I’m in a Casino Hotel (no, really)

casino hotels ruleMy friend got a voucher for a free night at a casino hotel.

So, yeah, free wireless, a free cup of coffee, and a jaunt to the ice machine later we are hanging out on our two queen sized beds with both of our laptops on the endtable like fat, happy queens of the universe.

Well she’s on the phone with her mom but after that she’ll be having a blast too.

We got here and our room wasn’t ready, so we got some nachos and chilled out in the sports bar. Our overly-friendly waitress talked to us way more than we were comfortable with, but hey, them’s the breaks.

I’m looking forward to taking a bath.

The bath is HUGE. Like, I could do laps in it. (Ok, maybe not laps but my knees don’t bend and that’s amazing. Standing up the bath goes right above my knees. I’m 5′9″ - so that’s pretty darn deep.

After my friend made friends with the maid, we got hooked up with oodles of soaps, lotions, and coffee packets so we’re good for the night.

I’m going to be torn between not sleeping at all to truly enjoy this experience for every possible minute and going to sleep, like, NOW just so I can lounge in bed without the sound of children. Knowing I don’t have to listen for the sounds of fighting, rambunctious toddlers is absolute bliss.

So of course I’m wasting my vacation writing on my blog. My priorities are so messed up. Seriously.

Maybe I’ll go take a bath. The awesome floor supervisor that showed us the penthouse suite (it was beautiful and the bathtub was even bigger!) brought us bath salts that only the high rollers usually get.

Ooooh snotty bath salts. I’m seriously in heaven.

Image Source: stylesr1

August 31, 2008 | Filed Under The Everything Basket | 3 Comments 

Oh The Sad, Pathetic Saga of My Hair

Before I get into this, let me make it abundantly clear I am thankful to have my hair. I used to be jealous of African-American hair (there was a girl I used to work with back in the day that had the most amazing corkscrews. I had dreams of wearing my awesome hair all corkscrewed, or if I wasn’t in the mood for all that, rocking my cool hair all Macy Gray style.) But that dream ended soon after actually expressing this wish out loud to a few friends who let me in on the secrets of “black hair.” Good GAWD, I didn’t know you couldn’t just throw it in a ponytail if you got tired of messing with it. I thought the afro was this amazing free-wheeling no muss, no fuss rebellion – but that took WORK. So, unless I wanted to get my hair cropped (in my fantasies I’d look awesome with a cropped hairdo, in real life, not so much…) I needed to stop with my active fantasy life. Now that you know I’ve been fully educated not to bitch about my straight, white girl hair I hope you can enjoy my story about being stupid with it.

On to our regularly scheduled story.

I used to be blonde. Like shocking, awesome, perfect golden blonde. My college pictures show hair that only came out of fancy salons. It rocked. Of course it was permed, so it looked like crap, but it was the best. color. ever.

The older I got, the more I noticed my hair was starting to gradually get darker. I started to panic, just a little, until my friends found out I was PHOBIC about my hair turning brown. That’s when my friends (the ones with the BEST senses of humor, ever! <—sarcasm) decided to tell me every time they saw me my hair was getting darker and I really couldn’t be called blonde anymore, unless I called it…

…dishwater blonde….

Who the hell thinks that sounds like a compliment? It’s not. Dishwater is dirty and nasty. Yes, it probably comes from some way they used to dye hair back in the day, because I cannot imagine washing dishes and my hair ever being that color. Dishwater blonde sounded, to me, like I just had blonde hair but hadn’t washed it in a month or seventeen. Gross.

So, finally, I decided to grab an ammonia-laden box of something from the grocery store and remedy the problem.

I was blonde again and all was right with the world.

Then I got married, got pregnant a couple times, had a smidge of PPD (Or was it just being half crazy from having a ten-month-old and a newborn? your call.) and forgot to color my hair for about three years. It grew long, and it grew “light brown” or “dark blonde” depending on which box you read at the grocery store.

I hated it. (Have you figured out yet that my hair is the direct line to my self-esteem? It’s like the batphone to my self-perception.)

So I went to this shi-shi salon and told the girl I wanted “1940’s blonde, you know, suicide blonde. Almost white blond but with just a hint of yellow.”

When she was done with me I had this mellow tangerine color that looked like doll hair gone wrong. I couldn’t actually call it a color. Possibly the color of copper (but not that cool redhead shade of copper) or maybe just straight up brass.

I came home and cried, then called the 800 number and COMPLAINED UNTIL I COULDN’T COMPLAIN ANYMORE. I did it in a polite way, but didn’t stop till I was promised the manager herself would fix it.

So I went BACK to this shi-shi salon and paid a total of (I’m not exaggerating) THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS to get my hair done. The second time they only charged me for the extra foils or some crap, most of the bill had been paid the first time. Yes, I paid the bill with tears streaming down my face. I didn’t know what else to do.

But when the second girl was done with it, I looked amazing. It was the most beautiful shade of blonde ever seen in nature. My eyes looked friggin’ TEAL my hair was so awesome-tastic. People asked me if my pictures were retouched to make my eyes brighter, but it was all my hair. My beautiful, amazing, car payment hair.

Time passed, my roots grew in dark (which looked cool for about two weeks. Very punk rock.) and when I went in to get two inches covered it took four hours and another two hundred dollars. That was not an expense I could keep rocking every three months no matter how much I wanted the super-blonde hair.

So I let it grow out. Then I tried to box dye it again. That’s when I ended up looking like a calico cat, with patches of varying shades of blonde, brass, orange, and shades in between. I decided to go get it fixed.

At the local beauty school.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA – GENIUS!

Eight hours and sixty dollars later I still looked like a calico, but a more mellow one. With an awful haircut.

If you look closely you can see the different colors. Oh, and my hair is not flat by nature. Only after it’s been hacked at for a few hours. That’s all the haircut baby. (Also note the orange at the top of my head. That is not from the picture, that’s how it really looked.)

A couple months pass (see, I wait so when I get it done again it doesn’t, you know, all fall out) and genius that I am, decide that the beauty school is not the way to go. I book an appointment at Ulta. A mid-level salon that also sells makeup, shampoo, conditioner, and whatnot. I mean, you can buy Urban Decay cosmetics there, the chicks should know how to rock the blonde, right?

So after bonding with my stylist I told her, “I look like a calico with these different colors. All I want is one shade of blonde.”

More conversation, none of which is about my hair. Then…

She says, “Do you mind if I have a little fun?”

Here’s where I make my fatal mistake…get ready for it…

I say, “Sure!”

Without knowing what’s happening (because I have to take off my glasses to get my hair done and I can’t see but four inches in front of my face) she is turning me into a total bar whore.

No offense to you if you have this hairstyle, I’m sure it doesn’t make YOU look like a bar whore.

rock-of-love-hair

The top of my head was blonde, and under that, all around my head, the entire underneath and sticking out about three and a half inches past the blonde is DARK FRIGGIN BROWN. I looked like a reject from the Rock of Love auditions. Seriously, then she flat ironed it.

More crying ensues, and I don’t ask for my money back because how do I explain that my idea of fun and the stylist’s idea of fun were vastly different? I just let it go.

So I wait a month so my hair won’t all fall off, buy a box of brown hair dye, and dye it. My hair is now a light/medium brown. I am in hell.

My hair stayed like that for three or four months. My self esteem dropped into the toilet. I stopped taking care of my hair, wearing makeup, and just wore my hair in a scrunchy-bun. I looked like a dowdy, suburban mom. It blew. There are NO pictures of me as a brunette. I always hoped it was a phase and it would pass and I could block it from my mind.

Tonight, I made a decision. I was back at Ulta and I picked up two boxes of hair dye. The same kind I used before I got married. Before I got pregnant. Before my hair turned into a Frankenstein movie for two years.

It’s still wet now, so I don’t know exactly how it looks. There are still multiple shades in my hair (even wet) but the darkest one is still going to be blonde when it dries (I’ve had blonde hair long enough to know what it looks like wet.) The lightest might be almost white.

The results are in. Don’t judge, my friends, I just woke up and took this picture. You’re REALLY lucky I ran a brush through my h air. Yesterday I was a brunette. Today….I’m not….

I know I look shellshocked. I normally don’t take pictures before ten in the morning so again, don’t hate, this pic is so you can see my haircolor(s) not so you can be all, “Damn, you couldn’t smile or something?” See the bottom where it used to be dark-dark brown, then light brown? It wasn’t able to lift all that out, but it’s okay, because in person it looks like blending and stuff.

I really like it. I’m so much happier now.

I still need a haircut. My last haircut from the beauty school dropout student was a long time ago and has since grown out. Maybe I’ll jump that hurdle next month. It was about all I could do to get the courage together to mess with my hair again last night!

August 30, 2008 | Filed Under The Everything Basket | 8 Comments 

Finance Fridays: I have a Budget!

finance-fri-sept-budgetThis is insane! I never thought I’d get to the point where I’d be one of those people with budgets. For the last five years we’ve been at a place where we didn’t make enough money to pay the bills, and every time we put it down in a budget I’d just cry.

Since I moved on from the please let me work extra for you without billing because I can’t charge for the time I think about your project while I’m in the shower can I? business owner client thing and went to the oh my gosh there’s actually more work available than I could actually do in a month? Don’t you dare pinch me because if I’m dreaming I want to be in a coma freelance writing thing our lives have changed dramatically. Oh, and Randy getting his awesome-tastic job in January certainly didn’t hurt, either.

September we are going to make more money than either one of us has ever imagined. Maybe for you it wouldn’t be that much money, but for us, this is huge. We wanted to make sure we didn’t mess this up and blow the money without realizing it. It was time to make a real, live budget.

I have two bulletin boards on my wall. We got them when a business was getting rid of them and we snagged them. In order to not have that “cubicle blue” color they originally were, we put gold wrapping paper on them. It looks awesome against the green color of my office, so that’s what the gold color is in the picture.

I purposefully took this picture with my cell phone because I wanted it to be just a tad blurry. My boundaries haven’t been set yet on if I’m comfortable sharing exactly how much we are in debt, how much we bring in a month, and how much our budgetary expenses are a month.

No offense, it’s not because of YOU, it’s because of those other people.

But I wanted to share what my personal junk looks like. If I turn my head to the right these papers are at eye level if I stand up. Let me tell you a little about what’s going on.

September Budget

The September budget is us spending every penny “on paper, on purpose.” It includes entertainment, gas, extra money in case Randy needs to eat out for lunch because he forgot to take one. Everything. Every. Little. Thing. Those little things that I usually don’t add up into the budget are about $900 a month. I almost choked when I saw the numbers. No wonder we were always scrambling!

The bottom total in red is expenses for the month. Next to that I have income for the month (brought over from another spreadsheet with income. If you saw that one you’d be amazed at how many entries there are. I do a lot of different stuff! Then the boxes on the right are, in order:

  • Expenses
  • Income
  • Total left over
  • How leftover total is being spent
  • That yellow box is the paypal information. How much is going into paypal, how much comes out of paypal, and the balance. The balance turned out to be the gas budget almost exactly so all gas purchases are going to come off of the PayPal Debit Card.
  • That last green box is how much the budget is balanced to. In this case, for September, the budget it balanced with THIRTY-THREE cents left over.

Both Randy and I agree it feels good to balance the budget this closely. Since we have the Baby Step #1 emergency fund in place we can do that and if an emergency comes up we are still okay. It feels so weird to live without constant fear.

Debt Snowball

Ok, on this one I’m cheating just a little bit. it does not include three mystery debts from a hospital. Mostly because I think those mystery debts were from the birth of my first daughter and covered by Medicaid. (Since we’re in Illinois, if you’re low income you can get a medical card. Illinois rules for health care.) Thankfully we saved the cards, so we should be able to fax over the information and get those off of our credit reports. Okay, off of my credit report. Guess it’s my baby, my credit report. Nice.

Baby Steps & More on The Budget

I like having a constant one-page reminder of the baby steps. Eventually when I’m feeling really smart I’d like to put dates by each baby step. I found this list of the baby steps as well as the brief summary of each on Ezine Articles. I copied and pasted the article into Word, made the headlines big and bold, took off the information I didn’t need and printed it out.

I mean, I love me some Dave Ramsey, but I’m not going to spend almost $30 on the book and workbook when I can get the information for free. It would be silly when I could spend that $30 on my budget or debt.

The only thing is, of our total debt number including the mortgage check out these numbers:

  • Our student loans are 31% of the total! That is huge!
  • Our mortgage is 62%

Just those two numbers are 94% of our debt!

I couldn’t tell you how many items are on our budget. Oh wait, thank you Excel, yes I can. There are *gasp* 23! Here are the categories:

  • Randy Emergency Lunch Fund
  • Groceries
  • Gas
  • Entertainment
  • Eating Out
  • Savings
  • Mortgage
  • Web Hosting
  • Ring Central
  • e-junkie
  • AT&T Wireless
  • Domain Names
  • Nicor
  • Garbage
  • Savings
  • ComEd
  • Student Loan Randy
  • Student Loan Jen
  • Chase
  • Water
  • iPass
  • Esurance
  • PrePaid Legal

Wow. That’s a lot. We’re canceling some of these to reduce cost. PrePaid Legal and Ring Central to be exact. That will give us an extra $28 to add to the budget. If I add that $28 to my mortgage payment it would be paid off seven months early. Every dollar makes a difference.

In case you’re wondering why I share things like the items on my budget is because it reminds me of things that I may have forgotten. Most of you know I finally took the plunge and signed back up for dedicated Internet and cable television. That’s not on the list. We haven’t been billed for it yet. That’s going to have to wait until October, because I’m paying off that damn car in September.

August 29, 2008 | Filed Under Finance Fridays | 2 Comments 

Different Directions – No Map

image I was reading about how other freelancers diversify their workload to make sure there isn’t a crazy-weird drop in income over at Yielding Wealth yesterday. (What a clunky sentence, right?)

What she says makes sense. Those of us who work from home need to make sure, as freelancers, all our money isn’t coming from one place. Or…do we?

How is a recurring freelance writing gig any different than my husbands steady 9-5 job?

Sure, back in the days of middle management glut and people staying with the same company forEVER that might have been the case. Now? I don’t think so. People change careers 3-5 times over a lifetime now (at least according to the US Census Bureau). That number will only increase as time wears on, because most of the jobs are shifting from labor to knowledge and when knowledge is your main asset, you use it how you can to get what you need.

Even though my husband has an amazing job working with Fortune 500 companies and no one in his company could do what he does, that certainly doesn’t make him irreplaceable. He may be the best at what he does, and I don’t think they’d get rid of him (he is quite the savant) at the same time, no one is ever safe. What if the whole company goes up in a ball of flames financially or something? That’s why he always had clients of his own. His company is fine with this as long as there is no conflict of interest. He doesn’t take on the same kind of clients his company does. There are more than enough clients out there so it’s not a problem.

If he lost his job tomorrow, he would still have income and would turn to building his business. That’s a great backup plan, right?

But what about me? I’m a writer. My main client takes up almost 70-80% of my monthly income (which, I’m thrilled to say, is more than Randy’s…at least for September…)  Should I start applying for things on the side? Do I have the concentration and time available for that?

There’s this one thing I want to apply for…which is the real question.

Do I apply for this one gig I really, really want?

I really want to, because the subject matter for this ongoing gig is fascinating to me. I mean, it’s something that’s a hobby of mine and is second only to finding out I get to write quantum physics stuff in layman’s terms. It’s that cool.

But it’s listed as a full time gig. Can I balance two full time writing gigs and the kids and still have room for sanity in my brain? How much can I really write every day?

While I know I can do anything for a while, I don’t know if I could keep it up in the long term. But the new gig I want to apply for can take me into a whole new level of writing that can be so profitable.

Maybe I’ll leave it to the “Universe” to decide. Apply and if they accept I can tell everyone, “Everything works out the way it’s supposed to.” But that’s small relief compared to the knowledge that I’m creating my future right now. Today. And the options kind of scare me. There are so many.

Plus I still need to finish that book proposal. But I don’t have a second to myself except for yesterday and today but those are my days off so I don’t get all burned out and twitchy.

What to do?

Image Source: flaivoloka

August 28, 2008 | Filed Under The Everything Basket | 3 Comments 

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