To About or Not To About....

First, thank you for each of you have been supportive of my issues with the FL site. I miss you all as well. Many of you are like extended family to me. And, I MEAN that!

I don't appreciated being censored, and it not at least being marked as such. I find it to be really offensive to have my words changed and not to be made aware that has happened. The FL site is one of the only ones I have ever been to where your words are changed, or part of your post deleted, yet there is no note made about it. If I write something, fine. If you want to delete what I write - fine. But, don't change the meaning of my posts and attribute them to me. How hard can it be to simply mark on there "edited by moderator" or something???

If the above were to happen I would happily join in again at About. I don't think it will, however.

As to my life of late - yes, I have been busy and have been really bad about posting to my blog. I think about it a lot but don't seem to get to doing it as much as I would like.

I like my new job okay. It's not great but not bad either so I am managing. My first "big" project happened a couple weeks ago and that was a pretty crazy time. Now that it is over everything has mellowed out a bit. I have a decent amount of downtime to study and/or surf the web.

I managed to pull a muscle in my rib cage Friday night. I moved weird with a 12 pack of soda and that was all it took. I am leaving work early today in search of some decent medication from the doctor. I spent all weekend in pain and I am so over this... Even breathing hurts! I am still amazed that I actually managed to get my bra on this morning. I know, way too much information. :)

We had our well cleaned out in the last few weeks. The bill for that was $3300. Basically they put a pipe down all 750 feet and then blast water into it, forcing the water to come up and out. What came out first was some smelly, grease like stuff. Apparently everyone has a bit of oil in their well and this builds up. It was pretty gross.

Then last week they finally came and put our submersible pump back down. It was $100 an hour to have that done and when they finished we pumped AIR... They finally pulled it back out and figured out that one of the pipes was cracked... Fixed everything and we now can pump groundwater agin. This bill will likely be $1000 or more.

So, for our $4300 we have water, but we can't use it yet for anything because it's so highly contaminated with arsenic and other crap. However, filtration is getting cheaper so the plan was to do the well now and save up for filtraiton.

Hubby Willie is still traveling 3 days a week for dialysis. It looks like he will be able to start home-hemo in January. When/If this happens we will save about $500 a month in gas cost and will put that towards the filtration system. Unfortunately the USDA has grants for cleaning/filtering wells but we do not qualify because our mobile home is not on a foundation (and can't be put on one because it doesn't meet the county's new snow load...)

How Are You Doing the Holidays Frugally?

The holiday season is fast approaching. The leaves are turning their amazing shades of yellow, orange and red and the mornings are starting to feel cool. I have to admit that I love this time of year. I really love the snow, but if I can't have that yet, then I will take the nice cool fall weather while I wait for the snow. :)

This year I started doing things a bit different for the holidays. I joined MyPoints and have managed to get $50 in WalHell giftcards through that for free. I started doing online surveys and focus groups in my spare time and have managed to get paid about $150 for that so far. When I have received a check or giftcard in the mail I have put all of them away for the holidays in the "Christmas" envalope.

I have also received some Amazon.com gift certificates doing surveys and am using those for gifts as well.

Grocery shopping gets interesting this time of year because it seems like everything goes on better sale this time of year. I started getting coupons from TheCouponClippers and managed to save about $40 so far this month. I am planning on continuing that for the next couple months and see how it goes.

I have also started reading the samples and freebies sites, when I have the time, and ordering all the free stuff that I think we will use. Can't argue with free being a good price. :)

I changed jobs a couple months ago and now get paid every other week. It's taking some adjusting to figure out how to pay the bills and shop on this new schedule. I prefer the income coming in now later in the month but it's strange still to pay things later in the month.

How do all of you do things this time of year?