A windfall

I have this reputation for finding things at the moment I need them. Notably small amounts of cash. I will say to Jer, "I need five dollars," and -- no, I don't just take it from his wallet when he's not looking, that would be cheating -- I go through an old purse or a coat pocket and voila. Five dollars.

I wouldn't call it a super power or anything, but it's helpful. Also entirely self-fulfilling since I must have hidden the money from myself at some point in the past. But there it is.

So Jer was in my office last night as I read him the day's play pages I'd written and he idly thumbed through a pile of desk stuff I'd stacked on the floor.

"Hey," he said, "is this still good?" And handed me one of those Visa cash gift cards that was hidden in the pile.

I usually don't forget a thing like that. The key to this "gift" is "small amounts." So we looked it up on the internet and discovered it has $100 on it. Plus we have to use it now since it starts accruing maintenance fees in about a week.

The good news is I have three ideas of how to spend this windfall. One: pet food. You can never have enough pet food. They, like, need that to live or something.

Two: groceries. We're still living off the party leftovers and a gifted fruit basket, but foresight dictates we'll need more eventually.

Three: a printer. Our printer is about 7 years old and it recently started only printing the second half of a page, and only then when you manually push a single sheet through.

A broken printer puts a serious cramp in my new writing lifestyle -- of which I totally rocked yesterday. I even made it to the gym, where I ran as I fast as I could in place watching Jerry Springer on the televisions.

Turns out there is no amount of fast enough to escape that crazy.

To counterbalance the windfall however, I noticed my ex-work overpaid me in my last check. They decided the "least impactful" way to handle it (for me), would be to have me send them a big ass check next week. I explained to them it would be "less impactful" if they just reversed the payment and reissued it correctly, but then I found out they were substituting "least impactful" for "makes our job easier." So whatev. I get a few extra days of interest before sending it back. And they get to continue living in a delusional fairyland where "impactful" is a legitimate word.