Day	Amount	Place	Category
Tuesday	$46.12	Gas	Car
Thursday	$42.20	Seafood City	Groceries
	$19.38	Dinner	Eating Out
	$5.92	Petsmart	Pets
Saturday	~$45.00	Safeway	Groceries
Sunday	$19.56	Safeway	Groceries
	$30.61	Mud Bay	Pets

Finally, down to under $200 spent this week. I’m not certain about how much I spend on Saturday because I seem to have lost the receipt and the debit hasn’t posted online yet, but I’m pretty certain I estimated high.

It’s been a nice, calm week for us. On Friday we got our first foster dog, a beautiful older Beagle mix named Howie, so we’ve had a couple of pet expenses we otherwise wouldn’t have had- an extra food bowl, a new harness for walking.

But that’s pretty much it for this week. Next week spending will shoot up again as tomorrow we have a service appointment for the car, and they are never inexpensive (the only drawback to our diesel engine).

 

Bloggers Give Back update: Well, most days I clicked over on every button at the Greater Good Network and on FreeKibble and FreeKibbleKat, but I did not do anything via Sparked. And we didn’t get our foster dog until February, so he doesn’t count for January. So January was mostly a fail.

 

I have six goals for 2012. As part of the Sunday evening posts, I am tracking those goals, kind of like I do for spending, in order to hold myself accountable.

1)      Be paid for publishing one piece of fiction

Submissions so far: 2

Responses: 1 rejection (this was for a contest. Almost 240 entries, only 10 chosen)

2)      Make money publishing my next art/fiction book

I haven’t contacted the artist I plan to work with because of the weather. Nor have I started compiling the pet pictures I want for a book. Hopefully I’ll have time to work on it this week. (This hasn’t changed since last week.)

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

Still no accurate number.

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

The application for Delta class is up. I looked over it and realized I needed 10 Challenger recommendations and 20 Member recommendations. By my count, I’ve established relationships with 16 members. 10 days is not enough time to establish relationships with 4 more bloggers, so I will wait until the next class.

Still, that will be in about 6 months or so, so it will still happen this year.

5)      Make money from my blogs.

AdSense earnings: $18 (They won’t send me any money until I hit $100)

6)      Be healthier

We did pretty good this week on food, other than Thursday night when we had take out teriyaki. We even did dim sum for the Super Bowl, so while there were a few chips, it was overall pretty healthy.

We went to the dog park two times and walked the dogs once. The weather is getting better, so hopefully there will be more of each.