Well to follow up that TV news announcement, I looked up the local news online to find out more about all this. It applies only to cash benefit welfare. You can’t use those cash benefits to spend it on the listed banned items and the entertainment is ADULT ENTERTAINMENT. The article didn’t say anything about vacations, but I’m pretty sure I heard the TV state that. Damn my hearing and poor concentration.

Anyhow all cash benefits and food stamps now are put on an EBT card. This means they can track every transaction on that card. Safest bet is if for whatever reason you have to go out of your state, don’t use your EBT card during that time. Critics claim this tracking is going to be expensive but banks already track your transactions on your debit cards and what do you think the EBT card is? It’s a debit card linked to a special account assigned to you. Duh. Credit cards are tracked the same way. So yea, the state can track this just by asking for a report. And if they find you are trying to dart out of being tracked by withdrawing the money to use it as cash only well guess what, they can request an audit meaning you have to produce receipts to account for every penny. Failure to do so and you’re nailed.

Actually they could have done all this before but the regulations giving them authorization to do it wasn’t in place. Otherwise they would have been just spying on you. lol Probably were for all we know. The “big data” is available for them to do it. But anyhow just good to know this won’t effect my ability to comply with visitation or to visit Little Bear in any way – or mess up Christmas and birthdays for that matter. Still might be a good idea about asking for a nicotine alternative though. I roll my own but a pack where I live costs around $7 name brand. If I bought them by the pack (one at a time), in a 30 day month it would cost me around $210. I know it’s cheaper by the carton, by I don’t know what a carton costs anymore. It’s getting to be pretty stupid if you ask me. By rolling my own I pay about $27 a month but still that’s $27 that could go somewhere else if I didn’t smoke. In my case it would likely go to a med though and sadly that med wouldn’t be that cheap per month. Heck I doubt it would be cheaper than buying packs of cigarettes. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And then they wonder why some people like me say “Fuck this shit, I will die eventually anyway.” and just continue to smoke. It’s pretty sad. There’s no true incentive here at all. Not for my personal well-being anyhow.

Ever since telling my husband I wanted to see a lawyer about getting a divorce and settling it out of court to his face, I’ve been hit with how striking his lack of emotional response has been. And it’s not just that. His entire being is… I don’t know, flat. That’s all I can think of to describe it. Flat affect. Suddenly everything that I have heard his family say in the past about how they took him to therapy when his mother died because the school raised the alarm that he wasn’t grieving. The problems he had later in school and they sent him to therapy again. Over and over again the lack of emotion came up. How he bitched about that so much when we first started dating, claiming that all therapy ever was for him was people boosting his ego and patting him on the head. And tonight it struck me that maybe what I have been calling all this time as socially awkward isn’t that at all. Maybe it’s been him going through the motions of emotion? And now he isn’t bothering to try. It explains the weird half laugh of his. I’m not sure which is more chilling for me: to actually see this or the fact that is feels more natural. I mean it’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to see it.

I know my therapist wanted me to see that lawyer before my next appointment. That’s this coming Tuesday. Not sure if that’s going to happen. I’ve been putting it off in favor of getting the portfolio finished. Maybe I should stop by this Monday and ask about how do you go about settling out of court and at the very least get the process started. Whether we can settled this out of court or not I’m going to need a lawyer.