Today (Sunday) this site is officially 6 years old, and to celebrate that fact, I figured I would actually post...which is something I have been fairly bad about recently. I go in waves, as most of you know, so me going some time without posting shouldn't be too surprising. I have been in a huge work-wow-sleep schedule and everything else has been drifting away.
Work is going well. I tried to keep my whining down to a minimum while I was unemployed, but I HATE not having a job or at least something real to do. I am making decent money, but just between us, I would probably do the same job for much (much) less. And the fact that they pay me makes it that much better. As long as I show up on time and work my full 40 hours, I make about as much as the wife. Of course, since coming to second shift, this has been my first 40 work week, the rest were 46. There are a couple of things that can jack the pay up, part of which (attendance bonus) keeps you on time and working each day and the other part (incentive bonus) makes you work harder and push your partner to do so as well.
This influx of money after scrounging for so long is just a little scary. I am trying to push as much of it out the doors as we can to get rid of debts instead of blowing it on DVDs and pizza. Our day to day stuff is caught up, food stores have been replinished, and now we are going to set our focus on aggresively attacking our debts. I am looking forward to being able to count the number of people/businesses we owe money to on one hand. And the more debts we pay off, the more fun money we have to spend on hookers and blow (10-15% of a weekly salary doesn't get many hookers or much blow).
I did our taxes last week. For some reason I enjoy doing them, probably because we are so close to the poverty line that we get back almost everything we pay. But this year, I was a little worried. I was apparently the only one here who had paid any federal taxes. We are not sure why, but the wife wasn't paying them. I fully expected us to have to pay, but no. Apparently, the economic stimulus package Bush had given us made its way into the tax records (at least that is how it was explained to me) so we ended up not only not owing anything, but with a tidy little sum coming back. I am using just over half to pay off a debt, and the rest (plus our fun money for the past week or so) went to buying us a couple of new toys.
Speaking of new toys, we got a pair of Acer Aspire Ones. I had been hinting around at getting the wife a new laptop since I got my new job, but she was too attached to her current one she said she wanted a netbook again instead. About 15 minutes after buying hers, I decided I wanted one as well, so I turned around and got one. Getting Lightman fully functional would cost about as much (new battery, harddrive, and dvd drive), so I don't really see it as too much of a wasted investment. Besides, on this guy I have over twice the battery life that a new one for Lightman would have had anyways. He is a small little silver guy, and I think I am going to call him Gun.
