My new favorite website is...

This one. I was laughing so hard at it on Sat. at Job #2 that I had to excuse myself from the ref. desk and go behind it to get a hold of myself. Tears of laughter were streaming down my face! The posting that did it was where he decided not to renew his magazine subscriptions and instead is going to read them at the public library. He was being intentionally humorous about this and said something like, "Now, I could expound on how much $20 a year saved, invested at a compound rate of 8% over the rest of my lifetime will be, but..." Man, his poking fun at himself and other frugal penny-pinchers such as myself really hit the spot. That is exactly the kind of extreme, sometimes ridiculous, thinking we do every day!

I recently discovered a whole bunch of personal finance/money saving blogs and I am now addicted to all of them. One of them is even run by another librarian. I've found some great coupons off of them, too!

All this obsessive thinking about money works, though. For example, we got our latest electric bill and it is only $75, or $81 cheaper than last month! I believe this is due to a number of reasons:

1. I have started unplugging items when they are not being used b/c even though an item is not technically turned on at the time, just being plugged into the wall does drain a small amount of electricity that, guess what, you do have to pay for!
2. I am trying to do things like laundry and running the dishwasher only at night when electricity rates are, in fact, cheaper.
3. I am very big on turning off lights when I exit a room. Same goes for ceiling fans.
   
4. As cold as I've gotten in the past couple of months, I refused to turn up the thermostat and just slept dressed in layers.
   

This past weekend I was generous with the A/C b/c of the baby. My chicken pox instructions said to keep her cool and comfortable, so I was fine with that. Fortunately she was not feeling as itchy on Sunday, although her cough sounded worse. And she slept 12 hours on Sat. night, which was great since she usually doesn't sleep that long. Her appetite seemed fine, and she ate 4 bowls of baked beans yesterday (we don't know why she loves baked beans so much, but whatever). After that she and I walked over to the sno-cone stand behind the house and got sno-cones although I made her stand about 20 feet away from everyone since there were other kids there. She was upset that I wouldn't take her to the zoo, but I told her that we could go when her cough was better and she had no more pox on her.

Later we picked up Uncle M. and played with the rottweiler, Lucy. (I made him lock the psychotic cat Luke up before we came inside, though. My ankle is still scarred!) We picked up DH from work and went to get ice cream at Sonic, since McD's and its playground was off-limits due to the pox. I had told the baby she could eat all the popsicles, sno-cones, and ice cream that she wanted when she is sick.

DH career note: DH has refused to work for the sheriff's dept. if they give him the night shift, i.e., 10pm-6am--and they likely will. We had a big fight about this. He says he cannot sleep during the day or take naps and so he refuses; I countered that my mom did it for her family, and he is selfish for being unwilling to do the same. I told him then he better figure out something else and do it soon. I've already taken his credit cards away; I'm on the verge of taking away his debit card too and give him a strict cash allowance to live on if he does not get better employment NOW. We had to take his car "Charlie Murphy" into the shop today. I told him that it is coming down to either he gets a birthday present next month, or we fix his car.