Monday Morning Coffee

My Morning Coffee - my picture

Early Monday morning, the day is chilly and the sky looks ragged with rips of golden edged clouds and light. It's December at last, the shortest working month... hopefully. People got their Aguinaldo(*) and most have already spent it. Some are yet to receive it, some should receive it, but won't because their employers are like that. In this sense, it always fills me with sad amazement how some people are able to find all sorts of justifying as to why they are entitled not to pay what they are legally expected to, and pretend that they are the ones acting acording to the law.

My aguinaldo came and went, now I'm back to being as poor as I've always been, but at least I have no more debts on my credit card (well, there was a Black Friday and I had been in dire need of clothes and stuff!). The stuff for the Christmas Gifts is somewhere done around the 50% or so, so that's also "under control". However, my mail and my List of 13 isn't under control. Something will have to be done with that. I'm definitively lagging with the readings, so I'll have to pick up with those during lunches (saving that time for my indexed magazine), and then picking up as much as I can.

There are also other stuff to take care of, such as my personal finances, which I haven't been logging... since I arrived. What do I mean by that? Well, while in Budapest I took the habit of checking weekly all of my vouchers and log them on an Excel sheet. My bank keeps my electronical balance, but while doing this I actually saw were my money went. How much I spent on books, how much went on food, on clothes and so on. It was quite an eye opener. However once I crossed the Atlantic I stopped doing it, so now I have four months worth of vouchers I'll have to organize and log in a new Excel sheet. It would have gone like that for a long time - and eventually give up on the idea and stash the vouchers in an envelope. However as I was keeping them in one of my Ikea boxes, and since I'll be working on two smash book projects a place to park all my materials and inspirational bits is in dire need, so the bill box was selected for that. As result I had to take out all the bills and vouchers yesterday, and start by sorting them by month. The task itself was HUGE so I didn't go into sorting them by day, by card (thanks Hyne I no longer use eight cards) and then doing the logging. This will also take time, but since it's not in my list and my finances are well, I'll tackle slowly.

The smash books will start on 2013, but then there's nothing stopping me from gathering all the little accesories I'll need to make them unique and fabulous, right?

I sip my coffee, I check the binder full of uncathegorized vouchers and check my work e-mails, my list of tasks and set forward for a week of stuff to do.

(*)Aguinaldo: pronounce /ah-gi-NAL-doh/. An extra monthly payment paid by law to all workers. It's amount equals the average of the monthly payments of the last twelve months. Consequently, if someone hasn't received a salary in all of the last twelve months, those months count as if paid $0. The aguinaldo must be paid between December 1st and December 20th.