Day	Amount	Place	Category
Tuesday	$10.00	PetsMart	Dogs
Friday	$15.00	Copay	Medical
	$820.00	Car Service	Car
	$97.00	Gas	Car
	$46.50	Mojitos	Eating Out
Saturday	$15.00	Target	Allowance
	$50.00	CostCo	Allowance
Sunday	$60.00	Faire	Allowance
	$20.00	Fred Meyer	Groceries

The home inspection went well. We are now in phase 1 of “sit and wait”- which is the finishing up paperwork phase. It feels good. We still do need to get our birth parent booklet printed up, though we have created it. We’ll probably have the CostCo print shop do that on Monday.

With the exception of having to replace June’s leash on Tuesday, all of our spending was planned. Well- not the entire car expense. We knew we had to replace the fuel filter. Turns out the engine fan wasn’t working, either, so that had to be fixed. We still need to take our other car in for a major service and possibly replace the timing belt- which will take that in the close to $2k range. That always seems high to me, but then I remember that my car payment used to be $800/month, and I don’t have one anymore, so this service is less than 3 months’ worth of car payment.

Friday night we tried a new restaurant. Our favorite Caribbean place closed a number of year ago, and we’ve never found a good replacement. While we found the place we went on Friday with a search for Caribbean restaurants, it was more South American fare- good, but not exactly what we were looking for.

Saturday’s spending was for a baby shower for a friend of mine.

Sunday we went back for the last day of the Renaissance Faire. C bought me a lovely metal worked rose from the blacksmith.

 

We are half way through 2012. I’m revising some of my goals because life took some turns I wasn’t quite planning on when I came up with the goals.

1)      Be paid for publishing one piece of fiction

Submissions so far: 2

Responses: 1 rejection 1 acceptance

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

Make money publishing my next art/fiction book

This is on hold for now. However, I did have a chance to talk with the artist I want to work with on Friday, and her life has settled down, so there’s a good chance we can start work on this sometime in June. (When my life settles down a

bit.)

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

Conference attendance paid for. Tickets paid for. The only things left are food and the hotel. I probably won’t have enough in allowance to cover all of it, but it won’t be far off, and the biggest expenses are already taken care of.

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

I did not make Epsilon class. My Alexa ranking had gone too high. I think there will be one more class this year, so we’ll see if I can get my numbers back down to under 200k. I need to join the teams again, as that helps tremendously. And now that we’re done with all the house stuff for the adoption, I should have more time to participate.

Current ranking: 279,440

5)      Make money from my blogs.

AdSense earnings: $28.19 at the end of July, with $0.35 made so far this month. (They won’t send me any money until I hit $100.)

6)      Be healthier

As I wrote on the 9th, I am working on losing 65lbs in 13 months. We are about half way through the first month. I probably won’t give actual numbers here, but I will tell you that at the moment, I am ahead of target. That isn’t surprising because our bodies respond to diets really quickly, but then kind of fight back. We’ll see if I stay ahead of target or not.

This week continued some really hot weather, but I managed to walk twice on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday I walked once. Because of the heat, we didn’t go to the dog park as much as we would have liked. We went on Monday and then didn’t go again until Saturday morning, when I took Larry and June. (C’s tummy was bothering him, so he and Howie stayed home.)

Even a full hour of constant movement wasn’t enough to completely calm Larry’s crazy though, so today I took him for a 20 minute walk. Then, I took June and Howie on a 10 minute walk.

As for diet, I did really well this week. I went over my daily calorie limit by about 120 calories on Friday (thanks to eating out), and went right up to the limit on Saturday, with eating at the baby shower. But again, my goal is for this to be sustainable, so I’m not stressing over those things. Most other nights for the week, I was at least 100 calories under target. And we set that target as if I weren’t exercising, so I’m still good.

C is being incredibly supportive, even though he’s not on the diet, and put together a number of 100 calorie packs of rice chips and Kashi crackers for me, so that in the mornings, I can just grab a little baggie and know what I’m getting.