I’m spending time with my cockatoo, having already completed the Wednesday evening trash collection.

The teenager is carting garbage from the basement and organizing the tool bench in preparation for a trip to the hardware store. She hopes to lay a new floor in the mud room— the same mud room where the kittens shattered a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid.

I suggested the teenager use the basement experience for her gym log. I’m encouraging her to find unorthodox ways to fulfill her gym requirements.

We opened a mini-container of Oreo cookies today and I can’t even remember the last time I had an Oreo. It was delicious.

I have cat food and cat litter on auto-ship from Petco. With the four cats, we go through a lot of kibble, three cans of cat food a day and about 60 pounds of cat litter every three weeks.

Petco had my litter listed as “on back order” and I was almost out. To be on the safe side, I ordered 60 pounds of cat litter from Target.com. I ordered them at the same time.

All of the Petco order came today— but the lid of one of the cat litter containers smashed and led to 10 pounds of cat litter leaking out of the corners of the cardboard box.

Only two of the three Target bottles of litter came today, so I suspect we’ll see the FedEx driver again tomorrow.

Finally, my stimulus payment arrived today. I immediately transferred $1000 into savings. I plan on using $200 for groceries and the hardware store. The remaining $500 is going onto my American Express to pay off most of my medical bills.

I’ll have to reconfigure the budget I’ve been working with. March turned out to be a very expensive month.

I’m also not looking forward to the next round of utility bills— electric, water and sewer are going to spike.

I thought maybe something insightful would emerge as I typed this, but no.