I got a bill from the water company the other day that said you're overdue on the last bill from August.

Umm, what? I'm thinking to myself, well, I must not have ever gotten the bill. Later, I went rifling through a file I keep of utility bill statements and there I found the water bill. I filed it but forgot to pay it! Duh!

It got me worried, though, becus I was afraid that if the water company reported to the credit bureaus even this one late payment, it would zing my credit and I might not be qualified for all these wonderful bonus reward credit card offers I'm in the process of taking advantage of.

However, I checked my credit score on both creditsesame and creditkarma and it doesn't appear my credit score changed at all. Sort of wondering why...

I mean, I used to write about this stuff for a living, and I remember that even a few late payments was a big, bad thing to do if you wanted to preserve your pristine credit rating.

I was all set to apply for the Citi Dividend card ($200 bonus) but MM convinced me to go for the Southwest Airline card, though I haven't flown anywhere for years. It's funny they don't specify any dollar amount for that one purchase.

Today was another in a string of unusually warm days here in the Northeast. Low 60s, I think they said. So I did more treework. I had a very tall and ancient mountain laurel on the north side of the house (2 stories high) that in the winter storm, heaved up partly out of the groud. The weight of the snow on the branches is what did it.

I wasn't sure what to do about it. It was partly keeled over, but i wondered if i could save the shrub, especially if i relieved some of the weight that caused it to keel. It was way too tall, I guess, though I sort of liked it. I was going to wait until it went dormant this winter before pruning it, in case it did survive, but I don't know, I'll have so much other tree work left which I can't handle that this was one of those things I could do something about, so I cut all those 2-story high branches off at about the 6 foot high range. I wanted to be able to walk through that area, underneath the mountain laurel and a nearby rhododendron, and now I can again.

Many of the shrubs around my house are unusually tall. It's really a function of the out-of-control deer population here. Deer browse what they can reach up to about 4 feet high, and often kill a plant by doing that, so anything that does survive tends to do so by growing taller, not wider.

I also swept a lot of debris off the back brick patio. I finally have some beautiful green moss growing in between some of the bricks. It looks so attractive, and much better than all kinds of weeds. I am hoping to coax along that moss, becus it looks best. I have tried buttermilk in the past to encourage moss to grow, but it didn't seem to work.

Back to work tomorrow, to the contract job to see if they fix my mac computer problem. Not really looking forward to it but will do it.