Some things that have happened this week.
Wednesday I went and got the new van. I am so happy with it, even if it did flatten our savings AND use all my camper money I wanted to spend on kayaks. The purchase price was not the real issue, it was the tax and tag and title stuff AND the guy tacked on some $99 'fee' after all of that. It was $ I could have done without having to scrape up! Then Matt went and got new brakes, alignment and an oil change on his car. Goodbye, groceries! Okay, not that bad, but our big plans for the pay period include $5 night at the pool. And...that's it. LOL!
But thank goodness we had savings to cover it, I do not want ANY more debt to deal with after it taking us 3 full years to get debt free last time, I am determined to avoid avoid avoid. We can pay ourselves back over the rest of the year, just won't get a big trip this fall, or kayaks. waa
Jake has been working with a landscaping crew. It's hot and hard and he aches and I am SO glad. Nothing like manual labor to make the rest of the crappy job options out there seem a little more climate controlled. He is getting paid well, though, so he's managing to muddle through somehow.
As of the 31st of May, Matt's job dropped Vitality-which means we no longer get points for walking-in fact, we came to our senses and tossed the fitbugs. 2 years and 7 months of tracking our steps EVERY SINGLE DAY is over. I was going to keep tracking mine, then I accidentally dropped it in the toilet and thought, eh, screw it. That's a sign, yo. Besides, I dropped 30 pounds just walking to walk. Walking with the fitbug-zero.
We still have to hit certain goals to keep our insurance rates JUST the rate and not another $75 per month in 'fees'. I don't think it's fair-we already did all the crap to get all the points to keep from being fined in 2016, but they changed it with 5 months to go. Now we have to hit 6 points-non smoking, BMI, HDL, glucose, BP and triglycerides. The HDL (good cholesterol) alone I will never hit. They want it over 50 and in the 4 blood tests I have had, it has never been higher than 42. My 'bad' cholesterol is really low, too, though.
The Panther Run is coming up! Matt and Ben ran last year but this year Elan, Kurt, Emma and Alex, Melanie and her Ben and Gina and Jeff are joining them and running as a team. I am still on photography, though Kurt and Matt both think next year I will be running it. It's like we've never met.
I have hit my 15 miles a week of walking every week and thought I would up it to 20 miles in June, but Matt and I were trotting the track at nearly 10 last night to get that last mile done so I will stick with 15 a while longer.
The neighbors on the corner showed up-20 of them-and set fire to the rest of the house they took the roof off of. They were wearing matching shirts-pink for the women and green for the men. It was kind of surreal.
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| This is days later when it finally stopped smoking. How hard can it be to burn down a decrepit house? hahaha! Apparently, very! |
Not as surreal as across the road! They set the old chicken house on fire and then started cleaning out 20 years of accumulated crap. Then they brought in 4 HUGE earth movers and started scraping. The local theory is they have to get under the diseased part of the ground from the old chicken houses before they put in NEW chicken houses. Yes-right across the road! And one of the 'farmers' in that group has a side business of spreading chicken shit on fields! I am sooooo hoping they won't be storing it here, since he already has a place that is so well known for the stench that people drive 5 miles out of their way to keep from passing it.
But for now, it's this vast red pit (honestly, I think it's going to hold water the very first rain-they have made a giant clay bowl) and it's this huge negative space where 2 weeks ago there were trees, a hill, a pond and weeds and junk galore. I wonder how many snakes were in the tin pile? They have been at it for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It's loud, the whole thing is loud-the machines and the scraping and the backing up all day and when the houses are done, they will have huge exhaust fans going 24-7 and it will never be quiet here again. :( It doesn't seem right when someone else can take something from you like that. From the whole community.
Anyway, that's the news.
