So, despite the fact that I’d rather laze around and enjoy my weekend, I will probably participate and shoot for that magic number, because, honstly – a full week without having to drive 45 miles one way to work??  It’s quite tempting.

I’ve also debated whether to take the five unpaid days off all in one week since I’m salaried and it’ll be broken up over my next ten paychecks anyway… but the first day I picked was Feb 16 because the daycare is closed that day for teacher training, and if I take that entire week off that means one less person working with the group to get our numbers down by the first of the next month.  So… I’ll save the other four days for different dates.  My husband and I may be going out of town at the end of the month for our anniversary so I may use one or two days for that depending on how long we’re out of town.

But it sure would be nice to take a full week off of work, though, without it impacting my personal vacation & sick time.  Ah well.  Not in the carts this time.

Now my back hurts, my feet hurt and the sciatica in my right side is acting up – all for about 15 minutes of work!  Ugh.  Oh, and I have dirt wedged into the creases on my fingers, mostly my right thumb and index finger where the skin is a little rough, that I can’t get out with a scrub brush.  Bah.

We need to scrounge up the money to have the landscapers give the place a once over, and then to have the pest control company spray the yard with the industrial strength death for weeds so we don’t have to worry about those darn things for a while.  Having rock landscaping in the front has it perks (i.e. no grass to mow) but still makes it fairly easy for weeds to take hold.

My husband’s work schedule will be changing in a couple of weeks, he’ll be going back to swing shift so there will be a few days where we only see each other while we’re at work for a couple of hours but not at home since I’ll be asleep by the time he gets home.  And the Kiddo won’t even see him at all those days unless I let her give him a goodbye kiss in the morning while he sleeps.

On the plus side he’ll be getting 5% differential, which is good since there are rumours that no one is getting a raise at all this year, which I think is stupid but that’s for another post.  And he’ll get three days off from work again, plus won’t see much of his boss – who he hates – since he’ll be coming in about three hours before the boss leaves for the day.

Unfortunately this means no more carpooling for me, so I won’t be able to snooze on the way into work.  On the other hand, I’ll be able to go back to telecommuting once a week again, which will be nice and help save on gas.  And as long as the gas prices don’t skyrocket again we’ll actually see the benefit of the extra 5% of his pay rather than it all being drained away in the gas tank.

My iPod nano will be happy as it’ll be getting used again during my drive to and from work since I don’t have satellite radio in my car and let’s face it… regular radio is pretty lacking these days.

Just in time for me to go back to work, too.  Goodie.

I just can’t quite put my finger on it.  Maybe I’m just picking up on every else’s mood?  I don’t know.  All I do know is there is a little over two weeks left before Christmas and I haven’t even begun my shopping yet.  I am usually a procrastinator but even last year I had most of my shopping done by now, or at least it was ordered and was en route to my house if I bought it online, which most of my purchases were.

I think it partly may be due to that on Sunday I drove 20 miles with the item that would net us the largest amount of cash in one purchase, and waited for 20 minutes for the guy to show up and he was a no call / no show.  He hasn’t even responded to the email I sent later asking what was up.  Communication just completely ceased.  At worst maybe some unfortunate incident happened, at best I hope he was just a flake.  I haven’t heard anything from him so I offered the item to the next person who inquired, so hopefully that person will not flake out.  It really puts a damper on my mood when that happens.  The extra money was going to go toward getting some extra things for the Kiddo and maybe pad our limit for everyone else’s gifts, too.

Originally I had tried setting aside any leftover money out of my weekly lunch allotment, but I have maybe half as much as I should since I ended up spending some of it at a fall festival we went to in October, and another sum went to some new fall clothes for the Kiddo in November.  Ah well, we can make do but the extra money off craiglist sure will be nice.

Now to pull myself out of this funk and at least get SOME shopping started or risk stuff not arriving before Christmas…