wildflowersoul

Oh, hey, yesterday I paid off the balance on my last credit card from the Years of Bad Credit Decisions. I am no longer paying for cigarettes and booze from before 2004! I still need to win the lottery to pay off my student loan, but I now have zero credit card debt.

While I'm on the topic of money, I finally broke down and started shopping at Market Basket, and holy crap, the money I am saving! My mind has been blown. And their produce doesn't rot as quickly as Stop & Shop's! And they actually staff all their cash registers with both cashers and baggers! It's like a whole new world of grocery shopping. You have to be willing to be ninja-like in your navigation around exponentially more people in the way, but I will accept that to get savings.

So it turns out that when I took a preliminary stab at this year's taxes last month I must have futzed up the math, because I finally got 'em completed last night, and we're actually getting a bit of cash back from both the feds and the state. Even though I understand the idea that it's better to owe than to get a refund, since the government basically gets to earn interest off your money all year, I'd still rather get something back than owe.

Yesterday was another round of komos's excellent Iron Chef Challenge. I made up a batch of Caribbean pork chili that I hear came out tasty. I couldn't stand the sight of it after working on it for hours on Saturday, but I'm really glad it was well-received. For all that I was excited to fry up some plantains to go with it, the end result of said fried plantains was that it was too much effort for not enough taste.

Kung-fu tonight! I've been a bad girl and for all of Feb. I only made it once a week, so this week I need to step it up again.

Owie. I got a flu shot today and my arm is ouchy. But I'll take a few hours of ouchy over a few days of flu.

So yesterday was Free Money Day. Got my bonus at work (yay!), and came home to a surprise refund check from the student loan that was paid off (double yay!). I'm feeling a little more secure, or at least, less likely to freak out, about the impending holiday wallet-suck.

So last night I did my volunteering, and then got home and made cookies. Cookies! For those of you with Cooking Light, the maple-spice cookies are really good (I did 'em without the walnuts, but I'm sure they're good with them, too).

Wow. This is so totally my day, I am almost dancing in the office from all the worry that has just been lifted off my shoulders.

First, due to my, um, foresight (or inability to remember when I've paid bills), turns out I paid my student loan bill twice in March, and since then I've been pre-paying for each upcoming month. The upshot being that I don't have to pay that bill this month!

Then, due to my firm's unbelievable awesomeness, I just received a sweet bonus check!

Holy crap!