Gosh, I sure hope this new design is just for April Fool's Day. It's kind of weird having a guy's picture on the top of my blog!

I've been concentrating on other things lately, and let the blogging go. But I've got to start paying more attention to money again. I feel like it's been slipping through my fingers...

Let's see, our biggest financial hit recently was an emergency vet visit on a Sunday that cost $460--and the cat just turned out to have gas. (Did you know they give cats Zantac?) Today he's limping--and he's going to have to keep limping til a weekday.

Our neighbor the mechanic prefers to be paid in cash, and we both thought my car's problem was going to be an expensive one. So I took out $500 to be safe. It turned out to be much less, but it wasn't convenient to get the leftover money back into the bank right away. And so it just WENT. Since my last blog entry, I've gone through $164 in the "unaccounted for" category.

DH's boss is having a baby, and we ended up spending $56 on baby shower gifts. There was a group gift where each employee was expected to chip in $40, and then I was invited to a shower, which seemed to require an individual gift.

There's a possibility that my paycheck could actually go down this year. A new town government has come in that's decided to take away "longevity" bonuses from non-union workers. (The unionized ones would never agree to it.) That was a percentage of pay that was in every paycheck. We also don't know if we'll get much of a yearly raise or not. Usually we get the same % raise as the unionized workers, but there's no guarantee. It's possible we'd get no raise, and lose the longevity, resulting in a lower hourly rate. Keeping my fingers crossed.

On the positive side, I have not run up any debt during these little emergencies. I have two car test drives that haven't expired yet ($75), and I know of a couple of credit cards I could apply for that would give a bonus after the first purchase. It's a new month--gotta get cracking!

Well, that's the news from Lake Woebegone.