The Week

	Amount	Place	Category
Monday	$125.73		Medical
through			Allowance
Friday			Eating Out
			Groceries
Saturday	$21.88	Target	Allowance
	$20.00	Cash	Allowance
	$99.44	CostCo	Groceries
	$32.00	Gas	Car
Sunday	$5	Starbucks	Allowance

 

Format is a little different this time because I bought C’s Christmas gift this week. Since he sometimes looks at this blog in order to be a supportive husband, I’d rather not publish how much and where he gift came from. But since I still want to be transparent about our spending, I put the total we spent during the week and the categories it falls under.

In addition to getting C’s gifts, I got MS Office Pro 2010 for only $10 (plus tax) due to an agreement my company has with Microsoft. It was just too good a deal to pass up. In addition, I ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home via a friend of mine who works for Microsoft, which should prevent me from purchasing a new laptop.

 

Thanks to a post from Squirrelers way back on November 9, I remembered to purchase a grande tea (instead of a venti) this morning, and just went back for a couple of hot water refills. This saved me like $2.00. That might not seem like a big deal, but I’m at Starbucks roughly 26 times a year, so that’s $52 dollars of my allowance money that can be used on a mani/pedi or massage instead of tea.

 

The other thing I am proud of us for doing this week is we created a meal plan. We really have never done this before. Of course that meant that while we were coming up with our plan, C mentioned that his problem with it was what if something we wanted wasn’t on sale or at a good price. I countered with the idea that people who are good at this meal plan thing actually have the sale ads in front of them when making their plan.

Anyway, because I’m so proud of us for doing this, here’s our meal plan.

Saturday- chicken burgers and fries

Sunday – chicken with mango curry and rice

Monday – bourbon chicken served over rice

Tuesday – leftover curry

Wednesday – leftover bourbon chicken

Thursday – pork shoulder with sautéed bell pepper over penne

Friday- leftover pork shoulder with roasted red pepper soup

 

Yes, our main protein is chicken, though part of this also comes from the fact that we wanted to empty out our chest freezer in order to defrost and clean it. Next week we’ll start stocking up again. Mind you, variety wise this pretty much adds ground turkey to the mix.

 

The Blog

So on Friday, The Consumerist linked to my rant against giving cars as gifts. I had no idea. I didn’t get a ping back message about it. I did get a ping back message that led to one of those “ghost” sites – you know where the blog title is in Russian or Thai and the only post appears to be yours – that was a ghost of the Consumerist post, but since it didn’t identify, I simply marked it as spam and moved on.

Then I started getting comments- real comments, not spam, from people I don’t know and aren’t Yakezie members. I figured maybe they were coming from one of the other blogs that had linked to that post and didn’t pay much attention to it.

Then this morning I checked my blog stats. Previously, my busiest day had been 35 views- 35. On Friday, I had 1,390 views! On Saturday 266, and 124 so far today!

I don’t expect this keep up this volume, but it sure is cool.

 

And since I do have more viewers than usual, I thought I’d take this opportunity to mention the other blogs I maintain on this site.

 

Life by Pets is my pet blog, where I write mostly stories about our dogs, or the pets of family and friends, but I’m looking to improve it. (Suggestions much appreciated.)

 

100 Words On… is my daily blog where I talk about pop culture, science, technology, what I’m reading, and life in general, all in exactly 100 words. I’m thinking of adding a regular weekly feature where I write about and link to one of the blogs (pet, finances, etc) I read regularly.

 

Fiction in 50 is a weekly/monthly micro-fiction contest. Each week there’s a new picture to use as inspiration. Entrants write a story in exactly 50 words and submit it as a comment. At the end of the week, I pick my favorite and post it above the picture. At the end of each month, the weekly winners get listed in a poll and the readers get to vote for their favorite story of the month. The winner gets a $5 amazon.com gift card. Right now is a perfect time to check it out as the first December inspiration is currently posted and it’s the week to vote for the November winner.