Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A Pre-Christmas Update

It's kind of crazy around here...
  • The cousin will have about 12-15 family members come to Las Vegas for Christmas so we volunteered to help her out by cooking a meal for them each day for the next week.  Actually hubby will cook and I will bake something each evening so tonight hubby will cook a beef stew type dish (in the Philippines it is called apritada and since everyone is Filipino they should like it) and I will bake brownies.  The cousins have helped us out a lot over the past couple months so this is a good way to give back.  Also, hubby loves to have people to cook for and I love to bake but don't want and entire giant batch of brownies or cookies just sitting on the counter where I will make a meal of them, plus this will save the cousin a considerable amount of money since in the past she would just take the whole group out for each meal(!).
  • I am determined to get Christmas gifts sent off to my friends in Japan by tomorrow.  I feel so bad that they won't arrive until New Years but I have kept putting it off (mostly because of the cost but also because we have been busy), however I don't want them to arrive in spring so I better get busy!
  • I was going to get hubby a smart phone for Christmas which would have cost $200 for the phone then an added $20 each month for the calling plan (his plan now is $30 but for phones that use a lot of data the plan costs $50), but he said he doesn't really want one so now I need to figure out something else to get him (but I am secretly breathing a sigh of relief that our monthly cell bill won't increase!).
  • We seem to be chronically frugal now.  We needed a butter dish so we looked at one at Walmart and it was $4 and we both agreed that that was too expensive (!?) so we waited a couple of days and found one at the Dollar Store for, well, a dollar.  We have never been this frugal before but since we have been traveling and living on a really small income, we question each and every purchase no matter how small it is dollar-wise. Yikes.
  • I have been listening to Dave Ramsey on the radio a lot lately, mostly because his show comes on about the time we cook dinner so it is something nice to listen to while we cook.  I can't recommend listening to his show enough for people who want to get out of debt--or even for those of us who are out of debt, so we don't go back to our old ways.
That's about all that is happening today.  I hope all of you are getting ready for a wonderful Christmas!

2 comments:

  1. I was thinking about getting my BF an iPhone for Christmas, but he's not sure, I wish he would choose already!

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  2. Wow nice gift! I hope you and your boyfriend have a wodnerful Christmas!

    ReplyDelete