woa's bark

It's the 11th, and my sister will be leaving to visit for the 5th(?) time this year in 9 days.  Tomorrow my mother gets food stamps, which is good news considering the cubboards have little in them.

  My Inbox Dollars check totalling $31.27 is to be mailed today or soon.  I finally completed the post-sign up portion of their iBid2Save offer, by winning a $20 Amazon gift card that totals $13.08 w/ S&H + auction fee.  The gift card itself should be shipping soon too, but there's not much telling.  They say it could take 14 days to ship, but there could be delays (how is taking 14 days to get something into the hands of the postal service not a delay N&of itself???  I'd REALLY LIKE TO KNOW!!!  Out of curiosity, if nothing else...trying to get "behind the scenes" information from these people is like pulling teeth a lot of the time...)
But if they both arrive at or around the same 2 business day span (my gramma, who I rely on for transportation most of the time, volunteers her time mostly on Mon-Fri), then I will have a mini-shop'n spree on my hands.  As if $51.27 isn't awesome enough to die from excitement over (?), I just got a $5 Amazon gift card from OpinionSquare less than 1hr ago.  It's the 3rd one I got from them and I **THINK** I signed up to their site less than a year ago.

 I'm hoping I'll get all this while the Philips Fidelio DS7550 remains at its current price of $50 @ Amazon.  My bank lets me OD my acct by up to $3 before they block a charge, and without any OD fee(s), and I currently owe them $2.88, which means the $31.27 IDB check will amount to a net spendable total of $28.39, which, when combined with the $20 Amazon GC from iBid2save, totals $48.39, and then you add the $5 from OpinionSquare, I still will have $3.39 cash(!!!!!!).  The downside to this is I owe my gramma $10.  Thankfully I haven't had the patience and enough of her undivided attn to feel comfortable explaining how I'm rolling in dough, so I don't need permission to repay her later...she's almost 70 years old and never felt comfortable around computers.  She has a hard enough time using cordless landline telephones.  So the idea of some internet based company offering incentives for being me might seem like "whaa?"  I've told her about Swagbucks and MyPoints, but I don't know if she really gets what I'm saying.  And I myself am no authority on the logistics of the thing.  I looked up Swagbucks on wikipedia and I'm still confused as to how the dang thing makes me $10 in Amazon GC funds richer almost every month.  Granted, I didn't read the whole article 'cause it basically just described the different methods of winning points, which I can find out first hand by taking a gander at the site, which I have, several times a day on most days, although granted I don't investigate the different "doors" of each site that carefully when I visit 99.9% of the time...

I wrote a flaming-red email to my mom a few days ago, and she was flaming-red more so than I was, almost killed herself, although she may have been mostly bluffing, it's hard to say.  But we (mostly I) talked, and then she laid down, cried, slept, cried some more, woke up and faced up to the facts, to me, and agreed that Danielle & we need to work on a st8 forward budget that shan't be tampered with.
So I'm not sure how much money I'll have to spend on obligatorily unnecessary spurts of lalahappy, but hopefully it'll be **AT LEAST** the same amount I've been getting or very close to it.  Assuming this is the case, the Philips Fidelio thing **COULD** go up by $20 and still be within reach.  But I'm not sure I want to do that.  I would like to get the PCA-1 mini-amplifier and see if that works with my speakers, since my speakers are currently just bookending my DVD and book collection, which each sit on either side of my CD rack, which is holding 20 CDs, with room for 10 more (?), and getting a pair of "Real" bookends would cost more, or AT LEAST as much, as I spent on the speakers (got 'em at a yardsale for $5!).  The PCA-1 is on sale @ Amazon too, but it usually retails for no more than $10 beyond its current sale price, which is $20.
But I just assume the Fidelio will have better sound quality and for $30 more -- $30 that I can, for now, actually afford (almost) -- I figure why not?  I just really hope I actually ***CAN*** acquire it for that price.
But if the price does go up, there will probably still be sellers offering refurbs for the same amount or less than the current price of a brand new 1 from Amazon.