JULY TALLY $21,517.77

I've been depressed all evening.

That black lab still hasn't arrived. If it doesn't arrive in Tuesday's mail, I will order a new black lab directly from Amazon so that the boy has it by Thursday. If that happens, I will LOSE $3 on the transaction. Even if the black lab arrives on Tuesday, I'll still have to refund something because it was supposed to go “expedited shipping”.

Stupid post office.

That's what I get for never paying for tracking or insurance. I mean, who knew the post office was this incompetent?!? Yeah, yeah. I know. Everybody.

Of course, if I have the black lab shipped on Tuesday, they'll get the original package on Wednesday... For all I know, the buyer is pulling a fast one on me; I have no way of knowing. So I'm assuming honesty. (Therein lies the difference between me and Kenneth L. Myers.)

But none of this is why I'm depressed.

I decided to start doing my bills this evening. Step one is always to reconcile my bank accounts (I maintain two) and write down all my deposits.

So I looked at my first bank statement and there was the deposit from Amazon. $7.55.

Now, I KNOW I've been working harder than that! I mean, maybe not as hard as I oughta, but certainly harder than $7.55 worth!

Knowing that in my quest to find $100 200 times I had managed to come up with only $7.55 clouded the rest of my bill-doing chore, which I actually managed to get through.

Here's the big picture:

Last month, my credit card debt totaled $22,474.70.

This month, it totals $21,517.77.

I should be excited!! It dropped almost a thousand dollars! And that was largely because I was THRIFTY. Well, that and the $7.55. As my loyal reader may realize (yes, that's singular because only one person asked me for a free bar of soap!), it is a huge accomplishment for me to drop from the $22,000s to the $21,000, unprecedented even, particularly since all my hard work only yielded $7.55. But I just couldn't get excited about it... Maybe tomorrow.

I just checked on Amazon. My “account” has a credit of $160.19. It will deposit into my bank account on July 7th. So that's the problem.

I think my next big goal will be to do whatever it takes to get that $600 back from my insurance company. Well, I can at least try. Despite the fact that I'm an attorney, I've never really gotten anywhere with them. Generally, they pay me whatever they decide to pay me, and if I have a problem with that, well, they already paid me whatever they decided to me, so they're done!