Lordie, what a money hemorrhage! Dollar bills (or maybe we should say bills in denominations of $50 and $100) have sprouted little butterfly wings and are flying out the windows and doors. An AMEX bill of less than two grand feels like an accomplishment these days.
Getting ready for surgery and an unknown recuperation period has really racked up the bills.
• Cleaning lady
• Pool guy
• Showerhead on a hose
• Shower curtain & hooks to trick out center bathroom to be used for shower
• Dog gate with a swinging gate in it so I can fence three dogs out of the bedroom without risking breaking a hip climbing over a kiddie gate
• Weeks (I hope!!) worth of dog food (which may morph into days’ worth), cooked and stashed in the freezer
• Food cooked and stashed in the freezer for myself
• Endless, endless, endless bills from the Mayo, some of which are covered by Medicare B and Medigap, but only in dribs and drabs
• Dog spay, done early so Pup won’t come into heat while I’m flat on my back
Then the usual crap…
• Routine dental cleaning: $150
• Car registration
• Irrigation system repair
• Entertain friends for dinner: $28 bottle of gin + package of Costco steaks
• Car carrier pad to carry surged dog home
• Huge power bills
• Huge water bills
And the charitable project, making rosaries to sell to benefit the choir…
• Fire Mountain, Fire Mountain, Fire Mountain…
• Heard Museum (wow!!)
• Bead World, Bead Word, Bead World…
Actually, except for the rosary schemes, there aren’t that many extraordinary costs. It’s just that costs are so damn high right now, it being the dead of summer, the electric banging away 24/7, and a nearly constant flow of water barely keeping the xeric plantings alive through 120-degree heat. And of course, no teaching income.
The piddling adjunct pay actually was supplementing Social Security well enough that until my last class ended, I was about breaking even and not having to even think about budgeting and pinching pennies. But the last $1900 AMEX bill (hey! It’s an improvement over $3000! 🙄 ) makes it clear that I’m going to have to return to the tedious routine of marking down every single expenditure, by way of getting a grip.
And indeed…a grip is what needs to be had. We have 22 days to go in the current budget cycle, and I’ve got all of $512 left for discretionary spending — which includes all the groceries and household goods.
Of course, the cleaning lady, the pool dude, and the yard dude are paid with checks and so do not appear on this. They’re carried as nondiscretionary, even though, with the exception of Gerardo the Scintillating Yard Dude, they’re as discretionary as you can get.
I figure that whenever I recover from this surgery and whatever else gets inflicted on me, the pool guy and the cleaning lady are going away. But I wanted to get them in place before I’m knocked out of commission.
And it must be said, the pool guy has managed to get the infestation of mustard algae under control, which I was not doing. In November, the pool will have to be drained, the tilework patched, and a few other minor repairs done. I figure if we hit it hard with the fiercest algaecide he can get his hands on and let it sit for a day or two before draining the water out, that probably will dislodge its little tendrils from the porous plaster walls. And after this I’ll just have to apply PhosFree once a week, pain in the tuchus though it is.
BUT…under normal conditions, I can take care of the pool myself. And I consider it an enormous waste of money to pay someone $80 a month to come in once a week to do a job that really is a daily task.
The cleaning lady. Oh god. How can I do without cleaning ladies? Let me count the ways! This one is pretty darned good, but still she’s broken a vacuum cleaner, she derailed the heavy glass shower doors, she INSISTS on using an old junk mop that falls apart and drops yarn on the floor for the pup to swallow even though there’s a very excellent janitorial quality mop out there, and just go ahead and TRY to stop her from spraying crap chemicals on your Stickley and Thos. Moser furniture! I hate that.
On the other hand…even though she only comes once every two weeks, when my friends came over last week all I had to do was wipe down the middle bathroom, push a dustmop around the floors, and wipe up the doggy pawprints near the door with a wet rag. Otherwise, the house was clean enough for guests, something I was very grateful for because I’d put off the grocery shopping until that day and wasn’t looking forward to having to scrub floors, beat back dust, and scour the bathrooms and kitchen on top of charging around town in 110-degree heat.
So. Even though I can’t afford these two workers, I may keep at least one of them. Which one remains to be seen.
Speaking of the cleaning lady, it’s 9:30 and she hasn’t shown up yet. I’ve got to traipse to the post office to return broken & unwanted beads to Fire Mountain; traipse to the credit union to deposit more drib-and-drab checks from Medicare and Medigap (what a system!!!), traipse to Costco to grab some more breakfast fruit and various household items best purchased there; refill the propane tanks at Costco; traipse to Lowe’s or Home Depot on the way home to pick up some more birdseed by way of calling in the little ant predators again; traipse to a Target or supermarket to pick up cleaning goods for which I do not desire a lifetime supply… Ugh! That’s a good three hours of running around. I wish she’d get her tail over here so I can leave!
Dollars got wings, and I’ve got to go launch a few more of them into the sky.