Work started a move into a new building yesterday. Talk about miserable hot trucking computer equipment around in August. Fortunately for me, I brought a little red wagon to tote all of my computers from the old building, to my car, to the new building. But it was still miserable hot. Maybe that’s why I’ve been up since 4am, I’m too tired to sleep.

We’re supposed to go in today to hook everything up, even though the office is “closed”. That way we can come into work Monday morning and actually work. We’re also having a BBQ with everyone today, funded by the bosses.

The new building is GORGEOUS. I want to have pictures of both to post, but that’ll probably be a while. One disadvantage to the new building is the stairs on my torn knee. But I don’t really have a choice, so I will just have to be extra careful.

Our peacocks hatched 3 babies last weekend. We do not have very much luck with Peacock babies at all. The last batch before this were eaten by a blacksnake, and I think the batch before that were killed by the male peacock. Hopefully this batch will survive, which means building another cage.

I’m supposed to deliver some guinea fowl to a farm up in PA, but the owner hasn’t gotten back to me after several attempts to contact. In which case I will probably just keep them.

It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks.

I’ve decided on my father’s birthday gift.

A book on guinea fowl and I’m paying off his feed store debt (about $400-$500). A friend has also volunteered to put $50 towards my fathers feed store debt for his birthday.

So keeping track of my dads financial transactions this month, I’ve already noticed a few trends that I’m going to have to try and remedy (which is hard because he’s very set in his ways).

- When he ordered a porcelain piece from Hawthorn Village, he was somehow signed up for automatic shipping of additional pieces. And he would forget to send them back and then had to pay for the ones they sent him that he didn’t want. He says he’s called and sent a letter to have it stopped, but I’ll keep an eye out just in case. If they do continue to send items, I’m going to stick my foot up someones ass.

- He goes to Baugher’s Country Restaurant several times a week (2 or 3) to talk with the old farmers. But if I had to I would pay for this myself because it’s one of his simple pleasures and I fully support him doing it. This costs about $8 each time.

- He’s still making payments on his hospital visit, but has no idea the amount he owes, and can’t seem to get answers out of anyone at the hospital or the bookkeeping firm of the hospital. So I’m going to start requesting itemized bills for this type of stuff, because you can’t rely on any company to be accurate or legit.

- He has a large bill he’s making payments on at the feed store we get feed for all of our animals. I’m going to start making payments on this (it’s about $400) and get it paid off, since I give him money now for feed for the animals.

- The biggest problem is he doesn’t keep track of his account. At the end of July he took $20 out of the ATM (I assume not checking the balance) and it caused an NSF fee of $35. The month before that I think he had 2 or 3 NSF fees. This is going to be the biggest hurdle, but keeping a weekly check on his account should hopefully help.

So really it’s not TOO terribly bad. He has a large loan he used to pay off a bunch of debts with, maybe about $6k, so as long as he doesn’t accrue any other major debt and we work on paying this one down, he might be in good shape.

My biggest task right now is figuring out what the exact amount of his accumulated debt is. His unique filing system consists of shoe boxes on the kitchen table, and that just can’t be a suitable way to take care of your financial business. I hope to get him a desk for his room and a new filing cabinet to keep his paperwork in at some point.

Once I have all that done, I’ll have to tackle the issue of his ridiculous health care payments. If only I were rich and he didn’t have to worry about health care. :/

I thought about setting up my father a $250 deposit into an ING savings account for his birthday next month. But I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it or just to keep extra money in -my- savings and get a larger interest payment because of the amount I already have in my savings.

I’m glad I finally smartened up about my finances and put myself in a comfortable position. I’m glad that watching my dad struggle with his finances and absolutely no retirement taught me the value of my 401k and Roth IRA as well as my emergency savings. I’m glad the debt my father has created showed me to work hard to pay off your debt and as such I have no credit card balances. And I’m glad I learned the value of making my car payment on time every time and to pay extra to get it paid off as soon as possible.

I feel like I’m starting all over again with my dad. This is going to be a long haul.

So I took it upon myself to start tracking my dads bank account. I’ve inputted all of his transactions into Microsoft Money, and check it weekly to update it with what transactions he’s done. I’ll probably do this for a month or two and then print out some reports of his expenditures to give him a look at his spending habits.

That’s what really woke me up, seeing where exactly my money was going. When you have a list of needless expenses that have added up $300 or $500 over the last 4 months, you start to realize that maybe those types of things aren’t needed. I’m hoping it has the same affect on my father.

I also noticed that he spends $500/month on healthcare. How ridiculous is that? There’s gotta be something I can do about that.

If I can get him to give me a solid list of all of his debts, so we can keep track of how much he owes exactly, then we could figure out a better way to pay all of them off. I figure if I have a system in place now, when he’s unable to really keep track of his finances as he gets older, I’ll be in a good position to take care of it for him.

I think if we just got all of his hospital bills paid off, he’d be in better shape financially.

We had our annual block party in the neighborhood last night. All the neighbors get together for a potluck get-together at this one lady’s house, and it gives us a chance to get to know each other. I hardly knew any of our neighbors before we started doing these, except those that stop by on occasion to get eggs.

I played guitar and sang for about two hours, switching back and forth with another woman who was playing the fiddle. She played a lot of old civil war and bluegrass music, which I love. I would really love to play a fiddle someday, myself. I played the viola in elementary school, but what am I going to remember from that far back?

During the party, the horizon began to grow dark, eventually spreading further and further until it was on top of us, and then dumped buckets of rain. One of my neighbors, who is apparently a secret service agent for the White House, was commenting on how even though we needed the rain, why did it have to rain during our picnic? To which I say, BRING IT ON. I’ll play come rain or shine, and I don’t mind getting soaked. The weather isn’t meant to work around our schedules, our schedules are meant to work around the weather.

But we all filtered inside and still had a great time. I just don’t know why people dislike rain so much. It’s just as beautiful as a sunny day in my opinion.

The only thing I don’t like about these block parties is, we have this one neighbor that is positively annoying. My dad says she gets half shot in the ass before she comes over, and then every year she hangs all over and flirts with the cook. I feel sorry for the poor guy because it just repeats itself every year.

She always wears these really skimpy white trash outfits, and she’s quite literally anorexic, so it’s not very flattering to look at. She dances and stumbles around, and repeats herself over and over. Last night she had to tell me at least 15 times that “You should pursue your career in music!” “I just love when you play!” “Play house of the rising sun!” I just nod and smile politely every time, even though she’s already said it over and over.

The worst part is she does all this in front of her husband and son. I guess that’s why the last two years her husband hasn’t come, he’s probably embarrassed.

I’ve been distracted lately. So much that I don’t know where the last two weeks went, honestly.

Someone bought a lot behind our house and have started construction on their home. I’m at work all day, so the noise isn’t as noticed by me, but is noticed by my father, and most certainly by our chickens. They have not been laying very well at all due to anxiety from all the noise. I only hope they can settle and get used to it, because it will probably there for months.

Another reason to look for land elsewhere.

Still no significant rain. We’ve been conserving a lot of water, saving greywater, whatever needs to be done. We were able to harvest a bit of corn on Tuesday, which was rather good. But the masses of corn around here are still very malnourished and short, despite one of my city Grovemates commenting that Lughnasadh was after the harvest, so any wishes for balance in the weather during ritual were needless. And here I’ve been on a farm all my life, so obviously I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, such as our tomatoes being harvest well into October every year.

I dug out our pressure cooker from the basement because I intend to do some canning of said tomatoes fairly soon. I want to try my hand at my own tomato sauce. I make a mean homemade spaghetti sauce as it is, but I usually buy the tomato sauce for it.

I’ve also decided I’m going to sit my father down and teach him how to use a computer. He needs to get his financial stuff straightened out, because he’s been having a lot of overdraft charges lately. If he can check his account online, and use ING with no overdraft charges, I think he’d be in great shape.

His birthday is next month. There is a book on guinea fowl that I plan to get him, even though we’ve been raising them for years anyway. I should have half a dozen keets ready to donate to Highland Farms in 2 weeks or so to help their tick population. If the guinea’s I have now lay eggs, I’m going to try and start hatching them and selling guinea’s to folks around here. I also want to start getting some broiler hens in addition to our laying hens.

We should be doing another round of killing rabbits sometime soon, in which I’m going to try my hand at braining the skins for practice. I may even tan a set with eggs, because I’ve never done it before, but obviously it’s a method I should become familiar with simply because of the fact that we sell eggs.

A smokehouse might also be on the horizon in a year or two.