I feel good about paying the truck off.  I didn’t think this would even be possible until next year.

I still have to pay off two more vehicles, a travel trailer,  my boat, and of course, my credit card debt.  I’m making slow and steady progress.

Here’s some more free stuff I found online this week. I do NOT get paid to list the free stuff, I just like to share.

Free TV Guide magazine- fill out very short survey.

Free Field & Stream magazine.

Free Motor Trend magazine.

Free Breeze - Tidy Cat system. Take the quiz and act like you are just crazy about cats.

A bunch of free stuff from Walmart:
Icy Hot Patches
Ban Deodorant
Frizz Ease
Viva Paper Towels
Poise Panty Liners
Sheer Blond & Brilliant Brunette shampoos
Fiber One Caramel Delight

Free Sabino hair product.

Free sample Neutrogena Oil-Free Acne Stress Control Power Clear Scrub - boy that’s a mouthful!

Free “Don’t Bite Me Patch”, mosquito repellent.

Free sample Metamucil Berry Burst.

Printable coupon for free taco at Del Taco.

Free DocU Pocket.

Free gift for promising to vote.

Free Ragu recipe book.

Printable PetSmart coupons. $5 off $25 purchase, $10 off $40 purchase, and $15 off $50 purchase.

Printable coupon for a free Frutista Freeze at Taco Bell.

Woo hoo no more monthly payments of $198! The State of California charged us $2,300 in penalties and interest. Ouch!

My husbands bonus came through yesterday. He ended up having 42% of it withheld in taxes! I figured they’d keep about 35% boy was I off. We ended up netting around $7,000+.

I still haven’t paid off my husbands truck. I keep asking if he wants me to pay it off and he always says, “You don’t need to do it today.” He’s feeling superstitious and is thinking the truck is going break down the instant it’s paid off. Of course the warranty is expired so if it did break down, the costs would be on us. I think I’m going to pay it off this afternoon and not say anything about doing so to him unless he asks.

I think I’ve convinced my husband to sell a dump truck that we have that’s just sitting in the pasture. We should be able to get between $4,500 - $5,500 for it. I’m not sure what we’d do with that money.

On Friday, my oldest daughter (17) put down a deposit for an apartment about 2.5 hours away, near one of the biggest party schools in the USA.  It’s semi-official she’s moving out July 15th.  :(  The reason I say it’s “semi-official” is because I refuse to be a co-signer but she’s pretty sure that my neighbor will co-sign - her daughter will be my daughter’s room mate.  This is all so scary for me.  She’s naive and has no clue about a lot of things.

Yesterday she stayed home sick, turns out she has strep throat.  She dropped of her prescription at the pharmacy.  A few hours later, I told  her to call the pharmacy and find out if the prescription was ready and I’d pick it up for her.   She yelled, “MOM!  You know I don’t know how to do that!”  Does this sound like someone that is ready to move out on her own?  I sure don’t think.

I’ve noticed that lately she’s sort changing.  She’s been spending time with her siblings, even playing Nintendo with them and she hasn’t done that in years.  Yesterday she went around and feed carrots to the llama, horse, donkeys and steer.  I don’t think she’s even been out to the barn in several months.  I’m not sure if it’s her way of taking in what she has and how she’s grown up before she leaves home or maybe it’s her way of deciding if leaving is really what she wants to do?

I can only hope she smartens up quickly.

Wordpress makes this blog possible and so easy. I was wanting a non-blog feel to my new site. I first tried Joomla (it’s free and works for both windows based computers and MACs) but I just couldn’t understand what was going on. At first is seemed so simple to use and then I did something wrong and all my pages except for the front page weren’t stylized any more and I never could fix the problem. I finally stumbled upon rapidweaver for a MAC that makes building a site so easy. The software is fairly inexpensive and free to try.

My site isn’t fancy or anything but I literally threw it together this weekend. I still need to fix a bunch of stuff, add links, two pages need content added and I also need to place some more google adsense or other ads. I’m also going to try and make it look more “fun” and not so stiff looking. It’s a work in progress.

Don’t laugh at what my site’s content is about, ha ha, it’s hard not too. According to GTrend’s wordtracker the key words get about 15,000 hits a day that’s 5,475,000 searches a year! Hard to believe isn’t it?

If anyone wants to check it out, be sure to tell me what you think. I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts.

Now I’m going to start working on my next site, LOL -  pork-chop.info

Yesterday morning I was sitting down eating breakfast and I saw my little 12 pound dog come to the door wanting to be let it.  I noticed she was all bloody.  I let her in and picked her up.  Something had attacked the poor little girl.  The whole underside of her lower jaw was wide open, we could see her tendons and stuff moving.  She also had a rip on her front “elbow” and I could see the bone.  It looked like she had a broken leg and she could barely walk.

We live in a very rural area and there aren’t many vets that work or are will to even see animals on Sunday.  In tears I frantically called vets and finally found one willing to see my little girl.  We had to drive 45 minutes away but at this point I just wanted my dog to be okay.

She ended up having surgery, my husband and I got to watch.  She has seven stitches.  Four under her jaw and three on her “elbow”.  She’s still wiped out from the experience.   She slept all day yesterday and wouldn’t even take a drink of water or eat.  We finally had to squirt some water in her mouth.

I’m guessing it was a dog that got her.  We only have one neighbor and I don’t think either of her dogs have it in them to attack anything.  This time of year, every morning we get hot air balloons trying to land in our pasture without our permission.  My guess is one of their dogs attacked my dog, most likely on our own property.  The vet also hinted that it could have been a coyote we have them coming up near our house at night a few nights a week and have seen them in the pasture during the day.

She was given antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory.  She’s doing much better today but I’m still making her take it easy.

My husband’s bonus was NOT on his paycheck.  His paycheck is an automatic deposit.  I’m not sure what’s going on and neither is he.  Hopefully it’ll show up soon.

Yesterday was a pretty excited day for my younger kids and I.  I have about 16 eggs in an incubator in my bathroom.  They are due to hatch around the 24th.  Last night I got a small flashlight and picked the eggs up one at a time and took them into my dark closet to “candle them”.  We only had 3 bad eggs and 2 that were questionable.  In all the other eggs we could see movement, veins and a heart.  It was so exciting!  :D   I was thinking I’d be lucky if I had a 50% hatch rate this early in the season.

The woman was looking for “R”, my husband’s ex wife.  I get calls from bill collectors looking for “R” at least once a month.  Most of the time it’s Honda Credit and they are wanting to know where her car is, or where she’s working this week.

My husband and her divorced in 1994.  We have little to no contact with her.  She’s a very miserable, argumentative person and a pathological liar.  She’s 51 an RN and still lives with her mother because she can’t handle paying bills and life in general.

So this bill collecter calls and asks to speak with “R”.  I ask who’s calling, but dummy me, didn’t pay attention to what she said.  I tell this woman that I’m not going to give her any information.  Lord knows I don’t need or want anything to do with “R” and I sure wouldn’t want “R” to find out that I helped a bill collector find her.  Then the woman asks if “R” and my husband have any children together and could she have their phone numbers.  I told her that they do have kids together but I won’t be getting a teenager involved with this.  The woman then told me that she’s building a case against “R” and that she’s facing three felony charges.  I said, “NICE.”  That’s when all hell broke loose.  The bill collector accused me of getting in “R’s” business.  She was screaming at me on the phone telling me, “You are all up in her business.”  So of course, I bit and started yelling back at her.  I can’t believe I was so dumb to even do that and let the collector get a reaction out of me. 

Here this woman is calling MY house looking for MY husband’s ex-wife and then the bill collector accusses me of getting in “R’s” business???  What is wrong with people?  There really wasn’t any need for all that nastiness.  Next time, and I’m sure there will be a next time, in fact I’m pretty sure it’ll be today, when another bill collector calls looking for “R” I just going to tell them I don’t know who she is or something like that.

Did anyone watch the show last night?  I can’t get it out of my mind.  Of course the wives were polar opposites, one was a neat/control freak and the other was messy and had little or no control over her children.  The control freak mom was out of control, she’d go through all her kids drawers everyday and if one thing was folded perfectly or not “stacked in 2’s” she’d dump the whole drawer on the ground for the kids to redo.  Her reasoning was because “nothing in life comes easy” or something like that.

I’m not a neat freak, not by a long shot, in fact I’m quite cluttered but I’m working on it.  I personally don’t understand what’s wrong with having your drawers the way you want them, whether you are a child or an adult.  I didn’t understand that controlling mom at all.  I’d really like an update in a few years.  I’m predicting all her kids are going to spin out of control in the coming years because they have virtually NO control over anything right now.

Watching that show makes me wonder what type of wife I’d be swapped out with.   For sure, she would be a neat freak that didn’t like to cook because she didn’t want the kitchen to get dirty.  She’d also hate animals and most likely live in a large city and be really into exercising.  Oh and of course, she would have ZERO debt.

My husband spoke with his boss yesterday about the raise he’s supposed to receive.  His boss told him that the company hired an independent firm to compare their management’s salaries to “like salaries” of management in similar companies.  I hope that made sense.  Well it turns out that my husband’s company pays in the bottom 10% of all similar companies.  That’s not good.  So supposedly my husband is going to be getting a big raise, when it’ll come is anyones guess.

This same time last year we were hearing the same sort of story, “You are getting a raise”.   It took over 6 months for that raise to show up and of course they didn’t do any back pay.   We’re just happy it finally showed up.