Monday Morning Chit Chat: Out And About Edition

Good morning to everyone! How was your weekend?

Mine was busy. I was away from the house most of the weekend. Saturday Shane had to work, and Kat went with her mom for the weekend, so I spent the day wandering around the city. I had thought at first to go to our city's farmer's market, but the last thing I need right now is more veggies to deal with, so instead I went to garage sales. I was in a part of town that is not entirely familiar to me. I can get around there, but I don't know all of the street names to find addresses. So I just followed the garage sale signs as I saw them. There were many, so it wasn't as hard to find them as I thought it would be. Kat has outgrown almost all of her clothes (both for school and for play), so I was able to pick up about a dozen items for her, mostly for play at home. I picked up about 10 clothing items for myself, 4 books, 2 cassettes (my van was one of the last made with a cassette player, I think, along with CD player), and a couple of household items. The best part was that I had fun all day long and only spent $10. Ok, make it $14, because I ate lunch, too.

Saturday evening, Shane and I decided at the last minute to go out to our favorite Mexican restaurant to eat. We haven't been there for a year or more, so it was a nice treat. Only I completely overindulged! I ate too much, and had a couple of margaritas that only made me feel even more full. We were both miserably full by the time we got home, but we enjoyed it while we were there. They had a man playing his guitar and singing there, going from table to table. It wasn't a mariachi band, since he was alone. I guess you could have called him a troubadour of sorts. He played both Mexican and American music, both covers and original songs. It was very nice.

Yesterday we started out by going to look at a green house we saw on a craigslist ad, but that didn't work out for us, so we came back home.* Shane's boss and his wife stopped by for a short time to pick up some building materials we had to for them, and Shane's mom and step-dad stopped by for a few minutes as well. By that time, it was about 3:00 p.m. and time to head out to meet daughter Jean and the SIL to have a dinner out with them for their combined birthdays. (His was in July, hers is in early September). We ate at a local independent pizza parlor, and this time controlled ourselves from eating too much!

Looks like I may have to make the rest of August an "eat at home challenge month"!

So that was my weekend. What did you do?

I also want to make mention of a post of mine that you may or may not have seen. It was my wrap-up of my July pantry challenge. If you use a reader, you may have been able to read it, but not access it on my blog. Something happened to the formatting that I couldn't fix. It turned into one huge paragraph and nothing I did would fix it, short of retyping the whole thing. I decided I didn't want to retype everything, so I'll just recap here briefly:

I ended the month spending $183.80, which was our third thriftiest month so far this year. Our current average monthly grocery bill is $191, so I'm happy to say July was below that average. While the pantry finally started looking a little bare by the end of the month, there are still some things to be used up, like lots of dry beans and some pasta. We enjoy both, so I hope to incorporate those into meals in August. I'll continue to try to keep costs down by "shopping my pantry" first, but I won't be writing about it in August. I just have too many things coming up, such as getting ready for school to start and keeping up with my garden.

This week doesn't seem to hold many special activities in store. I need to take Kat to Target to exchange some birthday clothing gifts for better sizes, and maybe pick up 2 or 3 pairs of shorts or scooter skirts to get her through this first, and hottest, part of the school year. She also needs to go in for a hair trim this week. Other than that, it will just be the same 'ol routine. Nothing wrong with that, though.

What's on your to-do list this week?

*Edit: I guess the green house is working out for us after all; we just got the call-back this morning. It's actually an aluminum and glass sunroom on the front of an earth-contact house. We will will put on the back of our house either as a sunroom or a green house. It's free to us if we disassemble and remove it ourselves. We looked at it and Shane knows how to disassemble it without destroying it, so guess what we/he will be doing next weekend?