**Dh received an offer for an additional $50 if he did a follow up interview to huge focus group he just did. Cool!! He also has some unrelated $125 focus group this week.

**I should be able to redeem some nice credit card rewards this week (maybe $100 to ROTH and mortgage). Just from regular monthly usage of cards.

**I invested in some tupperware from Amazon and am pleased with what we got. I think I will return some of it though (got too much). Having just made do with hand-me-downs or whatever we have, this is a small but nice investment.

I told dh we should not spend any more money this month, so of course he looks at all the ads today. He shows me this huge tupperware set of a nice variety we already have (though just one or two pieces is all we have of this kind), on sale at Target for $15. I couldn't resist. We need to clear out the cupboards and start from scratch though. I think this set is way more than we need, but at that price we can donate or give away whatever we don't find useful. Heck, the return I have will cover this purchase.

**We are mostly prepared for our fur baby's arrival tomorrow, but our last pet had been declawed before we adopted her. So, it will be a bit of an adjustment. I have invested in a nice cat condo/tree/scratcher (Amazon - not sure when it will arrive). & a scratcher toy that I know my mom's cats love. Will start with that and go from there. I picked up a new pooper scooper yesterday and a couple of cat toys. I suppose we did not have much for old senior cat since she was not very active. We might have some toys somewhere if we can find them. So we bought a couple of the interim.

I am okay on everything else. I had tossed a couple of old litter boxes in my grief rather than clean them out and deal with them (I reasoned I had cloth diapered my kids, and I never throw away much anyway, so I would allow myself to be extremely wasteful in my grief), but I had also bought some larger litter boxes in effort to help aging cat and plan for vacation, so we still seem to have more than we need. One of the newer ones had never been used since kitty refused to use it. I did have the patience and mental capacity to clean the one newer litter box - way too nice to consider throwing out.

Since he will be recovering from neuter surgery, we will fashion him a cardboard box fort to hide in, in the interim. I know I had more cat stuff at some point but not sure where any of it is - probably donated. I used to have a nice cube, but all I could figure is cat didn't use it and we got rid of it. Cardboard will due until the new cat condo arrives.

**Carpet is getting cleaned a week from Monday. A highly recommended place; just really booked up. We have some mess to clean up from old senior cat. Too bad we didn't get it done sooner - it's just been so hectic. I will be pleased to get that done.

Better news yet, dh told me he would go through a Craigslist pile we have in the living room. He feels motivated to clear space for carpet cleaning. Awesome!! Maybe we have enough to sell to pay for the carpet cleaning?

**Speaking of cleaning up around the house, dh is finally caving on replacing the garbage disposal. I really wanted to about 18 months ago but he was being cheap. It's actually been behaving pretty well, but we have a small leak and we think that might be the culprit. It's beyond time. So I am very happy to get that taken care of.

**Dh has been complaining profusely to Sprint about slow 3G. They are knocking $10/month off our bill, but we have to call each and every month for the credit. We have 12 more months on our contract. We did solve some of the mystery. The higher populated areas have more troubles because too many users sharing bandwith. Dh figured that out, and it was our "aha" moment. No wonder we get such fast internet speeds when in the middle of nowhere. Sprint even admitted they were slowing down the 3G while implementing the 4G, which is why they issued the credit. But they also said 4G would be here any day. Like they didn't tell us that 12 months ago. If they don't get it rolled out, we will be long gone. Dh will complain more in coming months. This is totally ridiculous. We might go crawling back to Verizon. Their prices have come down, and we at least know what our usage is. We had no frame of reference before using a data plan. Now we know what we want in a plan and can make a more informed decision. I don't regret using Sprint for the transition because it really was cheapest. & at least dh gets an answer as to why they seem to be getting slower and slower. I hope it is indeed because they are rolling out 4G. For my pocketbook, I hope they just roll the dang thing out so we can stay with Sprint. But I agree with paying a little more so that our phone internet actually works and dh can use phone for what he actually wants to use it for. Fair enough.

**Kids have been complaining about old Frankenstein computer that dh cobbled together for him. So dh broached subject with me. He kind of was talking about one or two computers to replace. I told him I'd rather buy two $500 computers than one $1,000 computer. But again, maybe this could wait another year. HE didn't think he had replaced his computer since 2009, and that it might be wiser to hand down his computer and buy up. My response was: Whatever!! So I finally got around to looking it up today. What happened is the computer he had before just died very prematurely, and it screwed up everything after that. Ideally we would have handed that last one down to the kids, and it would have been much newer. So I just remember it being very annoying, unexpected and $$$$.

So I look it up. We haven't bought a computer since 2008. !!! You could blow me over with a feather. Particularly since dh has no issues and no desire to upgrade.

So I just told him we were both wrong and the good news is we have not bought one single computer in 5 years. (He had guessed it had been 4 years).

So anyway, I think it's fair for him to upgrade and to give the kids this system - it should have a lot of life in it and fulfill their growing needs. Dh is considering getting a laptop too, to replace our netbook. I am totally fine with the netbook. But I am much more open to this investment at this point. Then the kids have access to two computers for schoolwork and gaming. They won't touch my netbook any more. Dh gets super fast desktop. We all win. I feel like dh is always buying computer and computer parts, so this whole thing just floored me. We did upgrade our monitors during last few years, but apparently that was a wise investment during some "no computer purchase" years. (I think some of that was even more my idea). I told him, "I guess it's been all the TVs lately - it all blurs together."

**& that reminds me, the $50 Amazon TV part fix seems to be working. *fingers crossed.* So, hallelujah to that.