It will take a while to recover from this

My next blog post will be number six hundred. I usually try to write something special on the double zero numbers, but I don't think that will happen this time. Nothing wonderful has come to mind, and I don't think I want to write about anything bad either. So I think that I will just skip this time and the next blog will just be a regular blog day like any other.

Yesterday was kind of a mess. We did make some money over the weekend, but we can't spend any of it yet. I had all these worries going into the thing. One worry was that people wouldn't buy anything. Another worry was that they would buy stuff, but not much, pay with cash, and need lots and lots of change. I had this worry that all of the costumers would end up needing four pennies, a nickel, a dime, three quarters, four ones, a five, and a ten back in change, and if they paid with hundred dollar bills they might also need back a few twenties.

Well, that didn't happen. Only two people paid with cash. And after going back to the office supply place to get the special pens that check for counterfeit money, I forgot to use them. In fact, I think that I forgot and left them in the house. So, anyway, we made some money, but we didn't have much of it in cash. Only about a hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and the rental bill was due before eleven. Most of the people paid with a credit card, which means that it will take a few days before we have any money in the account. We have only a few dollars here and there of our own money left. So we took the one check that we were paid with and went to the bank to cash it.

Only they wouldn't let us cash it. Business checks are for deposit only.

So we deposited it, only to find that we had a minus sixty on the account. If you don't use the account five times or so (which we didn't this month cause we didn't have any money) you get a fee, and since the account was mostly empty we then were overdrawn and got another fee for that. (I haven't even looked at the other account, so I don't know if there is the same situation there or if it is just empty.)

So that meant that we only got thirty dollars out of the ATM from our hundred dollar check. So we went home and got our quarters and other coin change, and then we went to return the rental equipment. The bill was just a bit under two hundred, and we had just about that in dollars, so we didn't have to break into the change.

We spent the last few dollars on a gallon of milk and a Little Caesars pizza. Anything else I want to buy for a few days will involve counting out quarters and such.

So we did not go to see District 9 yet.

The credit card people called and wanted a post dated check, but I refused, because that is what got us into trouble last time. The car people can have a post dated check, but the credit card people will have to wait till I can actually see the money in the account.

So we are just sort of waiting for the money to show up in the account. And even then we can't spend much money. We only had a "profit" of four seventy-five or so, which is now down to about four hundred because of the bank fees. The car payment will be due on Friday, as will next weekend's equipment rental, so if he doesn't get paid anything from his regular job, we will be short and have to delay some of the business stuff. I think that we should delay business stuff til Monday anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, that sucks. My husband is out of money, and his car is out of gas. He called and said that he couldn't work this week, or at least, that he couldn't work out of town. They called back and asked him to just work Thursday and Friday in Fort Worth instead of Oklahoma. If the money is in the account tomorrow, that will be fine. If it isn't, I guess we will be buying some gas with quarters.

Saturday or Sunday, assuming we make some more money, we are going to Olive Garden. We are going to have a never ending pasta bowl, and we are just going to sit there and eat for about two hours.

Friday night I wasted my time putting my hair up in curlers so that I would look nice Saturday morning. Only Saturday morning it was already so hot that my hair started going limp even before we left the house. I never bother trying to curl my hair anymore, but since I haven't even had my bangs trimmed in a while I thought that I should make the effort, or else I would just have long bangs covering my face. It didn't work out. After working a couple of hours, I gave up and put my hair in a ponytail. So as soon as we get some money, we both need haircuts. Like before Saturday, we need haircuts.

I am still a bit ill from the stress of the whole thing. But it was good to get the business stuff done for a while and do normal stuff like gardening. I picked a squash and almost got done with the wildflower bed, and I even went for a walk to collect some seeds. I tried transplanting some stuff Wednesday or Thursday, but I think that most of those plants will die of shock. It just isn't the right time to transplant stuff, but I hoped that if I gave the plants enough water that it would work out. I guess it didn't.

The above was written on Wednesday. The husband needed the computer for something, and I meant to come back later and finish what I was going to write here in this post. Only when I came back to the computer, I couldn't remember what it was that I was going to write.

It is now Thursday morning. We should have that money from the credit cards today. And we will be able to see how much he made from his "real job", though that probably won't be much, and we won't actually have it until Friday. And maybe, we won't even have it Friday, because in spite of calling the bank and turning off the overdraft protection thing and telling them to put everything on hold, another check he forgot about went through, and now there is a balance of minus a hundred and fifty. So I don't know if there will be enough to cover that and the one post-dated check that we do write, which is for the car payment. There are about four things that we just cannot do without, the first being the rent, the second being the car insurance, and the third and forth being car payments. So we sometimes write post-dated checks for those four things, because those four things are the most important, and even the smallest paycheck should cover one of those. But this will be a really small paycheck, so I'm not certain that it will cover the car payment and the hundred and fifty dollar overdraft.

This all makes me worry about the rent. Since it is the first thing that we pay, I very rarely worry about the rent. I worry about everything else, but not that. But now I am thinking that even though it is not the end of the month, since he gets paid every other week, we won't be getting another paycheck before it is the first of the month. So the car and the rent will be taken out of the money that we make on the business this weekend. Which makes me worry just a little bit, because now I don't have this cushion of not having to worry if twenty-five people don't buy anything. Next week, all of the orders will have to be processed. Will there be enough money left to do that and pay the rent and the car payments?

As for the business this weekend, the list of things we will need is now haircuts for both of us, a cable for the new printer, a card reader for the old computer, and a keyboard for the new computer. Only the lady who organized this whole thing hasn't called us back, so we aren't even sure how many customers we will have this weekend, so I'm not sure if we should buy all this stuff. Maybe a bunch of people canceled? Or maybe a bunch more people want in, and she overbooked? We don't know, cause she didn't call back. I had started to calm down about the whole thing, but now, I don't know why she didn't call back.

So while we have spent all this time just sitting around at home waiting for there to be actual money in bank, today and tomorrow should be a bit busy getting haircuts and buying this and that and picking up rental equipment.

My husband's schedule at his "real job" has changed again. They have known for two weeks that he didn't have enough money to go out of town this week. So they were going to change it so that he only worked Thursday and Friday in Fort Worth. Then they called back and said that wouldn't work out, could he go to Oklahoma for just one day? Without me standing over him reminding him of all the reasons he said that he couldn't go in the first place, my husband said something like, I guess so. I got him to call back and say that wasn't a good idea. They finally called back and said they found someone else to work Friday.

I just could not handle him going out of town Friday. We have to work early on Saturday, and we have to pick up the equipment on Friday. When was he supposed to drive back and forth from out of town? And what if something happened out of town? What if he got a flat tire or something? I just couldn't deal with it, and it was going to be a major amount of work for which they would probably end up paying him only fifty dollars or so. Not worth it.

So, as you can see, despite feeling better about the whole thing for a few days, I am now back to pulling my hair out.