Back to Basics

I made many excuses for myself at the end of last week and over the weekend for not keeping up with my daily tasks. Jesse found me a part time gig cleaning apartments Wednesday to Friday and then he also worked on Saturday with me. Thursday night we went to the Barenaked Ladies concert and Saturday night we went to the Nationwide race in Newton. I told myself that I can put my tasks off for a bit while I make a smidgen extra money for us and that I didn't have time because we had fun activities to do!

Well, there will be no more of that allowed! Okay, a slight disruption in not doing everything I want to do is nothing to go batty about. But, I know myself and if I don't get back on track when I'm thinking about it, it won't get done. Case in point: I surfed the internet this morning and watched a movie online from Netflix. I will say that not making my bed or completely getting ready in the morning is not that big of deal to skip over (after all we are just going to ruffle up the blankets at nighttime and who honestly showers and does their hair to get dirty cleaning apartments?). I do on the other hand believe that meal planning (and somewhat sticking to it) along with cleaning up the kitchen should not be ignored.

I do have to say that I still did a decent enough job with our menu plan, but of course we could have done better. There was a slight increase in our eating out and I do have to allow us to get set back. It is a pretty big deal that we didn't eat out AT ALL last week. Naturally I want to reign us back in to that and keep up the lack of eating out. It needs to be a special event again. For this reason I will be buckling down and making out a menu plan for, wait for it, the next THREE weeks all at once! This will be quite the undertaking I believe but we definitely have our reasons for this. Okay, one reason. It is August and the students will be arriving soon, many already have. On our walk last night (a whooping four miles!) we noticed that the roads were much busier than they have been lately. Of course, it is August 1 and everyone is moving into their brand new apartments for the impending term (massive line at least 50+ at Jensen Property at 12:30pm to get keys). This will be the first time that classes are resuming at ISU and neither one of us will be taking part. It actually makes me quite sad. Now we move on to the point where we kind of dread those first weeks in August with the sudden rush of students flooding the stores to buy their much need dorm room and apartment supplies. This is the reason that I hope to manage a three week shopping trip. I will be avoiding the chaos by doing the shopping early and I even plan to go early (kind of early) at 8am to do the shopping. I will keep you updated on if I am able to plan the meals and get the food within our budget. I may try to save some on the budget because I am sure there will be sales that I will want to take part on over the next couple of weeks.

Next, the kitchen. I haven't been doing a very good job of keeping it clean this week. The dishwasher was full of dishes, though they were clean and the sink was almost over flowing with dirty dishes while our limited counter space was full of a wide array of items from the breadmaker to mail to sunglasses. Jesse got sick of it before I did and emptied and loaded the dishwasher. However, he didn't load it as efficiently as I like so I had to 'train' him on how to do this. He replied with, "Okay, I won't do it again." That is a lie. ;)

It is 1:00 and I have barely accomplished a load of laundry. It is time to close this computer up and get to work.