Tag: projects

Dishcloth: King’s Crown


I’m not really sure what makes this a King’s Crown, but it’s a nice enough pattern. I’m experimenting with reducing the number of rows on the ends (right and left sides in this picture) to see if I can get two dishcloths from one skein of yarn. With seven introductory knit rows at the beginning and end, I am just short at the end of the second dishcloth.

Payoff! March report

February started off as a very depressing month, money-wise.  My shoulder was aflame in repetitive-motion-type hurt, so much so that I went to the doctor who referred me to the physical therapist.  This was great!  Except!  According to my insurer, I would first have to pay my deductible of $1,250 before any physical therapy would be covered. Much sadness ensued as I realized that all of the money going toward the Payoff! goal would have to be rerouted to the shoulder project.  But my shoulder hurt a lot, so I made the appointment.

Then, on top of that, I wasn’t going to be able to do my tax return until April 4, at the earliest.  We were in line for a $1,300 tax credit for installing our heat pump, but the documentation I needed was not going to be sent to me until April 4, despite me having submitted my paperwork in late November.  I’m someone who files her taxes in early February, so this was not good news.

Things got better by the end of the month.  I pulled $1,250 over from my (now very small) emergency fund to use as a deductible and set a goal in YNAB to fully fund it to $1,250 by January 2019.  That way, as I pulled money out to satisfy my deductible, the program would have me pay back a little each month until I was back to fully funded for the next year’s medical crisis.

And then the physical therapy didn’t cost as much as I thought it would. Despite being quoted as around $300 being billed to insurance for each session, when I got the bills, the insurance company would discount them by half and apply other mumbo-jumbo I don’t understand, so the physical therapy was costing me something like $75 per session, not $300.  I hate how complicated insurance is, and though I read carefully the EOBs and also have a spreadsheet of my own to understand the system, I still don’t get it.

So, while I wasn’t able to make the full extra payment of $500 which is my goal, I made a bigger payment this month than I thought I would at the beginning of the month.  Also, my tax form arrived sometime in late February, which meant I could start on my taxes sooner than April 4.

In February, I paid $595.12 which was my usual payment of $103.67 and an additional payment of $491.45.  I was less than $9.00 from my $500 goal!  $5.56 went towards interest and $589.56 to the principal.

My money for the extra payment came from $408 budgeted initially, plus $50 in cash rewards from my credit card. I also had $37.00 because I waited to re-up my gym membership until the month flipped, $10 in unused Dining Out money and $11.28 left over in my Random Fun Things To Do category. That adds up to more than $500, but I had to skim some off to pay for the amount I overspent on groceries this month.  (That was another disappointing thing.)

My remaining balance at this point is just over $2,000.  It is very, very, very tempting to use the last of my emergency fund to pay this off in one fell swoop, but I am going to try hard to stay the course.

Payoff! February report

My total amount paid for January was $655.34 which consisted of my usual $103.67 and an impressive additional $551.67. Of that total, $647.21 was applied to the principal and $8.13 was applied to the interest. I had budgeted $383.25 initially, and then cashed in $11.10 of BottleDrop refunds, as well as my $12.00 in Christmas scratch-off ticket winnings. Thanks to the calendar, Matt paid me twice for food, giving me an extra $147.60. It all adds up.

I added nothing to my list of things not bought to achieve my goal. Truthfully, I wonder if I’ve wandered away from that part of the project. I seem to be buying this and that (things under $40) when I “need” them. It might be good to check up on that.

 

My payoff estimator has me finishing this project by June of this year. Hopefully I can meet this goal. My remaining balance is $2,633.53.

Dishcloth: Amish Diamond

I’ve stalled out on my project of making my old t-shirts into a quilt using sashiko embroidery. Sashiko is kind of intense, what with the having to make grids on the t-shirts. The needles are very sharp and I poked myself a lot. I need to solve some problems–the poking–and then I can return to that project.

In the meantime, I’ve felt like a slug just watching movies without having something for my hands to do. Enter the Leisure Arts book Knit Dishcloths by Julie Ray. This book promises 15 extremely easy designs inspired by quilt blocks.

Here is the first. It’s called Amish Diamond. It knit up quickly, taking only two movies to get to a finished project.

I like knitting dishcloths because the stakes are pretty low. The yarn is inexpensive, it doesn’t matter if I mess up, and this pattern was easy enough that I could concentrate on the movie when I needed to. They also make nice little add-ins to put with a gift for someone.

Thrift Food Plan report December 2017

I’m feeling rather conflicted about this month’s data.  I’ve got December down for five weeks, per the rules (December 30 and 31 fall in the fifth weekend, thus five weeks). However, when it came time to go shopping that weekend, I’d already spent my allotted $220 dollars, so I did an accounting trick and made it as if the purchase happened on 1/1/18.

I spent a lot of time deciding if I should do this or not.  Much more than was probably necessary.  In the end, I justified it thusly: nearly all groceries bought will be used to make food eaten in January.  I was shopping for two weeks, not one, so how to account for that? And finally, I wanted to “win.”

I didn’t, though I came close.  It’s a hollow victory through, because I know I skimmed off the Christmas budget this month.  For example, I hosted Christmas Eve Eve (celebrated on 12/13 this year) and made two kinds of soup, plus bread and dessert.  There was a lot of leftover soup.  It fed me breakfast for most of the rest of December. It’s not reflected in my groceries budget because years ago I made the decision to wrap holiday cooking into the Christmas budget.
One of the problems with December’s shopping, and the reason I essentially spent five weeks worth of groceries in four weeks, is cheese.  I’m a great lover of cheese and good cheese at WinCo is incredibly affordable. Thus, at the beginning of December I bought Parmesan. And feta. And goat cheese. And blue cheese. And mizithra.  As of December 31, I still have half the goat cheese and feta left and I haven’t even cracked open the blue and mizithra. I also impulse bought lunch meat (ham AND turkey) and had to work to get that eaten up before it went bad.

Not a good use of my grocery dollars.

I’m going to continue the Thrift Food Challenge into next year.  I’ve decided to cease this pantry-type shopping at WinCo, as it leads to cheese and other excesses.  Instead, I’m going to shop twice a month a WinCo having planned already what I will cook for the next two (or three) weeks.  I’ve been meal planning all along, but never with the intention of buying the majority of meal fixins at WinCo.

We shall see if that makes a difference.

Payoff! December report

In November, I paid my usual monthly payment of $103.67, plus an additional payment of $691.67, for a total of $795.34.  That additional payment is a new high point for a non-birthday month.

Of my nearly eight-hundred dollars, $12.51 was applied to interest, while $782.83 was applied to the principal. I did contact my company to see if I could have extra payments go only to the principal, and the answer was a lot of sentences that distilled down to: no.

I have a nice long list of this and that that added up to nearly seven-hundred dollars. There was extra money coming into my life: Matt paid me twice for food, I cashed in Fred Meyer Rewards, I found a dollar.  That added up to $155.96.  My original budget was $180 for this goal. To that I added the $185.34 that was left over after things had been budgeted for.  Plus another $30.00 for biking and walking to work. Then, at the end of the month I swept unused money from budget categories: groceries, joint bills, dining out.

I didn’t add anything to the list of things not bought in service of this goal.  It was a happily frugal month.  My only roadblock right now is being caught up in the idea that I will get a bonus from work.  We didn’t get bonuses last year, but because I pay the bills at work, I could see the profit and loss wasn’t going to support bonuses. This year is much healthier, P&L-wise, and so I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about something that might not happen. And I think at this writing (12/13) it’s not going to happen.  I think if we were getting bonuses, they would have announced it at the holiday party.  So I need to stop thinking about it.
Onward to December!

Side Yard Update: Spreading Sand.

To review. We’ve dug out four inches of dirt, we’ve put down two-ish inches of quarter minus crushed rock.  Now we are to the phase where we put down landscape cloth and spread the sand. Then we place the pavers.

Wish us luck.  I took no photos of the pavers being set into place. More photos coming soon.

Side Yard Update

As the side yard project continues, the back yard becomes increasingly shabby-looking.  This will perhaps increase the motivation to complete the back yard (scheduled for April-June 2018) in a timely fashion.

We excavated four inches of dirt.  This became a dirt pile in the back of the back yard, though I did give away some to a neighbor on Next Door.  Excavating falls firmly into the manual labor category.  I found that I was quite efficient at the process, thanks to my years of double digging. When we were done:  a mostly even slick of muddy ground.

Here’s the view from the sidewalk.  It was exciting to finish the digging part of the project. But that lead to….

Four cubic yards of quarter-minus crushed rock, and 3.5 cubic yards of sand.  Our neighbor Leo was kind enough to let them deliver to his driveway, as we have none. This also meant we needed to move all this stuff in one weekend.

We got the crushed rock spread and found we had this much left.  I put it up as free on Craigslist, had someone contact me within 30 minutes and then she showed up at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning to take it away.  She was quick.  That just left 3.5 cubic yards of sand to move.

We put down landscape cloth and piled it into the side yard.  It was a lot of work.  Next up will be putting the sand in a layer, not a pile, and putting pavers into place.