Day	Amount	Place	Category
Thursday	$75.00	King Tut	Allowance
	$35.00	Safeway	Groceries
Friday	$6.00	Parking	Car
	$30.00	Pub	Eating Out
Sunday	$46.25	Gas	Car

Less than $200 spent this week. I won’t complain about that. Actually, that’s a lie, on Friday, I spent almost $150 on bagels and pastries for my boss’s and admin’s last day. But my boss insisted I expense it to the company and refused to leave until he’d approved my expense report.

That said, Friday was the last day for my boss and my admin. It wasn’t what I would call a great day. The next year in my department and at my company are going to be busy and full of change- major change. On some level it will be interesting to look back at this time next year to see how much things have changed.

Luckily, we had plans to go out Friday night for a friend’s birthday to a pub and see our favorite local Irish band play, so the day ended on a really good note. And on Saturday, we managed over a full hour at the dog park, giving the dogs some much needed running time. (Which made them nice and calm Saturday evening and most of today.)

For those of you who may have noticed that there haven’t been the every two weeks Starbucks expenses, my writing group is still meeting, I’m just paying with gift cards.

 

We are almost done with 2012. I revised some of my goals because life took some turns I wasn’t quite planning on when I came up with them.

1)      Be paid for publishing one piece of fiction

Submissions so far: 4

Responses: 2 rejections 1 acceptance, 1 pending

The anthology I had a piece accepted to is now available to buy on Amazon. It’s called Conquest Through Determination.

2)      Pay All Adoption Expenses in Cash & Still Pay for C’s College Out of Pocket

We’re doing good here. This was helped tremendously by getting 3x as much in life insurance from the MIL than expected. Our savings is still growing, and we’re in really good shape.

We still haven’t gotten the background check back from the state of NV. With the holiday season fast approaching. I now figure we’ll be lucky to have our license by the end of the year.

3)      Attend FinCon12. Pay for the trip with money from allowance/side projects saved/earned BEFORE the conference starts. Goal: $600

FinCon was awesome. Not all of the money came from allowance/side projects, but it was still easily affordable, so I’m calling this a win.

4)      Become a member of Yakezie (6 month anniversary is Jan 21)

I am not certain this is still the right goal for me to be going after. I love what the Yakezie network stands for, but I don’t care that much about getting my Alexa under 200k. It’s pretty stable around the 275k mark. Maybe I can convince Sam to create a Friend of Yakezie badge/category, for those of us who don’t feel like being permanent challengers.

Anyway, it’s something I’m pondering.

Current ranking: 238,333

5)      Make money from my blogs.

AdSense earnings: $30.57 at the end of November, with $0.03 made so far this month. (They won’t send me any money until I hit $100.)

Amazon earnings: $0.00

One of the things that FinCon really brought home for me is that I’m not actually in this for the money. For now, I’m leaving the AdSense blocks up, but they’re getting moved further down the page. I’ll keep tracking, but making money isn’t why I blog.

6)      Be healthier

I was back walking and riding the recumbent bike this week. I haven’t done my weigh in yet, though I expect to be up a pound or two as my two Thanksgivings should have caught up with me by now.