Housekeeping, Money, & Miscellaneous

First of all, a couple of general housekeeping things:

1. I have finally decided to come out of the closet a little bit and start using the name that most of you know me by anyway, dee.  I’m getting a bit tired of the hardtoimagine name.  Even though there is some deep meaning  and lots of good memories tied to it, I think it is time to become a little less anonymous and just be myself.  I feel good about this for now, until someone that I don’t want reading finds my site anyway.  But, that is the risk of putting it out on the web.  It is not like I hide it very well anyway with all the pictures I post!  I will still keep the old name on tblog for those of you that read there also.
2. I’m sure you’ve all noticed by now, but when I changed the site around, I also added some ads.  I thought long and hard about doing this because ads on blog sites have always annoyed me.  But, given my current financial situation, it was a choice of trying to find a way to fund my web sites or give them up.  I’m not really wanting to give them up, so now there are ads.  I’m hoping that it will at least help a little bit with my hosting costs.  I know at least one of my web sites will be closing down soon because it just never became what I wanted it to be and I don’t have the time to get it there right now.  So, please feel free to click away on those ads and help me keep this site running because out of the 4 sites I run, this one is the most important to me.

Now, on to the money and miscellaneous parts.  I was sitting there lastnight staring at my budget spreadsheet and trying to figure out where in the heck all the money is going to these days.  I figured out that we are currently spending about $400-500 a month more than what we are bringing in.  That is an estimate because hubby’s paychecks always differ in the amount.  His checks should be going up soon because they are hitting their busy season and he should be getting a lot of over time.  That will make up for the difference over the summer months, but when we hit fall, we’ll be in the same boat we are in now.  Hopefully we can get some things paid off before then so it won’t be quite so bad.  The thing that is really killing us right now is day care.  That really makes up the difference of what we are behind each month.  What really stinks about this whole situation is that I am realizing that there is no way in hell we should even be thinking about having another kid.  And, I had just kind of decided that I was going to be ready to start trying again in June.

Then, while I was sitting there contemplating this whole situation, my brother calls me and tells me about this great employee discount that his company has been offered through Dell.  Apparently through the end of April, they can get 35% off, plus another 12% off of Dell computers.  He called to tell me because I’ve been questioning him about laptops lately because I desperately need to replace mine.  It is slowly dying and I’m afraid that it is just going to give out any day now.  If I bought one through Dell, right now, I could get almost half off.  I want this so bad I was practically in tears because I know I can’t buy anything else right now.  Next to Zach, my laptop is probably the most important thing in my life.  I know I can live without it, but I will always be upset that I missed this opportunity.

Brother also hooked me up with the new Tool cd.  I’m not really a huge Tool fan, but I don’t mind listening to them on occasion.  I haven’t even heard the whole thing yet, but so far it sounds pretty good.