Day	Amount	Place	Category
Monday	$23.00	safeway	groceries
Tuesday	$54.75	steam	allowance
Wednesday	$25.00	SODA	pets
Thursday	$32.25	olive garden	eating out
Saturday	$15.00	contest entry	allowance

Not a whole lot of spending this week. This is our first weekend getting back to the every other week CostCo run, and while there are things we’re low on, we’re definitely fine not having gone. I will be going to Safeway every Monday for the little things that we purposely don’t stock up on, but that’s never very expensive.

C bought his new game on Tuesday. We officially became members of the group that maintains one of our dog parks on Wednesday. We certainly get more than $25 worth out of the park in a year. Thursday was the day I had to finalize budget for 2013, and the direction coming from our VP was right down to the wire, so I made us go out for dinner. Saturday I paid for a fiction contest entry. (If my piece is selected for publication, I’ll get $700. If it wins one of the prizes, it will be over $1,000.)

This has been a lovely weekend. We went to the dog park Saturday morning with a friend and since then, I haven’t left the house. It has been so nice, I need to try and plan another weekend like it.

 

 

We are over half way through 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: 1 rejection 1 acceptance, 2 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.

For those who have been looking for an update, we’re waiting to get some paperwork back from the state of Nevada, where we all used to live. I am hopeful that we will have all paperwork submitted and just be waiting on official confirmation of the foster license by the end of the month.

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)

Yesterday I linked to Paula’s post over on Afford Anything about goals. 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: 275,086

Back down a bit.

5)      Make money from my blogs.

AdSense earnings: $29.82 at the end of September, with $0.10 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’d been at the same weight for 3 weeks in a row, so this week, I added riding our recumbent bike for 30 minutes 3 times a week to my routine. While I’m not a huge fan of getting up before 6am, the bike riding is going well. I listen to Flogging Molly while I ride because all of their music (even the slower songs) has a really good beat that keeps me moving.

I still walked at work, enjoying the last of the sunny weather. I need to bring my poncho into the office so that I can keep walking in the rain without getting soaked in my work clothes.

Food wise, this week we had a lot of beef barley soup and chili. Now I need to think of a new type of soup I want C to make. Any suggestions?