Fun Friday, Busy Weekend

Friday was a very good day of school.

First off, I had 8th grade music ensemble in the morning. Last year, this was something I would have dreaded, but I really like my 8th grade band students this morning. They are a fun, enthusiastic group. The only bad thing about the period was the 2nd fire drill of the week, which, for some reason, at my school, takes 15 minutes!

I only had two classes, a 5th grade and an 8th grade. The 5th grade was okay... a little chatty though. The 8th grade was very hyper and chatty, but pretty good for an 8th grade class. This is a pretty good group of kids, who I seem to have a good rapport with. They are just very talkative. I think at this point, the best thing to do with this particular class is work with what I've got. They are still participating, just noisily. Despite the noise, I had fun with this group. That's the first time in a while I've said that about an 8th grade class.

Right after this class, I sat down to check my e-mail, when Arthur, one of the computer support guys stopped by my room. I figured he was going to talk to me about having the yearbook software installed on the computers. Turns out, he told me that the ActivBoard was in, and I could go and get it from the computer lab.

So, I went to the lab with him, got it, installed the ActivStudio software on my computer, and played with it. It is really cool! It is basically a white board that hooks to my laptop. You project whatever is on your computer screen on to it, and then you can digitally "write" and create presentations on the board. There is software that comes with it for doing presentations, which I will use sometimes. The best thing is that the board simply interfaces through the mouse. That means, whatever movements you make on the board can work in any program, just like a mouse. I was running Finale, and entering notes from the board. I think I could do some cool lessons with this with music composition.

The good thing about Day 6 is, after those two classes, I am pretty much done. I have some lessons in the afternoon. However, they are 8th grade lessons, and 8th graders never seem to show up for them. I don't know why--when I was in 8th grade, I would've taken any excuse to get out of class. I am not going to make a big deal out of it, though. I didn't have these kids from the start, so I never really got do doing sequential stuff with them in lessons. None of them have a lesson book or anything like that. We basically just go over band music, which is pretty much redundant to what we do in rehearsals and music ensemble. I mean, every bit of practice helps, but in this case, it isn't completely necessary.

Well, all this free time meant lots of time to play with the ActivBoard. I also took a look at two trumpets that new students brought in, and I got my band schedule for next week posted.

When I got home from school, I started making the shopping list. Meggie had a growth scan at the hospital. I usually go to these, but the latest appointment they have is at 3:30, and there is no way I can make that. I am not really happy with the antenatal testing part of the hospital. They have terrible hours, and kinda gave Meg and attitude when she pointed out how difficult it is for someone who works to schedule things. I guess they figure that health comes first, but when you are trying to bank sick days for post labor, you don't want to waste anything. I can understand taking off work if you have a one-time procedure, like a surgery or something. But Meg needs to go to these things every 3 weeks, and then more frequently later. That will be several sick days used up.

I was further annoyed to find that Meg, after trying to leave the parking lot, had to go all the way back into the hospital to get a parking token. We've been there at least 4 times now, and the gate always lifted when we left the parking lot. Now, apparently you need a token. What is the point of the token anyway?!? Are people really going to abuse the hospital's parking lot?!? I think it is ridiculous that they even have the gates. What is the point!! And everyone (including someone who pulled up behind her and had to back up to let her out) gave her attitude because there is a sign that says you needed a token. We never needed one before! I am glad I wasn't there, because I would've been angry. I usually try to keep my cool and avoid confrontation, but between the crazy scheduling expectations, and the parking situation, I would have lost it. I am sometimes just completely disgusted at the health care system. Between the terrible hours, health insurance, prescription drug prices, and red tape, it is amazing that anyone ever gets help. I find it unbelievable that people who are in the business of healing and curing can make it so difficult. Something needs fixed. And that problem is not with the people who do the healing either. Doctors, nurses, technicians, etc., are generally very friendly, caring, and helpful people. However, call your insurance company or have to deal with a rude receptionist, and suddenly things are quite as helpful. I can't offer a good solution, because I don't completely understand the health care system, but there must be an easier way.

Anyway, despite my annoyance with the hospital, and health care in general, the appointment went well. Baby D is healthy, and growing at the correct rate. Below is an ultrasound of her face. The two dark circles in the top center are her eyes. Kinda creepy looking actually, since all you can really make out is a skull. The first picture is the original ultrasound. The 2nd picture I annotated using ActivStudio. The yellow highlighted areas are her eyes, pink=nose, blue=teeth, green=hands. You can read more about Baby D in an update on her blog.




So, while Meggie and Baby D were getting scanned, I was making the list. The whole Sam's Club experiment definitely isn't going to start working this month. We are going to be well over our limit. But, we ended up buying things we needed this month, that we won't need again for several months, so after a while, we should start to see results.

Meggie got home from school, we made salmon on the grill for dinner, and then went to my parents to drop off some folding chairs for the shower on Sunday. The original plan was to just drop them off, and then go shopping. Well, we ended up hanging around my parents for a while, and by the time we left, we were both too sleepy to go shopping. My parents living room was pretty much ripped apart. They are going all-out on getting ready for the shower. This included a fresh coat of paint in the living room, sanding and repainting the trim, and installing quarter-round. I think this is probably the first time a power-sander was involved in preparing for a shower!

When we finally got home, we pretty much headed straight to bed.

Saturday, September 23

I woke up early this morning, with that awesome feeling you get when you think it is a school morning, and then you suddenly remember it's the weekend. I then went back to sleep, and a combination of Max and the alarm clock woke me up at 9 or so.

I got up, got showered, and made breakfast for us. We then went to Sam's and Wal-Mart for our grocery shopping, came home, had lunch, and then got to work. Cait, meg's mom, and meg's grandmom were all coming today, and we really weren't sure when, and the house desperately needed cleaned. I did the floors, and Meggie straightened. Cait arrived soon after lunch, and offered to help clean by dusting. We also got word that Mom and Grandmom wouldn't be arriving till 5 or so.

After doing the floors, I blew all of the leaves off of the front lawn. Then, Max and I took the last swim of the summer. This was more out of necessity. The pool steps have to come out of the pool when you winterize it. You aren't supposed to winterize the pool till it is cooler out. Well, in mid-October when I go to close the pool, I guarantee that I am not going to want to get in it, and this is the only way to get the steps out.

So, I took Max into the pool, played with him a while, vacuumed (clogging the hose/filter several times with the nine-trillion acorns in the pool), and then removed the steps. It was kinda sad, because we really had a lot of fun with the pool, and it is weird to think that we won't be going in again until next spring. I'm sure Max is even more disappointed. The vacuuming got the filter dirty, so I also had to backwash too. I finished all of this right around five, and then got a shower. While I was in the shower, Grandmom and Mom got here.

Grandmom took us all out to Peter's, where Mom had the servers (and the entire restaraunt) sing to me. Very embarrassing, but I appreciate the effort. Grandmom wanted us to splurge a little, since she was treating, so I got the tortellini alfredo, and I have some leftovers now for tomorrow.

After dinner, we all came back to our house, and we gave Grandmom a tour of the nursery. Cait is staying the night here, and Grandmom and Mom are staying in a hotel up in Mt. Laurel on 73. So, I gave them directions, and they went on there way.

I got my weekend's worth of school work done--band update letters and a calendar for October. I did money stuff, and am currently blogging. Man, this is a long post.

I am sure to have another post tomorrow night on the shower tomorrow. Until then...

Weekend

Okay, so I got lazy about blogging over the weekend. Here is my weekend so far...

Friday, September 15

A Day 1 at school, I am starting to see all of my students for a second time. Most of my classes were very good. I like Day 1, because I don't have any 7th or 8th grade classes. The big deal of today was the 4th grade instrument demo. Joe, the rep from the Local Music Store that services our school, came and brought the instruments. He is a woodwind player, so he demonstrated the flute, clarinet, and sax (WAY better than I demonstrated the brass). Then, I demonstrated the trumpet and trombone. We decided to leave percussion out of the demonstration, as Joe suggested not to encourage any more 'drummers,' than the usual bunch to sign-up. I am thinking, for next year, of starting anyone who wants to play "Drums," "Percussion," etc. on bells. The Local Music Store offers bell kits that the kids can rent. It would my rehearsal planning much easier, and would weed out the kids that only want to play drums so they can bang on something. Then, later, I would introduce the other percussion instruments (snare drum, bass drum, etc.), since the rhythm-reading and technique skills would already be learned from simply learning the bells. It's too late to try it this year, but I'll definitely do it next year.

Meggie came to pick me up, and then, the WEEKEND officially started! On the way home, I stopped at the bank and deposited my check. It was still the same amount as last year, as our new collective bargaining agreement hasn't been ratified yet. It is also the last time I will have to stop at the bank, as our next paychecks will be direct-deposited (It's about time my district caught up with the 21st century)!

We came home, had a snack, made the shopping list, and headed to Peter's. I got the patty melt, Meggie got the fried chicken platter. It was insanely busy there for some reason, so we had to wait a while, but the wait was worth it. If you are ever on the Black Horse Pike in Williamstown, you NEED to go to this diner.

We then headed up to Wal-Mart, did our shopping, came home, put everything away, and collapsed into bed at 9:30! Some exciting Friday night, huh?

Saturday, September 16

Our living alarm clock, also known as Max, woke us up yesterday morning. We got up and showered, and headed to Meg's school. Since there was construction at her school this summer, and every one's rooms had to be completely cleared up, they decided to open up the school on Saturday this weekend, so teachers could get into their rooms to finish setting up before Monday. Meg brought me along, and I helped by decorating the higher parts of her room. She made it very easy for me, by laying out what had to go where. Meg got her stuff set up for Monday. We ended up staying there for a while, as it took time to complete all of this.

We headed home, and had lunch. Afterwards, Meg ran to Wal-Mart (or at least I thought), to get me some stuff for my birthday. While she was gone, I cleaned up the bedroom, brought the dirty clothes downstairs, and started the laundry. After starting the laundry, I decided to see if I could fix our squeaky dryer. For about the past month or so, our dryer makes this terrible metal-on-metal squeaking noise as it turns. Years ago, my parents had the same problem with their dryer, and temporarily fixed it by rubbing candle wax against the shaft that the drum turns on. I figured I'd give this a try, so I started to take the dryer apart, only to find out that I wouldn't get access to this part of the dryer.

So, here I am , with the dryer in the middle of the laundry room, and my tools out, when I hear Max making all kinds of noise at the front door. It was my parents. So, I let them in, and explained the dryer problem, and my dad started to look at it. Soon after they arrived, Meg came home to find us all in the laundry room, with the dryer half apart. My parents then told me there was something in the van for me. I went out to the van, to find my birthday present, a chest freezer! Now, I was surprised by this. I knew that I was getting a chest freezer for my birthday, but I didn't expect to get it now. Here, Meg had met my parents at Sam's Club, so they could pick up the freezer. Now of course, the freezer's destination was the laundry room, which was now all in pieces. So, I put the dryer back together, and my dad helped me bring the freezer in. They took off, I read the instruction manual, and plugged it in.

Afterwards, I got started on school work. My goal this weekend was to make and print personalized band reminder cards for all of my band students. These cards contain the usual days and times for lessons and rehearsals. I also included this year, a calendar that high-lights the days they need to bring their instrument to school. Using mail-merge, I was able to complete this job.

Meg and I were going to make salmon for dinner, only to discover that the frozen fillets we bought had to be defrosted first, so we ended up doing burgers on the grill. After dinner, I made two copies of a video a fellow teacher had given me about instruments of the orchestra. I made one copy for Meg, and other for myself. While copying these, I kept up with the laundry, and made a CD of upbeat music appropriate for school that another fellow teacher had asked me to make. I am pretty much done my schoolwork now. I just have to fold and sort all of the band cards I printed yesterday.

We went to bed, where I read and sang to Baby D (through Mommy's belly). They said you should do this, as it helps the baby get used to Daddy's voice. We also need to start playing music through headphones for the baby.

Sunday, September 17
Max woke us up again this morning. We had breakfast, then I did money stuff. Now, I am blogging. After this, I will get dressed into work clothes, and mow the front lawn. Tonight, we are going to my parents, and having my birthday dinner. Tomorrow is technically my birthday, however, I have school, then Back-to-School night (yeah, pretty crappy birthday). So, today is kinda like my birthday celebration. Mom is making tortellini for dinner, and Meggie is making me my favorite kind of cake- yellow cake with white icing.

Oh, I have been meaning to post a bunch of pictures. I will try to remember to do this tonight. I'll take one of the freezer, as well as the dresser we got for the nursery. Also, I am sure we will have some fun pictures of my birthday dinner.

Lots to do, gotta go!

Oh So Tired

Whew... All I can say is that next week is going to be a LONG week... not because school is going badly or something, but just because I am tired after only 2 days of school!

The schedule always takes some getting used to in the beginning of the year. Yesterday, my feet were killing me at the end of the day. Today, it is my back, for some reason. It just keeps hurting more and more as the day goes on. Right now, I have one of those heating patch things on it now, and I just took some ibuprofen, so hopefully that will help.

Today was also a good day at school. I got a lot done, and had my first 7th and 8th grade classes of the year. The 8th graders are going to be a challenge once again, but I am starting strict. I dove right into assigning seats and explaining my rules and expectations. They didn't seem happy about it, but who really likes rules. I don't care anyway, it's my class, my rules. I am not going to have my class turn into the attention show from certain students like last year. I already had to give one demerit. I gave it to someone who received several from me last year. Every time he gets one, he argues with me, and I would argue back. This time, I just ignored his arguing, which made life a lot easier, and I kept my cool. I plan on keeping this up--I think it will make a much easier year.

The rest of my classes were good too--no major problems. The nicest thing so far about the start of school is my car rides. Having the Zen has allowed me to listen to stuff that I haven't heard in years. In the beginning of the week, I was doing a "random play all" from all 3500 songs. At one point, I was listening to the stupid Queen Latifa (sp?) version of "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago. That inspired me to listen to the soundtrack from the movie, which put me in a showtunes mood. So, I've been spending the last few days listening to the complete Les Miserables. 3 CD's worth, so it took some time to get through it all. I was obsessed with the show when I was in high school, but I don't think I completely got the story line, so it was neat to hear it again. The only problem was, I don't think I've ever cried so much from listening to music. I forgot that most of the major characters in the show die tragically. And setting a sad death to music just makes it worse. I'm driving to/from school bawling when Fantine... Eponine... Gavrosche... Javert... Val Jean (I think I got them all) die--hoping none of the passing motorists notice. I gotta find something more upbeat to listen to next week.

After getting home from school, Meggie and I had a delicious dinner... homemade cheesesteaks with sauteed mushrooms. Then, we stopped by my parents, so I could endorse the loan check for my sister, and then went to Sam's (had to pick up a couple of things), and then Wal-Mart. We ran into Cathy (a friend of Meg's), and her husband, John, who is a band director at a local high school. He has a small staff, and needs help, so he invited me to come and help out if I was feeling like I wanted to do some band stuff one night or two. I might take him up on it. Right now, I am definitely NOT missing marching band. If I were doing band, I would still be at a football game right now. I would not have come home from school, and I'd probably have a practice and/or a competition tomorrow. I never had any problem with this schedule in high school/college, but now that I am getting older, it is definitely not for me. It's funny, because I always wanted to be a marching band director. I think that is because, in my high school, marching band was the pinnacle organization of the music department. It made sense to me that marching band-directing was a high-ranking position. I have since learned that people can have meaningful, successful careers as middle and elementary school band directors. And, you can do this, and still get to have weekends. But, if I get bored, I might call up John and ask if he needs help. It would be neat to be the extra guy that comes in to offer advice.

So, after talking to Cathy and John, we finished up our shopping, and then got home. After this, I'm going to bed. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Money Woes

Much of yesterday morning was spent worrying about money... again. This topic seems to come up a lot.

After getting up at 6, I had breakfast, and then got down to money stuff. I put in all of the receipts, printed out our category spending report, and then plugged everything into our budget. I discovered that, once again, we were over-budget, WAY over-budget for the month of August. I began to ask myself "why?," since it always feels like we are saving, but on paper, we are not.

Well, first off, I was expecting my stipend for writing the band show for the HS band I write for. I usually get it in August, but it didn't come yet. I'll have to e-mail the director, to find out what the deal is. The other thing was, and here's where the guilt comes in... my Zen. I was depending on that money to buy the Zen. Well, I bought it, and then the money never came in the month. So I went, "okay, let's pretend I did get the money--how would the budget work out then?" No better, we were still in the hole for the month. Just a little bit over here and there on a bunch of categories, but enough to break the budget for the month.

I took a deep breath, and said, "Okay, we just gotta be more careful in September." Then I remembered that I have been saying this a lot lately. Then, I actually took a look at how much we had saved this summer. It was a little bit, but nowhere near the amount of savings we need to live while Meg is home. And, it doesn't look like we are going to be able to save a whole lot more.

I felt like I had failed. I felt so optimistic about all of this working out months ago when I planned it. Then, I began to ask, "where did the money go?" And it was pretty easy to figure out. Our beautiful deck came with a price tag of $2,300. It never felt like that much, because we were buying things for it slowly, but when you add up all of those Home Depot receipts, that's the grand total. We overspent on groceries and food this summer, although we are already in the process of fixing that. I poured a lot of money into the pool. We poured money here and there into stuff for the house. It was very obvious what had happened. We made a budget, didn't follow it, and now we have to come up with plan B.

I broke this bad news to Meg, and after the initial shock, began to brainstorm. Meg thought of the idea of just going back a month early, but this probably isn't possible, since her sub has already been hired. We decided to put an ultimatum on spending. Only buy what is absolutely needed. Nothing more. If we're bored, we'll find something free to do. We also learned that we have a tax credit coming our way, just for having a kid this year. That will help. And if things get really bad, we can always dip into our summer pay savings, and repay that money with the stipends we earn at the end of next school year. That means sacrificing any home improvement projects for next summer, and the possible vacation with my family to OCNJ for the week.

We also resurrected the idea of starting our lesson studio. We tried it at the end of last school year, but only half-heartedly. I had one student, a kid of one of the people in the handbell choir. We kept up lessons for a while, but ours and their schedule were so busy, we had to keep canceling lessons. I think we might have actually had maybe 5 or 6 lessons or so.

But, we figured out, that if we can actually get some students and maintain them, that it could bring in some extra money... to use for the fun stuff that we wouldn't otherwise get to do. Here is our plan. A going rate for lessons is $15/half hour. We figured we would charge $50 for a month's-worth of lessons. That equals out to about $12.50 a lesson ($10 if the month has five lessons in it). $50 a month sounded like a lot to me (we could never afford that), but anyone who had the money for lessons should find the rate competitive. If we each get 1 student, that's and extra $100 a month. Enough for a few dinners out. If we each get 2 students, that's $200, and you can do the math for anymore. It sounds great, but I am not that optimistic that we will get even that many students. We live in a blue-collar community, and I don't see many people having an extra $50 a month. But, hopefully a few will. Meg made posters, and we are going to put them up everywhere we are allowed. Meg is also going to call the local band directors, and send a letter with some business cards. It would be nice if this works, to actually have money outside of our tightly budgeted income.

Feeling better about money stuff, we had lunch, and then I got to work on more school stuff. I got a bunch more done, but not enough to satisfy me. I decided today would be my last day to do school work this summer. Hurricane Ernesto is making its though the Delaware Valley, and therefore the weather is crappy. It's a good day to stay in and work on school stuff. The weather is supposed to be a little nicer on Sunday and Monday, so I will relax those days, before the school routine starts again on Tuesday (still not bummed yet for some reason... I hope it stays that way).

After the school work yesterday, Meg and I went to Peter's for dinner. The great thing about a diner is that you can eat a good meal for relatively cheap. And and Peter's, you really get your money's-worth. I had soup, a cheeseteak, fries, and a cannoli--Meg had fried chicken, a baked potato, salad, onion rings, and coleslaw. The total for all of this was $20. Our waitress was really good though, so I gave her a bigger tip than usual-- $6. I am a firm believer in the minimum of 20%, unless you have really crappy service (in which case, I leave the standard 15%). 20% is easy to figure out. Just move the decimal point over, and then double. Like this: let's say your bill came to $25.72. To figure out the tip you'd: (1) move the decimal point over: $2.57, and (2) multiply by 2: 5.14. Then I usually round up to the nearest dollar, so in this case, $6. It always pays to leave good tips at a restaurant you go to a lot, because, chances are, you'll have them again. And as a former waitress, Meg will tell you that this will make a difference.

After Peter's, we went to Wal-Mart, to do the first half of our new shopping system. We got out of Wal-Mart only having spent $50. Today, we are going to do the Sam's part of the shopping. This will be an expensive trip, but it will be a lot of stuff that will last us for a month or longer. We won't know until the end of the month whether this new shopping strategy will make a difference, but I sure hope it does.

After shopping, I was going to get more schoolwork done, but ended up watching 2 episodes of Star Trek: TNG, and surfing the web on my laptop. Ah, the summer has ended... let the procrastinating begin!!!

End of Summer Improvements

Quite a busy day, but now begins the season of shorter blog posts. I am going to go to school tomorrow to start setting up my room. Voluntary, of course, but I am still of the mentality that this is more a way of life then a job I'm getting paid for. I personally think it is a noble attitude, but I know many of my colleagues would disagree... "Don't give them anything extra!" Anyway, it is past my bedtime (10 PM--HA!), and I am blogging anyway.

Today was a productive day. I got done the following (including pictures)

• Some more school work

• Helping Meggie install new carpet in the pantry and linen closet in place of the gross stuff that was in there.

• Went up to church to check out the new closet they are relocating the handbell equipment to (more on that when I have time)


• Got rid of touchier lamp in living room (not baby-safe, and to make room for a baby swing) and rehung pictures to make up for the missing vertical space.

• Rearranged the laundry room so that I can put shelves in there for our Sam's Club purchase.

• Went to Wal-Mart AGAIN, but buy shelves for the laundry room, and a second set for the new handbell closet.


• Got my boxes of school stuff out of the crawlspace to take to school tomorrow

Okay, well it is now REALLY past my bedtime, because it took forever to post these pictures. I learned tonight that you can't post pictures from Picasa with the new blogger beta. At least not yet anyway. So I was trying to insert them manually, and it was taking forever, and then I realized after uploading 2 that you have to shrink them first, or it sends the whole 5MP picture. I guess Picasa does this automatically when you hit "BlogThis." Really gotta get to bed now. Enjoy the pics!

More Grocery Experiments

After blogging yesterday, I woke up Meggie, and we got ready to go to Wal-Mart to make our list of prices.

We worked it just like we did yesterday at Sam's Club. I took our list, and we went through every aisle, writing down the prices of everything we bought.

Then, after we got home, I sat down, put everything into a spreadsheet, and then discovered that, yes, we did do the right thing. Most of the products that we compared led towards Sam's Club. Now, it's good, but not as good as it looks on paper, because a lot of the stuff in the Sam's Club list are things that you only buy once every couple of months, or maybe even once a year (like the 3-gallon pack of bleach). However, I think the meat prices alone made the card very worth it.

After comparing prices, I toyed around with the spreadsheet some more, and gave it the same functionality it had before. I put in what we need, it tells us how much it will cost. My goal this morning is to put in our Sam's Club order for the month. Hopefully it is not too much. It could take a few months to tweak this new shopping system to make it work, but I have faith that it will work in the long-run.

I worked on this all afternoon, so when I finished, we got ready to go to my parents. Dinner was fun, and as usual, I laughed a lot. I usually laugh a lot at my parents. My sister is crazy funny sometimes, and usually the combination of her, with my brother, can be very funny. Probably the moment I laughed the most was when we somehow all started chanting, "Ohmmmm..." at Scamp to calm him down. While we were in the middle of doing it, I burst out laughing when I realized how ridiculous it was. I guess you had to be there. Anyway...

Some other news I forgot.

Our new camera came in. I don't like it as much as the old camera, but it will work. Apparently they don't sell the old version anymore, and this was the next best thing they had. It goes up to 5MP, (the old only went up to 4MP), and it has a few other features that the old one didn't have. My biggest complaint right now, is that it takes really dark videos, and I can't find any way to adjust the darkness. Guess I'll have to turn on a light or something.

Sorry there haven't been pictures in a while--there hasn't been a whole lot to take pictures of. Next Sunday is "Crab Day," an annual celebration held at my Mommom and Poppop's house, so I'll definitely have some pictures from that.

After my parents, I went to bed right away, because my plan was to get up at 6 AM. Well, it didn't happen. I heard my first snooze go off at 5:33, and don't remember anything after that. I love my alarm clock because it has a gentle-wake feature (the alarm starts soft, then gradually gets louder), but they put the 'Off' button right next to the 'Snooze," button. Bad idea, because I think I keep hitting the wrong button in my sleepy state. Maybe I should look for a new alarm clock. Give up snoozing, you say? Never. I'm addicted to the snooze button!

So, I'm blogging now. I'm gonna plug the Sam's Club order into the grocery spreadsheet, and then get cracking on schoolwork.

Grocery Experiments

I got up right at 7 yesterday, blogged, and then got right into schoolwork and such. I created several rhythm practice worksheets. Each worksheet contains 1 measure examples that are meant to be repeated. I'll play music with a strong beat, and call out the # of the example, and the students will clap it. I'll probably turn them into transparencies, or maybe use them on the ACTIVBoard that I will be able to use this year. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with them. I am thinking of using Google Pages to create a website where I can share the teacher resources that I make. When I finally get around to doing that, I'll post them there.

I worked on that kind of stuff until lunch. Meggie and I had pizza, and finished up the 5th Season of Seinfeld. We will have one more season that we have yet to watch. Then, we have to move on to The Simpsons. We have up through Season 8 now, and I have only watched up through Season 5.

After lunch, Meggie and I went BACK to Sam's Club, this time with our grocery shopping list. We walked around the whole store, and wrote down the price and the quantity of everything that we might possibly buy there. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but it was actually fun. Meg and I were commenting that we feel like little kids in Sam's Club because everything is supersized. There were also tons of free food samples. The prices seem to be really good, but we still need to do the same thing at Wal-Mart, and make some decisions about what we are going to buy where. Sam's Club only carries certain brands, and we still might be better off getting the generic brand at Wal-Mart for some things. We'll have to check it out. It seems like an unusual Saturday outing, but: it was free, it was fun, it will potentially save us money on our grocery bill!

When we got home, Max was acting a little rambunctious, so I suggested we go S-W-I-M-M-I-N-G. Apparently Max knows how to spell now, because I got all excited when I said this. The weather was kinda yucky though, so I ended up letting him in and just watching him from the deck. Then we had dinner, and afterwards, I got some more school work done.

I developed an updated lesson plan format, and then changed gears back to groceries. Now that we are Sam's Club members, we are going to plan our meals by the month. We usually plan them by the week, but if we do it once a month, then we can go to Sam's Club at the start of the month and see what we need to get and store/freeze. Meg and I are discussing rearranging the laundry room so that we can fit shelves in there to store all of this stuff. Eventually, we want to get a chest freezer for down there too.

I'm very excited about all of this. When my Grandmom & Grandpop used to live in Stratford, my Grandpop had this neat workshop off the back of the garage. Along one wall, he had a workbench, some machinery, and a bunch of tools and stuff. Along the other wall, there was what I called the "store." They had shelves with all of this food. To a little kid, it looked like a grocery store aisle. Basically, my grandmother bought lots of sale items and stored them there (I don't think they had wholesale clubs back then). I always thought this was really neat, and now we are talking about doing the same thing. Also, when I used to work at Cinemark (a local movie theatre), I was always fascinated by the stock room for the concession stand. Now we will have a stock room. Now, if we could work on a popcorn popper (which they did have at Sam's Club, I might add), and a soda fountain, we'd be set.

So my task for the rest of the evening was making a calendar on the computer to put our meals on, and actually planning out the meals. It was a little tough to think of 31 different meals, but I made it simpler by thinking of 'theme days.' For example, Saturday is Fish, Sunday is my parents, Monday is pasta, Tuesday is Mexican, Wednesday is chicken, Thursday is pork, and Friday is either the diner or beef. Once I got that down, it was easy to plan everything else out.

After that I went to bed, got up at 7 (still not by the alarm clock, I really gotta do something about that), had breakfast, and blogged. Today we are going to Wal-Mart to complete the other half of our price comparisons. I'll blog about that, plus dinner at my parents', later tonight.

In the Club

7 AM didn't really happen yesterday morning. Missed the alarm again, but only by like a half-hour or so.

I got up at 7:30, had breakfast, and read the news. Then, Meg and headed to the hospital for our monthly growth scan.

Baby D is doing fine. She was 2 lbs 9 oz right now. Her growth rate is where it should be. She is breech (upside down--or is it right-side up? Let's say, feet down) right now, but this is not a concern until the end, as she is still able to move around a lot. She was much more cooperative this time, and the technician was able to get all of the measurements she needed. No pictures though, she was very 'business-like,' and did not print any.

After the scan, we had lunch, and watched some more of Seinfeld: Season 5. After lunch, I started to make the grocery list, and then got involved in a tangent that took pretty much the rest of the afternoon

As it is the end of the month, our grocery budget was low. I wanted to make it a goal this month to find a way to stick to it, since we always go over. So, what I did was start by making a simple spreadsheet of everything we needed. Then, I went through old receipts, and put in prices for the things we needed, since we pretty much buy the same things. Then, I had it total up everything. This way, I could make our list according to our budget. This seemed like a good thing, and I got the idea to switch to making our regular shopping lists in Calc (OpenOffice.org's version of Excel). So I added to this list everything we ever buy, and went through old receipts, adding prices for as many things as I can find. Then, when you make the list, all you have to do is type a number in the "Qty" column, and it totals up everything you are going to buy, including sales tax! Pretty cool. So now the problems: I ended up with a list of like 200 things that we could possibly buy. And the idea is that we can continue to add to this list. Well, it seemed silly to have to print out a few pages for one trip, when really, we probably only by 30 or so items in a trip. So, I found out a way to filter out all of the items we didn't need for the shopping trip. Great! Now, I can work it, but my next problem was to make it more user-friendly for Meg. I was trying to record macros (small programs to automate tasks) to make things faster. I was able to successfully program one to sort the list by aisle and one to clear out all of the numbers in the "Qty" column to start a new list. I was working on one to automate the filtering process, and I just could not get it to work. I posted my problem to the OpenOffice.org Forum, and found out you need to know some advanced stuff about programming language to do this. I think it would be cool to program stuff, but apparently I know nothing. I was looking over help guides to do this, and I might as well be reading German. So, I gave up on that. But the rest of the file is cool, and should make grocery shopping easier, and help us stick to our budget.

Speaking of groceries, I am now part of the "club," Sam Walton's club that is. My mom has been a member of BJ's (another wholesale club) for a while, and I have always been impressed with what you could buy in bulk. However, I never wanted to join a wholesale club before, because A) I thought the membership was really expensive, and B) I didn't think we'd be able to use everything we bought in bulk. Well, I found out the membership was only $40 a year for two cards!

So, we decided to check it out last night. Just on the meat prices alone, we will definitely save more than $40 a year. Plus, they have diapers, and a lot of other stuff that can easily be bought in bulk.

So, we signed up. I've got my own Sam's Club card now-- Complete with bad ID picture.



After Sam's Club, we went over to Wal-Mart (boy, the Walton family can eat tonight), and did our regular grocery shopping, and actually were UNDER the amount that I had predicted. Woo-Hoo, we actually stuck to our grocery budget this month!

We got home, and I toyed around more the the grocery program, and then gave up and went to bed.