Too much!

That is what my life is filled with right now, too much of everything. Too much work, too many activities, too many responsibilities, etc. Something has got to give but I'm not sure what right now.

We continue to work on our new property with the hopes of moving out there sometime in the next week or so. The weekends have filled up with catch up projects for Paul and work outside the home for me.

We've found a new church we desperately want to try but I've been unable to get time off from the market where I'm scheduled to work every Sunday. I asked for this Sunday off but they just "couldn't make it work." They were annoyed and surprised when I just "couldn't make it work" on Wednesday when they called me into work early. To be fair I was working at the feed store but I don't know that I would have went in even if I didn't have prior commitments. So far I'm still working 35-40 hours outside the home between my 2 jobs. The strain is getting more difficult to handle. It's especially hard when I only bring home $260 a week for all that work. Yes the money is nice but I do feel my time is worth more, especially with everything that is not getting done at home. I need to figure out a balance of working enough hours to get by but not so many that our family suffers.

I'm considering dropping one of my major activities. As much as I hate the idea, it would free up a tremendous amount of time and save me lots of frustration. I have no idea if I will go through with it but it's been entering my mind more and more. I use up most of my patience at the market where I have to watch the tax money I pay being spent on junk. Maybe our area is the exception but watching people use their food stamp cards on soda, candy, ice cream, cigarettes, and alcohol just makes me angry. For most of the people who come into our store this is just their normal way of life, this isn't temporary. They have learned how to work the system and so they live comfortably. Yes, I'm jaded and frustrated! All of this is to say that I just don't have any patience to waste on outside activities anymore.

Okay on to the positives going on. I'm excited about our upcoming move and I've been riding! I can't remember if I mentioned the horse that we got a number of months ago. She is an older retired show horse who has a "been there done that" kind of attitude. Very little seems to bother her so I've been building my confidence on her. We've gone out on a number of hour long trail rides and we will be doing our first gymkhana tomorrow. I'm really excited even though we will only be walking through the events. I know it's not all that impressive but I'm no longer terrified to get on her so I feel like I've achieved something huge :)

Out of control

That's what has happened to our eating habits.

I knew that since I'm averaging 30-35 hours of work outside the home our food expenditures were getting a little out of hand but I didn't realize how bad it had become. As I was balancing the checkbook I found more receipts from eating out than I remembered. I also noticed that popping into the market for convenience foods becomes expensive really quickly. All of the money from my extra hours is being eaten up, literally.

I'm going to be making a better effort to plan out dinners so there is no question of what there is to cook. In the beginning, dinner was ready by the time I got home from work. The current tendency is to wait until after I get home and ask me what should be made. By that time, around 9 pm, I'm not in the mood to help people with dinner prep. All I want to do when I'm not working is to sleep or veg out so making sure dinner prep is done before I go to work is going to take some effort on my part.