hqueen's collection of Far From the Usual stuff.

[creativetwinszoo]

That's sounds like a super lovely trip! 80 degrees sounds like heaven right now lol
And the bear sighting sounds awesome! Their really lovely creatures most the time~ I hope farm duty goes by quick! Dont forget to keep hydrated and to take lil breaks for a snack or breather

 

[hqueen13]

Thanks ladies!
We actually do have bears here, but since we're so close to the city they are super rare. Down there with as much green space and woods as they have they're very common. My sister had a 50# bag of dog food drug out of her garage by bears, and was told that every trash can in Asheville has been visited by bears at some point or another! It's just part of what you have to watch out for. They really aren't a threat unless it's a mother with cubs, they're surprised, or it's a bad food year. Otherwise, they mind their own business, just like most wildlife. Of course they are opportunists, so they will take advantage of food that's left lying around or dumpsters, but if those things aren't accessible, then they leave things alone for the most part.
We had a great weekend. The weather shifted here on Thursday evening, and we had a crazy storm that rolled through that dumped 2" of rain in around an hour or so. Friday was only in the 70's and gray and raining all day, which was lovely for a change. It cooled down and the humidity left Friday night and it has been GORGEOUS ever since. KN was here from FL and she was COLD and had to wear a jacket. I was laughing, but we were really enjoying the weather. I had a great lesson on Saturday morning, and I had extra farm chores to take care of most of the weekend, but other than that we were able to get a lot done.
Our shed has DOORS! One door is painted (Lowe's did a fantastic job color matching the siding, so the door is tan with white trim like the siding), and the other door has the lock in it. I need to put 1 more coat on the trim pieces that will get added to the doors once they're done, and paint the other door and that part of the project will be FINISHED. I can't wait to start moving stuff into it! We have decided that this week we need to get the tent set up and ready to be sold. We have to take some photos of it first, and then it needs to GO. I'm SO done with having stuff sitting around, especially when we need the cash to get this project FINISHED. I'm ready to get a move on this stuff and be able to get rid of the giant pile of DIRT. Which is now a weedy pile of dirt. I'm tired of staring at it! We also have to order the roof, which isn't going to be cheap... It's probably going to put us in the hole a little bit, but it's got to be done, the tarp is leaking and we can't have the shed getting damaged before it's ever finished.
So things are moving along, and there's lots to do right now. But I guess that is never not true...
Oh, and I am really proud of us. Other than the 5 days we were away, and other than a few meals that the BF and I have had to grab while working, we have not eaten out at all this month. I'm SO proud of us! That's a lot of money that is saved that we can put towards things that we would rather buy that help make our lives better and easier. I'm pretty much set up to keep that up this week, I have most of the meals planned, I'll have to see how things come together. I also don't have any extra farms to take care of. JS will be here Wednesday evening, so I have to make sure I have meals organized for her, too, but we should be good. That means I can make it all the way to September without eating out! I would rather be able to budget to plan to eat out than have to deal with not having enough organized to eat at home. We did pork chops in the crock pot last night, my mom gave me a SUPER easy recipe, and the BF says it's a keeper. It's 4 boneless pork chops (I guess you could use bone in with no problem, either), 1 can of cream of celery soup, and 1 packet of ranch dressing mix. You mix the soup and the dressing together, put 2 chops in the bottom of the crock pot, then layer 1/2 of the soup mixture, then the other 2 chops, and then the rest of the soup mix. 4 hours on high, or 6 on low. They were fall apart tender. They dried out some (despite cooking in the juices) because I think the BF left them on for too long because he got distracted when he was supposed to be minding the food, but that's normal, LOL. It was easy and painless to take care of! I'm glad he likes it because it will give us another option to work with.
I have to squeeze as many hours as possible in between now and Wednesday to try to make up for my missed days. We'll see how that works out, but hopefully I'll get just enough to keep things covered and keep from slipping backwards. I'll get paid for Monday next week, even though I won't have to work, which is awesome. Then I can add a few more hours on Wednesday to try to make up for what I am missing this week, so hopefully it won't be too bad. It's tight, but what else is new. I NEED to talk to my boss about a raise. It's way over due and we jst haven't slowed down long enough to do it. The tricky part is catching him at the right time. So here's to more money!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Your weather sounds awesome. We're still dealing with high 90's....like 97 today and 98 tomorrow and heat indices a lot higher. So. Tired. of It!

Thanks for the pork chop recipe - it sounds good and I'm sure I'll be trying it soon.

 

[hqueen13]

EW, FEM, I'm so sorry! We were stuck there for quite a while, including while we were away, so I'm VERY glad that it has broken, at least for a while. The long range forecast only shows mid to upper 80's for the next 10 days or so, I just hope the humidity stays down because that will keep the power bill low!
The BF just doesn't seem to comprehend how limited the budget is sometimes. He keeps talking about how he wants to do this or that, and that he could have the money together in a month or two, and I'm like yeah, if you don't do anything else. I'm like you can't complete these projects over here, and then buy that over there, and expect that there will be enough money to go around. He gets frustrated when I tell him that, which I believe is mostly linked to him not really watching the money move through. I have my fingers on the pulse of our money and I know exactly how much comes and goes, and when we are over spending. He just swipes his card, and has no idea if that purchase puts us over or not. He also looks at his bank account and sees several thousand dollars, which a few short years ago was NEVER possible. What he doesn't recognize is that money is ear marked for a number of things that are very important and so we just don't touch it, which means that his swiping at Home Depot and Lowe's puts us over budget.
He got the bill for the car insurance today, which isn't due until the middle of October. We already have the amount that is needed funded now, and we have another month and a half to get the money together. I'm SO proud of us for pulling things together and continuing to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. We save over $450 by paying it in one lump sum instead of monthly. That's HUGE. I also over budget for the next installment, so then we have some extra funds to work with and decide what we would like to do with them. I may just tuck that away and not tell him about it so that when he needs to purchase a new vehicle there is a little bit more money ready to go. We'll see. If he doesn't stop over spending I'll use it for that instead because the interest on the credit card isn't worth "saving" money.
We're doing way better, but it is hard to really comprehend that when he continually keeps over spending. He has talked about working every other Saturday for a while, so that will probably help his budget as well.
Then if we can get the things in the house that need to be sold out of the house that will help a LOT. That extra cash will help us fund the things we need right now, like the roof for the shed that he's going to buy which we don't have the money for. I get it, we need it, because the shed is going to get damaged if we don't get it on. It's just frustrating that we have to (yet again) over spend in order to get there.
He just had his 3 year anniversary with the company, so hopefully there will be a raise coming in, but the company itself isn't doing great, so we'll see how that goes...
And I STILL need to have a chat with my boss about a raise. I hate doing things via email, but I may because I've got to put the bug in his ear.
My business is doing ok for a little while. I've had enough extra farm jobs to keep things covered, and am making up ground that I had lost for a while. I covered the interest on the credit card debt this month for the first time in a long time. Now I need to figure out how to keep up this trend. Of course, working myself to the bone isn't sustainable, but hopefully between now and the next burn out I can generate some more opportunities that take less effort!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Oh man...hope you can get BF's extra spending reined in! I've had to "talk" with my DH abut his spending. I went through the AMEX bill the other day and there were 3 monthly recurring charges that I hadn't noticed before. Between the three it was almost an extra $50 a month! And the worst of it was that he couldn't even tell me what they were for - except for iTunes....the other two he didn't remember. ARGH! So, I had him get online and cancel the two of 'em. I don't mind the iTunes as much because music soothes the beast, lol.

Hoping you get the spending reined in and make life easier!

 

[Britesea]

Congratulations on your financial progress! I know how hard it can be to break the habit of living on credit.
The best thing we ever did to curb our overspending... and it eventually got us debt free... was to take all the credit cards, AND the debit card, out of the wallet. We went on a cash-only basis, which was really really hard at first, because we kept finding things that needed to be repaired or whatever and we didn't have the cash for it. But we stuck to it, although I remember one time DH coming home to find me in tears because we didn't have enough money to buy groceries after paying the bills... we ate beans and peanut butter (from a spoon- no bread) for 2 weeks until his next paycheck. Eventually, it got easier, and now it's pretty much a lifestyle. We have one credit card, with a fairly low limit even though the bank keeps trying to raise it... that is strictly for emergencies, and it is a low enough limit that we can pay the whole thing in 2 months easily so we won't have a lot of interest charges.
It's amazing how much more money we have now that we aren't making huge credit card payments!

 

[Lazy Gardener]

Credit cards can rob you of financial security. Back in the early days, we would put our MODEST Christmas gift purchases on a credit card, and not get that paid off till May! @Britesea , I like how you managed that issue!

 

[wyoDreamer]

We buy almost everything on credit card. We get points for everything we buy and usually take the points as cash back. DH just used $200 in points we had built up on one of our CCs and bought himself a toy.
But, we make sure to pay off every card, every month, ON TIME. If we do take a XX-month/no interest finance deal on a credit card, we make sure it is paid off at least 2 months early.
We are not huge spenders, so what we earn in wages is enough for us to have extra after retirement funds, health savings accounts, car payments, etc. DH makes sure we do not overspend.
Double income, no kids helps, lol.

 

[hqueen13]

I do have to say I am SUPER proud of how far we have come. The 2 year house anniversary will be at the end of November, and we went from having a small business that paid 2/3 of our rent, plus the power bill to having a full mortgage that was ALL the BF's responsibility. How he went from only spending less than $500/month towards rent to shouldering the ENTIRE mortgage and power bill it is INCREDIBLE that we are in the position that we are in right now. So these little over spends are no where near as "bad" as they used to be in terms of their impact on how we function over all. Six months after we had been in the house our lender helped us to refinance so that we could get out from under the PMI, which lowered our payment by about $100 (it's gone up a hair again since then but oh well). That refinancing time frame gave us a window of 2 months where we didn't need to pay the mortgage, and that allowed us to not only get one month ahead in the bank, but to also pay the car insurance in the lump sum instead of monthly, which as I mentioned before saves us a boatload. We have been able to maintain that ever since, I am RELIGIOUS about setting aside a projected amount of money in our budget in order to be able to pay that bill every six months.
I could not have done all of that without youneedabudget.com and the budget software that they have. It has given me a super CLEAR picture of what we have, and what we need to have, and how to break it all down. Thanks to the software, and having used it for so long now, I can geek out on knowing things like the average spending per month on groceries, gas, and the power bill. So I can actually set aside an average, and then just allow extra to sit there waiting for a month when we'll need a little more and I won't have to be so freaked out at covering a power bill that's more than $100 over what is "normal." The BF is also down to only about $5k in debt, and the vast majority of that is on a zero interest promo until January or February. I keep tabs on the credit scores through our credit cards and when we paid down a HUGE chunk of his debt with the last tax return his credit score actually dropped. So I decided I'm not worried about that last bit of debt hanging around and we'll just continue to roll it over to other zero interest promotions at the end of the promotional period and I won't care about it. The minimum payment is less than $50 so it is not taxing on the budget at all. There is a little bit of debt that has crept back in (see earlier posts ) but right now it's less than $1000. It will go over that when we order the roof, but we are also working on selling a few things that we don't need so that we can fund that (and get crap out of the house!!!). So all in all his financial situation is really not that bad. I get irritated when I find purchases stuck on other cards that I didn't know about, but really, we are in a WAY WAY WAY better place than we used to be. I'm still struggling, it seems that I tend to hang onto about $1200 in personal debt on average, but I just keep chipping away and doing what I can. I"ll get through it, and eventually it won't be a big deal. I guess all in all, $1200 in personal debt is nothing. My business has a LOT more (we're not going to talk numbers here... ) but that, too, won't be forever. It is all on personal credit cards, so while it does affect me, I still manage to hang in there. The last couple of months have been great, and I'm really happy to say that for the running bills I have things covered, and I might be able to put a little bit of money towards the debt here in the next little while, which makes me super happy.

Storm's trim was this morning, and I managed to do a lot of it. My farrier is the greatest, and helps me to learn so much. I just need more practice, but it is HARD work, and I struggle to keep up with it. I did most of it today, though it took longer than I would have liked. I'm slowly collecting the good quality tools, and in the past couple of trims my confidence has gone up. I have no idea what triggered that, but somehow some things have clicked for me, so that is a good thing. It is also helping that Storm is cooperating, though he isn't helping to LIFT his heavy legs, he is at least being calm about it! I'm SO glad I have a salt float and body work this week!! She's due back in 5 weeks, if I want her to come, and so now I just need to make sure that I am getting it done before she gets here so that she doesn't have to be here for long. Then she charges me less! And less is a good thing!
So now I'm in the office making up some extra hours even though my check is going to be terribly lean. I hope it covers everything, but somehow I'm not going to hold my breath. My only consolation is that Monday is a holiday so the BF and I have off! JS will only be here through the middle of the day on Saturday, so that won't be a big deal, and we'll have most of the weekend to work on projects and things. We need to move manure for Cowboy and Coyote, and I have to pick up my check from her for September, plus TW might be out of town and she lives next door. That's more money, too! HR is away Thursday evening and Friday morning, so that's another little bit, and that makes me so happy to have income flowing in! Plus HR couldn't have picked a more perfect time to be away - I'll be at the barn on Thursday evening, so I can stop over after I do the chores which is 5 minutes away, and then Friday morning I'll have to drive right by on my way to open the yoga studio. So no extra trips and I get extra money! It's perfect!
So anywho, that's about all that's happening around here. Now I just have to wait through the rest of the hours I need to be in the office until I can race home and clean the house. Gotta vacuum upstairs and downstairs, mop the kitchen and give the bathrooms a once over. It shouldn't be much but I'm already aching from playing farrier today...

 

[wyoDreamer]

One of my friends grew up with horses on the farm. His Dad did all the hoof trims on their horses, his Dads horse was a BIG saddle-bred bohemith. That horse would lift his feet for him, but then he would lean onto Dad as he was bent over working on the hoof, lol. Dad would elbow the horse to stand up and within a couple of minutes, the horse would lean and put all that weight on poor Dad again. Lather, rinse, repeat for all 4 feet.