Well, back to doing the farming thing on the weekends and working Monday - Thursday. I'm commuting 2.5 hours on Monday morning, working 10 hour days until Thursday night (staying in the house I need to sell), and then commuting 2.5 hours back home. I'm pretty tired Monday and Tuesday, feel good Wednesday and then tired again Thursday night before I get back home. But I can't quit until I find another similar paying job.

I had an ex-co-worker look over my resume the other day, and she said it had too much clutter and not enough meat. Not enough job skills, not enough specific languages and programs and database skills, etc. I rewrote it on Monster today and sent it back to her to critique again. Before she said she couldn't understand why I hadn't been able to find anything because of my skill set, but after seeing my resume, she said hiring managers don't know much about specific qualifications for IT jobs, so I needed to load up on specific "buzz words" to get noticed. We'll see how that goes.

As for the farm, we had a wheel fall off the pickup the other day! Something to do with the wheel bearing or shaft or something. Luckily we weren't hauling any bales like we had done the day before. Drug it to the shed and used the tractor to feed cows that day. He found another 4 wheel drive pickup, very rough, some kinks to work out, for $1300 and we bought that the other day. Jeez, when will we stop spending so much money?

But we have 4 calves now! They are so cute! Another two were on their way yesterday, but as of this morning, they hadn't been born yet. As soon as it warms up a little we are going to finish the electric fence around some more pasture so they will have more room to stretch their legs, and hopefully the cows will eat enough of the old grass that we can see some tree stumps someone foolishly cut off 4 inches off the ground. We can't hay that because it will break the swather, and the grass is so tall we can't see the stumps to clear them out, and there isn't a good fence around it so we haven't been able to put cows out there. I hope we can get them out there this weekend.

I am doing pretty good at not spending money on frivolous things since the wedding. I used a gift card to get a pair of pants, a nice shirt and a nice jacket for interviews, and only spent an additional $10 at Dillard's for that stuff. I've been eating at home most nights, but if I don't cook something big on Mondays to take to work, I've been ordering a sandwich for lunch. They are good, but expensive. So, gas is a big problem and farm expenses and lunch, but I am not spending a huge amount on anything else.

We paid off all of his credit cards the other day. I used some of the money from the 0% interest card. I know, I said I wasn't going to do that, but we were paying 19% interest on $5000! Even if we can't pay back $5000 when next December comes around, that was smart, because we won't have 19% interest then. He had two other cards he used on the honeymoon, but for only a couple hundred each, so we are not paying any interest on any credit cards now! We also paid off his line of credit ($1200 at 7% interest) and renewed the line of credit in both of our names for 7%. So now, all he owes is for the land (6.75%) and house (5%). Need to pay off the Co-op bill by the end of the month, or we will pay 18% on that. We still have my cows (8%), the tractor and baler (8.5%), my house (6.9%) my student loans (3.13%) and my pickup (3.74%). Hopefully we can sell the house pretty soon. We can refinance the cows and the tractor and baler for 7.25%, and we are going to meet with my banker next week to do that.

I've been taking over a lot of the monthly bills that he has been paying at the house up north (or sometimes not paying). I'm having to put $900 a paycheck into my bill paying checking account, and so long as I don't lose my job, it is figured out for the rest of the year. But, there are two more bills I need to take over for him...his long term disability insurance and his life insurance. He has a whole life insurance policy, and I would like to get rid of that. We are meeting the insurance people this weekend, and I'll make them re-sell it to me. Good luck, I say, cause they're going to need it.

He used to balance his checkbook in his head (? I don't think that is balancing it, do you?) but I have a spreadsheet worked up for him now, so he can look at that anytime he is home, and he is even updating it! Quite a change. We are also going over past week expenses and upcoming expenses on Sunday night before I leave early on Monday so we kind of have a plan for what farm expenses we will have that week. I'm using some of the money we got in cards at the wedding for cash spending money, and it is going pretty far, actually. I found some automatic charge on his account for $19.99 the other day, but we can't tell what it is, he doesn't remember, and I tried to call yesterday to cancel it, but their computers were down (a convenient excuse, huh?). If he didn't do it today, I'll call them on Monday to get that canceled.

We finally got health insurance for him, and dental and vision, and Accidental Death and Dismemberment, and $100,000 life insurance policy on him. I upped my insurance on me to about $540,000, plus the maximum AD&D. With all of those additions, adding him, upping all of my coverage, we didn't even double the premiums from before. As I've said before in a previous blog post, Single People sure get hosed on insurance!!! http://cptacek.savingadvice.com/2007/10/16/single-people-sure-get-hosed-on-insuranc_31214/