Well, I guess I've settled into my new temporary job. It's very fast-paced and while I work at home most days, there's not much time, make that, there's NO time to goof off or do anything else.

The new managing editor calls me all day long with questions and frankly drives me nuts with his really minor questions he could figure out for himself. It really disrupts my work; when I compared notes yesterday (the 1 day i drive into the city to work) with the other 3 guys who are writing, they agreed. I may have to say something at some point; I doubt the others will becus all of them are super-inexperienced and probably afraid to...this is their very first job after college.

However, having no commute saves me lots of time driving. While it's still too cold out now to do much outdoors, I imagine that once it warms up, I'll want to head outside to work in the yard or mow the lawn as soon as I wrap up work.

I'm usually up by 7 a.m. (no alarm clock) and am ready to sit down at the computer between 8 and 8:30 am. I enjoy taking a leisurely hour-long lunch break, at which time I walk around the block for a stretch. So I'm through by 5 or 5:30 pm, which is nice.

And this weekend, just like last weekend, I plan to work another 4 or so hours. Again, once the weather breaks, I doubt I'll want to be doing that on my time off, and what i really need to do in my free time is exercise and move around, not spend more time in front of the computer. But it's still not truly spring around here; in fact, temps are a little below normal.

I calculated, though, that IF i DID work an extra 4 hours each Saturday all year long (or just spread 4 hours during the work week), I'd earn an extra $5,000! Which is a nice chunk of change.

They mailed our paychecks Thursday and so am REALLY hoping I get it today. My first check for 2 weeks = $2112. I've already prepaid April mortgage and transferred $300 to savings and once i get that paycheck in my hot little hands, will also make a transfer to my SEP-IRA.

Haven't heard from Deloitte so decided to send a quick note to the HR person asking when they expect to make a decision. My interview was March 16. I'd just rather know if they already hired someone rather than wait and wonder indefinitely. Still really hoping they make me an offer.

The guy who redid my closets got messed up in something not very good. He came here late one morning and was explaining that he hadn't slept well. He started explaining why. The job he was doing before he started mine was one involving installation of kitchen cabinets in someone's house. My guy had to hire an electrician to do aspects of the work.

At the end of the job, the homeowner was unhappy with the quality of the work and decided to withhold about $1800 in pay to the 2 of them. (Personally, I think that was definitely the wrong thing to do. This guy knew they weren't professional installers and made the choice to hire them, i'm sure becus they were cheaper. So he can't unilaterally decide he doesn't want to pay after agreeing to do so.)

But anyway, the electrician was real ticked off. A day or 2 later, my carpenter guy had to go talk to the police, and so did the electrician, becus the homeowner's house had been broken into and the kitchen cabinets were vandalized!! Now of course (!) the electrician did it but he denied it and police have no proof. What a stupid thing to do. And I think this guy is a little mentally unbalanced.

Before this happened, my carpenter guy had been telling me about the electrician and said that he was so ticked off that he said to the carpenter, well, so and so (the homeowner) has a daughter. In other words, he was actually suggesting that something bad could happen to her. I told my carpenter at the time that this other guy was nuts and i would steer clear of him. He agreed and said the guy was a pain to work with anyway.

I asked my carpenter if he relayed that part of the conversation, about the daughter) to the police. He said no. Personally, I would have; the electrician already cost him this customer, who my carpenter had worked for in the past and who had indicated there was future work coming too. I mean, it could have gotten the carpenter in trouble, too, and apparently the electrician didn't care when he broke into the guy's house.

I had given my carpenter a few more small jobs to do after he finished my closets, as soon as he gave me a price, and i haven't heard from him since last week. Now I'm wondering why.

I treated myself to a Subway sandwich last night on the way home from work. Now that i'm working f/t again, I'm feeling the itch to spend money on any one of so many deferred things. I really shouldn't, as for one thing, I still haven't gotten the bills for the UTi I had, and I'll have to pay 100% of costs due to my high deductible. That and my neurologist visit earlier this year will easily run into the $400+ range.

Then there's the quandary about what to do about my exterior siding. I need to get more siding estimates. But there's a great little upholstered recliner I have my eye on for the sun room. $300 from Lamps Plus. I was also thinking of some nice shelving for my office. I never seem to have enough tabletop/display space.

When I was surviving on unemployment (not too long ago), I only allowed myself to spend money on five essential things:

1. My mortgage
2. Utilities (heat, electric, water, sewer, phone/Internet
3. Taxes (property, homeowners, car)
4. Food
5. Gas

Now that I am working full-time again (albeit, at about 25% less salary than I'm used to and without affordable employer-paid health insurance), I've decided I can "loosen the purse strings" to add a few key items to my list of allowable expenses:

6. Health care for me, even though having a high deductible means I'll be paying 100% of costs for all health care. If I remain a contract worker and on COBRA for most of the year, the saving grace will be that I'll be able to deduct my medical expenses.

I've already scheduled routine gynecological and a physical; I already saw my neurologist and plan to get an eye exam as the co-pay is just $10 and it's not subject to the deductible.

7. Selected home improvements (I had 2 closets redone and still have to decide what to do about my exterior siding: paint again or vinyl? Vinyl would be a huge cost, 1 quote so far at $17K.

8. Eating lunch out with friend once a month. I view this as a kind of release valve; you do need to enjoy life once in a while, after all.

9. Savings and Mortgage prepayments: I should be earning enough money to return to saving modestly as well as resuming prepayments on the mortgage, both of which are very high priorities for me. I plan to save and/or mortgage prepay at least $1,000 a month, possibly more, but will have to see what's left over after making quarterly tax payments.

So that's it. I'm still allowing NO spending on the following:

* Eating out (more than once a month)
* Clothes-shopping
* Netflix
* Jewelery (a weakness)
* Subscriptions
* Entertainment (I still have free kayaking, bike-riding and walking, and there are the library DVDs)
* Anything else not considered essential!

The good thing is, every spending opportunity is a conscious decision-making process. For instance, yesterday I decided I would renew my $88 annual AAA membership, mainly because:

1. My car is 13 years old.
2. I gave up my cell phone last week.
3. Having AAA gives me a 10% discount on all car repairs at my dealer.

However, I did give up my prepaid cell phone, mainly because:

1. I have never had good reception at my house, and I'm not sure whether it's a dead zone or just this carrier. The sound quality was bad enough that people remarked on it and and I had to sit in the bathroom to make a call, or go outside, and i didn't much care to go outside this winter.

2. I may try another brand phone, prepaid again, but probably not right away as I'm still extremely cost-conscious. Besides, I'm only driving in to work 1 day a week, so less chance of a breakdown somewhere.

Happy to report that the first phase of dealing with damage wrought by one helluva winter is done. That is, I had 2 closets paneled, which considerably improved the appearance of both closets and covered up the mess that remained after I peeled off dampened, old wallpaper that had started coming up.

Here's what the outer wall of my spare bedroom closet looked like after I peeled off 2 layers of old wallpaper, covered by paint:


What a mess, huh? This is the wall on the west-facing exterior wall of the house which was damaged by ice dam water infiltration.

Here's what it looked like after my carpenter got done with it today:




Bigimprovement, no? And here's the opposite end of this small closet, where I have some shelving:



This closet cost me $287 and my downstairs hall closet, a little bigger, cost me $356, materials included.

I want to paint the ceiling and trim before loading everything back in there. (It's amazing how much stuff a closet holds.)But I guess I won't paint the shelves since I've found that latex paint on doors or shelves is kind of tacky and things stick to it, and i don't like the cleanup involved with oil paint.

Next job for this guy is actually an assortment of 4 smaller job involving:
1. Replacing a piece of formerly wet sheetrock with pine, above my kitchen door.
2. Cutting a circular piece of pine to fit and cover a hole cut in my downstairs closet door where the dryer hose used to go. The washer/dryer are in the basement now and i don't want the cold air coming up through that vent anymore.
3. Fixing a deadbolt lock on my basement/garage door that doesn't close properly becus the house settled.
4. Cementing in an area of wall between garage and basement that apparently someone drove into and bricked over very unevenly and not very well. It's hard not to notice as it's right by the door and I don't want questions raised by potential buyers when I sell this place.

The big job is to have him do real wood paneling on the north walls of my living room and dining room. That would hide a lot of wall imperfections and also look quite nice.

Since I had to hang around while this guy was doing my closet, I decided to put in a few extra hours of work for my mostly-remote job writing for this news website. I put in 5 hours, for an extra $125. Too cold to do anything out in the yard yet, anyway. I'll be busy with outdoor stuff soon enough.

About a week-and-a-half ago:

Started coming down with what felt like a yeast infection. (Squeamish alert) Thought I'd save myself some money and picked up an over-the-counter generic Monastat-type thing. Used it for 3 days as directed.

Result? None.

Called doc's office, by this time wanting to make sure I wouldn't have this thing, and be squirming in my seat, at my interview this past Wednesday. As you may know, I'm trying to avoid medical bills at all costs since my annual deductible with The Crappy Health Plan is $1500. She said, oh, you may have to come in to see the doctor, you haven't been here for over a year. I basically twisted her arm ("But I've been seeing Dr. so and so for 20 years!") and she called in a prescription without forcing me to see the doc.

Took the prescription for YI for 3 days.

Result? Nothing.

By this time, the supposed YI started feeling more like a UTI (instead of itchy/sore it was becoming more like "pressure.") I called the doctor's office again and made an appt. to see another doc as mine wasn't available. She took a urine sample, which came back negative for infection. Huh??? She said everything looked ok. She said maybe the infection was on the verge of clearing up. I had mentioned that one of my symptoms was itchiness, so she ends up giving me a prescription cream for that and said we'll call you if the culture comes back testing positive on anything.

I dropped off the prescription at CVS, planning to pick it up at lunch time. By lunchtime, I was feeling rather asymptomatic and I thought to myself, i really didn't want a cream for itchiness, that was just a secondary symptom and I can tough that out. I wanted to save myself the $$ for that, so I called CVS to see if i could cancel that med and they said ok.

But the next day, my symptoms were back in force; in fact, i had trouble sleeping and it was feeling more and more like a UTI now. I suddenly realized i happened to have some Uristat pills in the bathroom. I popped 2 and slept like a baby.

Next a.m., I called the doc office back again and told her of my evolving symptoms and how well i felt after taking the Uristat, which is used to treat symptoms of UTIs (but not cure them). And on the other hand, I'd been gulping probiotics and eating yogurt when i thought it was a YI and hadn't noticed any improvement. So all things pointing to a UTI now.

She said ok, i can call in a prescription for UTI, but you need to drop off another urine sample at Quest, that maybe i had just caught it too early when i did the first urine culture and that's why it didn't register. I did that today, and picked up my 3rd prescription. Popped a pill, and about an hour later, I see the inside of my lower arm breaking out in hives. Great. Allergic reaction!

Back on the phone with nurse, who said, bummer.I'll call in another med and you'd better stop taking that other one. Got the 4th med tonight and will start it tonight. God willing, it will work.

This will go down in history as the most expensive UTI I've ever had, costing me 4 prescriptions, 1 doctor's office visit and 2 lab tests, plus I'll be paying 100% for everything with my high deductible not yet being met.

My job interview with D******* yesterday went pretty well, I think. Met with 2 people, both technical editors, and one of them being the person I'd report to. Plus i did another hour-long editing test. They seemed nice. She basically told me that regardless of what any of the job candidates say to her, the job will go to whoever does the best job on the editing test. Makes perfect sense, yet i wonder how i did compared to the other candidates? I have a fair amount of confidence as I'm very good at what I do, yet I still wonder...

I want the job, though when i asked the guy what he thought was the most challenging part of the job, he was pretty honest when he said, i guess just doing the same thing over and over again. He was a classics major in college and ended up as a technical editor. Two polar opposites, I'd say. He's been there for 8 years.

The woman said she thought the pay was pretty reasonable; i forget how that came up, but i certainly didn't ask her about pay.

I am aware that this job, unlike many I've had, won't be "creative" and could become fairly tedious or dull over time. Perhaps a little too one-dimensional, even, though being an introvert, I've always preferred pure writing jobs. This will definitely be a pure writing job.

But the pay and benefits will be very good, and the commute reasonable (35 minutes) and I figure, if I'm going to work, i may as well work for more pay rather than less pay. I feel that the number of years i have left to work full-time is finite, now, and that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That has a way of making a job that could be a bit dull seem doable.

I am very clear and very focused on my financial goals, near term and long-term, and that's what's driving my decision-making process.

Wish me luck!

My carpenter finished paneling the first of two closets that had damage from ice dams. The one he finished (about a day and-a-half) is a downstairs coat closet and was in the WORST shape....a few holes in the walls, evidence of mice infiltration, plumbing and heat ducts going through it, and just generally really banged up.

I picked out some nice paneling sheets, much nicer and lighter than that hideous dark brown stuff you saw in rec rooms in the 70s.

The only thing i'm not crazy about is that i told him to go ahead and panel the ceiling, only because there is a piece of plumbing that extends down from above the closet ceiling and so after repairing a leak, the plumber quickly created a botched box around it and it looked terrible. I wanted the ceiling to be flush and level with no box, so the only way to do that was to lower the ceiling by an inch or so. I guess the carpenter could have sheet rocked a new ceiling and then taped it, but that would require multiple coatings and return visits and more $ so i told him to just cover it with paneling. It does look a little funny, but it's just a closet. I can live with it. Labor and materials for just that one closet cost me $365, which is quite reasonable.

He also created a false wall to hide hot and cold water pipes for a washer/dryer that i guess used to be in this closet. he used removable screws so that if a future homeowner wanted to put the washer/dryer here, they could easily access the plumbing behind the panel.

He'll start a smaller closet in the upstairs spare bedroom on Thursday and hopefully finish on Saturday.

This guy was really hurting financially this winter. He doesn't really advertise. I'd like him to give me a price for doing wood paneling beneath the chair rails on the two front-facing walls of my living and dining rooms. Just one wall in each room, as an accent, and maybe paneling on the 2 sides of my staircase, a small space. I'd like to cover up the walls becus they have bumps in them around where bigger older windows were replaced and the subsequent taping around the larger opening was poorly done. There's also old wallpaper that I painted over without knowing about the wallpaper, and it's a real mess when you try to take it off. (No one used wallpaper primer like I do.) Plus I love the look of wood paneling. perhaps an expensive solution to the wall issue, but I just want to see how much it would be. It's just the lower part of 2 walls, how much could it be? He he.

I hate the distraction of having him working there, and banging on the walls and stuff but at least i'm able to work at home. The cats get scared too and don't move all day. Don't like workmen in the house when i'm not here.

I'm also going to "bundle" a bunch of little jobs he can do and give me a single price on. He's so reasonably priced, I really should do it.

Tomorrow is my job interview with the accounting firm. I'll be glad when that's behind me.

Thursday I work at home and Friday I'm headed to New Haven. I should get my first paycheck from this job then!/!!!

I passed a former co-worker/writer's resume onto my boss at the new job and was thinking how nice it would be to work with someone I'm familiar with, although it would really just be that one day a week I have to go into the office. Given where she lives, she'd pass right by me; we could carpool in and save some gas!

I bought a Dell computer last August. It came with a 3-year warranty which I recently learned was just for the hardware; the pre-loaded Windows 7 software came with just a 3-month warranty.

At the time, the Dell salesman didn't bother to tell me that the new computer would not be compatible with the Dell printer I'd been using and that I'd have eto buy a new Dell printer as well; I found that out when I tried to get them working together. When I complained, they let me have a new Dell printer for free. It normally retailed for about $50.

Pretty much from the start, that printer frequently experienced paper jams. And sometimes it would not print. Numerous phone calls to Tech Support. A few weeks ago, based solely on the paper jam issue, he said he's send me a new replacement. He actually said that the best way to deal with paper jams is to drop the computer on the ground. Yes, drop it, not from standing height, mind you, but a few inches.

Anyway, I couldn't get the new printer to print at all. More time with Tech Support, who after 2 hours concluded that it wasn't a hardware problem, it was a software (Windows) problem.

When I had time in my schedule to call back Dell software people, he urged me to spend $200 and something on a 2-year software warranty. I've been barely getting by for a while now, and spending that was certainly not in the cards.

But I was feeling anxious to get the printer working again becus now i have a job interview this week and need to print out a few writing samples to bring with me.

He said just getting this problem fixed would cost me $130. (He had mentioned beforehand that it appeared 2 drivers had not installed properly and the problem might be fixed by reinstalling the printer drivers.) Maybe he thought i was a dumb idiot or maybe he didn't care, but as I'm trying to get him to budge on the $130 charge, I decided I should first try to reload those drivers. So I told him I'd think about it.

I uninstalled, then reinstalled the drivers and BINGO, printer works. But now the ink is not making full contact with the page and it looks very, very faint. Back on the phone with Dell hardware support. he helped me thru the process of cleaning my ink cartridges, which apparently clog up after not being used in as little as a week. The more you use the printer, the better it will work, he told me. (Yeah, and the quicker I'll run thru those $30 cartridges, too.)

So I'm pleased as punch to have avoided the $130 rip-off. I'm sure these charges are quite a money-maker for Dell. Without having heard the Dell guy conjecture as to the problem, I probably wouldn't have bothered trying to reload the printer drivers. Phew.

Now that I'm working full-time again, weekends recaptured their "special" feeling for me. Quite honestly, Saturdays and Sundays seemed very much like any other day when I wasn't working, except that I'd avoid doing any shopping errands then because it was so much easier getting around on the weekdays in terms of traffic and lines.

But now I'm glad the weekend has arrived. I decided to treat myself to lunch out with a friend tomorrow, something I haven't done in many, many months. Perhaps I did it once in the 4th Q of 2010, but if I did, I don't remember.

Aside from lunch, I'll just be running errands: Costco, Shop Rite, Petco (to use a $5 off coupon) and getting a DVD at the library for tonight.

The priority, however, is to get on the phone with Dell and get my printer working again. I guess since I'm working, having to pay some sort of fee to have them fix the problem (even tho i'm under the 3-yr warranty) is not as upsetting as when i wasn't employed. I will still argue the case, though, because it seems patently unfair.

The other important thing to do is prepare my portfolio of writing samples for my interview next week. Normally, I have TONS of samples from which to choose, and I tailor which I use based on the job I'm going for. This time there'll be less to choose from as i haven't worked for an accounting firm before. But there are 2 jobs I had where I can pull samples from: an alternative energy company, Nathaniel Energy, which I think has since been sold to someone else. I wrote all their website content in a freelance project. While it's not on the site anymore, I do have the original text I wrote, and that was pretty technical, so good to show with Technical Writing job I'm interviewing for. I may also show work from Prudential Financial, where I worked Q42010. I wrote about some pretty complex subject matter while there. E.g., trusts, advanced Social Security strategies for the retired to maxmimize income, and stuff like that.

It would be tempting to work in the yard a little this weekend as it'll be in the low 50s and much of the snow is gone. Just picking up fallen tree branches and pruning my butterfly bushes....but i know it's quite soggy out there and walking around on it won't do it any favors. So I won't.

My prepaid cell phone minutes expire this Sunday. I don't plan to renew the plan by paying another $100 for minutes, which is more than enough air time I need for the year. I planned to do it as a cost-saving measure, but also becus I happen to live in an area with lousy reception, and people complain they can't hear me well if I call from inside my home. I have to go outside, and i noticed my neighbors across the street often do the same thing.

I don't know if there's another plan (mine was Verizon, later turned into AT&T) that would be better, since this one said they covered my area when I checked on their website. I really plan to just go back to using prepaid calling cards with my land line. The cards are pretty cheap at Costco and they don't expire.

It's been a long time since I really rubbed shoulders with many young people, but the company where I work employs about a dozen people, and all of them seem pretty young. Two other writers are guys fresh out of college or grad school...this is their first job! The one guy announced to me that he was a playwright, though as it turns out, he's never had one of his plays on stage, except in college, and that's when I learned he was just out of school. It's funny how self-assured young people can be but you can forget how inexperienced they really are. He had been working overtime, probably about 20 extra hours all told, and not sought payment for it because he thought working overtime was expected of you. Well, yes, in a salaried job, but this is an HOURLY job. In other words, he was not putting in for the extra hours becus he didn't think he could be reimbursed for them,but after talking with us, he said he would ask if he could, retrovactively.

I was personally aghast at the thought of working for nothing, as I think employers already have the upper hand when it comes to employer/employee relastions. Just think about what happened in Wisconsin with union bargaining rights. They're setting us back 50 years and think they can get away with it becus we're in a recession and everyone's on the side of business these days.

Why are employees expected to give 2 weeks notice when they leave, while employers can fire you on the spot, no notice at all? Do I not have a life that could be disrupted by a poorly timed layoff? Why do employers almost always ask you, indeed, insist on you're filling this out on their form, about how much money you made in your previous jobs? How does disclosing my earning power work in MY best interests??? Doesn't sound like a very level playing field.

As you may know, I started working just this week for the new website. But while it's f/t, they don't offer benefits, and I have to have health insurance with my MS.

When I got home today, there was a message on my machine from that the big accounting company (hint: starts with a "D") where I applied for a technical writing job.

Mind you, I've never worked as a technical writer; I've always been in marketing, but apparently, i did well enough on their hours-long editing test to earn an interview spot!

And this is one place where my highly analytical nature would NOT be a hindrance to getting the job! I remember one job i lost out on simply becus the personality test i took showed i ranked much higher on the analytical end than creative, which is ironic since I've built my career in marketing and have had a lot of chances to really get creative.

I'll go there next week; she said to allow 2 hours for yet another editing assignment. (I guess they want to make sure that someone else didn't do the at-home test for you.)

This is exactly what I'd hoped for. Much as I truly appreciate the news website job for making sure I survive, financially, the work there is, well, not very challenging and is paying about 3/4 of what I should be earning in my field. And there's the thing about the lack of health insurance as well.

If I worked at D*******, I could no longer worker at home, I'm sure, but the commute is a doable 35 minutes. Monkey Mama says they underpay, but i guess i'll have to see...considering what i'm making now and what I've made elsewhere, i doubt whatever salary offer they might make would deter me from taking the job, especially if it included the all-important benefits. Long-term unemployment for the past 17 months has a way of crystallizing your priorities.

In other news, I gave a quick call to my dad after getting a message from my sister who got a call from my dad's significant other that today was the day of my dad's surgery to remove melanoma from his nose. He will need some plastic surgery on the nose, and he won't hear til they get the biopsy results next week if they got all of it. I sure hope they did.

I guess I'd have to say it's kind of like a writer's version of a sweatshop. Meaning, I have to work very quickly because volume is at least as important as quality. And of course it's easy to measure how much I've done by the number of write-ups I complete.

However, I figure if I managed to do tedious online surveys for months just to earn a little cash, I can do this.

Given how simple what I'm doing is, the pay ($25/hr) is really pretty good. To put it in perspective, it's twice as much as I was getting from unemployment but half as much as I was making at my last contract job at the big insurance company where I dearly wanted to stay.

The other great thing about this job is that I'm home 4 days out of 5. Even before the spike in the cost of gas, I'd consider this a godsend, but now it's even better.

He originally told me to expect to come into the city 2 or 3 days a week for the first 2 weeks until I get the job under my belt and after that I could work at home all but 1 day a week. Well, i guess i picked it up so quickly that after my first day ended, he said i could work from home and just come back in for the once weekly writers' meeting on Thursday. Very nice indeed.

I doubled my output at home today compared to the work i did yesterday, my first day, in the office.

There is absolutely no time for goofing off, you really have to commit to cranking these things out. However, I started at 8:30 am, took a 1/2 hour for lunch and called it a day at 5.

I created simple spreadsheets to help me track my tax deductible expenses, including 100% of my COBRA premiums and any out of pocket medical I may incur. Sweet.

There are still 2 perm jobs I'm very much hoping to hear from. Who knows how long I'll be working at this place, a month or a year? There's a place for me at the place I'm at if I want to stay (and of course i will until i find that perm job) because on my first day a gal there was showing me how to post stories online using their software, and i asked her who was editing my work. She said, well, so and so is doing it now, but we're hoping it will be you! Meaning, if things work out, there's a bigger role they want me to play.

It's fine with me; it won't mean more money, and the work will be pretty much the same except I'll be reviewing other writers' work. I think I'll be meeting the other 3 or 4 writers at the Thursday meeting.

On my drive into work yesterday, I saw the aftermath of extremely heavy rains here the day before. We got 3.5 inches overnight. My route parallels a a river that had overflowed its banks, and i saw a number of houses (summer cottages?) that were completely surrounded by water. I mean, it looked like the houses were in the middle of a lake! Surreal! Various wood docks had come loose from their moorings and were floating in the middle of the river, along with some canoes and, from what i heard on the news, even a few cars. I had a little seepage in the basement, but nothing to worry about.

Oh, I was also able to figure out why I got an extra $800 in my tax refund check. The IRS (surprising to me) gave me further details when I went online and clicked the "Where's my Refund?" link. I forgot to fill out one of the worksheets having to do with taxation of qualified money. BIG mistake on my part....sure am glad the IRS found it!!!!!!

I've already started analyzing how I'm going to handle the money I earn from the new job I start tomorrow. Many things will be different since it's a contract job with no taxes deducted.

I remember earning about this much at a job in 2005, though that job had benefits. I was contributing 15%, or about $300 to $350 each 2-week pay period to my 401(k). AND I was prepaying the mortgage, sometimes $100 a month, sometimes as much as $400 a month.

Since this job doesn't have a retirement plan, I decided I'll divvy up the money I'd otherwise invest in a 401(k) (and toward the mortgage) in the following way each month:

$350 will go to replenish an emergency fund; this is important, since I'll need that money to live on if for some reason i become unemployed again.

$300 will go to mortgage prepayments...I'm really obsessed with paying off the darn thing.

$350 will go to my SEP IRA. I created that account 2 years ago but it only has about $500 in it now because my freelance copywriting has only amounted to a few thousand each year. However, my full-time job will now all be "freelance," and i recall i can contribute as much as 20% of income (around $10,000).

So if you consider mortgage prepayments as "savings," my new savings rate will be $1,000 a month. Not bad, considering my modest income.

I also plan to create some spreadsheets to help me track my expenses since they will all now be tax-deductible. The ones I will track include:

* My $443/month COBRA premiums; by year's end they will have exceeded the minimum 7.5% of total income needed to claim this deduction.

* Mileage driving to the city, since my primary work location 4 days a week will be home, and after the initial week or two, I'll just be driving in 1 day a week for meetings.

* Phone calls to the office

* Office supplies such as copy paper and ink cartridges

I don't anticipate claiming deductions for my computer or office since I won't be using them exclusively for work.

I also need to mark my calendar with due dates for IRA quarterly tax payments.

I reviewed the agreement he wants me to sign. It's mostly non-disclosure stuff, but it looks like he only wants to pay me once a month, which seems to me a long time to wait to get paid when this will be my only source of income. I will have to talk to him about that tomorrow. Really not crazy about that at all.

I'm going to revise my goals that appear here on my blog, too.

That's what you're going to think when I tell you what I did this morning.

I woke up, wide awake, at 3 a.m., worrying that the quota/target my soon-to-be boss lined out for me was unrealistic and undoable.

When we talked on the phone yesterday, he said he was looking for 3 to 4 news briefs written each hour. It's a start-up and he can't afford to pay much now. They are just getting ready to launch. He originally offered me $20 an hour but agreed to $25 an hour but said the higher rate would hinge on my ability to write closer to 4 briefs an hour, not 3.

Well, we didnt' spend too much time on that, but after I hung up, I started thinking of how difficult it would be to write a news brief, following the very specific format he described, in 15 minutes, every hour of every day.

I might be able to churn out 4 an hour on occasion, but to do so consistently is unlikely. Part of writing each brief involves reading breaking news stories online, and just reading and absorbing their key messages would take 10 minutes easily, let alone writing intelligently and persusasively on a particular angle and posting it online using their software.

I want to position myself for success, not failure, and I take my commitments seriously. So rather than stress about this the rest of the weekend, I decided to write him a longish email saying just what I've said here (and more). I realized I was taking a big risk in possibly pissing him off and jeopardizing the job offer I just got yesterday. Or maybe making him think I was difficult to work with.

I got a reply back in maybe 5 minutes. He must've been checking for messges when I sent it. He wrote back briefly, saying don't worry, get some sleep, things will work out just fine, let's take it a day at a time.

I felt so relieved. He seems like a really understanding guy and I am feeling more confident that he will be someone I respect and enjoy working with.

In the meantime, I am halfway through the at-home editing test given to me my big accounting firm seeking a technical writer. The first half had maybe 5 pages of extremely dense copy riddled with all sorts of grammar, punctuation and organizational problems. It took me over 3 hours just to get through that!!

Umm, this is wierd.

I did my own taxes this year, as usual. I calculated a $1100 federal tax refund and filed it electronically. I think the program would have caugt it if i made some sort of mathematical error.

Much to my surprise, I found it had been deposited to my checking account in the amount of $1,900, about $800 more than I thought it would be.

I hope the IRS will send me something in the mail to clarify what this is about??

In other news,I'm having my mother and sister over today for lunch, in honor of mom's birthday. I wanted to keep it simple, real simple, so here's the menu:

Fresh greens with grilled salmon chunks. (My sister's bringing the salad.)

TJ's red pepper soup with a bit of chicken stock added to stretch it to feed 3 people (it's a quart) and grilled shrimp and scallions mixed in. (Should I grill the scallions or use them fresh as a garnish?)

For dessert, a chocolate mousse cake from Trader Joe's.

I got the job, I got the job, I got the job!

It's not a permanent solution to my employment issues, but it's certainly better than unemployment and it could lead to something better if it works out.

Here are the details:

It's a startup news website which uses a very different model for reporting on breaking news of the day. I'm going to honor the non-disclosure agreement I have yet to sign by not going into further detail about that.

The good things about it:

1. It's full-time but also flexible if from time to time I need to take time off to do other frelance gigs. he understands that becus he can't pay me the kind of money to keep people there 100% full-time that people may from time to time want to do some other things. That's exactly my situation: i've already agreed to edit an author's book, and I know i'll want to coninue my normal, though widely sporadic freelance real estate copywriting.

2. He's asked me to drive into their small city (about a 50-minute drive 1-way) for 2-3 days next week, and maybe 2 or 3 days the following week, until I get the lay of the land and familiarize myself with how they work and what I'll be doing. But after that, I can work REMOTELY and only drive into the city once a week for the writers' meetings. This is ideal for me; if it weren't for the need for health insurance coverage, this is very much my ideal type of job.

3. The pay is, well, I expected that it wouldn't be a ton of money for a startup. They launch online on Monday, and the weeks immediately following will say a lot about what kind of success they'll see. I'm getting in on the ground floor now; if, in the worst case scenario, they don't do well and the business folds in 6 months, I'll have collected a paycheck as much as possible. If they do well and grow, there's a real chance of getting better pay, more responsiblity and so on.

So he offered me an hourly rate of $20 an hour. I was able to talk him into $25 an hour, but he also said if he pays that, this is the kind of output he'd expect, x number of news briefs written in an hour, or x number per day. They will also reimburse me for the parking garage, which would otherwise cost me $12 a day to keep my car there. (So i guess having me work from home also saves him money, ie, $60 a week.)

I have to say I spent considerably more time writing up the 5 news brief for him in a test assignment he gave me, but hopefully I'll gain a much better idea of exactly the kind of stories they want to focus on and be able to write them up much more quickly. This is a news site and so they need a high volume of new news story briefs every day. Not sure how many other writers there are....

So if I worked f/t, i guess that comes out to $52K a year, sans benefits. I am still seeking a full-time perm job with benefits, becus i must have health insurance, and those jobs would typically pay in the 80s.

So I'd be working for a lot less for him, but given that I'd mostly be working from home, given that I'm a news junkie and that this pays better than unemployment and that this would serve to elongate the time my remaining unemployment funds would last, it certainly seems worthwhile.

It will enable me to more easily pay my current bills and take care of several home improvement projects I have already committed to (paneling 2 closets damaged by leaking water from this winter's ice dams in gutters done by a carpenter i've used before will cost a very reasonable $550) or are considering (vinyl siding estimate from company #1 came in at $17,000).

The only thing it doesn't do is stop the clock from ticking on the remaining time I have to obtain health coverage thru COBRA. I'm good til year's end or maybe a bit longer, not sure.

It also doesn't fix my current dilemma of having health coverage, but not being able to use it, at least, if I don't want to pay 100% of costs. This is due to the fact that my health plan has a $1500 deductible. I've avoided all routine healtcare except for dental and a trip to the neurologist I had to make to renew my meds to avoid having to pay everything out of pocket.

But I would dearly love to get a physical and see my gynecologist and maybe my optometrist and get a colonscopy.

So maybe I'll work here for 3 months, then leave when I find another job with benefits. Or maybe I'll end up staying there for 3 years.....who really knows?

I've been so super busy these last few days.

Yesterday I drove into a small city about an hour's drive from here for a job interview with the news website I think I mentioned previously. Had to pay $6 for the parking garage. Spent an hour yakkin' with the guy. He asked me to do a writing assignment and said if I could turn it around the very next day, then we'd talk $ and he'd have me come in today since every Thursday is their writers' meeting.

So I spent several hours doing the writing assignment and sent it back. Haven't heard from him since. So much for that. I'm not too upset about that one as I wasn't sure it was a good fit or if i could see myself working there. It was full-time, but contract job, meaning, no benefits. And I do need benefits.

This a.m. I drove south to do a focus group on probiotics. There were about 10 of us middle-aged women. Got paid $85, thank you very much.

Yesterday, I also got an email from well-known big accounting firm. I had applied for a job as technical editor, which isn't exactly my background, but i thought i could do it plus D***** would be a great place to work and just about 35 minutes from home.

So I was pleased when they emailed me (and probably a bunch others?) and asked me to do edit a document they sent. I plan to maybe start it tomorrow, but i took a quick peek at it and it is quite boring looking with lots of technical data and abbreviations and so on. Could I do a better job than other experienced technical writers? I'm not sure but I sure as hell am going to try.

In about 20 minutes the viny siding rep is supposed to come by and present his estimate. I hope I don't have to sit through another hour-long sales pitch.

My Dell printer stopped working a few days ago and after spending a solid 2 hours with Dell technical support (I have 3 yrs of free support with them) he informed he that it was Windows that wasn't operaitng properly and that I had 2 choices: talk to another Dell rep who would troubleshoot the problem and then tell mehow much it would cost (they would charge me becus it wasn't a Dell problem) or I could reload Windows. Well, they know I can't reload Windows becus the computer was delivered to me new with Windows pre-installed. They said no, it wasn't pre-installed that I, the customer installed it. That's a bunch of baloney. What they did was mail me, under separate cover, a product code key which "unlocked" the software and gave me access to it. But I didn't load it and i definitely do not have any disks to re-load Windows anyway, so if they try to charge me, i'm going to give them a hard time becus it just aint' my fault and if they're going to install it, they should take reseponsibility. Especially when one of the reasons i bought this computer was becus they offered 3 years of technical support.

I got an unexpected check for $66 from the agency that hired me to work at Prudential. (oops, there i identified them...doesn't really matter....) Seems they over-withhold $ from my last check. I whacked myself in the head for not catching that myself. But am happy to have that check now.

In the month of February I made $106 from online surveys. (Patting myself on the back.) All in all, income exceeded expenses. Being unemployed, this has become my new measure of fiscal fitness.

I'm also happy to report that my total investments surpassed the half million mark. First time ever. It may have since dropped after all the unrest in Libya, but anyway, that's a new watermark. So I'm rich in savings, broke in terms of current income. Strange.

OK, things have been percolating, a bit.

The most fun thing I have to talk about is that I have a job editing....a book!

It's a first-time author who has written a historical romance type book and who has already gotten books 2, 3 and 4 halfway written in her head. And she lives right in my hometown.

A friend of mine told the author, who was looking for a copy editor, about me, and while we talked on the phone a month or so ago, she wasn't quite ready to show me the book. Her publisher had told her she needed to cut the length substantially in order that they could sell it at a certain price point.

When we first talked, I wasn't sure how serious she was. After all, doesn't everyone know at least one person who wants to write a book?

So after we spoke, I sort of lost track of it and wasn't very aggressive in pursuing it. Then earlier this week, I had a free moment and I zipped her an email asking how things were going with the book. She replied back with a pleasant, long-running reply and mentioned that a friend had referred her to another editor who had already told her she'd do it for $1,000 to $1,200!

I was so upset at the prospect of having yet another potential job fall through my fingers. It seems like it's been happening a lot lately. (More on that later.) So I wrote back and said I was disappointed, and would she allow me to compete for her business, and that I would match the other editor's price. The other editor had said she'd edit a few pages for free to show her what she could do. I think I had offered to do the same. So I suggested that she send us both the same pages and then she could do a side-by-side comparison and may the best editor win.

She didn't respond to that directly, which surprised me. Of course, i didn't really know whether she had already committed herself to the other editor. But she did say, let's meet for coffee.

We did. We ended up at the coffee shop (sans coffee until the end) talking for 2 hours. Or should I say, she did most of the talking. She is very bubbly, upbeat, cheerful, funny and entertaining and of course, full of stories.

You might say she's my opposite, as I tend to be rather quiet and serious, more cerebral. But I think this meeting was exactly what she needed to do becus she wanted to KNOW her editor and have a good working relationship with them and she had already been turned off in her search for a publisher when a bunch of them were located in India and seemingly hired high school kids to do much of the work.

So after coffee, she agreed to send me a few pages for me to edit. She sent them, I spent about 3 hours editing 9 pages. That's a lot of time, isn't it? While she has a vivid imagination, she's not too good about things like punctuation and spelling and her sentence structure is, umm, interesting.

I spent some time trying to calculate how much $ I'd make on an hourly basis if i spent that much time on the rest of the book, and I don't think it'd be that much if i looked at it that way. I'm not going to worry about it too much; if there's one thing i have plenty of, it's time. I need to convert that into money and not worry about hourly rates becus the fact is, i'm not working full-time, so any $ helps.

Anyway, I did my thing, trying not to take too heavy a hand with it. She loved it. She was so effusive in expressing her appreciation and said it was exactly what she needed, that she had meditated on finding the right person to do this and here i was, meant to be, etc. She really seemed to appreciate my comments and markup.

So, we start for real in about 2 weeks, after she clears away some other projects from her interior design business.

I'm psyched becus she's such an interesting person, I find the work extremely easy, fun and I'll make some money, too. And there's the prospect of a longer term relationship if her first book does well.

I have an interview next week with a startup news website. I have somewhat mixed feelings about it but we'll see. It's a p/t contract job; I need a "real" job with health insurance but for the time being, who knows.

I also started a relationship with another new website that is for and about women in the NY and DC areas, mostly arts and entertainment (www.womanaroundtown.com). And they want to expand into my area of CT. They really liked my first story and already published it.

One problem: they don't pay! I'm not making this the sole focus of my attention, but it's a very good way to add published pieces I can embed as writing samples in my resume. Like for instance, i've always wanted to write professionally about health-related stuff, but the places i've applied to always want someone with prior experience....in that field. I am heavy in experience writing about personal finance stuff and real estate. So writing for free for this particular site is one way to accumulate some health/wellness-related articles I can point to with prospective employers. I had created my own health/wellness blog ages ago, but apparently, that's not that impressive.

They've already OK'd my next assignment...it's a story about my mother and her art! With lots of photos. My mom's thrilled. Great exposure for her and the topic is a perfect fit for the website, especially since some of my mother's art is very spring-oriented, and those are the pieces I want to focus on in the story.

Here's one of her pieces, from my own collection:



Maybe things are picking up. I applied for 4 jobs today which i feel well qualified for, which is very unusual. There's one at a well-known travel website that I'm extremely interested in, so crossing my fingers on that one.

There have been several instances of recruiters contacting me about a specific job, I respond almost immediately and then I never hear from them again.

Yesterday I got another assignment, a press release about a new condo development, from one of my regular clients. It's the kind of thing where, whenever I'm deep down in the dumps and not getting any work, I get an email from him out of the blue asking me "if I'm available to do such and such." Am I available? Ha!

Unless I get my federal tax refund, it looks like I will be in the red for February as I was in January,thanks to a $500 bill for filling up the oil tank one last time. I had only allowed for 2 fillups this winter. Maybe next month will be better.

I'm meeting my old friend Ron at a coffee shop tomorrow. I have 2 focus groups lined up for March. I'm going to help my elderly neighbor Sunday by crawling in her attic and checking for wet insulation. And mom is waiting for me to interview her.

I was feeling very down and dispirited the last few weeks, but activity is picking up, thank God.

I continue to umm, "educate" contractors who call me about the vinyl siding I want on why it's not nice to ask a female, would-be customer if there's a "Mr." in the household.

Seems like every single one of them lately is asking that question very pointedly. They insist that they do it so that one spouse won't sign a contract and commit them to the job without the other one's knowledge or consent. C'mon. I find it hard to imagine a spouse signing up to do a $10,000 project unless the other spouse already agreed it was ok to do so.

I explain that as a single female, I don't feel I should have to divulge my marital status to someone (a contractor) I don't even know. It's a question of security. It's really none of their business.

So after initially agreeing to have this guy come out, I changed my mind after he asked that question and didn't back down. We ended the conversation. Two minutes later, the phone rings again and it's the owner on the phone, attempting to resuscitate the visit out here.

Anyway, he was super polite and nice about it, and we thoroughly discussed why he does it and why I don't like it. He seemed so reasonable I relented and said ok, let's keep the appointment. He admitted that I wasn't the first woman to object to the question, and he even said he would bring it up at their marketing meeting next week. But I keep imagining that as soon as these guys hang up from me they're saying, "What a b****! What a pain in the a**!"

As for the worst case scenarios referenced in my headline: I woke up around midnight, unable to sleep. Actually high winds forecast for today were already ferociously banging one loose wood shutter on the house, and that's what woke me up. So i got up, opened the window and leaned out to take the screen out so I could secure the shutter.

But I had a kind of bad dream, one i think was caused by general anxiety about my future. I went through all of last year just hoping I'd get a phone call about one of many jobs I'd applied for. All I got was that temporary 3-month job and the Census Bureau stuff i did from spring through summer.

I'm fortunate to still have unemployment benefits and expensive COBRA, but this will run out by the end of the year, roughly. What happens if ANOTHER year goes by, just like last year? From a job-seeker's point of view, the economy hasn't moved much.

As I firmly believe, hope is not a strategy. I always feel more in control of things when I've planned ahead for various contingencies, and continued unemployment is certainly one of them. Heck, it's frightening to think about, but what if I never get another f/t job again?

What exactly will I do? Umm, I'm not sure, and that's what is making me so anxious. If I can't control my income, then I have to look for more ways to lower expenses. And I don't mean by clipping coupons. It needs to be in a big way to have any real impact.

Take in a roommate? Ugh, that would be a total sacrifice of privacy and I know, from having one or two boyfriends live here, that I'm very particular about how things are kept and that caused issues with others living here. Don't really see this happening.

But I've been thinking more that one option would be to sell my house and downsize into a less expensive condo sooner rather than later. Meaning, I always knew I'd want to move into a condo some day, but I had no specific schedule for doing so. Perhaps in 9 more years, at the latest.

But now I'm looking at a more immediate condo move not just for lifestyle reasons to free myself of time-consuming maintenance responsibilities, but increasingly, as a money-saving move.

Assuming I moved to a condo outside of this town into my current condo of choice, I'd save $3,000 a year in taxes right off the bat. (My preference would be to stay in this very lovely town, but taxes are higher and there aren't any condos I really like...they're either too expensive or not nice enough.)

I'd also be paying for the condo in full with cash and walk away with an extra $50 to $75K in my pocket,conservatively, depending on the sale and purchase price of both properties. There could be a smaller savings in heating due to smaller square footage, but I'm not counting on that to be as significant.

There are 2 problems: 1) My condo of choice requires you to be at least 55 years old. I'm 3.5 years away from that. I'm going to call them Monday and see if that's a real hard and fast rule. 2) There's a LOT of stuff I'd have to do to this house to make it market-ready. This includes dealing with the exterior siding, which is why i want to get vinyl, also paneling 2 closets and repairing all the damage caused by this winter's ice dams, repairing a leaky pipe (think plumber bill), restaining a small part of wood floor that I sanded down to bare wood after cat urine stained it black...disgusting) and maybe a few other things. Since I'm not working steadily, this would all come from personal savings which are basically earmarked for retirement (not in IRAs, though) so of course I want to minimize expenses.

Prepping and selling a house is so much work. But doing it now would be good in that since I'm not working, i wouldn't be totally stressed out by trying to work a f/t job AND prepping the house and doing all this stuff at the same time. Keeping it perfectly spotless would be easier if i wasn't working.

Another reason to do try to sell now rather than wait is that there's a really good selection of units at this condo complex that i like; once the market returns to more or less normal, I imagine other buyers will be active and I'll have less to choose from.

So, that's where my head is at right now. The only other good thing is that, in the absence of further mortgage prepayments, I'll have the house paid off in 4 more years, so that would lower my monthly expenses, though not by as much as you think, since when i bought this place i put down 45% cash. My principal is only about $750 a month.

I've also been wondering about the heating at these condos. It's all electric baseboard units. I know that heating oil is very expensive. This year it was high, and i don't see it getting any cheaper, since it's a finite resource and for a whole host of reasons, not to mention recent unrest in the Middle East. But I've heard many times that electrical rates in CT are among the highest in the nation. I don't heat with electric now, but my electric bill is typically $65 a month, and that's being very frugal. I shudder to think what it would be it I were heating with it.

There's one other thing I thought of...talking to my dad this weekend, he told me my sister is just getting by, financially. She lives in the nearby town where my favorite condo complex is. We have never been close (not my choice) and she never says much about her personal life when we get together, which is not that often.

She has a house about the same size as mine, with a separate barn/garage with a rentable apartment above it. She's had to have a few tenants leave after they lost their jobs and couldn't pay rent. One scenario I thought about was what if I sold my place now and moved into her rental apartment for a few yeas, until i turned age 55 and could move into the condo i want. I don't remember exactly what she charges for rent...I'm thinking it's $900/month. It's got a very large living room with a smaller bedroom and kitchen. It's not ideal as it has a long flight of outside stairs to access the apartment. On the plus side, she might have space on her 3 acres to let me continue to have small vegetable garden. Plus, she is my sister and she'd never do something really rotten, however, she is very prickly and short-tempered and hard to get along with at times, hence our current relationship. Well, in any event, she has a tenant in there now but i think she lost her job. My sister would probably like the idea if having me there becus she knows she can count on me to pay the rent on time.

I can't really think of any other options that would result in significant lowering of expenses. The best case scenario would be finding a new job. It wouldn't even have to be a great paying job, because I've already calculated that even with no further contributions to my retirement savings (assuming no big withdrawals, either) I'd end up with enough to retire on. (I haven't done my February investment statement yet, but I know the market's been up and I'm hoping i hit the half million mark.)

So a new job would only need to cover my current living expenses and provide me with reasonably priced health insurance. If I got another job, maybe instead of contributing to a 401(k) I'd start a new savings account for a new car, something I'll need in a few years. Or maybe contribute the minimum needed to get the employer match on the 401k...i don't know, just a thought. I'm eligible now for the catch-up contributions, so would hate to give that up.

My dad came up for an unexpected visit yesterday. He called from my sister's house and wanted to know if i wanted to go out to dinner. Of course!

He came over in the afternoon and we hung out and chit-chatted for quite a while, then my sister joined us and we headed to my dad's favorite Connecticut restaurant, the German place.

I wasn't in the mood for schnitzel so I got the only chicken dish on the menu, something with a red pepper sauce, along with some red cabbage and spaetzel. We also split an appetizer of German pancakes. Dessert was some sort of cake/pudding thing with almonds and whipped cream.

So it was a nice way to break up my week. He spent a 2nd night at my sister's last night and headed back home today.

Also yesterday i got an email that got me very excited. A recruiter from a creative agency emailed me about a contract job, rewriting website copy for a non-profit group that would be worth 40 to 60 hours worth of work. Although I'd never dealt with this particular person before, she was quite friendly in the email, addressed me by name and even apologetic that the rate was just $20/hr (because it was a non-profit). She said if I was interested, to send my current resume and writing samples, and that the job could start as early as this Monday with a phone interview that day.

So I immediately began crafting a great reply, hand-picked some wrting samples, etc and sent it back about an hour and a half after she sent it. I sent a 2nd email with a few more writing samples I'd dug up. Then I called.

I called again this a.m., asking her to call me back and let me know the status of this job.

No responses to my emails or phone calls. Which really, really, ticks me off. If she sends me an email to me and me alone, it would just be common courtesy to let me know if i didn't get the job, since she approached me.

But i thought it was weird from the start that a recruiter would go to the trouble of emailing someone when they could more quickly and easily pick up the phone. That's why I suspect she mass-distributed this email to a bunch of people. And I have to assume someone else got to it before I did. Even though no one else's name appeared on the email, there are programs that let you mass mail something and it appears as if it's gone to just you.

I am desperate for work, would be thrilled to do this for $20 an hour and responded almost immediately. For a stupid recruiter to dangle a job in front of you and then just ignore you is just cruel.

I noticed the receptionist at the place always asks for your name before transferring you, so when I called this afternoon, I gave a fake name to see if she'd then take my call. It didn't work; I got dropped into her voice mail again. I am so tempted to tell her off on either the phone or email, but of course that would ensure this agency would blacklist me but good, and they are one of the few agencies in my state that specializes in finding jobs for creative types.

Hey, I know they get their paycheck from the employers, but they also need the cooperation of job candidates to get their job done. I don't care how many job candidates are out there now, the surplus doesn't mean they should feel free to just treat them like disposable goods. What a jerk!!

So one of the contractors I'd talked to at last weekend's Home Show called me today wanting to come over and give me an estimate for vinyl siding. We scheduled an appointment for tomorrow, but not before he totally annoyed me by inquiring whether there was another homeowner, ie, a husband, and if so, could he be present when they arrive as well.

Why did this annoy me? 1. Becus i got the idea that if I happened to be a man, they would not be so insistent on finding out if I was married; in fact, they could probably care less, and 2. I got the idea that they didn't want a situation where they were trying to close the deal and then I say, oh, I need to talk to my husband about it. They want to close the deal on the spot.

Anyway, I argued the point with them and they finally gave up trying to find out whether or not I have a husband. My personal situation is none of their business,and men just don't seem to get it that asking anything having to do with your marital status makes me, as a single woman living alone, feel a little vulnerable dealing with people I don't know. So I prefer to reveal as little info as possible. I am the homeowner and I'll be paying the bill, I told them.

So anyway, after we set the appointment and I hung up from them, I decided to check them out on BBB. Turns out they have 84 complaints lodged against them by dissatisfied customers, and some of them were not resolved to the customers' satisfaction.

84 complaints? Ridiculous! Based on that alone, I decided to cancel the appointment I'd just made; there are tons of contractors out there. I don't need to take a chance with a company that apparently leaves customers hanging when the job is done. I got their answering machine, so I left a calm, but detailed message explaining why I was canceling.

The scary thing is that if a company like this realizes it's losing too much business due to the sheer number of BBB complaints, all they have to do to get around that is change their company name and re-register with the state. Unless you as a customer know the names of the principals, you'd never know it was the same outfit.

I dropped off some clothes and boots at my mothers' and she loved them all. I also spent quite a bit of time there trying to help her learn how to post photos of her art on a blog I helped her create....a year ago. My mother's been using email for years, but it amazes me how doing the simplest things online, like a cut-and-paste or just basic commands, gets her so frustrated.

Of course, she hadn't tried posting photos to her blog in the entire year since I set it up for her, so of course she forgot everything.

While I was out, I also stopped at Wal-Mart and did a call-in survey with Toluna while shopping for hand lotion. It was a 3-minute survey and netted me a lot of points, which I so laboriously work for doing tons of online surveys all month long. This was a different type of survey that doesn't come along often, but as I said, it was a chance to earn big points. I also participated in an online interactive survey at a scheduled time last week. It was 90 minutes long, and that one just by itself also netted me oodles of points, the equivalent of about $30.

In freelance news, I got a message today from a Realtor inquiring about my price for a press release. We haven't connected yet, but i hope to talk to her tomorrow. Last week, I had sent out my email flyer about my freelance services to several hundred agents at the one firm i know best (they have about 1500 agents mostly in CT)and when i didn't get much of any response (1 price inquiry, to be exact), I gave up and figured the market is too slow, there's no activity and hence no freelance work. But this call came from the marketing manager of a very prominent top producer in an elite, affluent town. Maybe the bread and butter Realtors aren't doing much business, but this tells me the top notch ones are.

So that will be a bit more work for me, although i already decided to lower my price for a press release from $135 to $99, just to ensure I get the business, becus business builds on itself; if they're happy with one thing you do, it's much more likely they'll call you again, plus refer you to others in the company. The $99 includes my interview of the new agent joining the team, where I ask them a little about their background. I write the draft press release, get both the agent and the group hiring me to sign off on it, and then i distribute it (via email) to their local papers. Pretty straightforward.

I think I'll maintain my $135 price for press releases when i do work for the corporate entity. With a Realtor, it's coming out of their pocket, meaning they have to pay me and they can't bill it to corporate, so the price really needs to be reasonable. Given this economy, especially.

In anticipation of a contractor showing up here tomorrow a.m., I was able to finish shoveling out my front stairs and front stoop, so he can actually get to the front door.

On Saturday morning I woke up dreaming about real estate, and that's how i ended up spending all morning browsing online condos for sale. I keep coming back to this one particular complex for people ages 55+. (I'm just 51 now, so would have to wait a few years.)

I discovered that you can buy a perfectly nice 2 bedroom condo in this complex for $225 to $250K, and that's with a completely remodeled kitchen. I do believe I could sell my house for $325K or so and would do very well to go for one of these units. What I liked about them was they were just the right size, 1400 square feet.

I want a small size so my heating, cooling costs and property taxes are lower. Plus, my environmental leanings and minimalist bent make me feel that's the right thing to do, especially considering that in my current 1650 sf home, I use the dining room as a pass-through only, use the 3rd bedroom for storage and have not one, but two living rooms. So there's a LOT of wasted space here.

Also, nearly every unit in this complex has a very generously-sized deck or patio, extremely private with woodsy views. That's the main reason i like this condo complex so much: it's very private with more outdoor privacy than most condos around here. Having to adjust coming from a very private 1.5 acres, that's important to me, plus I can still do a bit of gardening and feed the birds. The 2-bedrooms come with garage, fireplace, all wood floors and as i said new kitchen and new baths. these particular units were built in 1969, I believe, though most of them elsewhere in the complex were built in the 80s. All the units are one level, which i also like; who knows if the MS could be an issue later in life.

What I don't like about them is that the garages are all detached and not super close, so I could see it being a hassle in rain or snow. And the heat is electric, and rates are rather high in my state. Also, becus this condo complex is like a small village (close to 2600 units on a lot of land) and very woodsy, there's monthly condo charges plus a separate District quarterly tax.

Then I figured, what the heck, I know I'd be fine in a 1400 sf 2 bedroom, so let's see what the highest priced one-bedroom unit in the complex looks like. Well, that one also went for $225K and was the former residence of some well-known designer. It was quite interesting to look at: the fireplace had a dramatic copper hood that reached the ceiling, all the ceilings throughout the unit were done in wood beadboard, the kichen is great and everything was peachy keen. It was just 910 sf in size, but I would seriously consider it if it were not for the very stingy sized deck, barely enough room to stand on.


Very unassuming from the outside...


The Living Room


Another view


The kitchen

I love this unit, but truth be told, I think it'd be a very tight fit. Becus here in my current home, I also have a basement and full, walk-up attic I use for storage; most of these units don't have a basement, so the only storage outside of closets would be the 1-car garage which probably wouldn't hold much. Ah, well, it's fun to dream.

I considered it, but ultimately decided to pass.

An area credit union is offering this great deal: a no-fee refinance for 10 years at 3.74% with 1 point, or 4.74% with 0 points.

As you may know, I'm anxious to pay off my mortgage, or at least make it as inexpensive as possible for the duration of payments. But I long ago concluded it didn't make sense to pay $3,000 or $4,000 in closing costs on a $31,000 balance. I've aggressively pre-paid it down these past 15 years, and ramped that up in the past 3 years or so.

But the credit union deal caught my eye. I spoke to the director of refinances there and told her of my situation, namely, that while i have ample liquid assets and could pay the whole thing off now if I wanted, I do happen to be unemployed right now.

She said that would "be a concern." I told her my credit's great, over 800 last i checked. She said the unemployment situation would still be "a concern." But with no fees, I had nothing to lose, so i went online to pursue this a little further.

To be eligible for membership, you have to live or work in certain counties, which I do not. However, belonging to a church in those counties will also be enough to grant you membership. I could become a member of a nearby church in said county very quickly.

But then I saw you can't just become a member and then go for the refinance. You have to open some sort of checking or savings account, which is just a $25 minimum, but i really don't like to complicate my financial life unnecessarily, since i would never have any intention of further funding such an account as their rates aren't as good as my online money market.

I'm sort of on the fence about it, but mostly, I guess, I lost my enthusiasm about doing it. Because even with no further pre-payments, I'll have my existing mortgage paid off in 4 more years, and as soon as i do get a job, you can bet I will be prepaying my little heart out, and i plan to pay the whole thing off in 3 years once it gets down to about $9,000.

Going for such a juicy refinance would save me about $5,400 in interest payments, but i figure that once i get over the unemployment hump (a big if) my frugal habits of prepaying at least $100 or $200 a month will shave off some of those interest payments anyway.

In other news, Patient Saver was shocked at the still rising cost of heating oil this winter. Normally, Patient Saver would only need 2 fill-ups to get through the season: once in the summer, when prices are lowest, and once again in January/February.

But because Patient Saver decided to live in a tolerably warm home this winter (66/64)she did her 2nd refill Christmas week and now, with a quarter tank left, needs to do one more refill to get through to spring.

Today's price, after calling a half dozen discount heating oil places, was $3.36 a gallon. With a 150 gallon minimum at most places, that's $504 for my final fill-up. Shocking and OUCH that hurts!

My neighbors in back asked me if they could borrow my snow rake. Seems they're hard to find and completely sold out in the stores.

Every day this week the TV news has shown multiple examples of roofs caving in, mostly commercial buildings, old barns and apartment or condo buildings with flat or nearly flat roofs.

I said sure, and she said they'd give me more eggs in exchange. That's great with me!

There's something that just tickles me about neighbors sharing resources and trading stuff that avoids the need to go out and spend money. And I love having friendly neighbors. Seems so quaint and old-fashioned, but it shouldn't be.

Perhaps today I'll try to clear my front walkway and stairs, buried in snow for weeks now. It's already 32 and climbing.

Yesterday I did my taxes, both federal and state. I feel a sense of accomplishment. I was able to file the state online for free and will get a $39 refund. I was intent on filing the federal online as well, but for whatever reason they don't have the Schedule A ready to go, so I reverted to doing what I've always done, manually filling out the forms, which seem to increase every year.

I will get a $1,100 refund on my federal return, which I'm grateful for, but it's not nearly as much as I got last year, thanks to some tax rebates on my sunroom windows. And, I noticed that for whatever reason, my old employer took out way more in taxes than they needed to but perhaps I needed to increase the number of my exemptions.

So I have a federal tax return ready to mail but I can't get out my driveway. The last storm 2 days ago deposited a thick coating of ice on everything. I spent some time chipping away at the ice on the slope of my driveway, just 2 tire tracks, so getting up the hill shouldn't be a problem. But there's still a mound of mostly ice at the bottom of the driveway by the road. I was just too exhausted to tackle that today.

I guess mailing my tax return can wait. And maybe by the time I get it mailed (Monday?), Schedule A will be available online.

In other news, it was a productive day for the job search. I have 3 leads today that I didn't have yesterday:

1. a copywriter job for a luxury brand at an agency in nearby small city. I was excited becus I never find jobs in my field this close by.

2. A corporate writer job in same small city working for a real estate/relocation company bought out several times, now under a new company.

I feel very well qualified for both jobs and applied for both first thing this a.m.

Then I got a call from a recruiter telling me about a job in a city an hour's drive from here (or more) for a long-term contract job (6 mths to a year) for a financial services firm.

Not so crazy about that job, but i told her to go for it and send my resume on to the employer, just to see if they call. It's a really long drive and their stuff is way over my head i think. What i really need to find is a perm job becus COBRA won't last forever and the monthly cost is killing me.

Another snowstorm is coming through tomorrow. There have been a lot of roof collapses all over the state, but mostly commercial buildings with flat roofs. The roof over the main part of my house is pretty steep, but i have what's called a shed roof over my garage and family room with a fairly shallow pitch. However, after paying someone to clear all the snow off several snowstorms ago, I'd say i have an inch or two of solid ice, which is heavy, but just an inch or two.

I advised my friend who lives nearby to look into having the landscaper she does the books for to see if he can get some of the snow off her roof. She's never done that before on her ranch with shallow roof, and she estimates she's got a foot and a half of snow up there which in my opinion is way too much, especially since the topping will be ice.

Spring, and a job, CAN'T COME FAST ENOUGH.

Since becoming unemployed again, I decided to step up my online surveys. Last year, I averaged just $35 a month, but that's just an average. A more realistic figure was between $20 and $50 a month. I stopped doing them entirely when I was working.

My goal was to really ramp up my monthly income from these things. If they can pay for something like my electric bill...wonderful.

So I'm happy to report that since early January, roughly a month's time, I've earned $100. That could cover my monthly electric AND cable bill combined with a little left over.

It would be great if I could keep that up the entire year, but I don't know, it is very time-consuming and tedious. I once figured it to be about $1 an hour. But time is one thing I have these days, and since I seem to end up sitting at the computer anyway, I might as well do something for a little cash.

Other than that, my life this past week has been wholly dominated by the crazy weather. Last night and today we had a major ice storm. Shoveling the driveway, shoveling the roof, chipping away at the ice dam in the gutters. Really ridiculous. I hope we get a warm-up soon but they're talking more snow possibly on Saturday and something after that as well.

I've also been sticking pretty close to home, as another informal money goal I've set for myself is just one gas tank fill-up a month. I don't see why I should need more since I'm not working.

So when I had to return a book to the library and get a few key groceries for meals I was making, I walked there. It was about an hour round-trip, and I must say, a rather cold day, so I feel proud that I did that.

Still waiting for 2 more tax-related forms from a bank and a brokerage before starting my taxes.

Bad weather always has me cooking, so I recently made a turkey chili with tomatoes from last summer's garden, plus frizzled cabbage, which is basically shredded green cabbage and onion sauteed tiil soft with olive oil with egg noodles mixed in; you can also add peas if you wish.

I started researching portable generators. I never knew that I could keep my furnace running during a power outage using one. Duh. But I probably won't do anything for the time period; they're rather expensive. I'd want to go for a 3 or 4,000 watt generator for just my furnace and refrigerator. I'd also have to spend extra to have an electrician install a transfer switch, so all in all, too expensive for me right now.

I always worry bigtime during storms about downed trees and power outages and possible frozen pipes, but in the 15 years i've lived here, there was just one power outage that lasted about 24 hours, and the house got down to a very chilly 50 degrees.

I hate to be at the mercy of the power company and their repair crews; you always hear of people being without power for days at a time, and if that happened to me in winter, I'd be sunk.

But as it happened, the tree trimming crew was out here trimming the trees in front of my house on the day just before the snow/ice storm. They had actually been at it several days. Initially they passed my house and I knew, since I called to find out when they'd be coming, that they only come once every 5 years, so i didn't want them to pass by my house. The guy said the trees were growing right into the wires so much so that they'd have to do a "planned outage," in which they notify residents they'd be without power for at least a few hours.

In the dead of winter, with the kind of temps we've been having?? Well, I guess they thought better of it because they went ahead and did all the work without having to shut power down. They spent quite a bit of time here and I hope it reduces the many outages we seem to have here.

It actually was partly my fault becus once, years ago, when a workman came to the house for permission to trim the trees, nature nut that i am, I said "no" becus i'd seen the way they scalp the branches in a very unnatural looking way. The guy got annoyed with me and said he could go to town hall and override me anyway, which just annoyed me and made me dig in my heels, so they left and never trimmed.

I regretted it in later years when tree branches fell on the wires, caught on fire and shorted out the transformer. Mea culpa.

Now my feeling is, they can trim all they want.

I made good progress chipping away at the ice dams these past 4 or 5 days. Can't tell you how exhausted I am, every muscle in my back, shoulders and arms aches, but I feel a sense of satisfaction that after incredibly hard work, I got the entire back side of the house chipped free of the 6-inch high wall of ice, plus about 2 feet of snow above that on the roof. (The gutters themselves are still filled with ice and since they have screens on them, it could be hard to melt. Maybe sprinkling that calcium chloride in there would help, but i'd have to pour a ton there to declog the whole gutter. Otherwise, it will probably just freeze again as it will have nowhere to go. The important thing is that I was able to observe water dripping over the sides of the gutters, not down the side of the house. I have stopped the backup of water under shingles.)

I doubt that many women would have done what I did (especially one over 50 no less!)....drag a 17-foot-high aluminum ladder out in 3 feet of packed snow, positioning it multiple times, climbing to the very top (not feeling very at ease up there) and chip, chip, chipping away at the ice. Not having a lot of upper body strength, it was slow going, plus i was swinging the sheet rock hammer I bought in a raised position because the ladder is about 3 feet too short.

So it took me 5 days (maybe more, i lost count) to clear away all that ice. After hammering ice for so long, I came to recognize a hollow sound the hammer made when a block of ice was about ready to break away; more often than not, though, I chipped that ice in tiny fragments that went flying in my face, hair, etc. I actually had to close my eyes and turn my head away when I was swinging the hammer to avoid ice from flying in my eyes. (No goggles.) When my arm got tired, I switched hands and swung the hammer with my other arm. Over and over again. When my hands got icy cold, I went inside for a few hours, then went back out a second time in the afternoon.

I was driven by a desire to protect my investment, and seeing as how the mortgage company no longer owns much of it, I felt even more responsible to take care of it.

It occurred to me that chipping away so patiently at that ice was a metaphor for my approach to saving. (Make note of my blog name, Patient Saver!) Chipping away, slowly but steadily, and a great sense of satisfaction to see all the progress I made on the back of the house.

OK, that's enough philosophizing and my lame attempt to relate the Conquering of the Ice Dam to personal finance.

Tomorrow I will attempt at least a partial de-icing of the front of the house. I expect it will be harder, as the land slopes down, there's a mini roof over the front entry in the way and there are larger shrubs. We shall see.

I see a lot of references to Cee Jay's blog; can't seem to find it (must've been a few days ago?) but I see that people are commenting on what they'd like to change in their life.

I'm in the process of reading Eckhart Tolle's best-seller, The Power of Now. It's very slow going, definitely not the kind of book you whiz through.

But anyway, his overriding theme in the book is that you cannot change the past and you cannot live in the future. All you have is NOW, the present moment. And only by teaching yourself to live in the moment can you ever expect to find true happiness.

I am sure i am more guilty about thinking about the past, and planning for the future at the expense of today, than many other people. So I feel the message of this book is so important for me to absorb.

While it is tempting to think about what I would change in my life (so many things), it's sort of like dreaming about what you'd do if you hit it big in the lottery.

And I think that true change will come more easily if you focus on one or two things you feel are most important, and come up with a plan of attack.

So, in the spirit of participation, I choose to focus on what I would NOT change in my life:

1. Having the home I've worked so hard for, and get a lot of enjoyment from

2. Having my 2 kitties here with me to keep me company.

3. Having been blessed with a real ability to write and use language to express myself, and earn a living these past 30 years.

4. My mother and my father.

5. The ability to wake up each morning refreshed and alive, wondering what the new day will bring.

These last few days i've really nosedived in terms of my mental outlook. It was a combination of my employment situation, exacerbated by the water damage caused by ice dams. I've been up on that ladder daily trying to chip away that ice, but it's hard, because the ladder's not tall enough and so i'm attempting to chip with a hatchett with my arm fully extended over my head. I can't even look directly at what i'm doing or i'll get ice chips flying in my eyes.

On top of that, still having trouble getting my health coverage thru COBRA "active" because they haven't processed the paperwork yet (even tho i informed the company twice in mid and late December that i would definitely be wanting COBRA come Jan. 1). I already had to reschedule a doctor's appointment so as to give the COBRA administrator and health insurance company time to process what they need to process; i called today and still not active. The doc appt is on Friday. I can't put it off much longer becus i need to renew a medication i'm on for the MS and doc won't renew it for another year unless i see him.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE JUST GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My friend Michael called and managed to assure me the situation with the ice dam is not that bad and probably won't require knocking out walls, etc. and he doubts mold will be an issue. Not that he's an expert, but it made me feel better not to hear the doom and gloom I read about when researching all this online.

I also touched base with an acquaintance in town, a guy who's very "handy," whom i would trust to replace some sheetrock and do some repairs without ripping me off.

And there's a guy i haven't meet yet (a potential dating partner) who said he knows a guy in the mold remediation business, so i suppose if i wanted to get some testing done, i could turn to that guy as well.

All in all, i feel a little buoyed by all these people around me who each can lend a helping hand. I tend to worry a lot in general, and when you're sort of isolated, staying home due to bad weather and not wanting to spend any money, whatever thoughts and feelings you have tend to get more extreme.

So I feel a little better. My body is aching sore from using that hatchet for the last 4 days and snow shoveling each and every day for the past 2 weeks. It's just incredible. Today i was shoveling to clear the area next to the foundation of the house. Water dripping from the ice dams was freezing and was backed up against the house siding about 2.5 feet high. I was afraid that when that melted, the water would again find ways inside the house, so i had to break it all up with the hatchet and then shovel it away. Not done yet, but definitely made progress. On top of that was all the snow the guys who shoveled my roof off sent crashing down on all sides of the house.

The entryway to my driveway from the road was also getting narrower and narrower. My car just barely fit through the opening and actually scratched the sides of packed ice and snow now well over my head. It was just exhausting work to keep it open. Last night, some plow driver took pity on me and pushed the entire wall of snow and ice on one side of the driveway away. Perhaps it was one of the many people who drove by any number of times and saw a small woman shoveling, shoveling, shoveling.

We're getting another foot tonight. I can't take much more snow.

Don't know if they've always done this, but i just noticed a nice, neat little summary of my Amex charges on my account there, online.

I charged a total of $7,065 in 2010 (paid off in full, of course) and they broke it down into the following categories:

$6026, merchandise and supplies, 85% of total spending
$757, transportation (that would be for gas), 11%
$112, business services, 2% (don't know what this is)
$106 , communications, 1%
$101, entertainment, 1%
0, restaurant and travel

My general goal is to charge as much as possible on this card since it's a cash back card.

On today's agenda:
1. go back to Ace and get a bag of calcium chloride
2. fill up some pantyhose with calcium chloride and lay it across an ice dam
3. meet Mike the ice dam/snow removal guy at 2 pm so he can give me a price
4. go to neighbor's for "tea" at 4 and collect some fresh eggs from them

I feel a little better about the whole mess with the ice and snow damage. While my one friend was somewhat alarmist about ripping out walls and stuff, another friend said that was maybe not necessary, that he'd had water infiltration from ice dams and all he did was repaint and he never had problems again. My neighbor behind me also had water damage and is pretty calm about it but he's able to do the repair himself, if need be.

So, i posted a photo in my last post showing the blistered paint on the baseboard in my spare bedroom. There are 2 spots downstairs showing water damage as well, including a portion of wallpaper above the kitchen door. I think i have extra of that wallpaper in the attic.

I spoke to my friend Frank who is telling me it's going to likely be big bucks to repair all this and it'll mean tearing up the walls and getting rid of mold, etc. He has water damage, too and is filing an insurance claim.

I don't think I will since i just recently increased my deductible to $5,000.

I called a guy in town who advertises in the local paper that he removes snow and ice dams from roofs. His charge for a 2-story house is $600. I'm freaking out about the costs already.

He'll stop by tomorrow to look at the house; he said he charges less to just remove the ice dams and snow from the lowest portion of the roof.

If I pay him to do that, then maybe it would be possible for me to keep snow/ice from building up on the gutters for the rest of the winter with the roof rake I just bought today.

I haven't tried it out yet but plan to do so tomorrow. I'm not sure I can do anything with it since solid ice has formed over the gutters, and I'm not sure how far I'll be able to reach with the 17-foot roof rake.

I discovered a frozen stream of water down the INSIDE of the storm door on the kitchen entry. The water had streamed through some wood trim. I set up a small portable space heater to help melt the frozen stream, which had iced up into a small pool on my wood threshold, and i soaked it up with paper towels as it melted; I also had to chip away at it with a butter knife.

I also worked outside this afternoon, basically shoveling a pathway in knee-high snow to the area where I wanted to set up a ladder. I got the ladder set up and against my better judgment, went up and was able to knock off some icicles. I had a small hammer with me that i used to try to chip away at the ice, but it's such a solid block of ice my arm would wear out long before i was able to create a channel through the ice for melting water to flow.

I had also read online that you can cut up some old pantyhose and fill it with sodium chloride, tie the pantyhose at both ends, and then lay it horizontally across the ice dam and along the roof. This will eventually melt the ice and create an opening out where water can flow.

Talked to Frank about all this and he said he'll come over Monday with a hatchet, which might be better to chip away at ice at.

The most important thing i can do now is remove as much ice and snow from the roof as possible, since the snow higher on the roof is feeding and making those ice dams below larger each time it melts a little. If I remove it, I can at least limit the damage.

I read online that some companies use a thermal moisture detector that can tell if there's moisture inside walls before breaking into them. I had insulation blown in there years ago, so that would/could also get wet.

So we could be talking breaking down walls, ripping out insulation and sheetrock, retaping everything, etc. Maybe it'll exceed $5k anyway. I'm really freaking out. I've worked SO hard to minimize my expenses, and this just blows all of that.

Just got a phone call from my neighbors who live on the hill behind my house. He called to offer me eggs from their new chickens, who are laying like crazy. I poured out all my woes to him and he invited me up to their house tomorrow for tea. (He's British.) He said oh yeah, they had leaks, too, but he's not that concerned; he can do all the repairs himself.

Yesterday I noticed drip stains from where water had gotten inside the house due to gutters that are frozen solid with snow and ice. When the sun shone on it, it must've dripped back between window trim and siding somehow.

The drip stains extend down both sides of my back kitchen door and caused all the paint to come up on the piece of trim that goes over the door.

It was very upsetting to see that; now I'm wondering if i have to worry about mold issues and/or if i can just sand, scrape and repaint that wood without worrying about it.

Today, I saw more damage, this time in my upstairs spare bedroom, directly above where that kitchen door is on the 1st floor. A length of baseboard about 3 feet in length is water stained and all the paint is coming up. The wall above it, and below the window, has a ripple in what i guess is damp sheetrock.



The worst thing is, there's a whole lot of frozen snow and ice still up there. I sure don't want to see this damage popping up on other walls, especially those I've wallpapered!

I called Ace Hardware and they have snow rakes they're selling for $43. They are aluminum and extend 16 feet, which should reach the gutters on my house, although with hard-crusted snow above my knees out there, it wouldn't be easy to work.

I don't know if I should try to do it before Tuesday, as they're forecasting very cold weather, a high of 15 or so daytime, 0 or below at night. Starting Tuesday, it should be a bit warmer, but they're also forecasting snow from then through the end of the week!

I already plan to leave all my faucets dripping at night and leaving cabinet doors open under each sink to try to prevent frozen pipes.

As a cost-saving measure in 2010, I decided to cut my (basic) cable, which at that time was costing me $25 a month.

When I talked to the rep, he offered to cut my bill in half (!) and said that price would be good for a year. (Too bad I didn't know they'd do this for all these years I've been paying full price. Of course, I know now they only offer to do this when you announce your intent to cancel.)

So I agreed to keep the cable at the reduced price. Everything was fine for 3 months, but after that, the cable company (Charter) raised their rates and my monthly bill inched up again, from $13 to $18.

I called the cable company again when it happened, but ended up getting in an argument with the rep, who kept trying to explain that my promo rate was still intact, even though my overall bill increased. I, on the other hand, didn't feel that Charter had honored its agreement with me.

So in the face of continued job/money issues, I again decided today to just cancel the service entirely; there are so many alternatives available. I got interested in Roku initially, but decided against it since you need at least intermediate speed DSL to stream the video,and that added expense ($10 a month) would partially defeat the purpose. There's still Hulu.com and my local library. And I'm still prepared to just go cold turkey.

I called today and got a very professional rep on the phone who made everything so easy. He not only reinstated my $13 a month service but is giving me a credit for all the months I've been paying $18 a month. How cool is that? The revised pricing is only good for the length of my original involvement in their "discount program," in other words, June 2011. But then I'm to just call back in again and see if they have other promotions going on; if i again feel the need to cancel, I can do so at that time.

So I'm pleased to have cheaper cable again, although there's a part of me still wondering if I would have been better off saving $18 a month, given that I'm still not working and 1) my unemployment benefits have decreased slightly (by $9 a week), I'm not yet sure why and 2) my expenses have dramatically increased (by $268 a month), due to higher COBRA costs.

I guess discounted cable is OK for now, when you consider I'm also shaving expenses by doing the following:

1. I intend to not renew minutes on my prepaid cell phone in March, saving me $100 for the year. I discovered that I can buy 700 minutes of call time with a Verizon card from Costco for just $20, which comes out to about 2.86 cents a minute, so I'll rely on calling cards (as I've done before) instead of the cell phone. (I also already dropped my ability to dial long-distance on my land line, thereby saving me $2 a month with AT&T.)

2. I also plan to drop my AAA membership, saving me $90 a year. Initially I didn't think i wanted to cancel it since my membership gets me 15% discounts on car repairs at the Honda dealer (In previous years, I spent about $1,000 or more on car maintenance, so the AAA discounts wound up paying for my membership, but last year, I only spent $165 on car maintenance.) I don't intend to get anything other than oil/filter changes done in 2011, knock on wood. Since I'm not driving far or commuting these days, the AAA membership seems superfluous.

3. As mentioned above, I'm limiting car repairs to routine oil/filter changes, about once every 5,000 miles, as well as tire rotations, since they are free at the place where i bought my tires.

4. As blogged about earlier, I'm cutting food expenses by 18% and limiting monthly grocery expenses to $180, instead of the $220 a month I averaged in 2010. I already know I didn't hit that target for January due to my bad math (!) and partly because I included a $40 Costco membership fee as a grocery expense.

I have already switched to a lower cost electricity supplier, increased the deductible on my homeowners a 2nd time (to $5,000) and dropped collision and comprehensive on my 12-year-old car. And of course it's a given that all discretionary expenses, like dining out, entertainment, clothing, Netflix, gifts and routine healthcare, are deferred. (I did recently have a mammogram and plan on seeing my neurologist next week, only so as to be able to renew a prescription I need for the MS.)

So my minimal necessary expenses, which are mostly the mortgage, health insurance, car/home insurance and utilities, comes to $2,212. My net unemployment comes to $1,868 a month, leaving me with a monthly shortfall of $344, which I will try to make up doing freelance writing, online surveys, selling stuff on Craig's List, doing focus groups and of course looking for f/t or contract work.

Looked at another way, if I somehow manage to stick to my spartan budget but do NOTHING to earn income above the unemployment benefits,I'd be out of pocket $4,128 for the year, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not the end of the world. And I'm really in much better shape than many others out there who are struggling to pay off big credit card debt, car loans, student loans, etc. I'll have my home paid off in a few years.

Of course, I plan to work as hard as possible not to dig into savings to make up that shortfall. Thus far in January I've gotten about $375 in freelance work, so I'm getting off to a good start.