Reaching for the stars

Well for the first time since March, things are looking up.

There I was studying for finals and freaking about how we were going to pay our bills this month and Seth of course pipes up well my student loan money should be here in a couple weeks and it's $1000 minus what I need for textbooks. So of course I'm like $1000 for 3 months? That's only $300 a month and that barely covers your car loan. Well he rolls his eyes and says "Well I'm going to have a job." like how stupid could I get. So after a hour and a shower of stewing over this, I basically freaked out on him. I tried not to be mean, but I let him know that this was unacceptable. How dare he act like I'm stupid to not count on him having a job when he has barely applied anywhere for two months? That it was cruel to make me put the bills on my credit card when I had worked so hard to pay bills when I was in undergrad and that he basically refused to help me at all with school or bills and now he was going to ruin all my hard work paying off my credit card. I said that I just couldn't understand not doing everything possible to find a job when he knew how stressed and upset I was. I told him that part of going for his goal to be a teacher is finding a way to pay for his half of the bills while he was in school. He said nothing and what defense did he have really? He cried too, but I just couldn't feel sorry for him. An hour later he was out picking up applications. I swear within 3 days of this conversation he had a job. He is going to be a griller at Mongolian BBQ. He likes cooking and he gets to eat pretty cheap there, which is a nice benefit. He gets a small cut of the tips and a good minimum wage so I think it will be enough to pretty much cover his half of the bills.

So I have started this couch to 5K program and I am on week 5. I'm doing pretty good and can jog for 5 minutes fairly easily. I can't believe in 4 days I'm going to run 20 minutes straight. It seems daunting. The upside is that it has helped me lose weight fairly easily, I weighed 163.6 a week ago, which is down from my starting weight of 172. I can't wait to weight 162 lbs and 161lbs as it means that I will no longer be obese and also I will be below the weight I got down to in July when I gave up walking. I really hope that I can stick with it and be below 150lbs by the time our vacation. I also hope to run a 5K sometime before school starts.

I tried to get straight A's this quarter and I came so close. I got four A's proper and one B+. My B+ was an 89.6 too and if I had answered one more question on the final right then I would have had an A-, which I count as straight A's. It gave my GPA a boost to 3.43 so hopefully if I get straight A's next quarter that will get me near a 3.5, which is what I'm hoping my GPA will be at the end of my P3 year.

My credit card goal is a total mess. Since we had to use our emergency fund money to pay the bills, while Seth was unemployed when an emergency occurred I had to put it on my credit card. Sancho had to have surgery and while I am so happy he is okay, it cost $600. So now our emergency fund is gone and my credit card debt, which I had gotten down to $900 is now $1400. I want to put summer health insurance on it, but I feel like I will never pay it off. It doesn't help that my computer is still broken, something is wrong with Seth's car, our microwave broke. I want to go to a conference in the fall. The good news is that I got a $1 raise so that's some extra money that I can put towards debt/rebuilding emergency funds. I'm entering like crazy any contest that has money as a prize in hopes that I can win a prize to wipe out my debt.

Also I'm hoping that I can learn a couple crafts this summer. One is tatting, which I'm hoping I can learn to make snowflakes for gifts this Christmas. It would be really cool if I can turn it into a etsy business too. Of course I have been wanting to start a t-shirt business as well. I have a lot of ideas, it's just putting those ideas into action. Another thought is writing a book. I would love it if I made enough money from creative ventures so that I can spend less time at work and more time at home. Also I thought about doing a fitness blog since there is so many 'mom' blogs that I thought a fitness blog would be really marketable. This would be great if I could pair it with a t-shirt business as well and sell fitness related t-shirts. If I am able to have several streams of income coming in then I can use that money to pay off my debt and also bolster my savings. The sooner I save money to cover the bills and Seth's tuition the sooner we can start trying for a baby. My feeling is why not try to do all of these things at once that way I don't get bored if one venture fails then working on others will give me hope.