Friday, May 16, 2008

Planning........

Today was full of gymnastics, swimming, reading, and starting logs of income and expenses (for the boys). Can I just tell you that I am so grateful for Quicken to track our accounts? Pencil and paper reek. It is a pain. How else can I put it?

One of the Boy Scout Merit Badges involves estimating income and expenses and then tracking the actuals. They also keep a log of financial transactions. S-man felt it was far too boring. J-Dawg wasn't thrilled to start but got into it as we rolled along. Lots of math here!

On the reading front (for their Reading merit badge), we began The White Giraffe, by Lauren St. John. I read it a couple of days ago and enjoyed it. Our volume is the Literature Circle Edition by Scholastic so we will be doing some of the activities it lists at the end when we finish. The merit badge requirement just has them writing what their thoughts are on 2 lines when they finish their day's reading, but we first discussed it and hypothesized what we thought the beginning foreshadowed. It has quite the loaded beginning with an overpowering dream and then the main character's parents dying violently.

Then I spent some time figuring out how to live on almost nothing for the next 15 days. Necessaries will be provided for, of course, but we'll be living on food storage mostly. And eating lots of bread stuffs! It will be an interesting experiment. We had an emergency roofing expense so we are cutting back to handle that without credit cards (at least an absolute minimum.) Ironically, we had just barely paid a substantial amount down on a credit card before this happened! Two steps forward and one back? At least it was only a portion of the roof! I am ever so grateful we were blessed with the foresight to buy the boys' birthday presents early!

Of course, I forgot about dinner so I hurried and made pancakes. Yummy! Jim has been the chief pancake maker (mostly on Saturday mornings) lately, so it was a fun thing to make them tonight.

Jim was out late shooting gymnasts (with his 40D Canon camera) with a photographer that is going to China to photograph the Olympics and needs a few good photographers to go with him. Jim's hoping to get the nod. He has already been told by the COO of his company that they'd make a way for him to skip work during that time. How cool would that be?!

2 comments:

Mrs. Darling said...

Well you can look at it this way; you will probably lose weight in the days to come. Thats always a good thing!

Seriously though I do hope and pray that tiems will get a bit better for you all on the financial front.

3 for school said...

Hopefully inches too!

My favorite scripture is one my dad repeated to me many times, "And it came to pass," and it will. It's also a good excuse to get our freezer emptied in preparation of a side of beef coming too! We've been working to get out of debt and put in a year's supply of food so that's why we're trying to get the roof paid off quickly. Anything "extra" goes to one of those two endeavors.

Thank you for your prayers. We'll take them most gratefully since our goals are rather aggressive!