I've been really depressed lately thanks to work/home/mother/etc. Bleah, enough already! Just one thing after another. Nothing really earth shattering, but this past week did throw me for a loop. What's the worst thing that can happen? My precious mutt, my tiger cat, got sick!!! One unhappy cat = one VERY unhappy ME! Here she is a few minutes ago - naptime on her elephant! What an improvement over a few days ago!



Long story short: Noticed she wasn't walking well Monday night. Rushed her to the vet Tuesday assuming she was constipated. Turns out she had a HUGE abscess under the base of her tail - most likely caused by a clawed swat on the butt from the other cat. She wouldn't eat, would barely drink, couldn't sit. She just laid on the floor by the heater, mostly lifeless. She got an antibiotic shot (they make these now!!) and by Thursday it still hadn't drained. She was worse. I called to schedule her to go in on Friday, but a couple hours later the floodgates opened. By Friday morning: happier mutt = happier me! She's MUCH happier today and is eating. But EW, heal already! That thing is disgusting! She'll probably have to go in to be checked sometime next week, but we're on the mend for now!

Christmas wasn't as bad as I expected - not many gifts at all. Ok, so where did all my mother's money GO? I blame the boyfriend - blame him in a way that he's not asking her for anything, but she feels obligated to buy him things. Her store card is near maxed out, her bills are all late, and her bank account is negative too often. Quite different from just four months ago when her bills were paid in full and I had shuffled $1400 into savings for her. I had to distance myself from her. To make matters worse, the boyfriend rolled his truck last weekend and now has broken ribs. Oh yeah, and a totalled truck. She only calls me these days if she needs something. All I hear is "I'm having FUN!" How's that working for ya?

I made my own stupid banking mistake this week. NOT like me at all!! I just wasn't paying attention when I scheduled a payment. Ugh, too much stress these days. Thankfully, I found out I have the BEST BANK! I ran off to one ATM to get cash from a different account, then off to this bank to deposit it. By the next morning, they had re-ordered my transactions to post credits first, then debits. Yay, no overdraft! That's the first time I've ever done something like that and you bet it'll never happen again.
I lucked out this time.

What started out as a really stressful week, ended up working itself out ok. Yeah, I'm still stressed and I still brought work home, but my mutt is feeling better, I didn't royally screw up our finances, and not complaining at work is paying off. My boss handed me paperwork to process a $1000 bonus for myself. $730 after taxes/401k - I'll take it! DH's eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him. Wow, he didn't even ask if he could spend any of it!! I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Just sit on it for now I guess. I did finally order a new filter for one turtle, but this is something I've been procrastinating for months. It didn't have much to do with the extra $$ I'll be getting.

I haven't been blasting away debt lately. Too many expenses. We BOTH needed new tires, plus added gas expenses for our road trips. The electric bill is up - electric heat - and the water/sewer rates are going up soon. Oh yeah, our car/home insurance payments started back up too. I plan on blasting those away by summer like I did last year. I still need to call and discuss insurance options for DH's old car. It's over-insured.

Well, back to working on getting my netbook "workable". I didn't like the Xandros OS, so I installed eeebuntu. Still need to find a program to run the webcam on it. Ah well, it's a learning experience. The good thing about the netbook is that it's small enough that I can work on it AND hold the mutt!