Had the job interview today for the freelance "editor" job today at translation services company and based on new info received, not sure it's the best choice for me.

I guess I misunderstood the woman from the agency when she called. I THOUGHT she had said it was work at home, but that was actually a different job she called me about which was later put on hold by the employer.

So I was proceeding on the assumption it was work at home, when actually, they would want me there on the premises.

The work sounds even more tedious and dull than that transcribing job I did for exactly 1 day about 6 months ago. It's not editing, or even proofreading, by a long shot. While they don't want any glaring typos, they seem more concerned that the person who fills this job work fast. I'd need do a side by side comparison of the Japanese document and the translated-into-English document, checking that no entire paragraphs were dropped in the translation. How can I do this if I don't read Japanese? I would look for things that would carry over into the English verbatim, like people's names, numbers, dates and so on.

Not sure I could stand doing that for more than an hour or so, and with a 45-mintue drive, it wouldn't be worth doing for anything less than a full day.

So that's where we left it. I'm not sure he'd want to bother accommodating me in that regard (making sure he had a full day's work for me) becus it could prove more of a nuisance to him.

I'm not too shook up, though i am disappointed as i thought it was work from home. I start the driving job this Monday anyway, so in the back of my mind as I'm talking to the interviewer, I'm realizing there's no way I could do both jobs and I'm quickly trying to analyze which would be the better choice.

They both pay the same gross, $20 an hour, but the translation job would have taxes deducted, the driving job would not. The main difference is that while the driving job would be a mazimum 10 hours a week and i could do other freelance work for the rest of my day (if i had it), the translation job would probably be more than that most of the time. I think. Like full-time when they had the work. They are very busy right now with a lawsuit involving US Dept of justice suing Japanese carmakers for price fixing. they've been working on this one case for a year now.

I'm feeling very schmucky about maybe having to tell the guy i'm driving, soon after I start, that i can't do it after all. If I had known some other job prospects would pop up so quickly, i wouldn't have told him I'd do it, but who knew?

the best thing for me would be if i get the PR agency job where i'm going for a 2nd interview on Thursday. That would be just 2 days a week at much better pay. I would plan on telling them that due to a prior obligation, I would need to arrive at 9:15 am and leave at 4 pm on the 2 days a week i work there, just for the 1st 2 weeks. This would give the guy i'm driving time to find someone else. He will probably be very upset with me but hopefully would appreciate that i'm giving him 2 weeks notice. I could STILL continue driving him for the 3 days a week i wouldn't be working at the PR agency, but i don't know if he'd want to bother with that.

I would think that having 2 people driving you would make it easier to handle things should 1 of the drivers have an occasional something comes up. It should also make it easier for him to find someone to drive just 2 days a week. It does sort of tie you down. but again, he may be so pissed at me for begging out almost as soon as I start that he may not want to have anything to do with me. Oh well.

Well, since losing the publishing job, i guess it's to be expected that my work schedule/scenario goes thru a bit of an unsettled period. But I hope the ultimate outcome is an improved financial situation where I'm making more than i made at the publishing job.

That's a pretty low bar to jump, so hope it works out that way.

I hope you're not getting tired of hearing about the job search. It just goes on and on and on and on and well, you get the idea.

First interview is tomorrow morning for the freelance, work-at-home editing job for a company that specializes in translation services for law firms. Who knew there'd be that much work? I guess I'll learn more when I talk to them. It's mostly Japanese, although that part of it is irrelevant to me since I would be editing the English translations. I was told by recruiter that it would be full-time until a given project was finished, and then there might be a lull between jobs. She wasn't really sure how much work there might be.

I'm very interested in this job becus while it pays just $20 an hour, it is work at home and hopefully would be ongoing, on a project or as-needed basis.

My next interview is the 2nd visit to the PR agency in New York state. (Can we say 3rd tax return?) I would be meeting with one of the project managers that works for the owner, who i interviewed with first. This job would pay much better, between $30 and $45 an hour. It would be 2 full days a week, at their office, which is about a 45-minute commute.

I could conceivably do both jobs, depending on how tight the deadlines were at the legal editing job. If I needed to work weekends, that would be no problem.

I asked the guardian ad litem I've done legal editing for whether she'd be willing to serve as a reference. She seems to like my work and it's pretty similar to what i'd be doing at the new job as far as editing legal briefs and such. Even if she says no, I will still bring a sample brief of hers i edited, with all my editing marks, to show the interviewer.

The weather is just awful. It "only" got up to about 88 today, but the humidity level is at 79%, which is really unbearable. Tomorrow will be hotter, up to 95, HOWEVER the humidity is supposed to be down to 49%, so it should be much more comfortable.

The agency called and said the translation services company wants to see me for a quick interview this afternoon. I asked if we could do it tomorrow. It's a 40-minute drive and I'm hot, sweaty and tired. Hopefully tomorrow will be a go.

A woman wants to come see the rocking chair I'm selling. Possibly this afternoon. She is apparently willing to drive an hour, coming up all the way from Greenwich.

This morning I got some rice pudding going in the slow cooker, double batch. I added a variety of dried fruits my sister grew and gave to me...apple pears and pumpkin. It also calls for coconut flakes and agave so it will be plenty sweet. I may skip the agave.

I also made my refrigerated pickles, but couldn't find the recipe I was set on using, so had to do a whole new search for a recipe I liked. They're pretty simple to make anyway. I did mine with just white vinegar, chopped white onion, sugar and salt.



Despite all the rain we got yesterday, it's hot as heck again today, and will be same tomorrow. Brutally hot. Still 100% no AC here in Connecticut.

As long as you dont' really need to SEE anyone, you can just walk around in your shorts and tank top and sweat a little. The challenge will be looking presentable for the interview without wilting.

I often buy Edy's fruit popsicles or other high-priced dessert on a stick in favor of ice cream. Although I adore ice cream on a stick, too. A holdover from my grandmother spoiling me.

But when they're priced at close to $5 a box, it begins to get irksome.

So I used some Amazon gift cards to buy a setof 6 BPA-free popiscle molds. then I had some fun browsing recipes for popsicles using yogurt, juices, coconut water and fruit, of course. At least now I can control the sugar content and be sure I'm not eating crappola.

I should get the package tomorrow, along with some "reinforcing fibers" which will allow me to make a larger hypertufa trough that won't crack and can be left out all winter.

My friend R. came over this afternoon with his dog, to catch up. we were going to sit outside with a couple of beers in the shade but he arrived just in time for a massive thunderstorm, so i moved everything into the shelter of the garage and we watched the thunder and lightening show from there.

He visited a chihuahua at the shelter and was thinking of getting him as a companion for his other dog.

I went to a condo open house today to check out a unit at the large, village-like complex i like. It's the only one i can picture myself living at. Well, that one and the associated one which has the same name but which is actually an independent complex. The unit i saw today was totally new inside,with new kitchen, baths, carpeting, paint.

Just 4 rooms: kitchen, big enough for a DR table, a super large living room with fireplace (one part could be a formal dining room), 2 bedrooms and 2 baths. Pull-down storage. Detached garage. Slate patio.

The ktichen had dark wood cabinets with stainless frigidare appliances, nice hardware and bathroom cabinetry matched. Everything new, tastefully done.

Nothing was wrong with it at all except the outdoor patio was not so private and i know this complex has tons of units with much more privacy, which is very important to me. It was fun to look though. $184,900.

They are so affordable now. You could easily find an updated 2 bedroom, 1,400 sf unit for $150 to $180,000, which I could pay cash for if I sold my house.

Taxes in the $3,000 range and common charges high: $500 a month for a 2-bedroom. That's becus the complex has 1,000 acres. Like a little village, plus they have a state of the art new fitness center, garden plots, about a hundred different clubs, library, crafts center, 4 pools, tennis, golf course, lots of large ponds with fountains, etc.

The thought of getting the house ready for sale and moving is just so completely enervating. But I've been looking around thinking about what i would sell or give away and i'm trying to declutter a little at a time.

Like, i have 4 2-drawer file cabinets. 2 of them are stuffed with writing samples of my work over the years; i have tons of extras so i can leave them with a job prospect/interviewer,but they don't often need to keep them. I also have 2 files for personal stuff, but i'm sure i could condense and get rid of 2 file cabinets.

I posted an old rocking chair on craig's list for $25.

It's still raining here. We really needed the rain. It was very dry. the garden will be thankful, although i've already gotten that white powdery mildew on the squashes.

I need to mow but it's been so blasted hot. I work up a sweat just picking a few vegetables.

Oh, yes. The pickles. I'm going to try my hand at turning some excess cucumbers into pickles tomorrow. I have a recipe. It looks pretty easy.

I'm proud to say that I HAVE NOT ONCE caved in to the heat yet and dragged the AC down from the attic. It's a hassle getting it down here, and I guess that works to discourage me from turning it on.

I've tried to trim Luther's long fur as best I could, but he considers every snip a personal affront to his right to wear his fur as long as he wants.

Sometimes, I try to distract him with a string as I cut his fur:


"Nasty, no-good string..."


"How totally annoying..."


"Was that a bird I saw out of the corner of my eye?"


"Take that, you fiendish string!"


"Whoa. I just had a thought..."


"I'll swallow you whole if you just hold still."

I am saving all of the cats' fur in a large plastic bag so that I can redistribute it with an ironic twist to the birds who look for nesting material in the spring. My sense of humor is such that I derive great amusesment from seeing Luther's familiar orange fur well-packed into a soft-as-a-pillow nest for baby bluebirds.

I've had a difficult time concentrating lately, but I finally waas able to focus back in on a sales brochure I started for a real estate client.

I've now logged 9.25 hours on it, so that's $452.50. It's 95% done. I want to read it over one more time.

She said there's more work coming in the pipeline.

Is this not the most perfect yellow squash you ever saw?






It was eaten promptly, baked in the oven and drizzled with olive oil.

On the job front, I was EXCITED to hear back from the woman who interviewed me for the PR agency job. It ain't dead yet. She said she had to handle 2 crises and wanted me to come in for a 2nd interview with another manager there, probably next week. Hooray.

I mentioned in my last post the fond memories I had spending time in my grandfather's gas station. I guess it just goes to show that you don't need to spend big bucks on music lessons or summer camp to provide your children with happy memories.

The place always seemed to have a layer of black grease on everything and there was that smell of gasoline and oil. My good-natured grandfather would always be wearing filthy overalls covered with black smudges. But it was his friendly presence and kidding ways that stay with me always.

I couldn't remember the brand of gas he sold so I HAD to look it up. I have a priceless black-and-white photo of him standing with his foot on the running board of his pick-up in the 1960s. The gas station sign is behind him.



I remember he had a sandwich sign out by the road that advertised the price of gas. It was .29 a gallon!!

My grandmother did not work at that point, but every day at noon she would bring him his lunch in a brown paper bag and sit with him while he ate his sandwich. Sometimes, if he was underneath a car, she would go out and pump gas for customers. New Jersey is one of the few states where by law, customers cannot pump their own gas.

I don't think of my grandmother as a feminist, but in those days it seemed unusual for a woman to pump gas.

My (paternal) grandfather's first service station was in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, which is where my mother's parents lived also. Then he bought a station out "in the country" on Rt. 202 in Wayne. They bought a brick ranch house in Lincoln Park at the end of a dirt dead-end road with woods surounding the house on two sides. It was a very long, steep hill down to Rt. 202 and I do remember sledding on it. Across the street is where one of the Little Rascals grew up; his parents always remained there. I don't recall which one of the Rascals because I never watched the show.

These towns are hardly rural anymore but I will always think of them this way. At one time, my parents kept a sheep named "Lambchops" at their house, which was down the hill from my dad's parents.

The other really intriguing thing about this photo is the other sign in the background that says "Brogan." I'm not sure when this photo was taken. It could have been before I was born. But, highly coincidentally for me, "Brogan" is Brogan Cadillac, a car dealership in Ridgewood, NJ. It just so happens that my very best friend's father was a salesman at Brogan Cadillac. He worked there many years, even after his legs were paralyzed following a bad car accident.

My friend and I would sometimes take the train from our home in Mahwah (I lived with her family for one year as a teenager) to Ridgewood for some shopping, and we would drop in on her father.

Ahh, one memory leads to another. Here is another cherished photo I have of all 4 of my grandparents and my parents at a Frank Sinatra concert:



My paternal grandfather, the mechanic and a German immigrant, is on the left. He was a very good man. He was the first of my grandparents to die (stroke) when I was 16 years old. Next to him is my Irish grandmother.

Next to her, in the back, is my maternal grandfather (Polish). He worked all his life in a US Rubber factory making rubber fire hoses, but his real talent was woodworking and marquetry. He was the only grandparent that I am sad to say I was not close to. He was a very crotchety old man and was always cross and gruff with my grandmother. While he always gave my mother, sister and I money when he won the lottery big a few times, he never gave his love.

On the right, in the back, is my beloved grandmother (Polish). She was the one I loved the most.

Next to her, on the right, are my mother and father. They all strike me as so handsome, especially Fred, my German grandfather.

In the 1940s, the FBI came a knocking at my grandparents home. They were there to question my grandfather, solely because he was of German ancestry. The war was on, and I guess the country was pretty paranoid.

They say cauliflower's hard to grow. I carelessley planted a few seeds last May, not expecting much. And then I discovered that one of my leafy, bowl-shaped plants was hiding this!

It's only about two inches wide, but suddenly, I was VERY interested in growing this little thing. Did some quick online research. You're supposed to time the planting so that they DON'T come to maturity in the heat of summer. Oops. Mine looks like it's doing great despite 2 weeks of very high and humid temperatures. I "blanched" the head, meaning that i loosely folded over some of the leaves to cover the top and protect it from strong sunlight, which can alter the taste and make it turn green.

So exciting!
And then there's this:


I also blanched these. (The definition of "blanched" here is different, meaning to parboil in boiling water for just 3-4 minutes.) Then I froze them. I have more than I can eat at the present moment.

Yesterday I pulled up the little row of spent snow peas and some of the bolting lettuce. I had to plant something that would mature quickly, seeing as how we're already into mid-July. I planted more beans and more cauliflower, which should do even better because it will be coming into its own as temperatures decline, and cauliflower is a cool-season crop.

I've still only had one ripe cherry tomato; the rest are all still green. This is how it always goes. It seems to take forever for green tomatoes to ripen, but once they start,you can barely keep up with picking them daily.

I'm also impatient to see what happens with the soybeans. They are much slower than the other beans,although they're the same size now. They've gotten as far as small flowers. No pods yet. But I should be picking when I pick tomatoes,which means lots of edamame, tomato, corn salads to come.

I need to go vote today on the town budget. The voters have already spoken four times and they have said: We don't want higher taxes.

I want to ride my bike there, just as I rode my bike to the mortgage bank yesterday, but I am feeling so sluggish. I felt like the ride, in this heat, took a lot out of me yesterday. But I still want to do it, because I know I can and it tickles me to get around without the car.

Aside from that, I need to get back to work on the sales brochure project. I need lots of focus to do that. Maybe I will hear from either one of the 2 contract jobs I spoke with recruiters about yesterday. One was editing for a translation company for $20 an hour, the other was a long-term contract writing job for a well-known NY-based life insurance company, paying $47/hr. Huge range in pay, huh?

Next week I want to get my oil changed and have the mechanic at least eyeball stuff like possible frayed belts and air filters, in prep for the start of my driving job July 23. I started using the less expensive Portuguese mechanic my mother uses, rather than the dealer, but he likes to have you drop the car off and then pick it up later, which is really inconvenient as he's not in my town. He lacks the large, air conditioned customer waiting area with free coffee and tea and theater-style seating. Being in his garage brings back fond memories of my grandfather's gas station, where I used to spend time as a child while my grandmother manned the pumps.

All 5 of the "Most Talked About" Entries are Mine! Oh, it just changed....

I see the deposit into my checking account cleared, so today was the day I intended to pay off the mortgage.

It's another warm July day but I headed out early on my bicycle to pedal to the mortgage bank. I was there at 8:30 am and the first customer to arrive.

When I announced I wanted to pay off my mortgage and should we alert the media, the teller looked at me with a tired look on her face, no doubt wondering what she'd done to deserve a wise-***, non-routine customer first thing in the morning.

It took her so long to verify everything with the main office and give me a written confirmation that I was able to tell her a good part of my life story these past few years.

I can tell you it's been much more interesting since I haven't been locked into a soul-scorching office routine 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. I've met more interesting people, have time to savor my everyday stuff, like biking to the bank, and I'm in physically better shape.

The teller was very envious, as she had to extend what was once a 15-year mortgage to a 40-year term. Working full-time as a teller, she confided, doesn't provide enough to live on.

So it will be more of a private celebration, sans press conference. It's a little bittersweet, as my thoughts of this day in the past included the assumption that I would be on "Easy Street" with no mortgage to pay and a full-time salary coming in. Savings into the old retirement account would accelerate and I would reach my $1 million mark in a few years.

Screeeech. Stop Reality check. It's not quite like that, but there's still a chance it could be, with just about any full-time job. I don't need to be making the big bucks. $50K a year would do just fine now.

In other news, everything in the garden seems to have gone into high gear with all this oppressive heat. String beans need picking, A baby cauliflower is forming! Squashes and zucchini growing, collards big, broccoli sending up mini heads good in a stir fry, tomatoes still green, but more of them. Basil threatening to go to seed. Snap peas and lettuce needs to be pulled out to make way for, dare I say it? More beans! Soybeans.... Picking wineberries daily now; froze one baggie, want to freeze more for winter months. Will do the same with the stringbeans.

I love it. My vegetable bin in the fridge is stuffed, and I haven't gone food shopping. Life is good. Things like this make me happy.

I have a paid off house, a thriving vegetable garden, two lovable kitties, a new p/t job. I have a lot to be thankful for.

This morning I was able to begin work on a new sales brochure. It's a big project and very important to the client. I don't usually write sales brochures for them and am wondering what I'll charge. I'm keeping track of my time spent, of course, and will see what the total is. We've worked together long enough that they don't usually ask my fee anymore. When I do press releases, blogs or magazine articles, it usually comes out to $50 an hour. This is already going to take longer than usual but I don't want to shock them with the tab, either.

This afternoon I headed out to pick up shampoo/conditioner for a 3-week product test with Unilever. I answer some questions and return 2 more times; get paid $60.

To consolidate driving trips, after picking up the product, I headed out to a family-owned garden nursery that had a plant sale I couldn't resist: all perennials $1.50 in quart-sized containers. It was about 45 mintues from home, but since I was headed out for the product study stuff, i figured what the heck. Having nice succulents in the hypertufa pots I'm making could help them sell, and I would easily recoup the low cost of the plants.

After that, I headed back home in time to meet the guy who needed a driver.

I wasn't planning on asking him why he needed a driver since I already know from googling his name, but I give him a lot of credit because, after introducing me to his 2 kids, he sat me down at his kitchen table and told me in a very straightforward way about his 2 DUIs. (Yeah I ordinarily wouldn't meet a stranger in their home, but doing so avoided the need to make a separate trip plus i knew his kids would be there plus he does appear to need a driver and this would all be quite an elaborate effort if he had other intentions.)

He told me he also spent 30 days in jail. With the 2nd DUI, he would have had his license back in August, but he was out driving when it was still suspended and as luck would have it, he ran out of gas and the first car that came along was a cop. Driving with a suspended license is an automatic 1 year license revoke. So I guess he figures he can't fool around anymore.

For the past month or so, he's had a friend of his girlfriend drive him to work but she's sort of doing it as a favor and as a result not taking it as seriously as he'd like. For instance, she decided to go to a concert and asked him on the day of the concert if he could take the day off from work. And having junk in the back seat so his kids couldn't sit there. So he said he wanted someone older and more responsible, like me.

So I start July 23, 2 weeks from now. I hope nothing happens to change that; you never know with people. He said the first time he tried doing this last year, no one responded. This time, about a dozen people did. He said he told his employer all about it and they were very supportive, allowing him to string together all his vacation days, sick days and personal days so he wouldn't lose pay, or his job, while serving his 30 days; he also goes to AA 2-3x a week. His drinking problems started after his divorce a few years ago.

So I'm happy I got it, but at the same time, I have some trepidation about how this will all work otu over time. He needs a driver til May 2013; that's 10 months. I had 2 calls from recruiters about contract jobs on my machine when I got home. I'd have to quit driving for him if I got one becus even a contract job would be huge for me, financially. I will feel s***** for doing that but I will give him 2 weeks notice.

I also wonder, even without my getting a job, if driving him will become a hassle/chore on bad weather days this winter. I'll have to be out the door 5 days a week at 7:20 am, and then be at his work at 5 pm.

Plus, with 2 hours of daily driving, albeit locally, it is putting wear and tear on my aging car and replacing it is,,, well LETS NOT GO THERE. So I've known this all the while, it's not just dawning on me now, but I feel I really shouldn't pass this up. It will net me after gas expenses $682 a month for just 10 hours of work a week. That would cover my property taxes with $135 to spare each month. And I don't yet know the status of my remaining unemployment benefits.

That $682 a month is based on gas at $3.75 a gallon. It's about $3.62 around here now and has risen recently. But even if gas goes back up to $4 a gallon, I'd still net $674 a month. With my Honda, I calculate I'd use 7.87 gallons of gas a week, so a .50 difference in price won't make that much difference.

I do hope he's as trustworthy as he comes across and that he pays me what he said he would. I intentionally did not ask WHEN he would pay me when I met him; instead, I wrote him a brief note saying it was nice to meet you and by the way, i forgot to ask you, would you be able to pay me each Friday. This way, when he confirms, i will have his offer in writing/email, just in case I have any trouble. (I do also have the original Craig's List ad.) Dealing with strangers online and having freelanced so long, you really have to be this way.

It's been a busy couple of days.

At noon today I had a conference call with my #1 client to discuss a big and important project they've given me: a sales brochure that will help them win and expand new construction business in the greater Boston area.

I also found a possible new source of long-term income after seeing on Craig's List a guy who needed someone to drive him to work each morning, and bring him home at night, 5 days a week. It just so happens that I live in between him and his work.

After a flurry of emails, we are set to meet face to face tomorrow. I hope I pass muster. The pay seems pretty good, probably only made possible by my Honda's great mileage. He's paying $200 a week, and I carefully calculated my gas expenses and time spent...about 10 hours a week....to discover that I'd be making MORE driving him around than what i made at the publishing job from which I only recently got fired...about $19 an hour! How ironic.

I would be driving him through May 2013. He didn't say why, but it was pretty easy to figure out, as my friend's husband was recently arrested for DUI and they suspended his license for 6 months, during which time my friend had to ferry him to and from work, a royal pain in the butt, according to her. She spent many an hour with her laptop, writing, in Starbucks all across Connecticut.

The guy who advertised revealed his last name in the last message, allowing me to google him and discover that yes, he was arrested not once, but twice for DUI in my town and his town. Well, hmm. Guess I won't be going to happy hour with him.

Anyway, $200 cash a week or $800 a month, is nothing to sneeze at. I told him i was a freelance writer working at home, which is true, but i did not tell him I was still looking for f/t work. I mean, i've been looking for f/t work since 2009, so it has ceased to have much meaning. If I did get a job that prevented me from continuing to drive him, I would try to give him 2 weeks notice to give him time to find someone else.

The other parameter of the job would be to also pick up and drop off his kids (when I was driving him) to and from daycare 3 times a week. He has joint custody. I added that to my gas expenses, and it had a minimal effect.

I really, really hope I get that job. Not sure what else to aim for when I meet him other than being friendly and agreeable. I already told him I am fully insured, have a clean driving record and am reliable.

Two days ago I was mowing the lawn and got stung by a hornet skimming the grass. I half ran, half walked down the Stairway to Heaven when I realized the hornet was following me. I dove into the garage and closed the door. I immediately took an antihistamine and after 3 days, the swelling and redness have subsided somewhat.

Today I deposited some checks at the bank and returned some DVDs at the library...after riding my bike there! No gas burned! I love being able to do that. About a half hour of riding, but that includes a major hill, so I got some high intensity heart-thumping in, too.

I've applied for a few other jobs. Another I really want is editing a variety of online stuff for a start-up website that can't afford to pay much. Not sure what that means, but volume and ongoing work could make up for that.

I am feeling upset once again that I haven't heard anything from the PR agency I interviewed with 2 weeks ago. She had said she was interviewing all last week and would likely administer a writing test. I havent heard a word from her.

I got $35 in Amazon gift cards from my online forum participation, plus a $10 BP gas card. Love the gas card.

I did laundry today and it's hanging out to dry outside.

I've begun picking stringbeans and wax beans in earnest now, and will don my hip boots momentarily in search of wineberries, which are also ripening.



I made a yummy three-bean salad with the beans and canned kidney beans and chick peas, plus diced onion, oil/vinegar.

I checked my checking account online and see that the $6,000 I transferred from a mutual fund account is there and "in process."

So I called my mortgage bank and asked them for the exact payoff amount. Since that figure will vary depending on which day i pay off, I decided to wait until this Wednesday to walk into my local branch.

I had a balance of $6,122 but will only need to pay the bank $2,246 as I had $3,865 in escrow and will save myself $1,969 by paying it all off on Wednesday.

Once I do the payoff, the bank will mail me some paperwork. I will have to pay my town $53, they say, for release of the mortgage and let them know to send the next property tax bill, which is due end of July, to me directly, and from now on. That amount is $3,287 and the bill comes twice a year.

I asked the mortgage bank the total amount of money I've paid in interest in the 17 years I've had my home. I prepaid something the majority of time.

The amount I paid in interest since inception of the loan in December 1995: $82,354.

Then I asked him how much I WOULD have paid if I had made no prepayments and just did the usual fixed monthly payment for the entire 30 years of the life of the loan. This number is something of an estimate and doesn't include the first 2 years prior to a refinance I did. But his figures was $127,419.

That means I saved more than $45,000 on interest payments by religiously prepaying the mortgage, anywheres from an extra $100 to $400 a month, except for periods of unemployment.

Nice, huh?

I'm excited and anxious to get this behind me on Wednesday.

Since being fired, I've been able to get some much appreciated moral support from you, my online friends, as well as a few friends closer to home. I was advised by two people to drink heavily. Not really my style, but I did enjoy a bottle of Beck's.

After the heat of the day was over yesterday evening, I did get out to clean up the garage some, as well as the basement, two cool places to be.

Next step? I will wait and watch to see when the $6,000 of my International Equity Fund which I sold yesterday is deposited into my checking account. When it is, I'll call the bank to get the exact amount it will take to pay off the mortgage. I may even take a ride down there and do it in person, alert the media and make a public announcement.

At the least, as a feel good measure, I will get from the bank the total amount of mortgage interest I actually paid these last 17 years and how much I WOULD have paid if I had just made normal payments over 30 years. Then I may frame it. My big milestone achievement.

I applied for a few Craig's List jobs this morning. Nothing too exciting but money is money.

During the past week, I've been reading a lot about hypertufa and educating myself on technique. While my first batch was a waste because i used the wrong kind of cement, the 2nd batch was much improved. My 3rd batch was just 2 pots: I broke an experimental one poured into a basekt when i sset about removing the mold/basket, but the other one is the best one yet; it has some very nice vertical lines on it because that's what the plastic pot had that I poured it in.

I'm thinking that if I could sell perennials this spring, I could probably sell some hypertufa pots too, both with and without succulents in them. I found a nursery, also on Craig's List, not too nearby but worth the trip, that has a sale on perennials now for $1 each. For prospective buyers without much imagination, sticking a $1 succulent in the pot would really enhance the pot's beauty, and I could mark up the price a little bit.

I don't think the peak of summer is a good time to sell any more perennials, but I'd like to post them for sale again in late August, with the hypertufa pots. By that time I should have a nice little collection of various shapes and sizes.

So the garage will become Hypertufa Central. Curing takes a good 3 weeks, with another week needed for de-liming the pots. So it's a process.

Today i bought a $1 children's ball, the plastic kind about the size of a bowling ball, which I intend to use as a mold for a cement garden sphere, the kind you might see scattered aboutg an old English garden. I saw a write-up about making these online. You cut a roughly 2-inch diameter hole in the ball at the spot where the inflatable opening is. You then pour in the concrete mix, let it dry, and then peel away the plastic ball when ready to de-mold.

the only thing I'm wondering is how hard it will be to fill the ball with cement once you cut itm open and deflate itm.

After all that happened, I needed to take a break from my thoughts and get out of the house today. I've had all the windows and doors closed tight and shades drawn for a week now, due to the awful heat. I come and go through the basement/garage now, so as not to let in all that hot air through the front door.

I left around mid-day to see if Great Clips was still having a $6.99 haircut special. it would be a nice treat and pick-me-up. They weren't. I left.

I filled up the gas tank at $3.61 a gallon, pretty much the lowest price you'll find around here, then I headed for Lowe's where I picked up more peat moss and perlite, spending $0 cus i had a gift card. These are needed supplies for the hypertufa.

Then on impulse I hit Good Will, remembering I had to throw away an old pair of jeans a few weeks ago after they developed holes in the crotch. I didn't absolutely have to buy these, but I did spend $6 on a replacement pair that was pretty comfortable.

I also browsed Xpect Discounts to see if they had any other interesting cheap plastic things I could use as molds. I saw one or two bowls that would work well, but didn't want to spend $2.99! How cheap am i?. I think I have enough to play with at home.

Oh...one more development on the job situation. I got another email from the owner of the company. He said we're giving you 2 weeks of severance pay. Wow. I hadn't expected anything from a p/t job I'd only had for 6 months. I thought that was pretty generous, but i know that the main reason they are offering that is becus they are also sending me paperwork they want me to sign, not to reveal trade secrets, etc.

However, what bothered me is that he said, while your offer to "go home now" could be construed as a resignation, we are often generous in situations like this and are giving you the severance, etc.

So the editor in chief told him that I offered to leave. I wrote back and told him I would never leave voluntarily becus i need the job too much, that my only other source of income is my freelance writing. (I didn't mention my unemployment benefits; that's private and nothing he needs to know.)

However, when he said my remark could be taken as a resignation, that alarmed me becus Dept of Labor would nix my remaining benefits if they thought i had quit. I never offered to "go home now" as the editor in chief apparently told him, but in the context of her continuing to attack my character and performance, it was like, what else can i do, what do you want from me? And so what I said was, do you want me to leave?

She said no, but then 5 minutes later, she said "You can leave...now."

I had a brief conversation with a DOL rep today who informed me that I have to have a hearing with them which won't take place til July 24, and until that hearing my current benefits will be suspended, pending resolution. I think that's really unfair since my current benefits are related to work I did prior to this job and has nothing to do with it. However, they don't see it that way and she said that yes, depending on the outcome, it could jeopardize my remaining benefits.

So, worst case scenario could be even worse than I thought. I could possibly lose not only the p/t job, but my remaining unemployment benefits, which, while reduced a while back quite a bit, would still last me a good while.

I think I have a pretty strong case now with several mitigating factors to cite, including 1) the fact that i don't think employers usually give severance to anyone they fire; it's usually something given when you're laid off. 2) Employers also don't usually offer to give a positive reference for someone their subordinates fire. 3) I told the editor in chief before I was hired that I didn't know quark or filemaker, the 2 software programs we used daily in this job. I even asked if there was a user manual or guide i could take home and study up on prior to starting the job so i could be better prepared, but she said no. 4) I can also cite the high turnover for this position, and I have no doubt it's due to the EIC's difficult personality. 5) Finally, we've been working all along with obsolete software and hardware, and even with a recent computer upgrade (they bought secondhand computers), they are still several generations behind the current versions of everything. So I really feel the equipment handicapped our ability to do the job. They were constantly gerry-rigging things to try to get it to do what they wanted it to do.

When I was writing about retirement planning for a living, one of our favorite metaphors was the three-legged stool: Each leg of the stool represented one facet of your retirement savings plan: personal savings, Social Security and investment earnings.

So in my head I likened my attempt to build steady income to my own version of a very wobbly three-legged stool, which in my mind consisted of:

1. My freelance work, erratic and impossible to predict

2. Dwindling unemployment benefits

3. My part-time, low-paying job with a publisher that's barely getting by and has the building up for sale

Well, a leg broke off the stool today. I was fired.

It all started with an air conditioner. I went into work as usual, arriving at 8:30 am. and was unable to sign in on the time clock that resides on another employee's computer because it was asking for a password which I don't have. There are 5 of us who work in an open office environment in a very large room. No one was there besides me except the editor in chief (EIC) at the other end of the room. I walked halfway down toward her and called out that I wasn't able to sign in. She said what? I can't hear you. The room is cooled by a very loud, in the wall AC.

I repeated what I had just said in a louder voice. She came down and entered the password, then returned to her desk without saying anything, but looking angry.

I went to my desk and started opening various programs up to get started for the day. The EIC came over to ask me about a file I'd been having problems with the day before and directed me drag it over to the master file.

I use a Mac at work which is a little different than a PC. When i tried to drag it, it didn't appear it was working right, and rather than take a chance and lose any data, I decided to ask her for help.

I walked over to her desk and politely waited for her to acknowledge my presence before speaking, which she didn't do. I waited, then started speaking and she said I startled her. She looked angry. I asked my question about what I was doing and she came over, visibly annoyed, and showed me what to do.

As she got up from my desk, she said she had really had it up to here with me, that she didn't like my attitude and that i was very rude. !!! Then she started walking back to her desk! I mean, you don't just say something like that to someone and then just walk away. I said S., would you like to talk about this?

She didn't answer. I don't know how anyone could just sit there and not address it. As you know from earlier posts, I've been having my own issues with her and I thought this might be a good time to try to talk it out. So I got up and went over to her again. She was now sitting at her desk.

I said again, S, would you like to talk about this? She started going into how i was slow to pick up on things, that I was stubborn, rude and that i had an attitude. None of which is true! All of which came as a complete surprise to me. And I have never been rude or taken an attitude with her.

I asked her how I had been rude. She said, like just now, with the AC. I said S., that was a case of your not being able to hear me over the air conditioner. How was that rude? She said angrily, how could you not know that I couldn't hear you? How many times have I run the air conditioner?

I just really was not getting her. It just seemed like she was so angry that she pulled that out of thin air. I mean, you think that was rude??? I said S., I don't think that was a very big deal. I think you're over-reacting. Maybe the wrong thing to say??

It seemed that no matter what i said or how i responded, she just got angrier. At one point, I asked her, would you like me to leave. She said no, I want you to learn things better so I don't have to keep telling you things, etc. She said I should know after working here how many months how to do what I'd asked her for help with this morning. Then there was more back and forth.

She was still sitting at her desk and getting more and more agitated as we spoke. I was really taken aback by how quickly things escalated. At one point i said, S., please, you need to calm down. It was at that point that she stood up quickly, standing very close to me. I honestly thought she was going to hit me. She said, "You can leave now."

And so i did.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't upset. Yes, I wanted to leave, but hadn't planned to until I found another job.

But wait, there's more.

When I got home, I decided to send a brief note to S.'s boss, the owner of the company. I do care about my reputation, and I was afraid that S. was going to say all sorts of nasty things about me. so I told him my version of the story, briefly, and also told him I felt that S. was condescending, disrespectful (due to her earlier comments about me being either "lazy" or a "plagarist") and a poor manager.

I wasn't expecting to get a reply, but I did. He told me he "understood the challenges" and offered to write a positive reference for me if I wanted.

I was a little flabbergasted. He obviously knows what she's like. But he's depending on her to get the job done and the books published. So unlikely he would do anything about the firing except maybe talk to her about it.

I accepted his invitation for a reference. I've never said more than a "Good morning" or "hello" to him if our paths crossed in the kitchen. But I imagine he was kept up to date on my progress and that of my counterpart, and as I've mentioned before, the EIC was very happy we were as far ahead as we were for this time of year.

Anyway, i thought it would be great if the company owner could post his reference on my Linked In profile, where S. could quite possibly see it. Wouldn't that be satisfying? I mean, what kind of statement does that make if you fire someone and your own boss gives the person you fired a recommendation?

Aside from that short-lived satisfaction, I am now most definitely in a situation I call, My Back Against the Wall, financially.

You keep waiting for things to get better and instead I'm going backwards. I haven't heard back from the PR agency woman as she had said she'd be interviewing all this week. It would be great to get that job, but I have learned not to count on anything.

Last week I also turned down an opportunity to interview for another p/t research job because it only paid $12/hr. I regret that now.

Oh, how I loved this movie.

If you haven't seen it, it's a Masterpiece Theatre type mini series made in 1979. I'm glad I rented these because I was able to watch all the episodes very quickly and not have to wait. It's addictive!

I had a sense that someone was going to get killed, one of the two brothers that fell in love with Christina. It was the one she married. And then I jumped ahead and wondered if Christina was going to end up marrying Mark, the other brother, but she ended up (surprise!) with Dick. But Mark married Christina's best friend, Dorothy, so it all turned out well in the end.

The heat wave continues and I have yet to turn on the AC. For years, I've run around closing shutters, drapes and blinds on the east side and then doing the same to the south and west as the sun rose in the sky, but it never really made a huge difference. I've also been running fans, including 2 fans in the attic.

But today I discovered quite by accident that the house stayed remarkably cool (75 degrees) if I shut up all the windows and closed off the doors to both the sun room and the family room. The house was really quite cool today when i got home from work. Usually it would be stifling. I think I underestimated how much the heat from the family room filters into the rest of the house. Even though I often would close off the sun room, I think the family room would heat up in its own right because all that hot air would be in the garage and just rise up above, to the family room.

I finished mowing the front lawn tonight in the sweltering heat. We're supposed to get rain by sunrise.

Thus far, I've had one ripe cherry tomato. The snow peas are pretty well spent in this heat, and the same goes for the lettuce, though I am still eating the greens; I don't mind a bit of bitterness. Tiny stringbeans have formed. Soybeans growing more slowly and haven't flowered yet.

I found an unwanted visitor in the garden: woodchuck! There were 2 burrows I filled in last year; dumping used cat litter really works well. I shall have to repeat the treatment first thing tomorrow. The dastardly fellow has already shorn my autumn joy sedum.

I made some hypertufa pots 2 days ago and they're taking a while to dry in the garage. It will be 3 weeks to cure so by the time I plant, we'll be halfway through the season. But I've wanted to try making them for a long time and it's very easy. I had a false start using the wrong kind of cement mix. Can't wait to remove the mold; maybe in the morning they will be hard enough to do so.

I'm hoping I can make extras and sell them along with the perennials. I remember one woman selling them and she was charging $50 and up for them! Outrageous when the ingredients to make them are so cheap.

I continue to work part-time at the small publisher. I've been there since January, working 2 days in the office and 1 day at home.

The editor in chief is becoming more of a problem. While we seem to have pleasant enough conversations when we're talking about her dogs, her family cabin in the Catskills or her Irish heritage, she takes on a very disrespectful and condescending tone when it comes to the work I'm doing.

It's hard to describe the nature of the work I'm doing, which requires online research of hundreds of different magazines half the time, while the other half the time I'm making updates to Quark and FileMaker listings which contain information about these magazines.

I don't think there's been a week I've been there where there hasn't been some change in the hardware, software, or procedures we're asked to follow. The work, while not rocket science, requires the utmost concentration because there are hundreds of places where, if you click the wrong box in filemaker or fail to mark something a certain way, it messes things up.

On top of that, there was just one day of "group" training of me and my counterpart (I'll call her Delia), who started the job when I did. After that, the editor in chief and another long-time woman, I'll call her Sally, would respond to specific questions, problems or issues that arose as they occurred with either of us. The problem was that when they worked with Delia on some situation, I wasn't always listening in on the conversation and so i didn't get the benefit of what they were telling her. And vice versa.

So yeah, the editor in chief, who has made it well known that she's been there for 25 years, is generally impatient, tense and snippy. There are tons of little rules and procedures involved in this job and it can be hard to remember the "right" way to do everything. So on any number of occasions, when she has to tell me how to do something more than once, she will ALWAYS take the opportunity to tell me how many times previously she told me the very same thing. As if doing so is going to improve my retention. On the contrary, it makes it harder, becus her obvious annoyance is a distraction.

The first time this happened, I just looked at her and didn't say anything, startled that she was so rude. I felt like she were addressing a 10-year-old.

The icing on the cake occurred last week. I was reviewing notes she had made on some new magazine listings I had written. She actually suggested that I was either "lazy" or "plagarizing" descriptions of the magazines.

Here's what happened.

We are working with ancient equipment and software. The company doesn't have any money to spend. I am using a small, 12-inch diameter monitor and need to have no less than 6 windows open at any time on the monitor: this includes the master quark file, the filemaker file, the website, the editor follow up form and the category page. Toggling back and forth and minimmizing screens is time-consuming. So what I had done to cause her nasty remarks was copy descriptions of a magazine directly from their website to my quark file, where I found it easy to rewrite the description when I could just look at what they wrote right in front of me. Unfortunately, there were two listings where I thought that I had already rewritten the description, when in fact i had not. A very unfortunate mistake, but certainly not laziness or plagarisim, either. Hence her comments.

I've worked as a writer for nearly 30 years, and I am neither. But i was so pissed when i read her notes that once again, i chose to completely ignore them and not say anything, even to defend myself.

Since then, I have fantasized about getting even. I happened to have another job interview on Friday, a place where I would love to work and which pays substantially better than the $15 an hour I'm making now. The woman I interviewed with actually told me the range she usually pays writers, from $30 to $45 an hour. It was really refreshing to talk to a prospective employer who was candid about pay instead of playing the game of trying to force me to name a price so they can determine how little they can pay me.

So my fantasy was that i get the job i interviewed for and then I can email the editor in chief, saying largely what I've said here, and announcing my departure, effective immediately. I would copy the people the editor in chief reports to. It would be a huge embarrassment to her.

From conversations I've had, she's like this to others. I mentioned here before that Delia, my counterpart in this job, who i like very much, told me she nearly quit herself last summer but was talked out of it by another woman who had our job previously (and left herself after 6 months on the job). In her case, the editor in chief was getting on her case...a lot..because she was working too slow and needed to work faster and complete more listings.

I know, I know, don't burn your bridges and all that, but i don't intend to make a name for myself in publishing and I don't think she could hurt me. What's frustrating is that I've built a career and enjoyed success, awards, kudos, etc. over the years. So when an editor who hardly knows me immediately accuses me of being either lazy or a plagarizer, it REALLY ticks me off.

The woman is so arrogant that when we email editors at the publications we are researching, in search of certain information that we can't find on their websites, she wouldn't even allow us to use our own name as the signature. She made us use HER name and title immediately below our name. Her reasoning was, being that she's been in the business for so long, some editors "might" recognize her name and there'd therefore be a better chance that they respond to us. Needless to say, using her signature with my name on an email I sent caused a lot of confusion, which was evident when various people would email me back, often addressing me by her name and so on. And here she's telling us she wants us to try to build "relationships" with various magazine editors when they don't know who they're talking to.

There have been any number of times when I've overheard her remark to Sally about how well we're doing in terms of progress, and listings written by me and Delia, especially when compared to where they were in previous years at this time. (They establishede weekly quotas we are supposed to meet as to the number of listings we complete.) Apparently there was always a lot of hair-pulling and last minute scrambles to get the books done. Not once, however, has the editor thought to address me and Delia directly to say hey, guys, you're doing a good job. Thanks.

In my last entry, I posted a simple line chart showing the ups and downs of my net worth over the past 17 years.

Ceejay remarked that it was "astounding" that I'd managed to maintain my net worth through what will be 3 years of underemployment this September.

I thought I'd analyze how I've been able to do that.

First, I'll define "underemployment." 2.5 years is a long time to go without steady full-time job, especially when you have a mortgage and all the bills that go with that.

Here's a rough synopsis of my employment history since 2009.

Mid-September 2009: I'm laid off. I was home sick with a bad cold and my boss, accompanied by an HR person, called to deliver the bad news. It took me completely by surprise that day, although the company had gone through two previous rounds of major, sweeping layoffs.

From there on, I focus on both finding another job as well as developing my freelance income. Truth be told, I have just a few regular clients, and the work is highly sporadic. I only average about $5,ooo to $6,000 a year in freelance writing.

March 2010: i get a f/t contract job with a start-up website. It pays $25/hr. It lasted 6 weeks before they let me go and later they pulled the site down to restructure, regroup and retry. (It's still not up.)

April 2010: I lucked out and after taking an exam to be a US Census Bureau worker, I got the job, which was probably 25 or 30 hours a week on average, paid $19.75 an hour + gas reimbursements, on which I actually MADE money becus i drive a Civic, and lasted through early August. It was an interesting experience.

September 2010: This time, I really lucked out and got a writing job thru a headhunter with a big, well-known financial services company. It was full-time but a contract job. It paid more than I've ever made before, $50 an hour. Or, on an annual basis, $104,000. Oddly, I have worked much harder on jobs that paid much less, and I found the job not that difficult, once again demonstrating that you don't have to work harder to make more money, only smarter.

Throughout all of this, of course, I'm continuously looking for work of all kinds (freelance, contract or salaried) and submitting my resume. I spent about 2 years doing online surveys, averaging as much as $100 a month, before I decided it just wasn't worth the time invested. I've also regularly done market research focus groups, product testing and even medical research studies involving blood draws or other stuff. I've been a poll worker in my town's local elections.

To generate money, I have also sold personal possessions on Craig's List, including firewood from my land and even perennials that I dug up and divided. I sold what little gold jewelery I had. I didn't consider this a hardship and am perfectly happy to wear my Technibond (sterling silver overlaid in 14K gold) which looks like the real thing.

After the well-paying contract job ending December 31, 2010, I went through another long period of nothing coming up, and i relied on my freelance and unemployment to get by.

November 2011: I get some contract work with a small publisher for 2 months paying $15 an hour. It's better than nothing.

January 2012: The same publisher where I did the contract work invited me to work for them on a more permanent basis, still at $15/hr, but it would be 25 hours a week of steady work as a p-t employee, which means they pay a portion of payroll taxes, leaving me with a little more left in my pocket. The company is just barely getting by, not making much of a profit and the building they occupy is up for sale. No one is sure if the company will survive if and when the building sells.

So that's been the employment picture these past 2.5 years and it's pretty much where I stand today.

The fact that I've been able to maintain my net worth during this time is something i attribute to a bunch of things:

1. When i bought the house in 1995, i was lucky that the market was not over-priced the way it was in 2007. Of course, if it had been, I probably wouldn't have been buying.

2. Being risk-averse, I bought "less house" than my realtor said i could and i also put down a huge down payment of 45%. I did this becus as a single person, i didn't want to get in trouble with huge monthly payments if something should happen to my income. And "something," (a layoff), happened fully 5 TIMES since 1995. That's 4 layoffs and 1 company closure. So my monthly payments of currently $1,150, which includes the property taxes, is doable, and a lot less, i think, than what other homeowners pay.

3. Aside from a well-timed home purchase, I was not afraid to cut way back in my lifestyle when i lost my job. My basic cutbacks (a long time ago now) were eliminating cable TV, the cell phone, Netflix, all paid magazine subscriptions, all vacations, all paid forms of entertainment except the very occasional $2 movie theater, all eating out except an occasional fast food fix, always off the $1 menu and very little spent on gifts. (My family understands.)

There are times I feel a bit deprived, but largely i don't. I have created different release valve mechanisms to ensure those kinds of self-defeating feelings don't build up.

for instance, I got into credit card rewards in a big way. While I started off systematically applying for cards with the biggest ($200) cash rewards last year, this year I branched out into cards that say, gave you $250 in gift cards after you spent $2,000 in 3 months. I've used those gift cards in a variety of ways, probably an equal mix of stuff I actually need, like food or gas, as well as discretionary spending like some clothes and other items for the house.

The online surveys functioned in the same way; they ensured I wouldn't go on a spending binge due to pent-up frustrations. While I don't do the online surveys anymore except for Pinecone, I do still particpate in 4 online forums. In two of them, you're just asked to participate in brief surveys once a week and you're rewarded with $15 in gift cards. So that's $30 a month in amazon gift cards right there. In the BP forum, i recently got a $25 BP gas card, which thrilled me.

It's been easy for me to adjust to no spending on entertainment because i've always liked to do things like hiking/walking, kayaking, and bike riding. If I get together with a friend these days, it's usually limited to a cup of tea (or iced tea,these days). Many of my friends are either naturally frugal like I am or required to be that way due to their own circumstances. So I am not often pressured by other people in my life who want to go out and eat at a fancy restaurant.

I sometimes watch a few favorite TV shows free on Hulu. And I rent A LOT OF free DVDs from the library. It's getting hard now to find something I haven't seen!

I also spend a lot of time working and maintaining my yard and a large vegetable garden and giving my 2 cats a lot of TLC. I hope to picking wineberries soon and freezing them for winter use, along with tomatoes and homemade pesto using my basil plants.

So there you have it. What's been killing me all along is the crrently $562 I'm paying each month for COBRA. Having benign MS, I don't have many other choices, because the pre-existing condition would not likely be covered if I switched plans. My best hope would be to find another salaried position that included medical as a benefit, but salaried positions, folks, seem to have gone the way of the dodo bird. I suspect they won't return en masse until the jobs market fixes itself and the pool of job-seekers shrinks.

I had toyed with the idea of dropping the COBRA (or waiting for it to run out, in June 2013), taking a great risk by going uninsured for 6 months so that the state plan would pick me up. Except that while it used to be "somewhat" more affordable, it now is, well, not so much. the monthly premiums are $442, or about $100 less than what I'm paying now each month.

I do have one medication,the Copaxone, which I take for the MS. It's extremely expensive (an injectable) and not something I could purchase without health insurance, although my neurologist said the pharma company would probably give me the meds for free becus i've been on it for so long (since 2000) and they want to keep me as a customer i presume so that when i do return to work, i stay on the copaxone.

Big picture bright spots: 1. I'm about 8 months away from paying off the mortgage.

2. At some point in my future, when the housing market recovers, I will likely sell my high maintenance house and buy a small condo. I would pay 100$ cash for the condo so no mortgage and I would probably be able to pocket an additional $50K profit.

3. I'm fortunate to have a skill (copywriting) that lends itself to working at home and is something i can do all my life, even, presumably, if my MS ever worsens.

Big picture challenges:
1. I have a chronic illness that requires a very expensive drug and future prognosis is always uncertain.

2. I am in my early 50s and become more unemployable with each passing year as employers naturally favor young 'uns. I often wonder if I'll EVER find another salaried position.

3. I do worry about taking care of aging parents, particuarly my mother. I have a sister, but she's so uninterested in playing an active role in the family I pretty much feel like an only child when it comes to stepping up to tthe plate and doing what needs to be done.

4. I think most of my dating days are behind me. I wish I weren't looking at my future as a single person, but it's just the way it worked out. Let's face it. I don't look at all like I did when I was 30, although people say I look young for my age and I'm not hugely fat.

5. Getting back to money talk, one of the worst things about being unemployed, as far as I'm concerned, is that I've been unable to contribute a dime to a 401(k) or my SEP/IRA for my freelance work and while I have taxable savings that could be transferred to my roth IRA account, I'm reluctant to do so when I have only so much money left. so I'm behind in my retirement savings goals by 2.5 years. It's really unclear if I'll ever achieve my original goal of $1 million, or the comfy lifestyle with travel that I had envisioned.

Now, the goal has morphed more into a question of, can i get by and pay my bills until I'm of retirement age and can get onto Social Security at age 67? That's a big shift in thinking.

Among other questionable uses of my time, I created a rudimentary line chart some time ago. It tracks my net worth each January for the past 17 years, from 1996 through 2012.

I bought my house in December 1995 and used a good chunk of my savings as a 45% down payment. So 1996 seemed like a good time to begin the chart since my life savings were the lowest they'd been in a while.

What's interesting to me is how much I can read into this chart about the ebb and flow of my financial life, my career, unemployment and a few windfalls.

Let's take a look....



As you can see at the bottom left of the line, there was a nice, steady, upward trajectory in net worth from about $67,000 in 1996 to $221,000 in 1999. Those were the latter half of the good money days when I worked as a financial copywriter for a firm that sold mutual funds and annuities, but they were also high stress years with a long commute and not much of a social life. I socked away the maximum 15% in my 401k each year, contributed the maximum to my IRA and saved a few thousand more each year in taxable savings.

From 1999 to 2000, you can see an even steeper climb in net assets. It was in 1999 that I lucked out and sold some stock options. My two grandmothers both passed away around that time, around a year or so apart. I inherited from both.

From 2000 through 2003, I didn't seem to make much headway. Maybe because, burned out and tired of the long commute and demanding hours, I left the well-paying job in 1999 for a start-up financial publisher in my hometown, only to see that job, and its income, go kaput when the company folded a year-and-a-half later. A period of unemployment followed while I tried to make a go of freelancing full-time, as well as full-time, but low-paying work and some consulting.

From 2003 through 2007 there's another sharp climb in net asset, from $227,000 in 2003 to $437,000 in 2007. Those were bull market years, plus I was working full-time with no interruptions. (Even if you're unemployed for just a brief period between jobs, changing jobs has its penalty since many employers won't let you begin contributing to a 401(k) for 6 months.)

The big drop in 2009 was of course due to the stock market crash. That was also the year I was laid off. But as you can see, I've recovered net worth nicely in the past few years.

This is the big picture snapshot. There were a lot more fluctuations in the months between each January. My highest net worth, not really reflected in the line chart, was $525,000 in May 2011.

I was down about $25,000 in January 2012 compared to January 2011, but I did withdraw about $14,000 for vinyl siding last summer and I threw at least $15,000 at my mortgage around the same time. Because I'm not working steadily, I've been unable to replenish the funds taken out, which bothers me.

I've also plotted out my net worth on a monthly basis, and that reveals even more nuances than the year by year chart.

My dilemma about what to do today sort of solved itself when the woman i do legal editing for asked me to edit her new website. I spent a few hours editing, and offered quite a few unsolicited, yet i think valuable ideas for further marketing herself (with my help, of course). This included blog posts, some PR and a vest pocket, leave-behind brochure about her services.

I'd love to get some extra work from her. She asked about my rates for the above, and I really made them much lower than what i charge my main real estate client. The difference is becus my real estate client is a corporation whereas this woman, a social worker aside from the guardian ad litem work she does, works for herself, so it's coming out of her pocket. But she won't be issuing me a 1099 so that will help make for it.

I want her to consider giving me work on an ongoing basis, not just as a periodic, one-time event, so I needed to make my prices reasonable.

Oh yes, the eggs. In between this morning's hail storm and this afternoon's thunderstorm, we had a brief hiatus, and I slipped out to run down to the farm. I scored some eggs from their help yourself system, basically a large cooler on their front porch. There were maybe 4 dozen eggs there and a small box where you put your money. $3 i consider a bargain for locally laid eggs. We'll see how good they are tomorrow at breakfast!

I picked two cups of loosely packed basil leaves from my plants and for dinner whipped up a batch of homemade pesto sauce. Normally I don't cook anything (is that the way you're supposed to do it?) but since I decided I would freeze the leftover portion, I blanched the basil leaves for just 1 minute. It seemed a lot less sharp/pungent than how it usually is, but still very good.

After work i went for a leisurely walk around the block where I saw a rainbow. Where's my pot of gold??

We had an early morning (7:30 am) storm here, even hail. It's probably beaten down the bean seedlings.

The storm has passed but this was an entirely free day for me. I don't know what to do with myself! I had been toying with the idea of going kayaking, but it's wet, damp, and still very dark out there, plus thunder is still rumbling off in the distance.

For the same reason, I don't think i want to do weeding; I'll just get eaten up by mosquitoes.

I don't think I want to start the hypertufa until I'm read to buy the concrete and actually do it on the same day, because in this humid climate, I've found rock hard bags of unused concrete in my basement.

It's so dark and wet outside I'm disinclined to do much outdoors.

So...what to do, what to do.... about the only thing that appeals to me right now is maybe later i'll venture over to Cherry Grove Farm (don't you love that name?) and see if they have any eggs.

I'll likely read my simplicity book some more.

My attitudes about buying things have really changed in the past year. In fact, it's getting harder and harder to spend all these gift cards i've accumulated.

Case in point. i visited Home Goods a few weeks ago to try to spend a $25 gift card. You don't know how long I browsed the store. Twice down every row. Couldn't find anything I had to have. They must've thought I was trying to shop-lift or something. I did finally settle upon an attractive blue glass bottle wrapped in sisal, and a long, rectangular box made in India from a pinkish stone.

But then I reconsidered. I mean, what was I going to DO with these things. I would find a place for them and then they'd sit. Forever.

But darn. I had to use the gift card on something. So this a.m. I decided to head for TJ Maxx, which is owned by the same company as Marshall's and Home Goods. I figured I would get more use out of clothes and I do seem to have a shortage of presentable tops and bottoms.

I pretty much did the same thing at TJ Maxx as I did at Home Goods. Scourred the racks. Hit the dressing room I think 3 times. I finally settled on a pair of black capris, the kind made for working out, but so comfortable. They could be worn to my office. They were just $10, so I still had $15 to play with. I carefully searched through the shoes and didn't see anything remotely intersting. Then I browsed all the home decor aisles.

I was pretty well set on a largish yellow glass ball covered with macramed rope or something. It had a nautical feel to it. It would go perfectly with the goldish slipper chair I don't really care for, and the creamy yellow vase in my family room. I thought I would get a cute set of colored pencils carved out of wood, for my sister at Xmas.

Ahh, but then it hit me again. Why, I asked myself, am i buying more or less useless things? How will this improve my life? What purpose will these serve?

Reminding myself of my under-employment status (not that I could forget) I tried to think in more practical terms. So I spent the remaining $15 on gourmet imported food and toiletry items, the kinds of things I would never spend money on ordinarily, but since I had to spend it on SOMEthing in the store, i figured food would be a good choice. I would benefit in a tangible way. So i got some very interesting pasta sauce ($6 for the jar!) and some special honey (also $6) imported from Germany. Oh, yes, and a bar of soap with healthy ingredients.

It must have taken me 2 hours just to buy that stuff.

Then I did my usual grocery shopping and got tons of fruit, including nectarines and plums and organic grapes, plus some yummy dark chocolate-covered frozen bananas I'd never tried before. Also got a rotisserie chicken, which I chowed down on for lunch.

Dinner was light, just a large salad with greens from my garden (amazing they haven't bolted yet) and cucumber, tomato and croutons.

There are lots of green cherry tomatoes on my plants but nothing's ripe yet, and the one broccoli plant that had formed a small head, well, i didn't pick it soon enough and in the heat it's started to open up and bloom, so too late to eat it. I have a ton of snow peas in the fridge i need to do something with.

I learned to lift up the hay I've mulched with under the broccoli becus i discovered that's where the slugs hang out during the day and it's much esier to grab and fling them far away, across the lawn, now rather than early evening, when the mosquitos are biting.

So i was looking for slugs under the hay and found a cute little toad who had submerged himself in the soil so just the top of him showed when i lifted the hay, Toads eat slugs. I carefully replaced the hay.

Yesterday I went to Home Depot to get a washer for my garden hose, which is leaking. Of course you have to buy a dozen washers at a time, not just one, but they're only a buck or so. A young man approached me and talked me into a free, at home consultation for kitchen cabinet refinishing/refacing. I had always been curious how much that would cost, and i figured the kid probably made a commission based on how many people he signed up.

Well, i rethought that today. The appointment was to be Tuesday, but what was i thinking? I'm in no position to act on that, and it would be a temptation to do something if the price seemed reasonable. So I called him today to cancel it. Like I said, i did it more for the kid than for myself. Young people are finding it hard to land a job as it is. But i have to think of myself too, and kitchen redos aren't in the plan for 2012. Plus, the house is a MESS and I'd have to do some cleaning if i knew they were coming over.

I got psyched up about making some hypertufa troughs and pots. I've read about it before and had a strong interst, but the blogs I'd read didn't seem quite detailed enough to convince me I could do it. Then I came across a blog today and she had both step by step instructions and photos. It seems pretty easy. I went looking around the house for the right sized containers. You have to nest one inside the other with about an inch of space in between.

I'm all set with my containers, I think, but have to return to Home Depot and get some Portland cement, perlite and peat moss. the cement, i fear, is going to weight a ton. That's going to be the biggest pain, just getting the stuff home.

But I am excited to try it and will do it either tomorrow or next weekend.

Well, I'm feeling pretty good that I filled up my heating oil tank this past week. I may have mentioned, the price I paid per gallon ($2.96) is the lowest I've paid since February, 2010, when I paid $2.44 a gallon. The highest I ever paid was $3.52 a gallon, last year. What a killer.

So i should be set for winter's cold at least into December, perhaps early January. Having a full oil tank makes me feel "secure" in the same way that a well-stocked refrigerator does.

Got paid $350 for some freelance work this week. Nice. It,and the $175 I made as a poll worker will help offset the cost of the heating oil.

I did a quick preliminary tally of my June expenses and see that I'm ahead $200, income vs. expenses. Funny how it works...I often feel I make just what I need to make to cover expenses, and not much more. Although I'm not religious, it does remind me often of the bibilical saying about how the birds always finding a way to get the food they need.

I finished up my publishing/editorial work early afternoon and now my time is my own until next Wednesday. Got a request from the Massachusetts woman I've done some legal editing for to edit her website. I LOVE getting unexpected new business from existing clients.

I was going to head out to Trader Joe's this afternoon to beat weekend crowds, but, I don't know, it's still humid and so unpleasant, and now I hear rumblings of thunder. I think I'll just wait til tomorrow afternoon and brave the crowds.

I watched Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live last night (on Hulu, not sure when it aired) and was amused by the guy. the Stones were once my #1 band, when I was in college. He's in amazing shape and can still parade around on stage with so much energy.

Looking forward to doing some repeatedly deferred "shopping" with assorted gift cards, including $25 worth of BP gas and a Sears gift card I want to use on a pair of white capris and perhaps a pair of shorts and/or a summer top. The mall and TJs are both down in the same area. I also have a Home Depot card and i really need to get some watering hose washers.

I ordered my annual dump sticker online and got a $5 discount for doing so online. First time they made that available. I guess the price went up, cus it's usually $80 and with the discount I still paid $85.

I'm afraid the front lawn needs mowing again. Bane of my existence. One wonders how much MORe overweight I'd be if it weren't for all the mowing I do.

It's blueberry-picking time Jersey now. Most of July is. I want to get down there to see my dad, maybe after the 4th of July weekend.

I've been trying to cut Luther's long fur to give him some relief from the heat, but he HATES it when I cut his fur! I don't pull on it at all, but it's the sound of the scissor he dislikes. So I can only cut a little at a time before he hisses at me (!) or runs away. What a baby!!

Today on the 2nd floor of my house wasn't as bad as yesterday, when it actually did get up to 90 upstairs. Today I see it was "just" 85 degrees.

They promise better weather tomorrow. It can't come soon enough.

I read somewhere there's a new A&E show called Barter Kings. Sounds like something I'd really like to see but, boo hoo, it's no available on Hulu.

Tons of birds flocking to the mulberry tree. This morning there was a Baltimore oriole in there (!), along with red-breasted grosbeaks, house finches, cardinals, catbirds, robins, squirrels and even a limber chipmunk.

Yesterday and today were brutally hot, very humid and in the 90s. There comes a point when running fans does little or nothing, as does draping blankets and towels over windows as the sun moves through the sky.

I'm working at home all week, naturally, and my office and computer are on the second floor. I guess I could think about moving the computer downstairs. I must have the Internet connection, so I guess as long as I can plug in the modem into a phone jack, it should work, right? The place to do that would be the dining room table, but of course, no phone jack there. Hmm, that leaves the living room and the family room. The latter gets awfully hot in its own right, being over the garage. The living room is a tad cooler, but I don't have a spare table or anything to put there. I'll have to ponder that some more.

Don't much feel like cookin!

It's 80 degrees downstairs now, which means it's at least 85 upstairs. I did order two small box fans about 12 inches square on Amazon today with the last of my gift cards. I plan to put one in either of the two small windows in my attic, then put a larger box fan at the bottom of the attic stairs, blowing up. I will do this at night to sweet out the hot air which seems to get trapped in the attic.

Of course, by the time I get it, the heat wave will have broken, but it will be good to have the extra fans for the next time.

Between yesterday and today, I "cleared" a roughly 6 x 6 foot square area inside a fenced garden on the north side of the house. There was poison ivy in there, and vinca growing right up against blueberry bushes. I cleared the first one. Then I transplanted some perennials, then cut holes in a large piece of white plastic.

Tomorrow when i go to the landfill, I'l pick up as much mulch as I can carry, and I'll dump that over the plastic. If that doesn't kill the remaining vinca roots, I don't know what will.

It's extremely tiring work, but if I don't clear it out now, it will only spread more.


Clematis in bloom


More clematis


Astilbe


Yesterday I went on a fruitless search for local eggs. The two homes on a certain local street where I'd seen "Eggs for sale" signs several weeks ago no longer had signs out. Two other locales in town that I knew once sold eggs also aren't doing so now.

I went onto my town's Patch online and found an article talking about all the places in town that sell chicken eggs.

I now know of a farm that sells them and plan to go tomorrow.

Early this a.m. I started work ghostwriting an article for a builder magazine and was able to finish in a couple of hours. I got a brief email back later this afternoon. "Terrific, nice."

So then I billed them, $290.

The last few days have been absolutely LOVELY, weatherwise. Warm, in the 70s, but no humidity. All that's going to change Tuesday night, and Wednesday will be very humid and in the 80s/90s. I'm so bummed to see this great weather go. I imagine my productivity level will drop to 0.

Got some great news from the publisher's. They are setting up new computers and don't want me to come in at all this week. I can work at home all 3 days. Hooray!

Bluebirds already feeding young 'uns, second time around! I love watching them swoop around the yard refining their insect-hunting skills.

I went to CVS the other day to get some Zyrtec for Waldo, who has terrible seasonal allergies. I noticed the cashier checked the expiration date on the package for me, and I thanked her, commenting that no one had ever done that for me before.

She said oh, we have to, and that if anyone ever came back to the store to complain about expired meds, they'd look up to see who checked them out and fire them. I don't know if that's true...seems a little draconian. I've been going to CVS for years and I never noticed anyone else checking the expiration date of things I'd bought.

But I was more interested in what she had to say after that. That the store is so obssessed with getting rid of expired merchandise that they routinely throw out perfectly good stuff that doesn't have an expiration date. She specifically mentioned hairbrushes and those colorful rubber band things girls wear in their hair. They apparently throw it out if it's considered out of date.

Made me want to go dumpster-diving.

I was tempted to say something about the multiple times CVS has been caught carelessly exposing its customers to identity theft by throwing away sensitive patient data with birth dates and Social Security numbers in the dumpster (https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=1976), where anyone can fish it out, but I didn't.

I used to write a lot about identity theft in my last job, and what struck me was the apparent stupidity or obliviousness of CVS because after being convicted in one state, they did not clean up their act or change their procedures; it happened several times, not just in Texas, that I'm aware of. They should have used a professional shredding company to dispose of the reams of patient data they generate.

I love my long, 4-day weekends and the flexibility they offer.

I met a friend for iced tea this afternoon at a local coffee shop (NOT a starbucks). He was a former competitive water skiier and these days heads up a local non-profit that offers war veterans and disabled people (those who are blind, amputees or anything else) a chance to leave their disability behind for a day and learn how to waterski. My friend conveniently lives on a man-made lake, which really looks like a wide river.

You can imagine how freeing it would feel if you've been using prosthetics or been wheelchair-bound for years and you have a chance to get on the water. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but for those who can't stand on 2 legs, i think they tow them in something.

Anyway, we were talking about going kayaking together at some point.

We are finally getting some new(ish) Macs at work. They will bring us into the 21st century. For those who know Macs, the ones we've been using all this time are OSX, which are pretty ancient. More importantly, we'll also be able to access FileMaker remotely when we work at home, something we haven't been able to do up til now. What a hassle to have to copy all our work at home onto flash drives, bring that in and then spend an hour transferring Quark files to the master Quark in the office as well as doing all the Filemamker stuff then. I had to lug a different Mac home yesterday and bring the dome I had in last week. Wednesday I'll bring it back in and then I'll get my updated one which should be much faster to use.

I think we'll be able to soon start working from home 2 days a week with 1 day in office, too. Right now, it's 2 days in office, 1 at home. My cats will really appreciate this change.

I started working today on the next directory; I'm splitting the work with my co-worker, who just left for 2 weeks in Alaska. How jealous I am. But anyway, we each are mostly done with our own directories, and then this next one is so big we're splitting the work between us. Still many loose ends with the first one but it's 90% done.

I've been enjoying watching The Bachelorette on Hulu TV. She's got some nice options, though I was glad to see that condescending one go.

I've been eating pea pods and lettuce from the garden. looking for new recipes that contain pea pods. If anyone has 'em, let me know. Getting a little tired of stir fry.

Waldo has been very congested with his allergies. I ordered an herbal remedy which I should get in a few days, and after much online research determined that Zyrtec, an antihistamine that people use, is safe. However, I had to calculate a much lower dosage based on weight. Directions said a child up to 2 years old should take no more than a half teaspoon. but i needed to convert teaspoon measurements to drops, so I actually counted how many drops it took to make a full teaspoon, and the answer is about 100. So that would be 50 drops for a child up to 2 years old, and i found online that the average 2 year old, male or female, weighs 28 pounds. My cat is 10 lbs, so i determined that he needs about 6 drops 3 times a day in his food.

His sense of taste and smell are so good that anything that smells a little out of kilter, he won't eat, so I mixed the drops, which smell fruity since it's made for kids, in with some tuna juice, which Waldo hesitatingly lapped.

Not sure if there's improvment yet, but this is just first day and I'm not sure he got the full dose yet. Don't want to mix the med in with too little food, or he won't eat it, or too MUCH food, becus then he won't eat it all and I won't be able to tel if he got all the meds. So there's a happy medium where it's mixed with enough food to completely camoflauge the taste but not so much that he doesn't finish it all.

The book I edited for The Author hit Amazon this week. I'll be curious to read the reviews as they come in. I see she had one of her friends write one. I think they're very important, becus you can't erase a bad review and I know that, personally, reviews by others influence me a great deal when I'm debating whether or not to buy a book.

She asked me to edit certain parts of the Amazon description page, which I did, but other parts she didn't ask me to look at, and I cringed a little when I read them, because you could see obvious mistakes with puncutation and sentence structure.

If it were me, I would take the time to do it right. She must've said to me a million times she was at the point where she just wanted to get it out there, be done with it and move on to the next book, but it's not a race! And you want it to be an achievement you can be proud of years from now when you look back.

I realize everyone has their own taste, but if you know of abook that you think would universally appeal to, well, me, please let me know the title and author.

I'm in the mood to buy more books on amazon.

I like travel books and those that have at least something to do with the outdoors and nature, but I'm open to pretty much everything.

Well, hooray. I got a $25 BP gas gift card in the mail today!! It was a reward from a BP gas forum I participate in online.

(I was really worried I wouldn't get it becus when i created my profile at the BP site, they had said we'd get rewards in the form of gift cards, so i assumed they meant online gift cards, like the other forum I participate in. So since I prefer to protect my privacy, i had created a fake snail mail address, and just happened to update it with my real address in a fit of remorse about a week before they announced the winners of a little contest, which I won. Phew!)

I know I'll have no problem spending the BP gift card, but today I TRIED to spend gift cards I've earned elsewhere and I did relatively little damage!

OK, so I had a balance of $10 left at Wal-Mart and $5 at Target and $25 at Home Goods. You wouldn't believe how long I wandered those stores, searching for something that was "worth it" and not just another tschotske that would collect dust.

The problem is, I've conditioned myself to spending so little for so long that I'm having a tough time allowing myself to buy something nice. I thought I found 2 items at Home Goods (a small woven tray basket for the bathroom and a stone box made in India) but then I looked at them and said, is this really worth it? And I decided it wasn't and walked out the store!

I did finally manage to buy 2 hand towels at Target that will match the new wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom. They were $8, so I had to actually pay $3 and change. Which rather bothered me.

At Wal-Mart, I finally bought a terra cotta pot made in USA because I want to plant more basil for my pesto sauce. Also bought some groceries.

I treated myself to 2 $1 burgers at McDonalds with a free cherry chiller, but after that, I was too tired to pursue Sears, Home Depot and Lowes, where I have more gift cards. I still also have about $30 worth of Amazon gift cards.

I really do want to get a hands free device for my cell phone so i dont get brain cancer, and hope to get that online at Amazon.

I feel so wiped out. Maybe it was all the fat in the burgers and sugar in the chiller.

The veggie garden is doing pretty well. Lettuce is finally ready for pickin (had some last night) and the pea pods are growing gangbusters. They're flowering now, so the pods won't be far behind. Have to remember to pick regularly so they don't stay on the vine too long and become inedible.

As in years past, I'll be keeping track of how much produce I harvest all summer long so I can calculate cost savings. Expenses were really minimal, just the cost of seedlings and seeds.

Yesterday, I also sowed a second long row of beans: wax, green and edamame. And that pretty much completes the garden, which now contains:

Pea pods
Lettuce
Wax beans
Green stringbeans
Edamame (soybeans)
Heirloom tomatoes, both cherry and regular-sized
Yellow squash & zucchini, 1 plant each, that's all I have room for.
1 eggplant, in a pot
Several pots of basil, for my homemade pesto.

I also have several broccoli, cauliflower and collards, but all are already so bug-ridden I don't know if I'll get anything out of them.

When I planted the broccoli, I covered them with a fabric, forget what you call it, but it's a fine mesh you might see on a bridal veil. The plants under neath the mesh seemed to fare no better than thos I'd left out, so that was a big disappointment.

When I was planting the 2nd row of beans, I decided that was a good time to dig a trench and bury the rest of my soaker hose. Before doing so, i decided to test it with the water on to see if i did possilby puncture another portion of the buried hose several weeks ago when i was pressing down a tomato hope metal prong.

Voila! The soaker hose still works! I am so thankful, becus burying it was a big pain. Probably not deep enough, in places just an inch below the surface, so i hope it does stay cool enough under a hot sun to still be usable any time during the day. Although I'm wondering how useful it is to plants not immediately next to it; Since I didn't want to disturb plants or seeds nearby, the hose is probably as much as 6-8 inches away from the plants i want to water. The way it drips, i don't know if that moisture will really spread much. Hmmmm.

Happy to see that after some sightings of both english sparrows and house wrens at the bird box, bluebirds have again appeared and seem to be nest-building in there for the 2nd time. Two bluebird nestings in a single season would be a first for me.

Yesterday early evening, I sat out on the front stoop for a while drinking a bottle of Beck's and surveying my wild kingdom. It was so cool to see flashes of blue flying by, left and right. I don't know if these could be the fledged babies or the parents, but it doesn't really matter. Just nice to have them around.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day, warm but not humid. I had to put in about 6.5 hours of work for the publishing job, but after that, I vaccuumed upstairs and down, did the aforementioned garden work and some other stuff.

I was able to confirm with Teva Neuroscience that my new health plan is a member of Teva's patient discount program and in fact they use the same pharmacy, Express Scripts, that I used before, so I don't need to do anything there. I will still be able to get my MS meds with no co-pay.

The assistant at my neurologist's also called to let me know she'd gotten my letter with the info on my new plan and the form the health insurer wants you to fill out for prescriptions, so she has sent that in so i can be assured there won't be a lapse in the prescriptions. If I'm lucky, they'll let me refill 3 months at a time instead of just 1 month like last insurer, which is a pain in the neck.

Today will be my big shopping/running around day, i think. Still have gift cards to use at Home Goods, Sears, Home Depot and Lowes and WalMart, and I have some plans for those. Want to see if walmart has any large terra cotta pots on the cheap. I dont like to plant edible things in plastic pots or pots of unknown substance made in China, but terra cotta seems safe, esp. if made in US. the whole toxic drywall/sheetrock thing made me leery of Chinese products generally.

Also might like to get some white capris or maybe even some sandals or comfy sneakers. The kind i'm into these days are the slip-on variety with no laces. I always remove my boots when i'm outside in the yard before coming in the house, so i'm constantly slipping my footwear on and off.

While I'm out, I'd like to use the McDonald's coupon good for a free berry cooler or whatever they call it. I tried to use it once before, but they said them machine wasn't working. Hmph.

My combined AT&T phone and internet bill last month was just $35, the result of my downgrading my phone service to the $7.50 a month base program where you pay .41 a minute for long distance calls and .03 a minute for local calls. It's ideal if you already have a cell phone and just like the landline as backup. If i can get in the habit of just not using the landline, even for local calls, i should get that bill down even more.

when i'm at wal mart today, i want to pick up a hands free device. Not sure how it works exactly as i'm not real cell phone savvy, but am hoping i could easily use it when interviewing someone on the phone and i need to type notes at the computer. I hope the sound quality is good enough that i can do that.

Yesterday I worked from 4:30 am to 8:30 pm as a poll worker for the 3rd time this year. And the budget failed to pass AGAIN.

Then this morning it was back to the usual at my p/t publishing job.

Got home, had some leftover barley and bacon casserole (yum), put the recycling out at the curb and took a walk around the block.

Feeling a little sad, there is death all around me. Only one whom I'm close to, but it's a reminder that nothing stays the same. My friend with the prostate cancer who anticpates things worsening in a few years time. My neighbor across the street who lost his 20-something daughter in a car accident about a year ago; he recently erected a small cross and plantings in his front yard as a memorial for her, and the family recently had an outdoor memorial service for her there....very sad. My builder, who did my sun room 2 years ago, lost his wife suddenly also about a year ago.

As it turned out, when I worked yesterday in the budget vote as a checker, checking people's IDs and names in the grand list, I sat next to a woman who, I learned, was the sister of my builder's wife who died. She apparently had just spoken to her husband 2 hours before she died, saying, see you later, etc. She dropped dead as she was leaving their house. An autopsy revealed some sort of heart valve defect that no one knew about.

It's all depressing to me.

On a more positive note, I finished up all the freelance work I'd gotten in recent weeks and figure i have over $700 in billable invoices out now.

I have a ton of projeccts to do in the yard. Weeding in many areas. After being unable to contact the cheap Guatemalan chainsaw guy to do some much needed tree pruning of damage caused by last fall's freak snowstorm, I managed to at least get branches off the ground for both a mighty hemlock and an apple tree. i didn't make the cuts the way they should be made, close to the main trunk, because there's just so much I can do with a hand/bow saw, but i did at least move stuff off the lawn so I can mow there again.

I've got to call my neighbors to see if they know why he's not returning my phone calls.

I was heartened to see that the Dow recovered a fair amount today from its wretched drop of prior days.