Money Money Money Money...Money!

Real Thursdays are so much better than those fake Thursdays.
They are superior in every way.
Especially this Thursday.
A while back I mentioned that AOL was paying out its annual bonuses to employees and to those employees, like me, who were laid off.
I was beginning to get annoyed because I knew that current employees had already received their bonuses last week, but I hadn’t heard anything or noticed a sudden increase in my bank account.
I was especially annoyed yesterday when I heard people where I work now – a company owned by the same corporation as AOL – saying that they would be getting their annual bonuses today.
While I was lying in bed last night, it occurred to me that maybe I would get my bonus today, as perhaps AOL was waiting for my company’s payday to give the bonuses to ex-AOLers now working on that other branch of the corporate tree.
When I checked my account balance this morning, I found that this as indeed the case, and, in fact, AOL had disbursed the bonuses via my company’s payroll system.
So…bonus!
The nice thing was that the bonus was deposited separately from my regular salary, which means that while the government took a huge bite out of it, the bite wasn’t quite as big as it would have been if my bonus and salary had been lumped together.
Given that this is a non-mortgage payment payday, and that the bills I have to pay with my paycheck amount to a lot less than a mortgage payment, I’m pretty much rolling in dough right now.
Things only got better, though, when I went to H&R Block this evening and got my taxes done and discovered that I’m getting a huge refund.
So things are looking pretty good.
Which is, of course, making me nervous…

Things That Couldn’t Possibly Amuse Anyone But Me Department:
The other day while I was sitting at the computer doing…something. Drawing maybe? Well, whatever it was, I was listening to my MP3s, with Media Player in “shuffle” mode, and the song Wake Up Dead by Megadeth came on, and my inner metalhead rejoiced.
So this morning when I got in my car I reflected on this metal moment and decided to eschew my standard car CD listening habits – which tend to hover between Nick Cave, Liz Phair, and Sarah McLachlan – and put in something with a little more “oomph.”
I decided on Tribute, the Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads concert album that I listened to so much in high school that at this point it’s probably encoded in my DNA.
As I was rounding the last major bend on my way to work, the song Mr. Crowley came on, and as I sang “Oh, Mr. Crowley” along with Ozzy, I did so in a voice that was somewhere between that of Lucille Ball and Mrs. Big Head from Rocko’s Modern Life, a sort of raw, throaty, “Ohh, Mistah Crowley!”
And then I laughed.
A lot.
(For those in the know, I sounded rather a lot like our standard imitation of Carol from AOL, though I didn’t ask for a chili dog or a Lucky Strike.)