Serious/not serious/worse?

Last night, I thought R was at home and had gone to bed, with the central air blowing air around the house (but not ventilating with the outside world). So I went to sleep.

I woke up at 12:15 or so, to the sound of five gunshots. It sounded like they were coming from near the train tracks, just south of us. My sleep-addled brain instructed me to get low to the ground--I suspect that this was either drug-related or somehow tied to the high school area. A short while later, two more shots were fired, somewhere off to our west.

There's just not much to do in a situation like this. Part of me REALLY wants to get a neighborhood watch started, at least to distribute flyers with police contact info on them up and down the street. It couldn't hurt. But it would be a lot of work, and there are so many crappy rental properties on our street with really high turnover that it seems like it would be a futile endeavor. In the very least, we have our small corner of three houses, as well as the folks in the house right across the street.

It was really hard to get back to sleep--I was too hot, sweat-soaked. It's really strange to get used to sweating in the way I'm sweating now, where most of the sweat is just straight water, but is just unstoppable because of the heat. The one nice side-effect is that when most people are complaining about how hot it is, I really don't feel all that hot.

My sunburn has started to peel. Last night, after I rode home from the Tuesday night CRAP ride, I noticed beads of sweat on my arm that wouldn't wipe off. The sunburned skin is apparently not as porous as regular skin, so sweat got trapped between the outermost layer and the tissue underneath. It's one of the strangest things ever.

Back to ants. Between the lack of sleep and the abundance of ant-watching, I'm feeling crazy.

Accountability [finances]

Well, one nice benefit of not spending much money is that it's much easier to keep track of what I have actually spent. My brother and sister learned this lesson really early on, back when our parents would make us keep track of our finances every month. They basically decided to not spend any money. Me, well, I just did a crappy job of keeping track at that point, and spent however much I earned or was given.

Anyway. I've been relatively diligent about monitoring these things since 2006, the year I resolved to keep better track of my finances so I could start paying off my undergraduate loans (deferred through grad school, yes, but accruing interest pretty quickly, to the tune of $330 per year). So there are lots of numbers to play with (I can't do a thorough job, though--ants beckon again already).

So altogether it turns out that I spent a grand total of $814.61 in June. That's mostly rent ($450) and groceries ($165.70). Utilities and my cell-o-phone make up another $100. It helps that I haven't had any of those semi-regular big expenses this month (ceramics, CSA subscription renewal, plane ticket purchases, bike ride registration). Those will return in July, I'm sure. But I figured many of you, my loyal readers, would be kind of interested in these figures so that you have a frame of reference for my spending habits, and maybe a frame of reference for your own spending habits. I just wish I'd kept better track as an undergraduate--now that would make for some interesting comparisons. My rent and utilities were pretty comparable then ($437 and $80/month, respectively, my senior year of college), but I can't remember how much I averaged on groceries (probably around $160, in fact).

For most of the remaining months for which I have readily available data (that's January 2009, and January, February, August, September, and October of 2008), that's about $400/month less than what I've been averaging. Spending on eating out is way down ($30, mostly spent on the mountain biking expedition up north, versus at least $150/month in most prior months), and groceries have been halved, probably because I stopped going to the farmer's market and stopped buying more expensive organic and pre-processed foods (crumpets, soy lunchmeat, avocados, etc.).

Anyhow. Ants.