The rest of my previous paycheck

I left off my paycheck tally with $112.51 in the bank. Here is how the rest went:

$5.70 - dry cleaning Tuba Girl's uniform
$33.28 - gas for the second week
$14.00 - a trip to Wendy's after I changed the tire and was too lazy to cook. I wrote about it somewhere. The heathen boys' school earned a $1.40 from our trip. Yaaaaay.
$7.00 - field trip money for DMan.
$6.50 - field trip money for Wild Boy
$1.98 - hand sanitizer for work. Working with the public has suddenly made me slightly germ phobic and my building budget is so minute that Germ-x is not even on the radar.
$1.68- Suave lavender conditioner
$1.68 - Suave lavender shampoo  (The shampoo and conditioner should actually last a couple of months.)
$2.48 - freezer bags to separate my hamburger meat
$1.00 - Family Dollar toilet paper (a four pack apparently lasts four days)
$1.00 - a five pack of new toothbrushes
$1.00 - toothpaste
$2.54 - some more Great Value brand toilet paper. I bought two packs this time, so hopefully it will actually last a full two weeks. So far, I've spent a little less than five bucks on toilet paper, so if I can figure out how many packs I need to buy a month, it may actually cut my toilet paper costs in half. I like the Great Value brand tp fine, it's just a bitch because it seems to run out rather quickly.
$15.00 - a phone card for Tuba Girl. It said I have to pay up again by November, but I'm hoping this bitch will last through December. If not, then it's really going to agitate me. I have very little experience with prepay phones, so I'll have to test the waters with it. Basically, texting doesn't cost her anything as far as I understand. As long as no one calls her, then she doesn't actually use any minutes. Or something like that.
$1.00 - fifty cents for each boy child to wear a hat to school last week. It was a fundraiser for Jay's Hope, an area organization seeking to help families of children with cancer. For all my personal dismissal of religious matters, I'm still a spiritual sort of bitch and I get teary eyed every time I read about that little boy.
$2.40 - tights for Tuba Girl
$.82 - taxes

That leaves about $13.45 out of my first October paycheck. I'm going to leave that alone and try to pretend it's not there.

< . . . >

My second paycheck, after taxes and whatnot left me with $504.70.
Bills for this paycheck:

$193.00 - light bill. This is my actual light bill for this month. The previous payment was carried over from August. I have one window unit. Not only does August and the early part of September tax my window unit, it taxes my bill.

Like I said, this bitch ass trailer can hit 95 degrees in the evening. After spoiling myself due to Wild Boy's years of Reactive Airway Disease (another post, another time) I'm just not about to spend one more minute lying in a bed with sweat running down my ass crack. I live in a SUBTROPICAL REGION where where air conditioning is available and I damned well plan to take advantage of it.

(And a moment to rant here.)
I know those who lived here in the years before me didn't have air conditioning or central heating systems. I grew up in several houses that didn't have either one. I don't remember being horribly hot as a child, but I do remember being colder than hell and hanging out around that potbellied stove in the living room a good bit. You'd think by the 80s, the world would have moved up, but a lot of us hadn't.

Also, the thing about those houses is they were built differently than mine. The house with the potbellied stove must have had walls at least eight feet high. I'll have to ask my mommy. During the summer, I really don't remember it being that bad because the hot air rose toward the ceiling.

I also spent a lot of time out on my stepgrandaddy's old farm place as a child where there were no AC or heat units to handle business. Being built even earlier in the century, perhaps even around the end of the 19th century, the walls were 10  feet tall or so and it was built with a dog trot hall to let the breeze flow through. (I remember it getting pretty cold, though. If you've ever lived somewhere without a regular heat source, you know that feeling of suffocating under five or six blankets. Once you were in bed, you were in bed.)

Here, have a picture of my stepgrandaddy's old home place.

Maybe I'll make up a whole post about temperature control or something. 

/rant out



$50.00 - car insurance. I don't carry comprehensive on this car since it's an old beater I picked up for a thousand.

$75.00 - Cable. I think that should finally catch it up. I called the 1-800 number last week and said $40 was my limit for cable and internet so they worked with me. Perhaps I will eventually buy one of those outside TV antennae thingies and an HD picker upper thingy and let the cable completely go. But jeebus, someone's going to have to go out there and figure out how to set the damned antennae up- dig a whole or pour some concrete or get on the roof or something - and that someone is going to be me. Rargh.

Man. The kids were a bit pissed when they figured out we don't have cartoon channels anymore, but that's something they'll get over. I didn't even have cable when I was a kid. They didn't run it out that far.

I also didn't have air conditioning or central heat, but there's just a point where you have to decide which part of the civilized world you're going to hang onto and I choose to hang on to the part that maintains nice temperatures in my tin box.


$40.00 - Tuba Girl's band trip. I'm getting close to finishing this bitching ass trip off.  



Things I have bought out of this check:
$10.00 - storage bowls. I can't remember the exact price because I can't figure out what it is on the receipt.
Maybe I could have saved old margarine or cool whip bowls, but that would require buying things like that on some regular basis.

$3.66  - duct tape. If you can't duct it, fuck it.
$7.96 - plastic sheeting. I plan on going full white trash this winter and wrapping up my useless windows in plastic wrap.
$5.70 - dry cleaning Tuba Girl's uniform again. Her final competition for this season is this Saturday so I should be able to get by the rest of the season with Dryel.
$33.37 -gas for this week
$1.92

That leaves me with approximately $84.09 until next Friday.

There are things I've paid for that I could have just said no to - Wendy's, field trips, tights, hat wearing, and band trips. But honestly, the only thing I'm really edgy about is the trip to Wendy's. It wasn't necessary and we went because I didn't want to cook.

The rest of it - meh. I want my kids to enjoy life some. On top of that, the day I actually say "No" to donating a dollar to a children's cancer society is the day I should just wrap myself up into my misanthropic blanket and refuse to get off the couch.