Monthly Archives: January 2008

Hi guys. I am trying out wordpress because I am tired of Blogger having so few options. (@mab: sorry I stole your same template. I liked it best. You have good taste!) I’ll let you know if I decide to keep it!

I have experienced in the last week:

1. A flashback to middle school as I had a slumber party for 20-something girls. (Abby gets really hyper with lots of sugar, specifically powdered donuts.)
2. An emergency lockdown drill at school (And no they didn’t announce one of those fun code phrases, “Red bird at 3′oclock!” or “Teachers, the Saturday faculty meeting has been canceled”)
3. Pulling up wet carpeting and carpet pads in our house (Then it sounded like a wind tunnel for about 24 hours!)

Possible photos/details to follow…if/when I have time. Gotta go vaccuum before company gets here.

Our main goal is to pay off student loans, and stay debt-free other than those loans. If/When we have to buy a car, we don’t want a lot of debt with that.

Pay off my loan totally by August
Pay $X a month towards it

Set up a savings account to pay off Hubby’s loans
Get a good interest rate
“Snowflake” any saved money into it
After August, pay $X a month into it
Pay any tax refund towards loans

Buy a car and pay off within a year or pay cash
Research a good deal
Put money in a car fund each month

Put money away for home owner’s association dues every month.

Cooked meals at home instead of eating out:
Sat 12/29 tamales
Sun lunch 12/30 sandwiches – Even tho we were on our way out of town, we didn’t just “stop and grab a burger”!
Tue 1/1 chicken and blackeyed peas and cornbread – Even tho we just got home!
Wed 1/2 chicken pot pie, used the leftover rotisserie chicken – Thanks for the idea mab, I loved it when we had it at your house!
-gone for three days, then hubby on trip so no cooking of big meals-
Fri 1/12 made chicken casserole that will last several meals also bought only what was on list at grocery store instead of lots of extras

I am recording this not to have people say “oh good job T” but because I am a results oriented person and I like to see that I am actually doing what I want to do. So this is a way for me to track it. I am turning off comments for these since they are just for record keeping purposes.

I have been reading a lot of blogs about frugality and healthy eating and they inspire me to be a better home maker as far as shopping for groceries, planning meals, and eating at home instead of eating out. I would love for us to be healthier, and that is just not going to happen if we keep eating out as much as we do. And it is just wasting so much money! I mean I am all for eating out with friends, but too often I eat out just because I am tired/lazy and don’t want to cook. And hopefully I can learn how to cook easily and then it wouldn’t be such an ordeal. I am on the lookout for easy and quick and healthy recipes. I bought a Rachel Ray book for this reason, but found that her recipes contain a lot of ingredients that I never have. And while they may not see complex to cook for her, they sometimes are for me. Or some of them are too fru-fru for me, if you know what I mean.

**I wrote this a while back. Since then I have found www.joesgoals.com which has this cool thing where you can make your own goals and keep track of them. Scroll down to see the graph that it updates. I wish you could click it and see my goal chart, so you could keep me accountable, but it doesn’t work that way I guess.

Cook meals instead of eating out so much.
Plan meals and shop accordingly
Spend only a budgeted amount a month on groceries
Take calculator to store
Use coupons
Don’t buy junk food!
Get out budgeted cash for eating out
Make lunches for Cliff and myself
Make meals ahead of time and freeze

Oh…and by the way, scroll down and check out my goals graph. Go get your own. Its cool!

I am going to do a series of posts of my goals for the new year. I still have a piece of paper I wrote when I was a sophomore in high school titled “goals for my sophomore year”. I wrote out like 12 or so things I wanted to do that year and posted them in my locker. And I managed to do most of them. I think a part of that is that they were specific and they were right in my face every day. I am not a big one to set “new year resolutions”. They are usually rather vague and people don’t set any real steps to accomplish them. And there is no accountability. Part of our job as the body of Christ is to keep each other accountable. This year I wrote a list of goals and I am going to post some of them in segments about what they relate to. I am also going to post updates on my progress. We’ll see how this goes!

So what do you think about the new look? Is it too busy? It is going to have to stay this way a while because blogspot isn’t so bright in that you loose your page elements when you change templates. Or at least I couldn’t figure out a way to keep them. Can anyone help me out here? Big thanks to Margie for the idea of where to get a new template. She has one from Pyzam too and they have lots of free pretty ones. Blogspot’s just aren’t exciting.

Look at these and tell me which one you like best.
a. current one
b. green tree
c. grey verse
d. current in red
e. abe quote