My Single Mom Life

Most parents make sure that their kids have an awesome Christmas, they want them to be happy, and most parents don't get a ton of Christmas gifts for themselves for that reason.
Most married parents do buy their spouses presents though.
Single parents on the other hand usually have very little money to start with, so they make sure their kid(s) have a good Christmas, but who buys them presents?

My parents always send me some money, but I usually combine it with the other money that gets sent for the teens, so I can buy them more stuff, and I have some good friends who always send me some really nice presents too.
I got some very nice things from them this year, the perfume off of my wish list, a gift card to Publix, a magazine subscription to a great cooking show chock full of yummy recipes, and a Visa gift card to spend on whatever I want also.
But after getting my reimbursement payment, I decided to get myself some things that I wanted and things that I needed for my computer.
I work from home on this bad boy, so every now and then it needs some things to help me keep it running smoothly, and some fun stuff too.
So I bought myself the following things, the total spent on these items wasn't very much at all, just $263.21, and a couple of them were on sale at really good prices.

An Acer 17" flat screen LCD monitor, $117.99, not a bad price, just like the teens monitor.

A SimpleTech 1 GB memory stick, was on sale for $35.24, down from $195.00.

An AMD ATI Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB AGP Card, was on sale for $39.99, down from $129.00.

And then The Sims 3 Collector's Edition is my for fun item, not on sale, but not a bad price at $69.99.
The collectors edition comes with a 1gig Sims plumbob USB drive, you know, shaped like the thingy that is always over their heads and houses?
Yeah, this thing,
but it's actually a USB drive key chain, you can never have enough USB drives, and it looks like this,

An exclusive Prima tips and hints guide, a European sports car download for the Sims to drive around in, extra theme music from the game, and a Sims3 neighborhood poster.
All of that stuff is worth (to me) the extra $20 it cost me over the regular version of the game, I can use the USB drive, the tips and hints guide will help me figure out all of the new things they've done to the Sims3 game play, and the poster is just a cool extra.

I needed a new graphics card, my other one crapped the bed big-time, causing me to freak out and uninstall all of my Sims2 games thinking the game had gotten corrupted, but no, it was the graphics card. *slaps forehead*
I lost everything I had done in the game, all of it.
Makes me kinda sad, but now that the new graphics card is installed, I re-installed all of the Sims2 discs so I can play right up until Sims 3 gets here.
That's quite a few discs, we didn't have all of the expansions, but a good deal of them.
We have Sims2, Nightlife, Open for business, Pets, and Seasons, and they are so much fun to play.
When my new monitor gets here, between that and the new graphics card, the games are going to look amazing!

My monitor and memory stick should be here in a few days, they will get installed, and it will be the awesome.
I bought the exact same monitor that my sis bought the teens, so I know that it's a really good one and that it looks amazing, and the memory stick is so that the Sims3 will be able to run with no issues or errors.

I figured that I deserved some new stuff, and my computer is where I am almost all of the time, so I chose to get some upgrades and some fun stuff for me.