Tuesday, August 4, 2015

This Week...Beyond Money 7/27 -8/2

For me, a life beyond money is making choices so that you can live the best possible life, regardless of your income level. Obviously, you have to make a living, but there are many ways to improve your quality of life without increasing your income levels and correspondingly your expenses. This regular post will be some of the ways that we improve our quality of life beyond just trying to make more money.

This week's post is a little short. We moved into our booth at the antique store, so we have been working at that pretty much constantly. Some of you asked on social media for photos, and I will take some this coming week for next week's This Week post. Thanks for all the encouraging words!

Gardening:
* Continue to feed the bunnies weeds. They are growing nicely.
* I found mouse droppings in the bunny pellets bag, so I'm going to find a way to secure the bag better.
* Harvested 1 lb of green/purple snap beans. The Dean's Purple Podded poles give such a fantastic harvest compared to anything else I've ever grown. I think I'll grow them every year. I'm still getting some beans from the bush beans, although I may start culling plants that don't have flowers on them so I can get some late carrots, beets and radishes in.
* Harvested 4 cups of lettuces and nasturtium flowers.
* Harvested 5 cherry tomatoes. We made a special moment of eating the first two together.
* Harvested several jalapenos.

Cooking/Groceries:
* I wanted to make BLTs one day, but they were really just BLs. I used loads of lettuce from the garden, but I only had three cherry tomatoes. I cut them in half and put them on Trucker's sandwich and just had lettuce on mine. Soon I'll have more tomatoes, but I'm content enough with bacon. :) I saved half of the bacon to use in other meals.
* My sister came over one evening and I made pita pizzas. I used 4 pita breads ($.06 each), store-brand tomato sauce, a sweet pepper (from the manager's special cart), 3 crumbled slices of bacon, and some mozzarella from Aldi.
* I pulled some ground buffalo from the freezer and made buffalo burgers for dinner one evening. I froze one of the burgers to crumble to use later in tacos, stuffed peppers, etc.
* We spent the week working really hard at getting ready to move into our booth, so one evening I used our points to get a free pizza from Papa John's. They had sent a promo code to use 15 points for a free pizza instead of 25, so I've got half of what I need for my next freebie.

Fun:
* My uncle finished his chemotherapy on Monday, so he and his wife, Mum, Dad and I went out for dinner to celebrate. It was a wonderful time laughing and talking with some of my favorite people.
* My sister came out one evening for dinner. Afterwards, we went to the summer film festival I had tickets for. Since I'd bought a strip of tickets early in the season, our tickets only cost me $2.50 each. I brought some candy from the salvage grocery store. We saw From Here to Eternity.

Nature 
* Trucker and I went for a 2.5 mile hike at a park near us. It was a shorter hike, but there were intense hills, so we got a decent workout in. It was so beautiful.

Work:
* We packed lunches of leftovers each day we worked.
* I worked 45 minutes overtime.

Future:
* We went thrifting to get items for decorating our antique mall booth. I got more lighting, a huge basket and some linens for a couple ugly tables. I was a good girl and didn't look at items for myself. :)
* We spent most of our not-at-the-job time working on pricing items for the booth.
* On Saturday, we woke up early and hit a barn sale that only happens a couple times a year.
* After the barn sale, we ran home and loaded up the cars with all of our shelving, tables, desks, end tables, baskets and items to sell. We used our mad Tetris skills to fit almost all of it into the two Hondas. We got there and unloaded, then Trucker ran out to the hardware store to get more shelving while I started unpacking. We had worked for 2 weeks pricing items and thought we had a lot but...that booth is HUGE. It's going to take some effort to fill it up as much as we need to. Fortunately, we've still got a lot at home that we can price and bring up. As online listings expire, we will take them up to the booth instead of paying to relist online. It took us four hours of work that day. While we were leaving, we saw one of our items in someone's cart. YAY!
* While Trucker was at work Saturday night (poor thing worked a 6 day stretch with this in the middle), I stayed up late pricing lots of items. Sunday we came back with another car load and staged a bit better. When I came in, I saw that I'd sold a few more items. That was encouraging. The weekend sales weren't phenomenal, but the booth is still being filled and staged, and we were in the booth for most of the weekend. I'm sure many people walked by the booth without looking while we were there because it's awkward. We're going to work really hard to get it filled during the week so next weekend we're good to go.

Health:
* I ran a few times this week, but not as much as I wanted to. Honestly, everything was deprioritized after we signed the lease for the booth.

Setbacks:
* We're a little tight until we start making sales at the booth. We'd expected to have several months to save for security deposit and first months rent, plus time to assemble the needed staging and shelving items. Since they rushed us in, we didn't have the time to do it the easy way. We had to move some money around and had to be less picky about staging/shelving items. We didn't want to pass on this opportunity because who knew how long it would be before we could get another chance at such a great booth at this particular mall. Fortunately, we were able to make it work.

Community:
* My sister got a new pair of steel toes since she didn't like her current pair, so she gave them to me. She only wore them a few days. My previous pair was starting to fall apart a bit on the inside, so I had started looking at sales papers for a new pair. I will keep the old pair in my commuter car just in case. If you show up to work without steel toes, you get sent home and if you don't have the day available, tough luck. My dad said he keeps extras of everything he needs in his locker just in case, so I'm doing the same thing. Small step but adds a bit of job security.
* I gave part of my packed lunch to a coworker who forgot her lunch that day.

How was your week?

Shared on:
Wordless Wednesday Hop

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...