Saturday was our usual Shabat at synagogue. I'd planned ahead and thawed steaks bought on sale on my regular shopping day. With baked potatoes and a big tossed salad my husband was a happy man...I know because he posted about it on Facebook, lol. Well he did the cooking, I just did the budgeting and planning ahead part. I'd say we were both blessed that day.
Typically our Saturday is a quiet afternoon at home and this was no different. No work for us, just quiet pursuits like reading, watching a movie, playing computer games. It suits us just fine and is very restful after the usual busy pace of the week. By evening I've begun to feel restless, a sign that I've rested enough. I usually do some light housework then, and meal planning.
Sunday morning I was up early, ready to do housework and make my usual Sunday trip into town. Despite being a bit over budget, I'd noted in our local paper that sales were quite good on several pantry worthy items. So with John's permission, I did some shopping while in town. I added grits, Spam, sugar, and a couple of other items to the pantry shelves.
John mentioned seeing a movie and the character was cooking spaghetti and meatballs. I made my own meatballs at home. 3/4 pound ground beef, 1 egg, 1/4 cup each of dry bread crumbs and grated Parmesan cheese, a bit of grated onion. I had enough meatballs for a generous serving each at dinner and enough leftovers to make meatball heroes for dinner another day.
We washed a load of clothes and hung to dry.
Washed a full load of dishes in the dishwasher after dinner and then let air dry.
I halved a recipe for a pie we love in summer months, a sort of key lime pie. I bought a graham crust only because it was far less expensive than a box of crackers. Even so my pie cost about 1/3 of the cost of a frozen or grocery prepared pie....And I daresay it was twice as good. It's so rich and nice that a single piece each is quite enough for a day. It lasted us until mid-week.
Internet was down on Sunday so the day I'd usually spend writing was given over to other tasks, mostly planning ahead for the week ahead of me. Then I looked over my goals for the month. I've been a little slack on the deeper cleaning tasks with the heat we've had. It seems that getting routine things done is enough to wear me down, and that's with air conditioning running. Gracious, I don't know how on earth I managed all those years without any air conditioning at all!
I dug around in the fabric stash again and found a piece of fabric that matches my current pillow shams in color and weight. I'll use that to alter the size of them.
Letters are still a fairly inexpensive way to communicate. Amie is feeling a little blue and she tends to retreat when she's overwhelmed. So I took time to write her a nice long letter to send off.
Monday we were away from home all day long. We ate a meal out but only one meal. We opted for a snack of peanuts from the vending machine and water brought from home as our midday meal. We refilled the water bottles at the fountain, too.
Tuesday we found the internet was still intermittent. Fortunately we have a habit of saving every cable, cord and phone line that comes with computers. When the technician mentioned a new Ethernet cord was necessary I opened the drawer where we stash such items and found one. No money spent on that repair and it seems to have worked very well. No more internet woes.
We washed a load of clothes and hung to dry.
Used 'leftover' water (from water bottles not emptied completely or glasses of water not finished or extra caught while waiting for water to warm to wash) to water the plants.
I cleaned the fridge and had to toss a couple of items, but not so much really, considering I hadn't done this task in a few weeks time. I'd put the deli roast chicken carcass on to boil Sunday and on Tuesday strained the broth, picked meat off the bones and then bagged for the freezer. I got 1 1/2 cups meat plus broth for a future meal, 2 quart sized bags of broth besides.
Cleaned out the refrigerator freezer, reorganized it and then inventoried the big freezer. This allowed me to also organize the big freezer which netted me a little extra room. And good thing because Mama called on Wednesday to tell me she had three quart bags of butterbeans for my freezer!
When I bought a sirloin tip roast last month, I cut it in half and packaged it for mini roasts. Cooked one half as a pot roast this day and had enough leftovers to package up for a future dinner of hash.
Wednesday we had a use it up sort of meal for breakfast. A pasta frittata...It was okay. In future I'll find another use for leftover spaghetti but it worked okay for using up that cup of spaghetti.
Back to the store for us, this time to buy bread and fresh produce. Not such a big spend trip, far more in keeping with our usual mid-pay period expenses. I took time to review the new sales week ads and found nothing of particular good value.
Bought dog and cat food at the dollar store, less expensive than at grocery.
Leftovers for our meal today. We didn't even contemplate eating out while we were out, it was a good savings to remember the food we had at home.
Bought material to repair our pump house roof, picked up an insulated coozy for the front yard water tap and determined we could make do for the back yard tap using a piece of PVC pipe and insulating wrap. Cost to repair roof: $15.
And that is our version of spend and save for the week, lol.
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