Poking My Nose Out for an Update

I feel like the poor old groundhog, scared to look out for fear of seeing my shadow.  My last post was 10 days ago and I talked about the necessity of creating a Pesach cleaning plan and making myself accountable.  Then I disappeared.

Well, life happens.  Specifically, new babies happen!  No, not mine.  My Eldest Daughter's.  But combine a new baby (and one whole night with no sleep while my daughter was in labour) together with 3 little girls who are off school, the Olympics, two kiddie birthday parties, various and sundry family members and close friends traipsing in and out to see the little guy and, well, you get the idea.

What, if anything has been done?

Well, my son-in-law and his dad did get the drywall down, fixed what needed to be fixed, and then put up the drywall again.  It still needs taping, mudding and sanding before much of anything can be done in Dear Child's room.  I did go through the big bin that had been stored but Dear Child was thrilled to see most of the items after 3 years, my hubby vetoed getting rid of certain other items and it's still 3/4 full.  Sigh.  Honestly, I think she could have lived without the baby doll, the baby Cabbage Patch and 2 big stuffed Care Bears at the very least!  I know some will say that I should have gone through the bin by myself or forced her to give away more, but I've been on the other end of it and I still recall how upset I was (back when I was about 11).

Other than that, I've done a lot of laundry and hung up more of DC's things (in my closet) and I started sorting out paperwork that's stacked on the trunk and table (in an area I'm not supposed to even be in yet).  I also started to make a detailed list in excel based on a spreadsheet I saw elsewhere.  I worked on it for about 2 hours and was very satisfied with it.  I just wanted to add another worksheet for Things To Buy, so I did that and tried to edit the tab of the worksheet to say "To Buy" and excel totally messed up on me at that point.  It tried to tell me there was something wrong with what I was calling it (there wasn't), and listed that it couldn't be more than so many characters, no special characters and couldn't be blank.  It wouldn't let me get out of the tab, wouldn't let me switch to another sheet, wouldn't let me save, wouldn't even let me close excel!  It took 2 tries using Task Manager to eventually force excel to close.  Needless to say, I lost the entire thing.  I was not a happy camper and went to bed that night in a huff!  The next day I recreated it from scratch and successfully saved it.  In fact, I improved on the format, but I still didn't like having to do all that work twice!  And, of course, that was a "planning the work" segment.  Still have to work the plan!

As for money, I've been paying my bills and trying to get the MasterCard back down to where it was before.  I did pay off the flooring I bought but then ended up having to charge DC's birthday party, which was held out of the house for what should be obvious reasons!  I've since paid down another $90.  That pretty much covered last month's interest charge ($91.43).  Then I paid part of the money for the party but have to wait another couple of weeks to finish paying that off.  And, today, I charged the first 1/3 of DC's dental surgery.  We're paying it in 3 payments, each a month apart.  I'm hoping that my hubby will get paid the commission on a couple of bigger jobs he's done recently by the end of March.  Then we can pay the surgery off and be done with it.  The good news is that it turned out to cost considerably less than originally anticipated, about $1,700 when we'd been led to expect that it would be about $3,000.

Right now I'm just trying to get through the week until Thursday, when the surgery takes place.  And take baby steps on my cleaning plan until then.