Today Outlook 2002 informed me that I was supposed to clean the laundry room and entry way. I did that, sort of, but instead focused on accounting.

This meant I drove to the bank and put money in the hole, and I dropped off bills by hand to those dumbass local companies who either don’t process credit cards or who want me to pay a fee for the priviledge.

I spent two hours opening and processing mail and organizing our February bills. I keep a box a little wider than a standard envelope – it once had tangerines in it – and on each bill I write the due date and amount owed on the front of the envelope and file them by due date, then I make an index card to put in the front of the box with a list of all the bills. (This is for my husband, who sometimes doesn’t understand why I take all his money all the time. It’s worth my time to write up a visual aid. He rarely questions me, but I figure it’s got to get really old handing over your paycheck week after week after week… and I want to be able to show him that I’m paying our substatial bills and not spending his hard-earned dough on crap. Sure I buy my fare share of ebooks, but I doubt I ever spend more than $50 a month on crap just for myself unless I’m on vacation.) In the back of the box is a zippy pouch with the kind of stuff you’d normally keep in a desk: stamps, post-its, return address labels, coupon books for loans, scissors, Sharpies, etc. There’s also a box of envelopes in there. It’s basically a portable desk. Anyway, that’s probably much more than you ever wanted to know about how I, a fairly high-tech chick, processes her bills in a really low-tech way.

Next I balanced my checkbook. IT SUCKED. Remember how my Pocket PC reset itself recently? It took my checking account balance off to lost-data-land when it did that, so I had to print my last two bank statements off the web and figure out what was still uncleared, find a starting balance, and work forward from there. I think I know how much money I have. I’m usually pretty careful with receipts from debit card transactions, but you don’t get receipts from online transactions or from phoning in a payment. I’m going to try to let the account rest as much as possible to let it all shake out. (I hate not being TOTALLY IN BALANCE ALL THE TIME so much that usually when shit like this happens I just open a new account, but I’m getting too lazy even to do that any more. Snort!)

So I’ve done your basic tidying, a little dusting, a once-over of the laundry/entry area my schedule says I was to focus on today, and a bunch of tedious too-much-like-real-work bookwork.

I did NOT, you’ll be proud to learn, put the Jeep in either the pond or the ravine opposite it while driving down our treacherous ice-encrusted driveway this afternoon. I’ve been using the “back” driveway (the Adrian’s driveway) since I got the Jeep back, but today I was feeling adventurous… well, FUCK that! I was in FULL TIME FOUR WHEEL DRIVE and lost control of the vehicle going about 4 mph! That’s just too damned icy for me to think its funny.

It’s also why I’m afraid to check the gauge on the propane tank. I mean, we’re probably running low, but it’s not like it makes any difference what the damned gauge says because there’s no way in hell Double Circle (excuse me, it’s Farmer’s CoOp now) could get one of their duallies up our damned driveway anyway! Last year they refused to deliver one time because they thought the trees lining our driveway would SCRATCH their truck! (True story.)

Yeah, yeah, I know. Ice Melt. LOTS of Ice Melt.

Needless to say, I came in the back drive when I got home from my errands, and just basically slid into my parking space. I’m getting pretty good at it!