Whimsy of Things

Its 2020! Today starts the budgeting and no buy rules that I set out for myself earlier last week.  For those interested, here are my rules: My 2020 Budgeting and Spending Rules January is a no buy month. This includes replacements. I have enough products and backups to cover anything I may run out of.  This does not include groceries (see budget below) or the dinner we have reservations for on the 4th for my husband's birthday. It also does not include normal utility bills, the $13.00 for an annual Birchbox subscription that I signed up for last year, the dog's annual vet visit or the registration fees I am going to have to pay for my son's school and summer camp.  It does mean that there will be no trips to the drug store, no eating out, no morning Starbucks runs (though I do have some money on my account which I can use). It means no random Amazon orders.  If I run out of something and do not have a replacement that I can use, I am going to have to do wit...

Recap Last year at this time, I didn't take the time to reflect on the previous year, and I didn't do a good job of planning out my upcoming year.  Because of this, I feel like I spent the first part of the year being inefficient.  I spent too much time on each class in school, I didn't get started on any sort of fitness goals until over halfway into the year and my house went from being super organized for my brother's visit for Christmas to a chaotic mess again. What Went Right Clothing For the first time in my life, I have a wardrobe that works. For every occasion that happened last year I had the right clothes to wear available and that I felt good in. I have to credit a lot of that comfortable feeling to the fact that I obsessively track my wardrobe in Airtable. Airtable is a freemium platform that allows you to better visualize spreadsheets. I have every wardrobe item entered in this platform with a picture, description, pricing and category.  As I wea...

A History Many years ago, in another lifetime, I had a blog that was part of a site that I had created for my business.  This was a very long time before any of the major blogging platforms that exist today, and in fact, before there really were anything like blogs.  I liked having a place to collect my thoughts about things that were happening in my life and I liked to interact with (most) of the people that followed my page. So here I am again, starting a blog in 2020 on a platform that is dated by anyone's standards.  I have gone back and forth about getting a proper website with an interesting blog template, but that sent me down a rabbit hole of finding the best price, with the best features, envisioning this magical blogging platform that looks fresh and interesting that will help grow an audience. It didn't make sense. I am not looking for an audience, though if I didn't want anyone to ever see this, I would leave it on a Word document on my computer. The t...