Sean was super sweet this year and bought me a 17″ MacBook Pro.  As much as I absolutely love it, being as it’s everything I’ve ever wanted – I’m also upset.  See, work has blown up and I’m back to working on five different sites at once – trying to pace myself through them instead of rushing through them this way I don’t royally mess something up. With that, I’ve yet to be able to really be able to enjoy this new lil super gadget.  I’m also having one of hell of a time patching some programs, no serial numbers I come across are actually working the way they’re supposed to and it’s driving me nuts to go have to repeat the steps numerous times every time I boot a program.  I even pulled the numbers off of the iMac (which work fine) but can’t have the same result here.  I just wish there was a physical ‘patch’ file the way there is on Windows but I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to get around it in the future.  For now I’ll just deal with it, and usually it only happens when I need to open the programs so just getting past them once and leaving the program open should pretty much do the trick for the time being.

I was very surprised to even receive the gift, honestly.  Our goal for the year was to pay down and pay off as much of our credit card debt as possible so that we can start banking something into savings to be used towards a home purchase later on down the road (yea, we’re back at that step in our lives together). So you can imagine my surprise when I dozed off one night and he woke me up by hopping into bed and pulling the super cuteness of “Guess what I just bought you?” Then the “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you since it’s not V-day yet” conversation.  So I got it out of him, which is never hard cause he loves to blab a good secret and knows I’m not big on being surprised.  (I’ve got OCD and I’m anal retentive about doing things a certain way – bad combo if you want to surprise me LOL)  So he told me that he signed up for another credit card and was approved for financing on the Macbook, and there was still more than enough left over for him to be able to order an iPad for himself.  The company has six months deferred payment and I’m not sure on the deferred interest but we anticipate having everything banked to be able to pay it off in July anyway.  So of course I was surprised, and super happy and I’m still super happy because it’s everything I’d ever wanted and more.  They aren’t making them this large anymore and I don’t care what anyone says – no matter what resolution you put things on the overall size of the screen does make a huge difference.  I’m not just putzing around on Facebook on my Macbook to be trendy – I’m utilizing it for everything Adobe – and it will really come in handy for school in the future too considering all the work I’m anticipating for the next semester anyway.  Next on the docket there is all Flash related.  I’m so into jQuery right now that Flash is probably going to completely throw me off my game but at least I’ll be able to recreate some of the funky flash-based headers I’ve been seeing around the net to be used for future clients – the only upside but whatevs.

So the mac got here last Friday and it hasn’t really left my side.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time in bed with it because I’ve got my fancy tray table to keep it sturdy and give me an actual spot for the mouse pad that doesn’t require it sitting on top of the blanket (not sure if you’ve ever tried to draw a straight line in Photoshop while your mouse is on the blanket but it’s NOT easy).  Sean, a few years ago, bought me a tray table for like $20 from Walmart, and it’s been my buddy every single time I’ve been working from bed because of my various back problems.  In this case, however, working in bed is actually causing the back problems because I’m not properly supported and sitting up the way I would be in a regular office chair.  The issue with that is the fact that my office chair is leaning like a bitch and I might have to actually cash in the warranty and pick up a new one anyway.  So for now, I’m setup in the kitchen until I can knock out a substantial amount of work tonight.  Too much needs to get done for me to worry about how often I need to stand up and stretch before I can jump back into something. That’ll throw me off my game and I can’t afford that right now.

The other upside to the month is a long-overdue client finally paid up and I was woken up yesterday to Sean sneaking around the room and opened my eyes to him saying “Are you super comfy sleeping in our bed?” Of course I was until he started talking to me (can’t function without coffee or a cig in the morning – don’t talk to me unless I’ve been outside for at least 10 minutes).  He went on to say that the client paid up and he just paid off the bed.  GE Credit must be super pissed at me because I’ve never paid an ounce of interest on my purchases before. LOL.  So yea, even though we bought it in November for about $1600, it’s completely paid off as of February and there was 6 months deferred interest on it so that wouldn’t have kicked in for a few months anyway. MWAHAHA!!

So yea, in a nutshell it’s been a pretty good year financially so far.  I’m not one of those people who chooses a ‘health kick’ as a new years resolution – I know my lack of a ‘drive’ and stick with the stuff that I know I can control. Since money makes the world go round, of course that would be the one to focus on anyway. So, our goal for this year was to pay off as much as humanly possible and so far we’ve paid off about $2,000 worth of credit cards since Jan 1st.  My only issue is there is still people who owe us a substantial amount of money and if they would get off their butts to pay us back we could continue to pay down our debt, but they’re pussy footing around and that’s just enough to be annoying for us.

It’s our ultimate goal to only have the car, insurance and the cellphone bill going out every month.  Hopefully by August that will be a possibility so we can start pushing all of the usual money that we shell out every month to bills straight into savings. The goal is to have about $25,000 in savings to put down on a house, and of course I’m super picky about how I want the house to look and the features it has because an in-law suite is mandatory for me.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a separate dwelling, even the option to setup the basement as kind of an apartment for my dad is all that matters to me. I was looking in the general Rehoboth area, but I’ve found a few down in Selbyville and up in Dover that I fell head over heals for and now at least have a starting point.  The requirements are in-law type of a suite/dwelling – a pool (or room for one) – no HOA cause I think they’re assholes and a gourmet kitchen with plenty of room for huge family dinners because that’s what us guineas do.

Now it’s just the matter of coming up with the money for it, so I guess it’s time to get off of blogging and get back into Dreamweaver.

PS: For the last 6 months I’ve wanted to come up with a new them for krissy.nu, I may wind up just converting to the 2012 WP theme and slapping a header image in there – who knows. But one will be coming soon, I promise!