Last week sucked.

On Thursday, we got a nastygram from our HOA, telling us, basically, “Paint your house or we’ll cut you”. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, since the last monsoon powerwashed a couple chunks of stucco off the front of the house, but I’d not budgeted for probably-two-or-three-grand-worth of paint job, and it’s going to hurt.

(I’m in favor of our HOA in general; our dues are pretty low, our common areas are nicely kept, and our neighborhood is generally pretty cool^[1]. But still … bleh.)

Then we got our taxes done on Friday, and holy crap, did we not need that just now. How can we claim married and zero exemptions, and still be on the hook? We didn’t have a lot of Reliquary expenses, but since we also didn’t make any profit, it’s only a matter of time before the IRS gets all “this is a hobby!” on our asses.

Then we tried to have Reliquary practice, but Cubase was all “Yeah, I have no idea what you’re talking about” every time we tried to get it to, y’know, play the music. (We’d gotten a new studio computer a few months ago to replace the dying, 7-year-old one we’d been using, and had just gotten it up and running. Except that the 6-year-old copy of Cubase wasn’t playing nice with the new OS.) So we’ll have to upgrade. And there go several hundred more dollars.

(I mean, I know we’ll be able to claim the expense next year on our taxes, but see above re: hobby. Unless Reliquary starts making money [on which we will have to pay taxes, argh vicious circle argh], it’s going to look more and more like a hobby to the IRS and it could get ugly. We could just eat the cost, but if Reliquary does make any money, we’ll have to claim it, so it makes sense to claim expenses as well. Gah, this sucks.)

And in the face of Loki’s demotion and ridiculous pay cut, it’s all just too hard. We’ve slashed our budget and I though we were economizing fairly well, but we’ve not been able to build our emergency fund back up, and I’m just terrified of the future. My spreadsheet is predicting, if not doom, then certainly stress and worry.

We’re going to have to make some unpleasant choices fairly soon. I’m just hoping nothing else falls out of the sky to smash our fragile little financial ecosystem.

[1] Notwithstanding the delinquent fuck who smashed into Loki’s truck last week & stole my black bass, the one he’s been playing with The Low Men. Yeah, there went another $500.