[St. Theresa]

I couldn't survive with dial-up. It's not just matter of preferring high speed. I need it for work. We have extended basic cable for TV and most of my favorite TV shows are on channels I would not get without extended basic. I don't do much for fun, so TV is really it. Plus, if I downgrade my TV package, I'll have to pay more for my Internet service. Oh, how I love Comcast. Can we have some competiton in this market, please??

The $100 phone bill is truly the best I can do. It's a business phone. If I don't use a business phone, I don't get listed in the yellow pages. It gives me unlimited local and long distance calling. Without the plan, it would be much higher. All the extras come with the plan and although I do have answering machines, voice mail sounds much more clear to my prospective customers than the machines do.

And I've kept track of everything for years in Quicken. Still do. And yeah, I don't worry too much about college because a) my son will probably not go - he's in a tech school and he will graduate with certifications and be ready for work. My daughter gets good grades and will probably end up with scholarships and as long as our government stays relatively sane, there will be grants and loans.

I'm about as frugal as I can be with utilities, heat, water, and everything else you can imagine. When the kids are with their dad every other weekend, the heat goes WAY down, most of the lights are off, and I'm quite happy with a package of Ramen noodles with a scrambled egg cooked in and a small can of peas. I also have a fireplace, so if I do have a chance to curl up and watch TV for the night, that works as a heat source for the livingroom. I don't mind bundling up.

There's very little to cut. What I need is more income. I'm working on big time web sites as we speak. It ain't easy work. PHP, MySQL, XML, Ajax, Flash, Java, Javascript. What's infuriating is that no matter what you do, your sites are going to look different depending on the screen resolution, the OS and the browser. Just when you think something's perfect, you look at it in another browser and, well, head meet desk. I'm trying to steer away from these tedious projects and focus on the easy money. For example, I have a client who will pay me to come "find" his email. He'll open Outlook and see the "Outlook Today" screen and think his email "disappeared." I go over and click once and his email is back and he'll give me $20.

I also have many domains but I have to work on my own sites to attract differnent types of jobs. Right now, I'm only found for real estate web design, which is what I really need to get the heck away from.

I've herniated my second lumbar disc (had surgery on one a few years ago) and now it's back to doctor's app'ts, an MRI on Saturday, prescriptions. Even with heath insurance, the co-pays are killers.