Huge prayer of thanks!

Wow! This was a miracle!

My youngest daughter has a stuffed pony that she absolutely adores. She's had him since she was 6 months old. His name is Mr. Horsey (or as she calls him now, Regular Horsey). Well, somehow Mr. Horsey went missing and in retracing our steps on the day he was missing, I decided to try and go back to the grocery store where we had been, just in case someone had picked him up in the store or the parking lot. I really had lost hope at this point and I feared the worst. But he was there! Praise God! Some kind soul realized the value of a small stuffed horse, whose tail is gone. His mane looks like a mowhawk, and he has a torn ear from where the new puppy got a hold of him, and his hoof is stitched up from where he was losing stuffing....but he was and still is my daughter's favorite, and she was a very, VERY happy child when I gave him back to her.

I will always, ALWAYS be thankful for this small, yet very BIG, miracle!

So much going on!

Wow, lots of praise reports!

Was pulled over for speeding (oops!) but only received a warning...

Harry managed to find 3 spark plugs and changed them out in my van, and now the van runs great...so we can put off the full tune-up for now.

Was approved for toy selling on Amazon, after they had disqualified me earlier in the day...

Got approval for another dropship account with a reputable company that has strict requirements...

Also need some prayers:

I had two sales for one of my dropship items, only to find out that those items were discontinued, even though on the website it said they were in stock. I was so upset! I took all of their listings off (this was the one where the emails were going into cyberspace...maybe I should have given up on that one.), refunded the two buyers, and am hoping that they don't leave negative feedback.

Need prayers that I can pay my Ebay fees so I don't lose my account. I had counted on some sales to make that happen, but it hasn't happened yet. And this was a short paycheck this week, because we had to pay the mortgage.

God is in control!

It got a little worse....

I remember an old Bill Cosby routine titled "Never challenge 'worse'", and today is so far one of those days...

Still no sales of any of my new items, and now the "check engine" light came up on my van. My husband ran the code at the auto store and it said it was a "misfire on cylinder 2", which is an engine problem. Great.

Harry ran the numbers and it will be about $200 to do a tune-up, which should take care of the problem, hopefully. Problem is, we don't have $200 now, and payday is not until Friday. Praying that the van can hold until Friday.

In the meantime, I've made the decision that I'm putting my Ebay store on vacation for a week and am going to take that time to try and get this house in some sort of order. I feel a leading to get the focus off of increasing income and just using my energy to cleaning up in the house.

On the good side of things, I have enough groceries to last until payday, so that helps.

Sorry to whine....

But I just feel like I have to get this out.

We are drowning here. Financially. Spiritually. Emotionally. I'm ready to raise the white flag.

My house is a total trash heap. I am hopelessly disorganized. Molly is still in a crib (she'll be 4 this month), because we haven't saved up the money to get her a new mattress. Ruth is on a mattress on the floor, because we never did save up for a box spring. Heck, we are on a mattress on the floor because we threw out the hopelessly broken box springs and did not save up for new ones. We owe the hospital about $1,500 from Harry's sleep study, we owe a total of other debt of about $18k, most of which is sitting with collection agencies, who are simply waiting under the radar for a chance to attack. The phone rings all the time.

We have, above all else, an income crisis. Harry is on salary, so the only increase we can get from his income are bonuses that he is eligible for, but those do not happen on a regular basis. For me to work full time would mean after school care for everyone, and by the time you add up the $$ for that, we would probably be breaking even. I was hoping to do well at Christmas with toy sales, but with the economy being what it is, who knows if that will happen.

Please don't get me wrong, I know that there are others who are a lot worse off than we are, and I am very thankful that we do have a home, Harry has the best job he's had since we've been married, we are all healthy. But it seems that no matter what we do or what we've done in the 12 years we've been married, we have always been in some sort of financial crisis, and I'm just tired of it.

None of this is God's fault, obviously. We have no one to blame but ourselves. I'm praying that we are finally able to turn the corner and really change the direction of our lives.

Thanks for listening to me whine.

Sometimes I just don't get it.....

A couple of posts back, I mentioned that I had found a couple of dropship opportunities that looked like they could prove to be profitable. One of the companies got me started right away...I listed some items on Ebay, even used Featured Plus on a couple of them....and....

nothing.

Now, to be honest, I don't have a lot listed yet, so I know that's part of it, but gosh, not even one sale? What is up with that?

Now, the second company, I emailed their rep, she sent me some information in PDF form to fill out, so I print it, fill it out, scan it and email it back.


nothing.

So, I wait a day, and re-email the rep. She's very nice, said she didn't receive it to go ahead and email it again, so I did.


nothing.

This time, after waiting a day, I give her a call. She's confused, too..she still hasn't gotten it, it hasn't bounced back to me, so she gives me an alternate email to use. I send it again.


nothing.


At this point, I'm starting to ask "What is God trying to say to me?"

So since all the emails are going to a cyperspace black hole, she asks me to fax over the information. So I fax it through an email-to-fax service, because I don't have a fax machine. I decide to call and make sure that the fax actually came through. I joke with the rep who answered the phone that I wondered what God was trying to tell me. She replied, very nicely, "Hmm...maybe not to give up?" "Yeah," I said, "I have a tendency to just give up after the first couple of trys."

I admit fully to God that I am dense. I don't get it. You have to spell it out for me sometimes.

So do I keep going? Just list like heck on Ebay and pray that something sells? If not, then what else I am supposed to do?

I just don't get it.

More election prayers

Continued prayers for our country and the new President which we will elect tomorrow.