Saturday hello

Yesterday was payday and Friday, so double good :) I managed to come in $23 under budget in my food/cleaning/personal/pet category for the pay period.  Not a lot, but better than nothing, I guess.  Or maybe I'm just great at budgeting, haha.

Here's a funny story about the awful renters at the end of the street. The neighbor in between us is a good friend of ours. He's lived here almost as long as we have. Single guy, quiet. Pretty much just goes to work and stays in his house/shop for the most part, so I don't think the renters have ever really seen him, other than maybe at a very distance. So the other night neighbor was making his way over to our house in the dark (to check out our new LED shop light DH had put up that day, because he just bought 2 also, and wanted to see how they worked) and was smoking his cig and stopped out in the road in front of his place to finish his cig.  There is a street light between his and our properties we had put up years ago, so he wasn't in the total dark. All of a sudden he hears some gravel rustling behind him and turns around and the renter is standing there and says to our neighbor "can I  help you?"  Can you freaking believe that?!! They have people up and down our street 84 times in one day!  So our neighbor replies "Nope" and turns away. A few moments later he hears the gravel again and turns around and our neighbor says to renter "Can I help YOU?" and renter says "well, I'm just wondering what you are doing here?" and neighbor says "I'm standing on my property looking at the holes in the road".  Then the renter says "Oh, you are (name withheld)". He called us when he got back into his house to tell us and we all had a good laugh.

DD should have her car back soon from our friend working on it. He's fixing the oil leak and ended up pulling the engine out and called yesterday and said he is glad he did because one of the motor plate mounts was broke in half, so he is replacing both sides. Hopefully we'll be able to go pick it up this weekend. She also just purchased herself (for college) a new touchscreen tablet/laptop combo. $750 and she still has a buttload of money in savings, even after she will have to pay for her car repairs.

I took her the other afternoon to get her sports physical done for tennis starting next week. I guess with the new insurance it's now covered 100%, so at least that's something for my extra $400 a month going out for health premiums (said sarcastically). She only needs to take one class this last spring quarter to satisfy her high school and community college AA degree, so she is very excited about that. She's taking on online business class, so she won't even have to go to the campus. Fall quarter she had afternoon/evening classes so she worked mornings Mon-Fri, but this current quarter she had to take morning classes and switch back to working weekends. Her best friend took the job to replace her weekday mornings, but now friend has to take morning classes spring quarter so DD is going to take back the weekday mornings and best friend will take the weekend shifts. Their manager is very happy it all worked out and I'm happy we'll have some weekend time back to hang out and do stuff again.

My mom is stopping by later today to drop off her paperwork for me to do her taxes. It's usually not too complicated - she just has her retirement withdrawal and social security to claim.

I see some little buds on my flowering plum tree - spring is coming! Yay!