i really do keep meaning to writei've not forgotten whysper, promise. it just seems, whenever i actually think about something to write about, i don't have the time to; and when i have the time to write, all the ideas are gone. it's not that i've been busy with anything specific. it's that my days are full. i get up, workout (1 1/2-2 hours, depending on the activity), eat lunch, taz gets home and we do housekeeping chores, then i get to work on paid editing work for an hour or so before i make dinner, eat, then more paid editing work until it's time to do dishes (usually around 8 or 9 pm). by then, my brain is tired and my body needs a break, but i usually try to work on my own writing. around 2, i do a little yoga, take a shower, go to bed, and read for 30 minutes or so before crashing. and lately, there's no staring at the ceiling for 30 minutes. i'm usually out in 5. it's a good busy, for the most part, but it's a busy.
things are slowly getting better all around. we're still waiting on the raise, and things keep coming up, but we're managing most things (not the credit cards, and saving for dragon*con is becoming a real bitch, but hubs finally got some much needed work pants). there's still some juggling, but there's not as much frantic panic about it. we do occasionally get up against a wall unexpectedly, but for the most part things are good. i'd like to figure out a way to cut out the storage space fee, but there's no way we can bring all that stuff to the apartment without some bookshelves and other storage space type things. what we need for the kitchen to be more functional will take a chunk all by itself. maybe next tax season. we'll see.
we signed the new lease for the next year, and the rise in rent was like $10. has to be the most reasonable increase i've ever experienced in an apartment. i remember one place...when my girls were toddlers, to be honest, wanted to increase our rent by $100 once. i figured we were looking at $25-50 here, at least, but there are also A LOT of apartments here that are empty, so i suppose they are doing what they can to keep what they can rented, and raising the rents by too much wouldn't help with that.
in other news, linnorm has finally found a new job. it pays less than he was getting a year ago, but he'll not be paying out over $800/month for insurance (no way they'll put any of the kids or me on a family plan covered by his insurance with us out of state; we tried that with the girls when the requirement to cover them until they were 24 kicked in) and he's not going to be paying $600 in child support. So he may be earning less, but he's also got $1400 less in expenses to worry about. he has said he'll kick in to help with taz, since taz won't ever be leaving our household, but the amount hasn't been determined. since taz is 20, it won't be court ordered, so it's something he needs to decide on himself, and it needs to be something he feels he can reasonably pay every month.
and middle daughter has passed her g.e.d. she wasn't happy with her final score, but it's the equivalent of a high "c", and it's not like anyone will ask her what she scored when she says she has a g.e.d. on a job app. college app is something different, but they'd want her g.p.a. from high school if she'd gotten a diploma. i'm very proud of her. she's been aiming for this for awhile now, and now she has it and can move on to other things, maybe even go to college at some point.
speaking of which, my loans have been purchased by sallie mae, which had me so totally freaked out. still does a little. sallie doesn't have the best rep. and then there was the $2000 monthly payments they wanted for the first THREE months of my repayment period. um, what? turns out, though, we probably should have had them on an income based plan for awhile now. with our income what it is, we'd have a $0/month payment, the government would cover the interest, and if we still can't pay in 20 years, they would be forgiven. if we'd been on something like this before, we'd be halfway to that mark. lol (of course, they probably didn't even have this plan a few years ago.)
and that's pretty much it. still working on losing weight, still on a plateau; still trying to get someone to accept novels, still not managing that so much; and so on. so whysper isn't forgotten, it's just that there's not much going on right now. at least not much that's interesting. with my days so full, it's getting harder and harder to find time for a lot of things on my to do list, things that i should be doing as well as things i want to do. and there's a couple major projects that i'm considering that i have no idea how i'd tackle if i took them on, including a an overhaul of domynoes.com that would end with whysper as the main page (since it's about the only part consistently updated these days). fitting it around the regular life stuff would be very challenging.
speaking of which, it's time to go and do dishes before it gets too late. some days i think it would be nice if life slowed down; most days i'm just glad life isn't what it was two years ago.
~*~
word of the moment: chatoyant
having a changeable luster or color with an undulating narrow band of white light