Whoo-hoo! Got another freelance check in the mail yesterday. Another $50 will be going onto the CC as soon as I deposit it on Friday!

So after my small rant about paying rent yesterday, I figured I should explain how and why I am suddenly angry re: rent and apartment living. As some of you may know, we have crazies living next to us. Literally. On one side there was a convicted pedophile (he has recently moved out, thanks goddess), on the other side of us is the one we call the Psycho Hose-beast – cops here all the time b/c she is wicked loud, she has huge fights w/friends and family and girlfriend that involve throwing things and slamming doors and she’s tried to kill herself twice). Across from us is the guy who was in Vietnam and never really left. Multiple personalities and voices and thinks he is still fighting a war. So, really, crazy neighbors. Thing is, I lurve our apartment. I’ve been there 4 ½ years. The whole apt (bedroom, living room, kitchen, dinning room) is blond hardwood floors, one wall in the kitchen is brick and has glass door cabinets, mini storage shelves built into the wall in the hall outside the bathroom, old fashion tub, and sliding wood/glass paned doors that slid into the walls between the living room and dinning room. 4 blocks from the zoo and a great park, 10 minutes from the ocean, 5 minutes to several huge strip malls; I really do love it.

But lately things have been getting to me: crazy neighbors, maintenance that doesn’t ever show up and fix anything (like our bathroom light which has been broke twice now), fighting for off street parking (more cars than spaces), crazy neighbors, not being allowed to paint the walls (I’ve lived with egg-shell white walls now for over 10 years. I’ve never been in a place where we can paint!), etc.

SO, we are thinking of moving. But then we said, well, instead of moving to another place where these same issues could pop up, and where we basically throw money away on rent every month, why don’t we look at buying a place. We know we can’t afford a house, so we are looking at some condos in the area.

Paying rent sucks. It's not even going towards owning something. Just throwing money away every month (and paying way more than the place is actually worth). We are looking to mobe and it turns out we have a very cheap apt. by what we've seen. I'm getting a sinking feeling we won't be able to move for another year or two.

Ok, done griping for now...

Did some big time cleaning this past weekend, and found over $5 in spare change! Yay! Threw it all in the bag, but will do a count up later this week. Not rolling anything right now because I'll need change for the yard sale on Sat!

So I've been having major issues with e-bay. I can't get pics and text to appear on my for sale listings at the same time and as a result, have not been listing. Which is a shame, becasue with the cleaning streak I've been in lately, I've found some good stuff to sell.

Anyways, I was on the ebay message board and saw a LOT of other people having the same problem. Guess ebay is putting in some new technology and it's basically screwing things up for everyone. I thought I'd have to wait, but someone on the MB suggested I try Auctiva.com

It's FAB! It's basically a place where you create your ebay listing, with pics, templates, all the same stuff as ebay, then they upload it for you. You still pay the ebay fees, but Auctiva is free and it gets you around all the tricky stuff from ebay. Plus, they have way more template and options to make your listing look good.

Since it's free (FREE!) I'm listing a bunch of stuff now. Yay!

Bam, baby! $25 for the car! He did the oil change, checked all the fluids, air in my tires, checked the computer...and only $25. Kickarse!

I never can seem to sleep on weekends anymore. Never been a good sleeper anyways, but....

So today I am bringing my car to the mechanic to get some minor work done. Oil change, overall check-up / tune-up (Car just hit 100,000 miles!!!), air in the tires, and hopefully nothing else! Been procrastinating this for a loooong time now.

Have about $60 to get us to the next paycheck (next Friday), and about $100 worth of room on the CC. Really don't want to use that but it looks like I might have to. Ugh.

I get paid every 2 weeks, and I got paid last Friday. When I looked in my account (Direct deposit rocks) I saw I had only about half my paycheck. Ut-oh. So, very long story short, it turns out b/c I was switched from salary to hourly pay w/my new position, they messed up and forgot to pay me for my last week of salary. Boogers.

So, HR cut me a petty cash check for the other week. (How sad is it that 1 week of my pay can come out of petty cash??? LOL)

OK, everything is going well, then I get an e-mail from HR yesterday telling me that when they did that, the took out my health insurance deductible AGAIN so I actually overpaid my health insurance by about $100. Their solution to this? Not deduct it from my next paycheck (June 8th).

OK, all well and good, but that $100 could have been good now. I mean, we have barely any money for the next week b/c I was planning out for us to have that $100. Ugh.

So for the next week, it's no going out, no grocery shopping (which we need, badly), no anything. I guess we'll just have to eat that case of Ramen we have sitting in the kitchen for times like this. LOL

On the plus side, listed 2 new books on half.com last night and one sold today for over $30! Yay!