My head is KILLING me. I need to stop thinking about being broke for 4 more weeks & start thinking about how to make meals on $25 a week. Or maybe just stop thinking altogether for a while until my head stops hurting.

Unrelated. I want the Red-bearded Wonder to send me a pic of his pecs to use as a #Boobiewed avatar. LOL

Normally I’m the Queen of “Eating Well, Cheaply.” Seriously my STBX makes 30K a year and I’ve fed & raised 7 kids on that with NO aid. No food stamps. No Aid to Families with Dependent Children. No WIC.

My kids have seen me make meals from practically empty cupboards. Tonight’s plan for dinner was
Scalloped potatoes
w/chunks of leftover ham
and 1/2 a 1# bag of broccoli cuts
Dinner for the 4 kids who were at home, for $2.

About a month ago I had only $68 to spend for groceries the last week of the month, for the 6 of us. But this thing of only having $25 a week for the next month… I’m still having to work it out in my head.

Something will give, I know. Stay tuned.

Being broke isn’t any new thing to me. We’ve raised/are still raising 7 kids on 30K a year with no aid. But this time around I was really broke. Way. Broke.

An almost-stranger, without being asked, gave me $200. This is so much money to me. I seriously don’t spend a dime that doesn’t go to bills, gas, or food for me or the kids. If this generous person hadn’t been so kind, right now I would have $70 for gas & groceries until the 20th. And a week’s worth of gas for the car alone is $50.

I need a new pair of shoes. I have a pair of Shape-ups I’ve had for nearly a year. For at least 200 days in the last year I’ve walked 2.5 miles a day. These shoes are shot.

My car insurance renews next week. I have a tattoo convention to attend next week. I think the hotel is paid for by the shop but it’s a tank of gas to get there & back.

My X called tonight from New Jersey, where he’s visiting his brother. A year ago they diagnosed John with mesothelioma. His lungs were already filling with fluid. Two days ago he fell, sloughed a silver-dollar size piece of skin off his arm, and didn’t even bleed. He’s down to 118 pounds. He has about a month to live.

X said he’d cover the car insurance renewal. He didn’t give me any money for the trip I had to take to NY to take our son to college so I guess that’s fair.

And I’m thankful to the generous stranger.

And I’m not dying.

But I still can’t afford a pair of shoes.

We made loaded baked potatoes for supper. No bacon to crisp up & put on them; I thought I had some but no. But we had sautee’d mushrooms & onions, steamed broccoli, fresh chives, butter, cheese, sour cream. I made a mixed salad too. It was good.

I didn’t have any cheese on mine.

I am suddenly very tired & headachey. I don’t feel like working on painting some more of the bathroom.

Lying on the bed knitting doesn’t sound appealing either.

Maybe I’ll draw. Boyd gave me homework to bring back to work Wednesday.

X paid for the car insurance, at least this month’s renewal. I have to call Friday morning to e-check it.

I mailed packages today. Muffins and soap to my son in New York. Muffins, soap, and a couple surprises to the Red-bearded Wonder.

I’m very worried about the money. Almost sick about it. I need to get to peace.

I have $2 in my savings and $2.57 in my checking.

And our SS benefit comes on Wednesday.

But I have gas in the car and food for us to eat.

So we’re a’ight.

I think I’m a little overwhelmed. For several days I’ve been trying to pass a kidney stone. I’ve alternated between kidney colic, a headache that makes me want to die, and pain that makes me want to kill something.

During this time I’ve done all my normal activities, plus had 4 houseguests overnight and done 3 tattoos.

Tonight my head feels like it could explode.

Here’s a brutal truth. I’m not really a very sociable creature. I went to a tweetup last Fall, where I met ONE woman I hit it off with and who actually cared/cares I’m on the face of the earth. Mostly I got to watch a dozen almost-strangers get pretty drunk. Live-texting the evening with a friend of mine was more fun than being there, and I left early.

I’m expected to go to this jamboree for work, but I feel the same way about it as I did about the tweetup. Except that there will be 25x as many people there, it will be in the old-growth woods of the Smoky Mountains, in the dark, and I get to sleep in a tent.

The thought of doing this is just about making me sick to my stomach.

Bad Mom of the Year Award Alert - Here’s another shocker. Sometimes I am tired of parenting. I’ve been parenting 25 years and my youngest kid still at home is 4. By the time she leaves, I’ll have been parenting 40 years. That’s a career in anyone’s book.

The X wasn’t much help when he was here… the more kids we had, the more it was just MY job. And he’s not a lot of help now, though he’s been better to offer to take the kids since I talked to him about it last month.

Working the middle of the day (11 - 8) plus commute gives me only an hour or two each, morning and evening, with the kids. This is hard enough. But lately I think, there are some times when I wish I didn’t have to come home and check schoolwork and correct little people and manage nighttime chores and deal with attitudes and try to get kids to bed. I wish I could just come home, eat some toast, play on the computer and knit.

I am just on the brink of being able to finally earn a little money. I’m really good at managing money, budgeting, and getting by on very little. But living on a once-a-month dependent benefit for nearly a year now is kinda starting to wear on me.

So Artemas calls me today from a borrowed phone (because his died last week), from the airport in Newburgh, NY.

The airline (US Airways) canceled his flight due to bad weather. They said they could get him on another flight this afternoon, from an airport an hour’s drive away. No, they don’t provide a taxi voucher or shuttle to get him to that airport. He should call whoever dropped him off (another student, on his way out of town) or the college (offices just closed for 3 weeks) to see if they could give him transportation.

Oh wait, that flight would get him to Philadelphia too late to make his connecting flight.

I told him to tell them that by God his ticket lands him in Knoxvile and if they cancelled his flight, they better put him on whatever will get him to someplace & someplace & Knoxville.

So they said, they can put him on a flight at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon to Philly, then Charlotte NC (that’s a new development) and then Knoxville.

Three-thirty in the afternooon. Tomorrow.

No money. No fransportation. No motel. No meals.

I told him to tell them to give him meal vouchers. My mom said the last time they had to get a flight shuiffled like that, the airline gave them meal vouchers, shuttled them to a hotel, put them up for the night, served them breakfast & shuttled them back to the airport.

I haven’t heard since, whether my kid is having to sleep in an airport tonight. Which I know he wouldn’t sleep, too worried about getting mugged or his stuff stolen. I have no idea if he’s eaten.

I put $40 that I couldn’t really spare, on his debit card so he could eat if he had to, if the frikkin’ ariline actually doesn’t provide him some meals.

WTH.

Artemas gave me $ for his phone. I put it in my gas tank. It’s all I had until Wednesday. After picking up Allen this evening, taking the girls to Oak Ridge to babysit tomorrow, running Allen to work and back, and picking the girls back up, that will all be gone. I have to go to work Tuesday, if I can get there.

Something will break. It always does.

My kid is in love with an imaginary ginger. Where have I gone wrong.

Speaking of ginger, it’s been a week again since Jay called me. Though I have had texts from him. But wondering what is happening there, and don’t like where the wondering takes me.

I’ve met some very interesting people lately. Some of them men. A couple of whom I like quite a bit… but unfortunately, being internet people, they’re “imaginary” too.

Everybody lives too damn far away.

I got about an inch of the Electric Mayhem socks knitted today. These were gonna be for the Red-bearded Wonder for Christmas. We shall see.

Which means I shop maybe tomorrow night. No time in the morning.

And which also means I can go to bed instead of going out.

That pleases me a lot, because I’m tired. I passed a kidney stone the size of a BB today and gave myself a tattoo.

I want to stay in and heal and sleep.

I was probably going to add “eat” in there somewhere.

But so far today I have:
~ Gone to see Jeremiah’s TaeKwonDo board-breaking class, which was impressive.
~ Gone to Kroger to get cat food and graham crackers
~ Discovered that my X put money in a bank account we’ve barely used in years, instead of in my checking account (that we were using jointly for more than a year before he left a year ago) to finish covering the fee on Diantha’s surgrey yesterday, thereby overdrawing me by $109 plus a $30 overdraft fee.
~ Talked to said X on the phone, who said that even though we haven’t used that other account for anything for at least two years, I “should have specified” which account and he would fix it Monday, since the banks were already closed for the day.
~ Remembered I had some checks on the old account and there was a branch of my bank open until 3 in Kroger. So I went and covered it.
~ Got cat food, graham crackers, and gas for the mower
~ Knitted on Next Project in the car.
~ Had two clean loads of laundry to be folded dumped in my room while I was gone.

So far I don’t see any mowing or weedeating in this list. And I’m already tired.

And for what it’s worth, I’ve never had my ass smacked during sex. So there’s that.

i-am-silly replied to your post: I just paid all my bills

everyone is liking this post but I want a dislike button cause someone is not getting christmas

You know what? It’s all ok.

My kids are all very loving and interactive.  We all knit things for each other.  My kids ask for simple things, not video game systems or new computers.  We’ll have good food and all be together and have stuff we made for each other and it won’t matter at all.

I had ideas in my head of what I thought some people needed but it was just my plan.  Sometimes Plan B is better anyway.

Today is no different.

But tips this week were going to be my grocery money.

The kids just texted me that we need to buy food in the morning, that we’re out of everything.  I told them we have beans for soup and noodles we can make something out of and eggs for omelets or “breakfast supper.”  Other than that, I don’t know.

I am in tears.  Now what, mom?

The reason the kids and I were strapped isn’t because of bad budgeting, or even holiday spending.  

It’s because I couldn’t make the car insurance payment on time, because I lost my debit card. So to reinstate the insurance, I had to make the payment due, PLUS the payment I would have paid out of our benefit 12 days from now.  That 2nd payment was our grocery and gas money.

I made a tip today which will get me through on gas until I can make some more next week.  And I found that I had stuck some money back into my license fund, so that will be some minimal groceries.

Plus I found 4 nights’ worth of dinner in the seemingly empty cupboards/freezer.  I can do that because I have had many years’ practice at feeding a household of kids on practically no money.

And this weeks tips (which have been practically non-existent) and next week’s were supposed to be the last 4 Christmas presents I needed to buy.  But they will be food money instead.  

And it doesn’t matter, because in my family, we will eat and be happy.  That’s all we really need.

I needed to be able to leave work today with a certain amount of money. The kids and I are broke, and what I needed was more than I could make from the appointments I had scheduled.

I left with what I needed.

I told a long-standing client that I made bank today & didn’t have to give anybody a blowjob to do it.

He said somebody was missing out.

Nobody KNOWS what they’re missing, so nobody’s sad.

I’m nowhere NEAR done knitting Christmas stuff.

But I’ve totally wasted the evening because I’m tired.

And I have rum.

Life is not so bad after all.