Slovenly

The word for today is slovenly. That describes me to a tee today. I feel especially overweight, particularly in light of my discovery from earlier this week that I had gained an additional 10 lbs compared to June of last year. I'm not happy with my weight. Which equates to not wanting to shop, which equates to not being happy with my worn out and faded clothes.

On top of that, I logged in to my Quicken this morning to discover that we are already way off track for spending for the month, and we're only halfway through. At least we still have money, but it's not going to be a neat budget month.

This wouldn't be so bad in and of itself if we had not had a recent tax appointment that informed us that we owed over $1300 to everyone's favorite uncle. So not only am I looking at shortfalls for this month, but trying to figure out how to get through April with a $1300 hit coming on April 14th.

And with all of that, there is still the other half of our pet deposit for Scout. When we signed our lease, the deposit was $400. Still exorbitant, but we decided that it was time to go ahead and get a dog and that it would be worth the sacrifice. Well, after we had chosen her at the shelter, we went to the leasing office and discovered that they had increased the pet deposit to $800. Yes, they doubled it. We argued and tried to get them to stick to what we had in our lease, but there is some loophole that enables them to get around that.

One thing they did allow was for us to pay half of the deposit when we signed our new pet affidavit, and then they said we could pay the rest in a month or two. Apparently that meant we had until February 28th, and last night at 12:30am we were awakened by Scout barking like crazy (in her crate, so we knew something was up) and it was the lovely envelope with the kind words stating "you still owe us $400." Thanks, Lewis Corporation. I know you must be losing sleep over not having my $400 to hold until whenever we decide to move out, so thank you for making me (literally) lose sleep over it as well.

So that's me in a nutshell. I'm not having the best day because of it. I am trying desperately not to worry about it, and I think as long as we're creative next month we'll be okay. But it's hard, I thought we were out of the budget crisis zone and now I feel like we've just slipped right back into it. And we've committed ourselves to going to NYC with some friends in July, now we need to make that money appear out of somewhere.

To try to focus on the positive, I think I may have lost a pound or two. I'm definitely cranking up the weight loss effort. I've played tennis this week, gone to Yoga, done some weight lifting on my balance ball, and I'm definitely eating better. So I'm going to do it this time. It's going to take a year to get down to my goal, which is 45 lbs away... but I really want to discipline myself and stick to it.

Anyway, TGIF. I'm not going to let all of this get me down, I just had to get it out of my head.