Hi, this is just a very short post, as not much went on today.

One thing I want to point out to my loyal friends and followers.  The comments section is not really gone from my blog, look at the top of the blog post, there is a little 'conversation bubble' there.  Click on that to make a comment.  My Blog guru (aka daughter, Becky) has been hard at work on my Blog and that is a little fun addition she found for it.  It never dawned on either of us that nobody would notice it or realize that is where you  need to click to make the comments now.  As comments are made the numbers show how many comments are made.  Now, I challenge you to test this out and be sure it works, by making a comment and then checking back to see if the number changes (and I ask you to make a comment, just so I can be sure it is actually working, lol).

Today is Mr. C's "Saturday" for this long week of 12 hour days (hooray, he gets two days off this week and there's only one week left of this "outage", so he'll go back to "normal" work hours--normal for where he works anyway, see one of the previous posts for details, LOL).  We decided to celebrate by driving clear to Springfield, about an hour and 15 minutes away, to go to our favorite restaurant, Golden Corral (OK, so I never claimed to be gourmets!!!)  We also did some errands:  getting a new BIG mailbox to finally replace the dinky one the State of IL replaced our old one with and some kitten food.  We almost bought some things we really didn't need at Walmart, but in the end put them all back, all because of a magazine article I read while I was in the hospital.

I'm not sure, but I think it was in either Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens (I was waiting to go get the second scan after the stress test and I was hungry, bored and a bit crabby by then).  Anyway, this article was about a family that decided to take a vow to stop spending.  I got the impression they were fairly well off and just bought whatever struck their fancy, whether it was new furniture or a new purse.  They had several daughters.  They decided they were spending way too much, way too frivolously (that's a hard word to write, but the spell checker says that's how it's spelled, so guess I'll leave it).  So they sat down and decided to do this together as a family.  They decided what items would be exempt, such as food, toilet paper, school supplies, mainly consumables and they wouldn't purchase ANYTHING else for an ENTIRE YEAR.  They learned to repurpose lots of things, such as one girl's tennies were getting a little too tight, and she wanted a new pair, but they weren't for school, just because she wanted them.  Mom remembered that a couple years ago she had purchased a pair of brightly striped tennies for herself but they were a little too small so she never wore them and just stuck them up in the attic, so she ran and got them and they fit the daughter perfectly and she was thrilled with the wild stripes.  Another daughter wanted to start a journal but didn't have any extra paper, but one of her sisters had purchased extra spiral notebooks for school a couple years before and there were some she had only used a couple pages of so she gave those to the one wanting to journal.  They learned to be very creative about gift giving and learned a very interesting lesson about frivolous and/or impulse buying.  They found they could do a lot more things as a family (outings to special places or special activities or meals out) as well as put away more than $500.00 per month that before they had just been frittering away.  After the year, they just continued it as a way of life and are lots happier with their simplified and scaled down spending.  So, today, we chose several things at Walmart, but then I asked, we have a larger size one of these, do we really want to get another one for just a week or two of use when we could use the larger one and just not fill it as full?  We picked up some DVDs we weren't sure we had and then I asked, you know, we have lots of DVDs we've never watched, do we really need/want to get some more (especially since one was one we weren't sure if we already had it or not ;-p )  I was going to get some new toothbrush heads for my Sonic Care toothbrush thing, but I don't really need them for another 3-6 months, so why did I need to get them NOW?  So, in the end we ended up putting everything back and walked out of Walmart without buying ANYTHING, which is definitely a first for us, LOL (which is why we call it Wallet-Mart).

Anyway, although we don't intend to go that extreme, it was an interesting one day insight into how much we spend mindlessly, just because we WANT it or MIGHT need it "someday" in the future.  I intend to continue trying to look at my spending this way and see if I can't help keep more money in the bank than in the store.  In this economy, every little bit helps.

Well, so much for a short post, sorry, sometimes my mind just runs away with itself (actually what you read here is the way my brain works nearly 24 hours a day, which is why I have a sleep disorder and Fibromyalgia, LOL, it just never shuts down).

So, to bring this to a close, the temps were all the way up to 41* today, the BIG mailbox is now installed, (for which I'm sure our Mailman will be grateful), and now I'm done with my blog post for the day and still have time for a movie tonight.  Hope everyone else had a good day.  Smiles