I’m sitting here, at 6:17 AM, where I’ve been sitting for hours making ready for my Boss’s awful, ill prepared for and unbearable radio show. There’s a turkey in the roaster (huge 22 lb monster bird!) which should feed Laota and I for ages and ages. The puppy needs constant attention. My boss has poured more work on my shoulders and I’ve got 3 WordPress and Coppermine themes to finish before the week is out. That’s not counting customer support, shopping, cleaning this huge Edwardian mansion, cooking, laundry and all of the million other things I have to do in a day.

So, basically, I have absolutely no time and I’m stressed beyond the telling. And now it’s tax time, so it’s one hundred and fifty percent worse!

I have no problem with tax time, I don’t make much and my taxes are never a problem, always on time and I’ve never had any issues with them. It’s my Mom and Stepdad I’m worried about. They get lazy and put their taxes off then, at the last minute, it becomes OUR problem!

In their defense, I can see why they don’t want to handle it themselves, because it’s terrifying. All those receipts, no order to them! They spend money like it’s going out of style on everything but tax help. Because why spend a little money on accounting software when my sister and I can be bullied into doing their taxes and keeping their books for free?

It’s looming! I hate it when the extra work starts looming! I’m no good with accounting, anyway, and I’m always worried I’ll screw something up then there’ll be some big audit and it’ll be all my fault. That’s setting aside the fact that they have no business forcing their taxes down my throat, anyway.

It’s not like I don’t have enough to do, I sincerely don’t need their work, too!

Tagged with: Busy Girl • Tax Time • Turkey Dinner • Very Busy

Posted by Faith on at 6:28 am

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in Missouri, or visited, but if you have I hope to the Gods that you didn’t have your own car with you.

My mom just had to junk a 15 year old white Chevy Lumina because she had it parked out of a garage and it hails golfballs here like it’s going out of style. The weather just keeps getting worse and worse, and it can’t ever just be horrible heat swells, either, it has to be some psychotic tornado picnic weather thrown in for good measure.

If you live here, or have been keeping an eye on the Doppler for the last few years you may have noticed the erratic way the weather changes – we have short term droughts then get flooded for two weeks, then it’s crazy T-storms that have been producing destructive hail.

So mom’s Lumina’s windshield had hail marks that looked like bullet holes (didn’t go all the way through, though) and a wide crack across the glass from steering wheel to passenger side to door almost. Unfortunately it would cost more to fix it than just to junk it and get a new used car out here because we don’t have services that actually do their job rather than cost you an arm and a leg. I was checking out an auto glass Phoenix website and, if we had lived in Arizona we would have easily been able to keep the Lumina without too much issue. What’s routine repair to them is is un-fixable to our locals, who don’t even offer windshield repair.

They provide same-day service and make sure their work is all finished by an insured, bonded professional which isn’t something you see too often out here in the boonies. Heck, they even allow you to get a free quote online.

I realize it’s a lot of damage, but we didn’t even have the option of replacing the windshield without driving to Kansas City! Is it too much to ask that *something* in Missouri work like it’s supposed to?

Tagged with: Auto Repair • Missouri Weather • Windshield Repair

Posted by Faith on at 8:23 pm

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Straight Talk for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

I have to sing the praises of my adorable phone. I have an adorable black Samsung with amazingly reliable service. How do I do this, you may ask? What with me barely making a living?

Well, I’ve got to have a phone for work, but I absolutely can’t afford a contract with a cell carrier plan thingy. In fact the last plan I had was with a local dealer (or whatever they’re called) and I spent most of my time either scrambling to find enough money to pay for it, watching my text messages like a hawk so that I could be sure I wouldn’t use too many or trying to figure out why I had no signal.

The lack of a reliable signal was the nail in the coffin for that plan and, as soon as it was over, I opted not to renew it.

So what’s with my Samsung? Well, she’s a Straight Talk. I bought her for $45 bucks at Walmart, and that $49 bucks included a month worth of unlimited everything. Unlimited texting, picture messaging, web data and calls (to anyone in the states, by the by). Of course, this is me we’re talking about – there’s now way I’m going to use that much. So I downgraded when it came time to renew my airtime and I went with the "All You Need Plan" with has bout 30 mb of web data, 1,000 texts and the same amount of minutes and I never use that much (I almost wish there were a smaller plan, I’ve got so many features that I’m literally wasting half of them!) and never have to worry about running out.

One of the nice things about my phone, which I’ve been happily married to for the last 8 months, is that all I had to do was pick out the one I wanted and buy it – literally. That means no contracts, no credit checks, no Halloween bills (you know, the kind that you don’t know are there until they jump out from behind a tombstone and scare the bejeesus out of you?), no bad.

Anyone who wants a phone and can afford a meal at a restaurant can probably afford one of these. Just buy, activate it and go. Even 411 calls are free, can you believe that? And if you ever skip a month and want to reactivate, well, that’s free, too. So is termination – this isn’t a contract, so you don’t have to worry about losing your shirt and a sizeable chunk of your life wrestling to get out a plan that more than likely was shoved down your throat by a sales person. They got me hook, line and sinker!

So you get 30 days of service, data, texts, minutes, and so on plus a brand new name brand phone like LG, Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera or Samsung in one bundle for less than half of what it would cost you to replace a phone with the carrier you probably have now. Why, exactly, haven’t you switched yet? When you can get everything you need in one bundle? I’m one of those people who needs every single penny, and that extra $70 a month is like having a fairy godmother who knows that I need shampoo and other such luxuries, and you’ll be surprised how much richer you feel when you can afford to live like a real person. Heck, I could’ve gotten it cheaper. Reconditioned phones start at around 10 bucks and they have things like blue-tooth capability, web, mp3 players and cameras and if I’d needed to buy a phone for a kid and didn’t want to have to guard it with my life? This is what I would have done.

I don’t use their international long distance service, mostly because my job generally requires me to email our over seas contacts, but when I saw how cheap it would be I almost jumped out of my skin. I’ve never, in my life, had long distance service within my reach. If I ever had time to call a friend in Canada, I’d probably have taken it. Plus I could have made those calls from my house, from my cell phone or even this pretty little bakelite 1940s number here at the office and it would all be at very low rates.

My mom actually introduced me to Straight Talk and I didn’t want to get into it because I’d had crappy pre-paid’s before and had the phones fall apart on me in two or three months. But I guess mom knows best – she’s got a Nokia, Samsung and I think a Blackberry (or similar) that she bought from them for, I think, 69 bucks? I’m so close to splurging on one fo their smart phones. I so want a phone with app capabilities and a touch screen – I’m so vain, I know it!

Tagged with: Pre-paid Cell Phones • Straight Talk Phones • StraightTalk Phones

Posted by FaithBowie on at 12:00 am

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of PacSun. All opinions are 100% mine.

I’m trying not to get all summer fever-y, but in this heat and humidity ( I live in Missouri, old house with a broken air conditioner – you do the math! ) it’s hard to not want to get out and have fun, spend what little money I’ve got, lol.

The spending is going to be the issue, because I’ve been full-fledged vintage (permanently stuck in 1941, thanks so much) for over a year and a half now but I find myself wanting to buy some of Ken Block’s special line. It’s very sort of streamlined meets 1990s X-Games and it’s available right now from PacSun. I’m more looking at the DC shoes than I am the Ford Collab stuff, to be honest, but I think it’s because DC tends to have that 80s Run D.M.C. look that I love so much. But yes, unfortunately these things are just beyond my means era-wise, and I have to stop myself from giving in!

The Ken Block Gear‘s looking so good that it makes me want to grab a few pieces for when I’m being lazy and I don’t want to pin curl my hair, lol. They’ve got some great stuff, what’s your favorite? Let me know in the comments, and let me know if you think it’s worth going off my vintage 40s diet for a pair of shoes!

Tagged with: Clothes • Ken Block • PacSun

Posted by Faith on at 12:22 am