Hi, everybody.

I just liquidated my kids’ college savings accounts to pay for treatment for my diabetic cat.

Of my two cats, Rocky is my least favorite. He’s kinda thick-headed and has never learned that he’s not allowed to jump on the table. He doesn’t sit on my lap and purr like Jackson, the “good” cat. He’s got an unnatural lust for appliances (as shown in Figure 1. He also likes to climb into the dishwasher when it’s warm and dry. I told you it was unnatural!).

But those are not good enough reasons for me to just let him starve to death because he can’t metabolize his food properly.

I may have made lots of dumb mistakes in my life, but I am not a cat murderer. Sheesh.

This is one of those scenarios that is so crazy that I couldn’t possibly have made it up. It sounds like a classic sob-story scam, even to me (I’m laughing, thinking about all the spam emails I’ve gotten featuring poor orphans and the like).

But every word is true.

So I invite you to laugh along with me, at least until I get to the part where I shamelessly flog this sob-story so that you’ll buy my stuff*.

(*Oh wait, I’m already doing it. Flog flog flog!)

September: Budget crisis as usual

September was already shaping up to be a lean month, finance-wise, here at Casa del Cholbi (yeah, we sometimes do call it that, after a margarita or two). Now, I’ve had plenty of months where the last week or 10 days is a don’t-use-the-debit-card zone, and the family bank account is down to chump change until The Professor’s paycheck arrives on the first day of the next month. But September was looking like it would be worse than the “normal finanancial crisis” scenario.

(Do I see a pattern here? Yes, thank you Dance of Shiva, I do indeed. And the unraveling of it includes writing this post.)

But I still felt optimistic. If not for September, then for October.

Just when things were going so well!

Possibly because of delusion and denial, sure. But also possibly because, for the first time in eight years, I now have time to work on my business at something approaching full capacity. Because both of my Genius Children are now old enough to be in school, full-time. For free.

And I am having so much fun creating and planning and internetworking with fabulous people. I’ve created two new service packages (WordPress Installation and AWeber Tune-Up, $39 each), planned a wacky teleclass called The Gentle Art of Making Money with your WordPress Blog in partnership with my new pal Meredith Curtin, introduced my Web Coach Open Office Hours, started revamping my personal/business Cholbi.com website, gotten more active on Twitter (sorry Facebook and LinkedIn, maybe later), and lots more. Trust me, you’ll be hearing more about these New and Exciting Products and Services here on the blog.

Lots of thinking and planning and also lots of doing. Truly inspired doing.

So, even if we squeaked through September by the proverbial skin of our teeth, October was bound to be better. Bound to be!

But then stuff started happening.

The plot thickens!

• The Professor is taking a mandatory 9.23% pay cut, because he’s an employee of the Great State of California, which is, apparently, having a bit of a budget crisis of its own.
• We had to have a huge amount of weed-abatement done. This is mandatory every fire season, and it’s a good thing (trust me, I’ve experienced California’s fire season up-close and personal, but that’s another post). It was, however, more expensive than I’d planned for. Much, much more.
• My therapist’s office called and surprise! I owe them for several visits, because they “misunderestimated” the number of sessions my insurance company would cover.
• Rocky, our younger (and frankly, stupider) cat, was diagnosed with diabetes. My cat, unlike myself and my children, does not have health insurance. So far, his diagnosis and treatment has cost about $600.

So. Several unexpected (or underbudgeted) expenses, one lower-than-expected paycheck, and all maxed-out credit cards later, I turned to our only remaining savings: The kids’ college funds.

I’m frantically rationalizing to myself: “There’s lots of time left until they’re college-bound. Surely we can make it up. Also, they’re geniuses, so they’ll get scholarships, right? And maybe they’ll become Internet millionaires out of high school and won’t want to go to college in the first place!”

Still, it was a hard thing to do. And there aren’t any more savings to draw from. No offshore tax shelters (at least, not yet, bwa-ha-ha!). And looming debt. Did I mention the debt? No? Well, trust me, it’s looming.

This looks like a good spot for a subheading, but I can’t think of anything witty

I could easily get freaked out about all of this. And I do, from time to time. I’d like to say that I’m being all positive-minded and confident and trusting-the-universe about it…and sometimes that’s true, but not always. Not by a long shot.

Mostly I just do what I need to do, right now. I try my best (and sometimes my best just isn’t good enough) to focus on the one thing I really really want to do in this moment. Whether that’s writing a blog post, tweeting about my upcoming class, giving Rocky his insulin shot (it’s much easier than it sounds — he doesn’t even feel it), installing WordPress for someone, figuring out how much I can actually spend on groceries this week, or reading a mystery novel to escape it all for awhile (most recently, I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a real page-turner. And yes, that’s a shameless Amazon affiliate link).

I remember that I am not a cat murderer. And that lots of regular people who haven’t done anything wrong are also facing financial problems, and that I can still be proud of my business ideas even if they fail, because I am working and learning and experimenting and being the real me.

Thanks for reading.

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