Hello. :)

This is my first time here, because I finally got tired of some wicked privacy invasions involving my old blog, which I meant to be anonymous, but wasn't careful enough about. I whittled it down to password-protected posts, and gave the password to only two or three people, but this morning I got a look at the stat counter and find my latest reader is an attorney from DC, and I definitely didn't give him the password, and what's worse, someone mailed it to him, someone I trusted with the password in the first place.

Eh.

So here I am, starting as if this blog began years ago, which it did in another universe. I'm kind of glad that's gone. Because now is much better than then.

Still, now falls something short of perfect. I made a lot of money with my business last year (100K?), but it seems like I won't get to keep any of it after I pay taxes. Like, none. And that's so disappointing because I'm a frugal black belt. I drive a 1995 car that's creeping up on 200,000 miles. I don't have cable or any kind of television signal. I borrow books from the library. I call out through a calling card to save on long-distance. I buy my clothes at the thrift store. My only extravagance that comes to mind is a tendency to buy organic food. It's discouraging. Even more discouraging is tax season, which involves sifting through brutal amount of information. I really need to handle this better next year; try to get control of it monthly instead of waiting until the whole thing dumps on my head in April.

Many, Money, Money, money. It sure is the topic of the month, and my husband and I are fighting over it. Because he doesn't have any, so I pay for all our living expenses myself (mortgage, repairs, utilities, majority of the food, most of our meals out), and even then, I get soaked on a fairly regular basis when he can't cover something, and needs to "borrow money," or an expense comes up, like a hotel room when someone gets sick. It's rare to never that I get paid back for these events. It's starting to really frustrate me and when I looked back over the year in Quicken today, and saw really a shocking amount of times that I "lent" him money for this or that, that was discouraging too. And I said something, and he got mad and stomped off to the bedroom.

I had the customer from hell today, too, but that's another story, and I didn't realize this was going to turn into one long rant, but so be it.