I decided against the job at the home improvement store. I spoke with the woman from HR last night and thanked her for her time. In the end I found that my time drive 20 minutes the opposite direction from home leaving work and then driving back late at night 40-45 minutes in good weather, nevermind the winter would not be worth it.

Winter where I live in the Northeast can be brutal. Nor’easters with multiple feet of snow being dropped in a matter of hours is just not my thing to drive home in. I did however accept the pizza making job that is on the way home at night. Tonight is actually the first night I will do it. I feel extremely comfortable with it and I am kinda looking forward to it. Since I make pizza at home it is a natural fit. It will be interesting to see how it goes tonight and what I will need to learn. During the interview I saw many things that I thought were odd given my previous experiences in a few different pizza places. This place just opened last month so I am sure they are just working the kinks out.

Here is to the reboot of the plasectomy employment; day 1.

So, I have been busting it the last couple weeks to find a second job and I am within reach of one, possibly two…

I applied at several places and heard back from a large big box home improvement store and a different pizza place than the one I had worked at several months back. I have gone through two interviews with the store and my third will be tomorrow with the store manager. It is your standard cashier position to make some extra money. I would leave work and travel 15-20 minutes farther away from my home to get there after work and then drive back about 40 minutes home at night and on the weekend.

The other possible position I found on craigslist.org, would be making pizzas, not delivering them. Delivery can be lucrative and while I enjoyed the position in college, I wasn’t making enough money at it to justify the wear and tear of my vehicle. I enjoy making pizzas at home and I hope that I can retain some of that joy if and when it becomes a job. The other bonus is that it is on the way home at night and it is within 15-20 minutes of my home. My only real concern of this place is that it is a new establishment. I mean NEW, in the past few months new and that scares me a bit. However, I did interview with them on Tuesday night at the dinner hour and they had me making pizzas that they were serving customers for my interview. It was busy then and in the course of 30 minutes I had made 4 pizzas while the other guy made a few as well. That was a good sign. I did well and they asked for my availability and a reference.

About getting the second job…..It’s odd because I know I need the position to get a bigger shovel for my debt snowball, but I don’t really want to do it and quite honestly who really wants to work a second job? Maybe it’s the fact that I now have two possible options for a second job in front of me and I keep telling myself to take both if offered and work your butt off. Then, I think of my family, the kids at ages 6, 4, 2, and I would literally being working ALL the time. No life.

The price I pay for being stupid.

Let’s face it. We quit. We quit for a good solid 4-5 months. Yes there was a little blip of resurgence from my last post in October 2009, but that was it. Nothing more. I am ashamed and embarrassed by losing focus.

The second job since quitting the pizza delivery job never panned out. UPS never called. The dream of keeping a somewhat normal schedule looks like it will be broken. I followed up with UPS in late October and was told I would hear something the first or second week of November, that call never came. It is now mid-November and I feel confident in saying that by now they would have their seasonal positions filled. When I met with them for a tour of the facility there was 8 of us and 1 position open. The odds were stacked against me.

This had left me to move on and seek other employment elsewhere. I am trying for a job at a big box home improvement store using some networking of a person I know there. Hopefully that will pan out since they have some open positions. I would think that would easily add a few hundred to the plasectomy busting.

Oh, also this month we re-worked our budget and for the first time really went cash only. It feels weird and seems to work. More on that later.

I ran accross this article on Yahoo Finance and I cannot believe it giving the state of the economy. There are 6 main points to the article, good debt vs bad debt. Really…? Is there such a thing as good debt? Why in the world would you ever want to owe something to someone? I am in that place where I owe money to a bunch of different businesses and I hate it.

I understand the logic of the article and I could rationale almost all of his points, but seriously, NO debt is good debt. Debt is BAD, mmm kay?

6 Financial Moves That Sound Good — but Aren’t
1. Applying for a Line of Credit
Yeah, it’s stupid. We all have done it and we end up paying big time. There is always a new thing that must be had, something breaks, or I need it now and I don’t have the discipline to save for it. *I am guilty of all of it*

2. Withdrawing From Your 401(k) or Retirement Savings to Pay Down Debt
Yup, dumb idea. I did it. I cracked under financial pressure and now have $0.00 in my future retirement savings.

3. Choosing Only the Safest Investing Vehicles
How is this a bad financial move? If you buy used *ahem* with cash it is a great idea. You spend less on repairs, less worrying on if your jalopy is going to leave you stranded, and if you resell it it might have some residual value.

4. Avoiding Debt Altogether
Wha What? She can’t be serious can she? Her only examples are taking out a mortgage and student loans for being good ideas. Listen, I have both and they stink. You can avoid student loans by working in college, I didn’t, but if I had a time machine I would go back and do it. I would also rent a HOUSE, not an apartment. No one ever mentions the constant home improvement projects and repairs that are needed once you own a home. The utility bills that go way, WAY up in the winter with the gas prices and the pleasures of raising taxes every year making the home you purchased soon to become borderline not affordable.

5. Cutting Your Variable Spending
I agree here.

6. Paying Off a Major Loan in One Payment
Is she mad? Get that debt out of your life, move on from it. Why keep it around like a little lost puppy? That thing is a %^$#^% leech, a parasite, and wants to kill you

I wanted to let you all know, those that are still reading this anyway, that we have COMPLETELY fallen off the wagon. We waffled a bit over the past few months, sorta stayed on course, but when July hit it was over. No more budgeting, no more saving, it was a slow incline to spend, spend, spend….spent to the point of adding an additional two grand to the debt tally. Not only that, but I quit the 2nd job not long after my last post. When it came down to it I really wasn’t making any money over what I could make elsewhere in a retail store. It averaged about $9/hour. Not worth it considering the wear and tear of my vehicle. Right now I am desperately seeking a 2nd job that could benefit my home life and bring in some money. With the holidays coming I have been applying to UPS since they work Monday – Friday 4am – 8am. This would be perfect since the facility is half a mile from my day job and would allow me to keep the weekends open for family time or a third job.

I really feel like all I am doing is dragging my feet on the 2nd job. I want out of this situation, a little bit of air to breathe, but I feel so beaten down by weight of it that I am depressed. It’s paycheck to paycheck these days and I can’t take it.

There I said my peace and I can feel the fire again start to burn for the plasectomy. I really should cut those cards up, but what if I need them to balance transfer from one card to another? Eek!

So, it’s been a few weeks since I have posted and I am sure you are wondering why, well I was having some health issues so I put this blog on the back burner while I dealt with it and the anxiety that came with it. It turns out I am fine and all the testing that I went through came back normal as can be.

I was having migraines for the first time of my life that affected my vision. It was scary as I had never had a migraine before and never associated a migraine before with temporary vision loss/blind spots in one eye. It was a scary thing to suddenly not be able to focus, read, and then to have shimmering lights in your field of vision. They lasted about 30 minutes and then at the end I would have a massive pounding headache for hours with little relief from ibuprofen or Tylenol. I saw a doctor about and apparently I am a prime candidate to start developing migraines at my age, whatever that means.

I don’t know if it was the stress of the plasectomy and the intensity, or if it was just a fluke. The doctor said that the lack of sleep, stress, certain foods can also trigger a migraine. I have a pretty good idea on what caused it. I used to be a heavy diet soda drinker up until a little over a year ago, I loved it. If the soda had to come from a bottle or can it would have been Diet Mountain Dew. However, if it were a fountain drink, it didn’t matter; Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, Diet Mountain Dew, etc. I loved them all. I picked up drinking soda again when I started delivering pizza again, a big liter of Diet Pepsi straight from the fountain machine twice during a shift and then it poured (pun intended) over to the home. 2 liter bottles of Diet Mountain Dew gone within two days. This I believe led me to have three migraines within the month of May. I stopped drinking soda on May 28th after some research of what was going on before I saw the doctor, knock on wood, I haven’t had another since.

So here is to moving on with the plasectomy and focusing in and living life.

It’s been busy around here lately.

I changed companies seven months ago and I am now learning what it is like during their year end business cycle. You see, they follow the calendar year of schools and universities from July to June of the following year. Which means for me all the business that can be placed on the books creates for a very hectic late May all the way through the end of June. Which is great because I like to be busy as it passes the time by just fine and before you know it it is time to go home.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending how you look at it one of my coworkers gave notice a little over two weeks ago and their last day was on Wednesday of last week. Sad to see them go, but this creates a whole world of opportunity for overtime for me especially now at the end of the fiscal year. My coworker will not be replaced because of the economy.

Hopefully I can take advantage of this and really reap in the rewards of overtime and bang out more of the plasectomy.

Beyond working a second job, where else can I make some moolah fast? I guess for starts, getting back on the wagon from recently falling off will help. I don’t want the intensity to stop and I want to regain the traction we had and the progress we were making. I know there are no true get rich quick schemes, but there has to be something, right? Right? Please….

This last little amount before we begin to tackle the auto loan is like a thorn in my side. I know it is there and there is no easy way to get rid of it at this point. We don’t have any more big items to sell and all the small things that we have now, no one really wants. Movies, music, etc. Now it seems it is going to be patience to go the distance. Looking at our budget we have an extra few hundred now to put towards the debt which will allow us to knock out the remaining $3,500 over about 10 months. 10 months is a long time compare to the recent progress we have made, but if we stay the course it will be gone by February 2010.

After it is wiped out we will have $10,000 in an auto loan. If everything remains the same and we roll that extra few hundred dollars into the car payment and include the minimum payment we pay now on the credit card, that will be over $600 a month to pay every month on the loan. We could then have the van paid off by February 2011. Thinking about that as I type would be amazing. A loan we took out for 5.5 years being paid off in less than 2.5 years. Putting this in perspective like this brings back the motivation to up the intensity.

Somehow it feels like I have done this many more Sunday deliveries than four. I know time as I get older is not slowing down, so how is it I have only done this four times? I guess since I only work this job once a week it makes it easy for it to be only four. Each week that I have worked I have done something different and this week is no exception.

What was it this week? You will never guess because it, to me at least, makes no sense. In fact, the three other people had as much of a puzzled look as I did. The owner, who I have known for ten years, asked the delivery guy, me, to mop the sidewalks. Yes, the sidewalks. I know what you are thinking and yes I did do it. I am not sure what the point of this was as there was no bodily fluid from the previous night bar hoppers engrained into the concrete. I swept the cigarette butts up and then proceeded to mop with bleach water. One of the guys was kind enough to snap a few pictures with his cell phone unbeknownst to me while I mopped. It was humorous and we all got a good laugh out of it.

This week of deliveries, 05/03 (yes I am a week behind as today is 05/11), was my best delivery tip day yet. I made a total of $35.00 and change. Not because I delivered more pizzas than any week before, no it was because of my final delivery of the day. This week it wasn’t a debacle like the other previous delivery attempts at the end of my shift. Dropping a sheet pizza and getting lost. I delivered four sheet pizzas to the local bowling alley to the brother of the guy who was making pizzas. Consequently you get a REALLY good deal if you know the person making your pizza. His brother paid $30 for pizza that would have cost close to $80 with the toppings he had. I am not complaining because I received a generous tip of $10 to conclude the night.

Total miles driven 24.7.

Total tips, $35.19 with 11 deliveries. Tip amount averaged higher this week at $3.20.

It’s been hard lately. I have been working the second job delivering pizza and that has given us the extra income to pay some overdue bills. We are all caught up now and we have extra cash to use towards our plasectomy and other debts. Which is great and all, but unfortunately I have to say though that I am getting the itch. The itch to go out and blow it. I can look around our house and see things I would love to purchase. New bathroom sink, new couch, a recliner, new laptop, new computer, grass seed for our back yard, stones to lay in the entrance to the backyard to prevent more mud tracked through the house, and the list goes on and on.

How do I fight it? I look back and see how much ground we have made. We have come so far in such a short amount of time. Sacrifices have been made, possessions sold, and simpler living has come our way. Forget about blow money, we blow it before we get it based on our budget. Our budget has seriously taken a backseat as of late, pretty much non-existent since starting this second job. Our bills are being paid, but anything left over does not get allotted to where it needs to be. Something always seems to come up that wasn’t planned for or goes over the budgeted allotment.

I had to replace the fluorescent lights in our kitchen recently and they are the not the inexpensive 4ft shop lights or the small bulbs that are in your standard lamp. These are the U-shaped bulbs that cost $12.99 a piece. I replaced one and all was well for a few days, then it began to flicker and would not turn on. I removed the housing and noticed the bulb that I had not replaced was dark around the ends and decided to replace it. $25 spent, not accounted for in a budget. A vet visit, eating out, a run to the store for X,Y,Z. Ugh

The month is still young and it is time to get back on track. Back to the plasectomy and a budgeted life.