I'm home. I think I might have to switch to a $2 a day budget for the next month to make up for the past four days.
I drove three hours to Detroit Wednesday to work until Friday. It was either that or only get 16 hours of work this week. I stopped at McD's to get breakfast for myself and my sister in law (who worked with me this week). Buying fast food first thing probably wasn't the best way to start our excursion.
I have a pre-paid cell that I only use when I'm away so I ended up spending $20 on minutes for that as soon as we arrived in Detroit. That turned out to be a stupid plan and a waste of $20. I had to call the cell company from a pay phone because the phone would not accept the minutes and turns out my SIM card was bad (whatever that means). So yes we spent three days in Detroit without a phone (except any pay phones we were near).
That night after we had drove three hours and worked over 10 we returned to the car to discover that I had locked the keys in it. That was another fun hour of waiting in the cold rain in a t-shirt for a tow truck to come and take another $35 from me just to open my car so I could go to the hotel. I think my insurance might cover the $35 but as it stands I spent over $60 the first day of this little "work" trip.
I only used a tank and a half of gas for the entire trip but gas was around $3.65 a gallon. I am getting reimbursed for the gas but not for two weeks (at least) and at present the weight of that much money just being gone is really heavy. I'd really like it back now so I can stop thinking about it.
We also spent three days eating a lot of food (most of which I am getting reimbursed for) that neither of us normally eat, drinking a lot of coffee that neither of us can normally afford, and buying stupid little things like lip balm (the stores and the hotel were SOOOO unbelievable dry... I feel like I'm never going to rehydrate) and payphone calls (which I'm not getting reimbursed for). I just feel like I spent three days sinning. I feel like WAY to much money left my fingers and I need to do something to cleanse myself. It's really a yucky feeling and I CANNOT wait for the reimbursement check.
On another note I have not looked at how much money my husband spent while I was away. At present I can't bring myself to do it. So I close this blog ready to jump back into $12 a day but not knowing in the least what shape our budget or finances are in after four days of madness. Ugh.
You should check www.gasbuddy.com. You put in the address you are near and it will tell you nearby gas stations and their prices. I usually just do it to get an average of what prices are out there, and make sure I am not paying $3.70 when there's a station down the street charging $3.39 (which sometimes happens out here; I don't know how they get away with a 30 cent difference but they do). Another thing I've been doing is www.mturk.com which is these silly little online tasks you can do to make money. It's stuff like writing a review, posting to a message board, solving a puzzle, finding out information for a database (like ten ski resorts in Utah) that kind of thing. It takes a long time because the tasks don't pay much, but they're easy and mindless, and I have gotten $40 from it so far which was transferred into my paypal. It's run through Amazon so it's legit.
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