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Category: Personal
Well, we had such a busy holiday weekend that I had hardly any time to work on the blog, which is a good thing. We all need a break sometimes 🙂 Our weekend was filled with family, fun, and food (but no fireworks. We were too tired to stay up.)
Out of all of the things I’ve inherited from my grandmother, one of them is the inability to look nice in an otherwise wonderful family picture.
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At points in time, I have made money while working online. I’ve had bigger jobs (like search engine evaluator and online program managers where I worked for companies doing contract work) but I have also done several things like surveys that earned me chump change. I don’t mean like pennies, though. I mean chump change like not enough to pay the bills, but enough to afford some luxuries like fancy coffee or a dessert the next time we went out to dinner.
What’s nice about the sites I am going to recommend is that you can do them while caring for children. You can leave and come back to these jobs without being penalized.
Today is my wedding anniversary. I can hardly believe it, but Andrew and I have been married for 4 years now. In that time we have bought a house, a dog, and had a baby. It is amazing how times flies.
We got married on June 30, 2012 at the Minnesota Zoo. It was honestly the coolest place ever to get married. And I know everyone considers their wedding the best, but mine was super cool. One of the coolest things is that every year we go back and visit the zoo around the time of our anniversary. This year, we were able to bring Mac and she had a great time!
That canopy behind Mac’s head is where we actually held our ceremony.
(Prepare yourself, this is a picture heavy post, but I promise they are worth it! Robin One Photography took awesome pictures.)
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So, if you have been reading for a little while, you know that we embarked on an exciting adventure in straw bale gardening. (If you want to catch up, read part one and part two.) Going into this, we figured that if we grew anything, it would be exciting. Neither of us has ever gardened and honestly, I can’t even keep flowers alive. So imagine my surprise when we visited the bales last weekend and things were actually growing!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
From the beginning of this gardening adventure, I have been excited, but I have kept a little place in the back of my mind that says we might get absolutely no produce out of straw bale gardening. So imagine my surprise when not only do we have pots upon pots of plants on our deck, but we also had a few things growing out of our straw bale garden.
If you want to read about straw bale gardening, I highly recommend “Straw Bale Gardens Complete” by Joel Karsten. It is very informative with amazing picture.
Last week, Andrew, Mac, and I started a challenge that I called “Paring Down the Pantry” which consisted of only buying $25 worth of food for the week. We combined that food with all of the random odds and ends that were stuffed into our full fridge, freezer, and pantry. Read more about week 1 by clicking here.
So how did we do? Great! After our Aldi run, we stuck to our budget and didn’t buy anything else. None of the meals were particularly photogenic, so I didn’t take any pictures. It went so well, in fact, that we decided to do it again this week. The only difference is that we raised our budget a bit to compensate for the food we ate out of our stock last week. Here is what we bought and are eating this week.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
My family is incredibly accident prone. Broken bones, surgeries, and partial amputations are just a few of the incidents that have taken place. I am the least accident prone and even I cracked my head open falling off of a waterski pyramid. So having my own family has been a refreshing change from hospital visits. Until last Friday, that is.
This week, Andrew and I set up a new challenge for ourselves. See, we tend to buy in bulk and when things are on sale. Most of the time, it works great. But right now, we have a pantry and fridge full of food and yet we still buy a bunch of groceries each week. Something isn’t adding up there. We need to start paring down the pantry.
So as part of some cost-cutting and decluttering we are doing around here, we decided to cut down on our groceries and eat what we already have. We set our weekly grocery spending limit at $25. That is for any food or beverages we are going to eat this week. Here is how we set up the first week.
I might seem like a well-adjusted adult, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I was one of the weird kids. In high school I went through phases where I dressed like an emo kid and then a hippie. I was both a band kid and a cheerleader. Through it all, I was a weirdo. A fun weirdo, but a weirdo nonetheless. Thankfully, I have friends who accepted my weirdness and are a little weird themselves.
This might sound like I’m writing a negative post, but let me fast-forward to my message before I post the pictures: It is okay to be weird. You can be weird and unpopular and still go on to become an adult fulfilling whatever sort of life you want to live. Weird people settle down and have families. Weird people travel the world and live out of their suitcases. Weird people start their own successful businesses. When you march to the beat of your own drummer, it is easier to hear the direction of the music.
My close group of weirdos liked to have a fun time in our small town doing whatever we could think of. We played on the playgrounds and got stuck in the baby swings. We played hide and seek in cars where you hid somewhere in town and called everyone else with a clue. It was all harmless fun and amazingly, we did it all without alcohol. People who sort of knew us will probably be shocked to figure out we weren’t drinking, just weird.
The night before we left for college, two friends and I were hanging out trying to figure out what to do with our time. Somehow we came up with a plan that ended up going something like this:
- Put on weird costumes
- Kidnap Amanda when she was done with work and make her come along
- Take enough pictures to fill 2 disposable cameras
- Stop at the gas station for a gallon of ice cream to split 4 ways
- Go to Wal-Mart for a posing session before developing the film
- Stay out as late as possible before going off to college the next day.
Here I am in a Renaissance fair costume. Eating a candle? and holding flowers? We thought we were really funny. After this, we piled into my friend’s old beater and drove to the coffee shop where Amanda worked. Once we knew she was done with work, we walked in, pushed her into the bathroom, shoved a dress in her hands and told her to get changed. She describes it as “Get in loser, we’re going to Wal-Mart.” It was like Mean Girls, but the indie film version.
Here we are walking around. Nothing to see here.
I think we were pretending to ride a broomstick? I mean, we were just pumping gas like normal people. P.S. this is my hands-down, favorite picture of Amanda and I. And we have some real doozies.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
Andrew and I have never gardened before. Like ever. But this year, we had a great opportunity that we just couldn’t pass up. So hopefully our black thumbs will turn green this summer and we can grow all sorts of vegetables! We are using a method I haven’t heard of before called straw bale gardening. We have been basing most of our knowledge on the book “Straw Bale Gardens Complete” by Joel Karsten.
