Educating the Wheelers

I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve discarded or saved or just plain abandoned in the last week.  As I’m down the homestretch in this pregnancy  [today is actually my due date, but there’s nothing going on yet, that’s for sure], it’s been lots of hormones and crazy emotions.  For instance, I wrote a post about the different feelings that men and women have about bringing debt into a marriage and quickly realized that would bring nothing but stinkbombs into my Inbox, just in time for post-partum depression.  Yeah, let’s postpone that one.  I read an article about "push presents" [a horrible term for this stupid idea that your husband should buy you jewelry because you went through labor, I’m not even going to find the link], and you can imagine how quickly I decided to ditch that post, too.  I feel like I’m in a holding pattern until little guy makes his big entrance.

Andrew’s birthday is today, and he said a few weeks ago that he wanted a Nintendo.  I looked around on Ebay, but realized quickly that, hey, I may be a nerd, but I’m not a gaming nerd, and he really needs to pick it out himself.

*Time passes*

He’s changed his mind.  He decided that he’d rather have a new dishwasher!  One that is quieter, and has a temperature booster.  So he’s been cruising Consumer Reports and elsewhere on the web for a good model at a good price.  Anyone have one that they like?

[Are we getting old?]

As I get more and more ridiculously pregnant, I’m wanting to make meals from scratch less and less.  So, last night we decided to *gasp* go out for dinner.

It’s been awhile since we’ve gone out for dinner, but we have a couple of favorite places.  They tend to have at least a few of the following criteria: cheap, family-friendly, not too busy.  Emphasis on the not too busy.  See, but therein lies the rub.  We like to go to places that don’t have a lot of people in them because then it’s not as stressful if Audrey happens to act up.  On the other hand, places that don’t get a lot of business tend to, well, go out of business.

Did we drive well out of our way to go to our favorite tamale house only to find that it was no longer?  Of course.  "But I loved going there, the food was good, cheap, and it was always empty!"  Uh huh.  [Is this the first time this has happened to us?  Of course not.]

So, we went to Luby’s  — less than 20 bucks for all three of us — we ate big and took home leftovers [and it was filled with familes and small kids so the pressure was off].

The Nineteenth Festival of Frugality is up at Punny Money and Nick did a really great job this week.  Even if you’ve never followed this Carnival before, this is the time to try it!  [And, yup, I’ve got one in there this week, my Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More At Home.]  Don’t miss it.

Andrew and I recently moved our photos off of a gallery installation on my friend’s server.  We had been mooching bandwidth for years, and it was time to pay our own way.  So we have been in the process of transferring everything to Flickr.  We’ve been doing them in monthly batches because we have a lot of photos [hey, we’re parents] and there are monthly upload quotas.

See, the funny thing about having your photos on Flickr instead of on a gallery site on your own domain … ?  Well, people look at the photos.  And not just family members that you email a url to when you post a new update.  People you don’t know look at the photos.  And comment on them!  It’s kind of weird to get used to, but who am I to talk?  I mean, I post about our finances on this website.  And people comment on them!  People I don’t know!

So what does the, uh, "general public" like to look at?  For soon-to-be obvious reasons, I’m not going to provide direct links here but according to my stats, it turns out that people like to look at dogs, post-partum cleavage, babies nursing, and children in diapers, where you can see the diaper in the photo.  I’m getting the same spooky feeling as I did when my big-belly photos from Audrey’s pregnancy somehow ended up being the #2 google result for a search term I’m not even going to mention and the next thing I know those photos have more than 9000 views.

I’m not even sure what I’m getting at here.

My previous post, about deciding to prioritize comfort over cash ?   Turns out everyone else in Texas had the same idea.  Apparently maintenance on the power grid happens in April, so 100+ degree days don’t jive too well with that.  But we’ve got power back now.   [Obviously.  Heh.]

It’s just like being in California, but without the state income tax!   [Good thing, too, since we just sent out an $8k dollar check to Federal IRS today…]

It’s going to be hovering near 100 degrees for the next couple of days.  And, alas, the air conditioning is now on.  I’ve got it on 76 and all the fans on in the house, which is still enough for a line of sweat on my brow when my big swollen-belly body tries to run around and do chores, but not so bad that I’m lying on the floor saying, "Aaaaaaaarrrgghhhhh."  Most importantly, it saps the that terrible, terribly humidity out of the air.

It’s expensive, sure, but my golly, it sure is bliss right now.

Oh, and I finally updated my blogroll some along the righthand side.   I have been really lazy about that.  

I’m trying to keep the food budget tight, and more importantly, I’m trying to avoid lengthy trips away from the house now that we’ve passed 38 weeks.  Audrey was born about 5 hours after my very first contraction, and within about 20 minutes after my first contraction, I was 2 minutes apart and would have been completely unable to drive myself home … or even tell someone else where I lived.  Heh.  [In fact, about an hour of that short labor was because her shoulder got hung up.  It would have been even shorter!]  With second labors statistically going shorter than first labors … well.  I’m getting leery about even running errands right now.

With that in mind, our meal plan this week is primarily out of the pantry and cleaning out the vegetable crisper of what we already have:

• Sunday: Gnocchi with Pesto and Turkey Sausage & green salad [It was very yummy, and Andrew’s getting the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.]
• Monday: Pot Roast with Carrots and Mashed Potatoes
• Tuesday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowl
• Wednesday:  Penne with Blue Cheese Pesto, Walnuts and Asparagus
• Thursday: Baked Taco Chicken and Broccoli
• Friday: Thai Roll-ups or Vietnamese Chicken Salad [depends on whether I’m willing to go get a cabbage for the salad]
• Saturday: Low-fat Hamburger Gravy on Whole Wheat Biscuits and Broccoli

With this menu plan, I should be able to avoid going to the grocery store all week, though we will run out of green leafies pretty early in the week. 

[Update on previous post about Audrey’s sickness: She’s better now, thankfully.  She was able to feel better enough around 7:30am to go back to sleep until about noon.  She’s been pretty normal since she woke up.  I, however, am a zombie.]

We have two cars in our household, a Toyota Echo and a Honda CRV.  The Echo was mine before Andrew and I married, but he drives it now because it’s an ideal commuter car.  [It gets very, very nice mpg.]  His commute is less than 10 miles each way, I think he puts some gas in every other week.  The CRV that I drive isn’t quite as fuel efficient, but it does fit two car seats and two dogs quite nicely.  Audrey and I will, maybe, make one 10-20 mile trip or so during the week, and some weeks we don’t drive at all.  If we go somewhere as a family on the weekend, it’ll be in the CRV, but I do our grocery shopping on Sunday morning in the Echo.  We put a half a tank of gas in the CRV every week and a half or so.

Honestly, I think gas could be 5 dollars a gallon and it wouldn’t even make a blip in our budget [save for other things, like groceries, that would become more expensive due to shipping increases, etc].  I feel very blessed in that regard.  Being a homebody has many financial advantages.

Nothing like waking up at 3:30 in the morning to your 2 year old throwing up on you.  She hasn’t been sick like that since her baby spit-up days passed, and the poor girl was scared, didn’t know what was going on.  But she was so brave!  Endured a shower with Mama and new jammies and crawling into the guest bed downstairs … which she promptly also threw up in.  Another shower, more jammies.

We have a spare folding mattress-like thing that we put out on the floor of the playroom … but this time I heard her stomach start to gurgle, so I managed to get her onto the tile floor before she got sick again.  

Hey, it’s not every day that you get to wear 4 different pairs of jammies!  [And, well, the night’s not over yet.  Heh.]

So we’re up now, and she’s watching a "Special DVD" [as she calls it] and eating bread while Andrew and I veg out and do laundry until we think it’s passed for good.

I’m so tired I don’t think I can even find a way to make this relate to personal finance.  Make sure to have a lot of beds? 

[ … I hope I don’t go into labor this morning … ]