DarqByte

I do apologize if you’re sick about reading about how busy I am. But such is my life as of late, and as we all know, I like to talk about stuff that actually relates to me in my blog.

So today is my marathon day. If I survive the day without going crazy and not breaking any bones, then I’ve accomplished an extraordinary feat. Here is my schedule:

• 7am-4pm: Work
• 11:30am: Lunchtime mortgage meeting
• 5:30pm to, at the latest, 8:15pm – Corporate Challenge Flag Football
• 9:00pm: Work (evening release)
• 10:00pm: Indoor Soccer

I’ll probably get home at 11:30, where I’ll probably go immediately to bed and wake up the next morning to get to work at 7am again. Oh. My. God.

So let me explain some of these items. Obviously, I have work. But during my lunch break I’ll be heading to rework our mortgage, probably to a decently lower interest rate, which would rock. If that happens, we’ll likely keep our payments where they’re at now, and if we run into issues in the future, cut how much we’re paying to it. It’ll be a nice buffer should we ever need to use it. Otherwise, we’ll pay off the house much faster.

So we also have Corporate Challenge Flag Football this evening. I’ll get into the reason why, but our earliest game starts at 6:30 and our latest goes until whenever. If we keep winning, we keep playing. But I know for a fact that I can’t play past 8:15 and some other people can’t because we all have evening releases at work. Which, of course, is next on my list.

Our evening release should actually be pretty easy. Normally, when we have Thursday evening releases, if I have an Indoor Soccer game later than 7:30, I won’t play. But this evening’s release shouldn’t take longer than a half-hour. So I’m going to head up to my Dad’s place and do the release from there, which is 5 minutes from the Indoor Soccer facility. As long as the release doesn’t take too much longer than we’re anticipating, I will make my Indoor Soccer game at 10.

Wow. Indoor Soccer at 10. Looking forward to that one too. But that means I’ll have at least played in two games (one football, one soccer) and potentially up to four, depending on how the flag football games shake out. I’ll be dead, dead tired. And let’s not forget all of the other busy-ness I’ll be tackling throughout the day.

Oh, I figured I should give you a quick wrap-up to my odd breathing issue. Yesterday it started getting better as the day went on, and when I woke up this morning, it was gone! I’ve had a suggestion that it could have been allergies from a shitload of dust that was kicked up over the last couple days by high winds, as well as hyperventilation, in addition to those thoughts that I listed on the post yesterday. If it happens again, I’ll have to see if I can identify any similar and dissimilar conditions between the two occurrences to see if I can come to a better conclusion.

So as for the reason we’re playing Flag Football tonight — we won last night! But that will be a blog post later today, likely, as I want to expand upon that subject.

Also, Wyatt Gallagher had a pretty interesting post on the state of the USA right now…

The trouble with money is, nobody seems to have enough of it. As of yesterday evening, us included.

We just bought our house in late April, and it is brand-new. Just built. Wich is kinda nice, given that we know the entire history of the house — us. Unfortunately, now we’re in a pickle and I’m finding it more and more increasingly difficult to find a way out

We got a letter/bill yesterday from our mortgage company. They deal with paying the county taxes for us. Back about a month ago we got a bill in from the county that had a lump-sum bill in it to cover a short in our property taxes. Apparently, on newly-built homes, Clark County doesn’t properly set the tax rate. They have to, after the fact, adjust the taxes on a property once the structure is completed. I called our mortgage company on this and they said that there would be no problem, that they are handling it.

I ended up forgetting about it until the bill from them came in yesterday. It’s asking for a sizable escrow account payment by December 1st and also informed us that our now-increased county taxes have pushed our mortgage payment up… By $200 per month. Please, tell me a family that could handle that kind of expense increase easily. Yeah, didn’t think so.

So now we’re in a pickle. Not only do we have to figure out how to come up with a big chunk of change (at least it’s one-time), but we have to carve out another $200 per month to cover our increased county property taxes. How much fun is that?

Laura and I have already talked a little bit about how we’ll probably end up handling this. The problem is that we don’t have any obvious place to cut expenses from in our budget. We’ve tried addressing different areas but the best we can come up with is cutting a small amount from our home phone bill. We both have an “extracurricular” activity that costs money each month, but we’re trying to figure out how to not cut those out, because we’re human and need recreation in whatever form we can get. Without that, we’ll have a tougher time coping.

So we’re officially under the gun financially. I’ve been worried about money for a couple months, but now I’m worried about things like Christmas. I don’t think we’ll be able to get many gifts for people this time around, and I feel kinda bad about that. Ultimately, I guess it’s better to not be able to buy gifts for loved ones rather than sink further into debt. It sucks, but I think our family members will understand.

This economic crisis is starting to worry me, and greatly. I thought Laura and I were on solid financial footing, so if we’re having issues, what’s it like for other people? I’m also curious to discover how other people are dealing with issues like this, perhaps to find some inspiration on what we can do.