The benefit of doing contract work for the government is knowing that you're going to get paid. The drawback is that you don't know when. The check that finally got here yesterday was for an invoice dated February 13.

There's no reason it should have taken over a month. We had to call almost daily to track the payment, and no matter who we talked to, it always seemed to be on someone else's desk. Someone who was out of the office that day.

Monday we were told it had finally been signed on Friday, but no one could find out if it had been mailed. I checked the post mark yesterday, and it was mailed from Sacramento Monday.

But at least it was here, and I could write all those checks, pay off all the suppliers (including finance charges for late payments) and pay down some of the credit line.

When you work for the state of California, you should probably figure the cost of borrowing money and alienating your creditors into your price, because by the time you get paid for work done in February, it might be late March and you might have some heavy interest payments to make.

You'd think, after all the pressure of worrying about the immediate cash flow situation was over, that I'd have slept like a baby last night. Not so, though. Or maybe I did, since I was awake most of the night and therefore cranky all day today. Oh, I worked, and I got the yard waste container filled and taken to the curb for pick-up, and I continued the battle with the birds who want to make my home theirs. But it was one of those days when all the other drivers irritated me so much that I got off the road as soon as I could.

In a way I'll be glad when the Oscars are over, because I can go out and see movies again without thinking I should be catching up on the nominated films. I didn't go anywhere Sunday because Traffic and Chocolat were playing at inconvenient times. Something tells me there are other movies out there that I'd like just as much. Possibly not, though, considering the roster of current pictures out. I can't see myself sitting through Exit Wounds or The Mexican. It's probably just as well that there are no must-see movies around, since the baseball season starts next weekend.

Some time I'm going to have to make a decision about whether to bother you with an entry on days like this, when I have nothing to say. I don't mind throwing something up (almost literally, at times) just to say the streak is still alive. There's a part of me that would rather do that than admit I'm too tired/depressed/lost to write anything. And it's not as if any of my entries were worth printing out and laminating.