Finances on Friday

As you can see, my rosemary DID overwinter indoors- but the poor thing is longing for sunny days as much as I am.  Just a little bit longer, rosemary.  Just a bit longer...

I am woefully behind on blogging.  I have our ARTS of the Month post to come (late, again!), Andrew's birthday post and I missed the yarn along post the other day.  This blogging business can be exhausting!  ;-) 

And we have a busy weekend ahead~ I'll have two additions to the house for the weekend while my parents celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary.  39th!!!  My adopted brothers and sisters are so young that they are more like cousins/friends to my children than aunts and uncles.  Out of the five of them, I am getting the 6 year old and the 10 year old.  My children are over the moon excited to have some friends coming over for A WHOLE weekend.  OVER THE MOON.

Meanwhile, I have been trying to deep clean nooks and crannies.  It is going slowly but it feels good to be rediscovering tidy corners and dusted walls.  In each area, I am happy to be plunking things in garbages or boxes for donation/yard sale.    I am seriously thinking I should just donate ALL of the books, clothes and toys and just forget about saving it all to sell at a yard sale...just to be rid of it, once and for all.  Just to stop thinking about it and feeling its' weight on my shoulders.  But then I think about that $100+ dollars I usually make and it keeps me dropping them off at the nearest Salvation Army.

While I work, I blare George Grant lectures or listen to David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback on audiobook.  It is a book about Teddy Roosevelt and so good!  Matt is a David McCullough fan so I thought I had better introduce myself to his work.   I am loving this audiobook thing because I can work (or crochet/knit!) and 'read' at the same time.  Awesomeness.

So that is what is going on in our neck of the woods.  You?

Here is a few financial efforts for the week.  Short but Sweet this week since I have children hollerin' for breakfast:

In addition to all the things I write about every single Friday like hanging laundry, baking bread, washing Ziploc, borrowing books from the library, etc...here are two other things that stand out.

• We ran out of wood on Wednesday for syrupping and I thought we were going to have to stop boiling (at least until the weekend when Matt would be home to cut some more) and to toss the spoiled sap we have been gathering.  In one last ditch effort, the children and I walked around the place and picked up every woodstove-sized scrap piece of overlooked wood we could find.  There was enough to get us through until the weekend which means- the syrupping continues! I am so glad because I was sick over the thought of any bits of sap wasted and we had over 30 gallons of sap that would have spoiled.
• For Andrew's birthday he really, really, REALLY wanted an incubator.  (I know, I know.)  The only one I could find was at Tractor supply- a silly Styrofoam one that cost $40.00.  I was on my way into the store to just buy it for him (while hating spending $40 on Styrofoam) when I heard someone yell "Hey Rebecca!"  Lo and behold, in the parking lot were some neighbors.  We got to chatting about why I was child-less uptown (birthday present buying) and what the birthday present was (the silly styrofoam incubator) when they said "Hey- we have an incubator that we won't be using ever again.  I was just looking at it yesterday, wondering what I should do with it..."  So they gave it to us!  When I went to pick it up, I saw it was a really large, fancy schmancy metal incubator.  They said they had raised hundreds of chickens, pheasants, quail, ducks and geese with it!  That was God.  Pure and simple.

How was your financial week this week?