After watching water boil -- and my old junker laptop do nothing -- for 24 hours, I went to the boss lady and said, "Quit being cheap and invest a little in your company so it can grow."

Boss lady stewed about it for a while, but then gave in and said I could spend $1,100 out of the business accounts on a new laptop if the computer repair guys said it would cost more than $300 to fix the old junker.

They did, so I did and now have mobility again.

Boss lady, which just happens to also be me, is back to stewing.

Thankfully, I go on vacation in 48 hours....

As of today, the "office" job will be officially over (dancing a little jig here....).

Summer vacation starts Friday for Mini, though, so there won't be much sitting around at home working on the booming business for me (so much for those no drive days....)

This poses a little problem since I do have work that I need to get done and my laptop blew up last year. (I usually work on a desktop.)

Thankfully, I was able to resurrect an old laptop from the junk heap known as my office closet, and I'm sloooowwwwwly getting it up and running.

Slooooowwwwwly as in watching water boil slooooowwwwwly....

Part of the problem is that it wasn't mean to run anything above Windows 2000 and it's now running Vista.

I don't know enough about computers to know what -- if anything -- I can do to speed it up (or if it's worth it cost wise). But I do know summer will be over by the time this thing gets done processing one request.....

I've decided to keep track of my no drive days, one of which I had yesterday. We rode our bikes everywhere we went and saw some beautiful sites, including this:

clipping coupons....

It's sad really. Other people go to church or take the opportunity to sleep in. But, not me.

No, I get up at 6 a.m. every Sunday to clip coupons in anticipation of Gil the Grocer making his weekly delivery to my house later in the day.

I do manage to get some work done for the booming side business while clipping coupons, though, so it does make for a productive morning. I call it multi-tasking while my husband calls it insane....

So someone (I'm not saying it was me) forgot to take into account the time it will take to get through customs on our return from our upcoming vacation and booked the second leg of our flight home a little too close for comfort.

Oh, and that second flight is the last flight out of Dodge for the day. So, if we happen to miss it because we're standing in line in customs for longer than the 1 hour and 7 minutes that certain someone allowed between flights, we'll be spending the night in the Lone Star State.

Anyone in Houston got a couch we can crash on?

I went on the airline website to see what it would cost to fix this little boo boo and found out it will cost a whopping $300 to change all three tickets.

Uh, no thanks.

I'll just take my chances; and if we do miss the flight home, I'll be playing dumb at the airline counter and hope all I have to pay for is a really cheap hotel room for the night.

Hey, but good news: I had another no spend day yesterday.....

Yesterday turned out to be a no-spend day even though I did leave the house to go into the "office" job.

I'm hoping I have another one today.

Think I can do it?

Just for fun, last night I used one of those online debt snowball calculators to figure out when my whopping debt will be paid off.

In the past, I just didn't want to project that far because I knew it was going to be a looooonnnnngggg, slooooooowwwwww process. But now that I have my personal credit card paid off and have more money to put toward the other debts, I was curious to see what would happen as my payments increased drastically.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that within this decade I'll have everything but the mortgage paid off.

"Within this decade" may seem like a long time for most of you, but considering the original amount of my debt I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Of course, this is all based on my current payments. My plan is to make even larger payments as our income increases and as we have extra money available from windfalls, so the time to pay it off will shorten drastically with any luck.

Because I only fill my car up every two weeks, I rarely notice the increase in gas prices. However, yesterday I filled it up and it took $60 in gas where just two months ago I remember it taking $40 in gas.

Thankfully, I rarely drive that far and quitting the "office" job means even less driving. Plus, my husband is taking the bus and train to work on a regular basis, so that's helping as well.

I just can't imagine paying that much for gas every week, which would be the case if I were working full time somewhere other than my home office....

I had a couple freelance checks come in today, so after setting some aside for taxes I'm putting $330 toward the challenge. My new total is $10,303.03.

I've been off nursing a nasty flu that I've had for the last two and a half weeks and trying to wrap up work at the "office" job, which is officially over on May 21. Thus, I haven't had much time to focus on financial matters.

One thing I did manage to accomplish, though, was setting up a Roth IRA with Fidelity. This was all part of paying off my one-and-only personal credit card using some of my savings. I arranged to have the Roth funded with automatic deposits from checking each month, so it should be easy on my part from here on out.

I'm off to lay down down and hopefully build up enough energy to plow through some jobs for the booming side business later today....

Another freelance check arrived for $690. After I meet my minimum spending plan requirement for the month, I have $247.73 to put toward the challenge. The new challenge total is $9,973.03.