It's All About Money Isn't It

The other day I was talking to Teresa on the phone and we got onto the subject of cell phones. She asked me how much Sarah's cell phone bill was in the average month because she was considering her brother adding them both onto his cell phone service. I admitted that I hadn't checked in a while. When I checked her account online I was a bit surprised: For the last 30 days, she has used $114 worth of service. Upon further inspection, only $14 of that was phone use, so that means the other $100 was all text messaging! Text messages on her plan are $9.99 for 1000 of them, then it's 5 cents each after that. If my math is correct, that means she has sent/received 2800 texts in the last 30 days. Wow, young love can be expensive can't it? I called her and told her to reign it in the best she can.

We'll see.

While I'm on the money subject, I got my income taxes printed out and ready to mail last night. It was a little painful writing a check for $888 let me tell you. I can only be slightly peeved really, because it was totally my own damn fault for not adjusting my withholding allowance when I was divorced. Now my paychecks reflect it. Last Friday was my first one that showed it, and I lost $30 off my take-home pay. Bummer. To make up for it (and then some) I'll try to make it a point to add a little overtime here and there when I can. I'm fortunate to work at a place where there is always something to do, and they even encourage it.

Oh, by the way... I got a good night's sleep on Tuesday night this week, so I guess I can stop wondering if it was pattern or coincidence. Who knows.

I figured out what went so wrong with the welding I did on my Harley fender a few weeks ago. The way a wire feed welder works is that the stuff (wire) you weld with is actually fed up through a nozzle of the hand-held portion of the welder, controlled by a trigger. It has two adjustments on the box itself: One for wire speed and one for electrical current. I pulled it out a few days ago to weld something and went to adjust the heat (that's what I call the electrical current adjustment) and the switch felt weird. Upon further inspection, I was surprised and annoyed to find that the inside of the knob was stripped out. The D-shaped hole was round and the knob was slipping. I'm sure that when I was trying to weld on my rear fender and fucked it up so bad, I thought the heat was turned to the minimum (required for thin metal) and in reality it was most definitely not so. If the current is turned up too high it will burn through, and boy did it... I went over to Radio Shack and spent a whopping $1.99 on a knob that goes on with a set-screw to hold it. Now I know it's right and it makes definitive "clicks" when you turn it. The welding I was doing after I fixed that was much, much better. Unfortunately, it was a little too late for my rear fender.

Oh well.

Work as been very frantic this week, mostly due to the fact that my supervisor is on vacation. It will be nice when he gets back on Tuesday so my world can resume to its former somewhat normal state. I'm both annoyed that he left, and jealous that he's in Florida and will undoubtedly come back very brown. Nudists like myself hate it when other people do that... I think it's high time I did that myself. I need a vacation big time.

Hey, speaking of money... What do you know, it's payday!