One Small Bonus for Man, One Giant Bill for Mankind

My annual bonus was deposited in my checking account early this morning. The bonus itself is based on last year's performance, from the performance of the company as a whole down to my own personal performance. These economic times being what they are, this year's bonus is relatively low, but still, it's nice to have this little budgetary boost in the middle of summer.

This year's bonus payment will be put to good use:

• Some of it will go to repay the cost of my recent trip to Santa Claus, Indiana. I schedule my summer vacation based on when I expect my bonus to come in so that I know I can pay for it. This year's bonus came a week later than I thought it would.
  
• I'm going to get a new mattress. I may just get it from Big Lots, but I certainly won't start there. Even if I crawl into bed at midnight, it can still take an hour or so for me to be comfortable enough to fall asleep. I blame the mattress and not the caffeine. [Update 7/13/19: I'd forgotten how expensive mattresses were. Or maybe I just assumed that sleep technology, like every other type of technology, would come down in price over time. Not the case. A nice mattresses is now easily more expensive than your standard home PC. It'll have to wait.]
  
• I'll pay off my speeding ticket.
  
• I'll get a new mouthpiece for my clarinet. My current mouthpiece was purchased in 1993 and is quite a ways along on the slow trip to greenness. I'll likely end up with a Vandoren M15 Profile 88, for the few of you (okay, one if I'm lucky) who are interested in such things.
• I need to get a new cell phone. My other one disappeared about two months ago. I keep expecting it to pop up somewhere, but Murphy's Law dictates that I won't find it until I buy a new one.
  
• I'll buy a domain name and some Web hosting space from GoDaddy. This is the least expensive (at least in initial cost) but most exciting thing on my list. I have to move my current site off of Yahoo!'s Geocities, which is closing down in October. I'm taking this opportunity to remake the site, learning a lot about CSS in the process, and I have the structure, all of the main pages, and most of the sub-pages already put together and ready to go. And I've already picked out the perfect (and available) domain name for it. (I don't want to publish that domain name here because someone could beat me to it and then try to sell it to me at 50 times the price I can get it for now, but certainly I'll post here when it goes live.)
  

I haven't done all the precise math, but what's left of my bonus combined with my federal tax refund ought to leave me with enough extra padding in my checking account to keep me from worrying at least until the school year starts up again.