Church — $15.00
Weekly offering.

Einstein Bros Bagels — $11.30
Bought lunch for The Son and The Daughter. We ate there and I splurged letting the kids have “sandwiches” and cookies and sodas, too. No bucket deal this week. We had an hour to kill before dropping The Daughter at school for a play rehearsal so we “dined in.”

handyman — $100.00
Labor to build the frame for the new retaining wall. They’ll be out here again next week or the week after to drill through the existing cement porch to install several rebar pieces. Then they’ll do the actual pour. I hadn’t realized that a new retailing wall would be so expensive — it’s only 12′ long, 1′-9″ at it’s highest point and tapering down to 1′-2″. It’s such a small and insignificant feature in my backyard landscaping project, I really hadn’t considered it’s cost because I didn’t assign any value to it. I’ll have to take closer care from now on.

Proactiv — $45.85
This was The Daughter’s second shipment and I’m still feeling extremely wary about this whole thing. See, it’s set up kind of like the Zit-Zapper-Chemical-of-the-month club. You make your first purchase innocently enough but it’s not actually an outright purchase. Instead it’s the first of what they hope will be a long string of regular monthly purchases. And they stack the odds in their favor by taking your credit card info and then automatically mailing out a box of stuff every month and charging it to your card. The only way to end the madness is, well, I don’t actually know how to stop it. Apparently you can’t do that by logging into your on-line account. I tried. I was successful, however, in switching our delivery schedule to every 16 weeks instead of every 4. My plan is that in the next 12 weeks I’ll either have figured out how to stop the deliveries altogether or The Daughter (who, by the way, has incredibly soft, to-die-for china-like skin with the occasional teenage blemish) will have finished using Delivery #1’s chemicals, have started on Delivery #2’s supply, and decided that she just has to have yet a third shipment of the stuff. At which point we’ll leave things be and let Proactiv send another box of chemicals and then start the process all over again. I figure, if nothing else, I can cancel the card, right?

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