What I do for money

While I'm unemployed, I've got to keep trying to bring money into the house. I haven't started receiving checks from Unemployment yet, and since there's some question of whether or not I'll be approved (I was fired from my job, but the reason I was fired was because I'd given six months' notice. It's a long story, and I'll post it sometime) I figure that I'd better do what I can do bring some other dough into the house. My wife, being a student, brings in what she can, but most of her time is eaten up by schoolwork.

I've posted on Craigslist for several things. I'm capable of tutoring math, physics, and computer science, so I posted my tutoring services. I have yet to get a bite on that. I'm also advertising motorcycle repair - I'll come to the client, as I don't have a garage. :) I got two nibbles on that, but as of yet, nothing has come through. Maybe when it warms up a little more people will be interested in getting their bikes ready for the spring.

I'm also walking dogs. Well, one dog. My friend Laura just adopted a retired racing greyhound. She works a lot, so she had been taking him to doggy day-care. This gets pricey pretty quick, though, so as a favor to her, I take him out for a walk every now and again. I'm thinking that I might could make a bit of dough walking other people's dogs, so I'm going to print up some flyers and put them up downtown, Westport, and in Crossroads. I've also posted on Craigslist about the dog-walking.

Speaking of Craigslist, I was browsing around CL last night and saw a posting for motorcycle funeral escorts. They pay something like $40/run, so of course I jumped right on that. Also a TV focus group that pays $125. Then there was this job that involved going around and taking photos of hotel event boards, but that sounded a little bit shady, so I didn't pursue it.

I'm also going to look into substitute teaching. It pays about $100 a day, which is nothing to sneeze at. I just have to get 3 professional letters of reference, which should be a little interesting, as all my professional references are computer people.

So I'm still hoping for the unemployment to come through, 'cos right now I'm not bringing in much of anything.

We are living carefully, though. We've been keeping the house at 65 degrees, which keeps the gas bill down. We don't have cable TV (though we do have cable Internet). We carefully budget our food money - I buy reduced-for-quick-sale meat at Sun Fresh, and buy as much as I can from Save-a-Lot. Next month, we'll be buying a box of meat from Angel Food Ministries for cheap. And we almost never eat out any more. So we're stretching the money about as far as we can.