Spendy McSpenderson

Alright, so the last time I wrote anything note-worthy (my bitching about the ceaseless rain is just noise, really, who cares but us SoCal’ers) was sometime in early December. Since then:

1. I have been swallowed up by Etsy which is going surprisingly well. This week it has slowed some so maybe the holiday rush has finally ended.
2. I ran the Southern California Half marathon last weekend and did “OK” (might run the Highland Half this weekend for shits and giggles)
3. I registered for the Carlsbad Half marathon (by transferring someone else’s entry since it has been sold out since early October).
4. My Italian grandmother came for a visit last weekend so now i have been commissioned to crochet her and my second cousin some stuff which I’m trying to squeeze in between my create-new-stuff-for-Etsy daily routine.
5. The audio receiver officially died in mid December. It would turn off and then we would “whack” the top of it. Really. We employed the “whack it and see if it works” with our electronics. That tactic did work for about year. Still haven’t replaced it since we had my old one upstairs. It doesn’t have HDMI inputs so it is only a temporary fix.
6. On Christmas Eve the TV started its slow crawl to death. It’s a 42” non-HD plasma TV that we got in 2004. Every morning we would turn it on and it wouldn’t show a picture, though the power was on. After 30-60 minutes of letting it sit there it, we would recycle the power button and gather in prayer. We finally bought a new TV this week after the last “warm-up” period lasted more than an hour.
7. I decided that dumping $2K+ of work into my RAV4 with 135K miles on it (only worth $5K tops) was not worth it. Unless I planned to keep my car to 200K+ miles. And the rain made my car feel unsafe without the  fixes (tires, suspension, at a minimum). So I got a new car.

Yes, I know. Husband still unemployed and I’m buying a new car and a TV. Soon a receiver. The neighbor joked with my husband and asked if we were drug dealers. I guess it looks a little strange. But I am a damn good saver because I am compulsive like that. And there is only so long I can be extremely thrifty before I explode. After two years of spending very little on stuff, never going on vacation (other than short-ish road trips), we went a little crazy and bought stuff. I am not overly concerned though; soon I will get a block of company stock from the stock purchase program and, well, the stock is doing very well, so, I feel less scared about spending. Hopefully the rest of the nation will feel this same vibe and start spending some so we can get some jobs created up in this piece.

That’s been the “happenings” in cha-cha land. Little work has been done in the bathroom (the one I am remodeling a bit – there is always daily “work” done in the bathroom! Ha!), and little work done on the chair – I am such a slacker on that front… eventually I will get to them.