact that I was late. I was afraid the disapproving looks I got when I walked in the door were going to last for my entire appointment. I think we all learned a lesson though, and my next appointment is at 5:10pm so the mad dash from work won’t be an issue. That’s also why it’s an 8 month reprieve instead of 6 months– the next late appointment available wasn’t until March. In the meantime, the dentist said my mouth looks healthy, and there have been no changes in my teeth since January. Woohoo!

Not the greatest picture ever, but Pudge unwittingly jumped into it, so I kept it anyways. Basically lazy day for me today. I took this picture early this morning, and didn’t even get in the shower until about 4:30 this afternoon! Even then, the only reason I took a shower was because I’d decided to make a run to Walmart to get a few things I needed.

Other than that, I just had a lazy day watching things on OnDemand, and cuddling with kitties who both decided they were rather in need of attention all weekend. Every time I turned around, one or both of them were right there. I told Sarah on Saturday, “Just call me Noah.” Usually they want nothing to do with you, but I had a pair of cats everywhere I went this weekend. I’m surprised only one of them made it into the picture– I think Lucy was sitting on the floor by my feet though.

You probably recall me coming home from work a week and a half ago, and discovering that instead of fixing my shower, the maintenance guys merely put up a piece of plastic with some duct tape and promised to come back at some unknown point in the future. If you haven’t, you can read the story here. Well, a week and a half later, I still have plastic and duct tape in my shower, and haven’t even heard a whisper as to when they plan on coming back to fix it. So I decided to make it into a contest for all of you.

The first person to pick the correct date that they will come begin the actual work on my shower will win a $25 gift card for Bath and Body Works.

As of 7:40 a.m., Wednesday, July 23, 2008, there are no plans to begin work on my shower. That means you can pick any date between today and however long you think it will take. You can only pick one day. Pick any day you like, but I only have one gift card, so if you’re not the first person to choose a day, I can’t promise a prize. If it turns out that my shower languishes in plastic wrap, and I move out before it gets fixed, I will award the gift card to the person who chose the date closest to my move-out date. Bonus points if they actually fix my bathtub drain (properly!) at the same time.

Contest begins now, and ends when the shower tiles are fixed or I move out, whichever comes first! Good luck!

I took this week’s Self Portrait Sunday picture while at the beach on Thursday night. Don’t you just love my beautiful windblown lake hair? Not the greatest picture ever, but it’s not in my living room like every other week! And it’s much better than the other attempts… I gave up though because there was a guy sitting not all that far away and he was starting to stare enough to make me uncomfortable.

I really didn’t have any intention of leaving my apartment much, if at all, this weekend, but it didn’t really turn out that way. I ran out and got some groceries yesterday and my mom called when I was on my way home to let me know that she had Killian. She’s also got Harold’s three granddaughters and they’ve really been wanting to meet me so I ran over there after I came home and put my groceries away.

Then I found out my cousin was having her graduation open house today so I went over to hang out with my family for a couple of hours. Now I’m home for the rest of the evening, and really looking forward to starting the work week tomorrow. [/sarcasm] I believe I’ll be putting in a movie, and then I’ll make some chicken salad to take for lunch this week. Yep, that sounds like a pretty good plan. I hope you all enjoy what is left of the weekend.

Ha, just typing that title made me think of that stupid little joke we always used to tell in elementary school about “Cherry Hill.” Or maybe it’s that on top of the fact that I ran into someone from elementary school and Camp Fire while I was at the grocery store today.

In any case, I took this picture on Thursday night while I was lying on Cherry Beach, a small little free beach on Lake Michigan. It was fabulous. It was very hot on Thursday, and I came home from work, changed and then took off to pick Sarah up from her work. When we arrived at the lake, it wasn’t crowded at all, and the breeze coming off the lake just felt fantastic. It was a wonderful evening, and I would have loved to stay up there and watch the sun set over the lake. Probably would have if there wasn’t the tiny detail of having to be up at 5 am the next morning.

So Thursday was pretty fantastic. Wish I could say the same thing for Friday. The most appropriate question for Friday would be “Where are we going? And why am I in this hand basket?” I started the day in a not-so-great mood, for no particular reason at all. I spent the whole morning feeling like one big raw nerve, and by the afternoon I went from being in a bad mood for no reason at all to having a very good reason for a bad day. Suffice it to say, I was very relieved that it was time for a weekend.

If normal is what you can call it, that is. In the midst of all my whining about my shower (still in plastic, just for the record) I completely forgot to tell you that I have my work space completely back to normal this week! Do they make memory cards for humans? Cause I’ve only been meaning to come over here and tell you about it all week! I knew they had opened the sidewalk because I drove by on Saturday, and apparently my boss came in on Sunday and they disconnected all the computers and moved them back out to the guardhouse. They left the lobby furniture out of place so the carpets could be swept, but by the time I came in at 6:45 on Monday morning, most of that had been put back where it belonged as well.

And let me tell you, people around here are clearly delusional because I cannot tell you how many comments I’ve gotten along the lines of: You must be so lonely now that your company is gone! You must really miss us/them!

HA! Not even one tiny little bit! (Well, maybe when I have to pee because, come on, that was just plain convenient.) It’s been nice and quiet, and I’ve actually been able to read and hear myself think. It hasn’t been too quiet though– we’re freshly back from shutdown, and it’s been like a zoo around here most mornings. I have been kind of stir crazy this week, especially during the afternoons. I just get to the point where I would rather be doing ANYTHING ELSE than sitting here for 5 more minutes. But trust me, it has nothing to do with “missing” my lobby roommates.

At some point over the weekend, I noticed that some of the tiles in my shower looked like they were coming off the wall. If I pushed on them in that area, the wall moved. Uh yeah, probably not a good thing, right? So I called it in this morning as I left for work, and at about 9am or so, one of the maintenance guys called to see if it was a good time to go look at my shower. I never heard anything back so I had no idea what I was going to walk into when I came home. The shower is obviously going to need re-tiled, and even though I didn’t want to have to make other shower arrangements for tomorrow, I was hoping the work would have been started. Except it wasn’t. Do you want to see what I found when I came home?

Oh yeah… Plastic wrap and duct tape! Sweet! That’s a high quality repair job right there. Okay, they’ll be coming back to “fix” it eventually, I’ll give them that but this I was not expecting. I suppose I should have… See that note in the corner? Here’s what it said:

So at “?” in the future, I’ll have a shower that’s been fixed. Until then, I have duct tape and a sheet of plastic. And time to figure out where I’ll be showering on “?” day in question… I’ll be packing my Rimowa luggage and hiking somewhere with my shampoo. If nothing else, there are showers at work I can use. In the meantime, sigh.

It seems like everywhere I turn, all I keep hearing about is the iPhone. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really interested. One of my coworkers wants one and is always trying to convince me to buy one so he can play with it and see if he actually wants one. I told him to go to the AT&T store and play with it there! Then my grandmother emailed me to find out what the “eye phone or aye phone” is, and does she want one? I think you can tell already that the answer is “no.” Personally I bought an unlocked phone direct from Motorola back in January. I did it that way so I wouldn’t have to extend my cell phone contract for another 2 years by purchasing through the cell phone company, and I think that’s worth the extra money I had to pay out of pocket for it. The phone works just fine, and I sure as heck don’t need another $200 phone with a bunch of features I wouldn’t ever use, and don’t even want.

I was committed to putting up a picture today. That’s the only reason there is one above these words! I couldn’t manage to take a picture that I was happy with, so I eventually settled for the lesser of the evils. Ah well, it’s not like I was looking super-fabulous today. I’ve spent the whole day running up and down stairs to the laundry room. I washed my work uniforms, the rest of my clothes, and then I got real crazy and washed the sheets off my bed. My comforter didn’t come out of the dryer so well (think maybe the fabric burned or something…) , but I have clean sheets on my bed, and I flipped my mattress while I was at it. That was about the extent of my productiveness.

That and deleting massive amounts of spam that managed to make it past the spam filter. It’s really starting to get rather annoying. I don’t want your links to diet pills, your male body part enlargement or your inappropriate behavior with animals. Please go away.

And now, it’s time for bed. After I delete the 16 new comments that came through while I was typing this. I’m excited about work tomorrow — thing should be getting back to normal, if they’re not that way already. They’ve finally got the sidewalk done, woohoo! I know my boss was planning on going in on Saturday to move the guards back out to the guardhouse as long as everything was done. I drove by there Saturday afternoon, and the sidewalk was back to normal. So even if they aren’t completely out of the lobby yet, they will be by the end of the day! It will be so nice to have some quiet back.