1, 2, 3

What is happening?  Are the forums freaking the heck out for everyone else?  Are the blogs?  My blog says I am logged out and I couldn't get logged in until I left a comment on Monkey Mama's blog and then it said I was logged in, but when I went to all entries or back to blogs I was logged out again, but then when I was able to get to my blog it has the control panel, so I am trying this to see if it will post.  And the forums page is just spazzing out, blinking like a disco light.  So let's see if this crazy thing works.

ETA:  So, it posts to my blog, but does not show up on the All Entries Page.  Hmm.

Let's see if it works from Edge.  Because it isn't working from Chrome.

Testing

Testing for date and time stamp accuracy.

Is anyone else having the issue of logging in, writing your blog entry, and it logging you out when you try to post it, thus evaporating your entry?  

Vacation was nice, but back to reality.

$309.15 Tithe

_400.00 Grocery Envelope

_300.00 Medical Fund

__75.00 Household Envelope

_100.00 Gas Money

_100.00 Adults' Blow Money

_130.00 DS's Allowance

__40.00 DD's Allowance

_401.00 Clothing for DD and DS

_400.00 Lawnmower/Yard Fund

_100.00 Car Maintenance Fund

_506.32 Emergency Fund

-599.87 Citi

-------------------

3061.34 Total Money Out

The EF deposit puts us at only needing $6,241.21 to hit our goal of 6 month's expenses.  I'd like to make that by the end of the year, but who knows?  It really depends on overtime.  But that was the choice we made when we decided to put 15% into retirement now instead of after the EF was funded to 6 months.

One good note is we have hit our out of pocket max on medical for the family so my colonoscopy/endoscopy, which was rescheduled to Monday, will be free.  And we still have $635.25 in our FSA which can go towards DD's glasses or dental.  I have $600 in the Medical Fund, too, and will continue to save for that towards next year's deductible and out of pocket max.

DS is going to need braces, but with what he has, he can do Invisalign or the like, which will be cheaper.  Not that anything is cheap when it comes to orthodontics.  After DD has her lumbar puncture on the 7th, I will look into getting a consult.  We will also be able to get our Covid vaccines after the 7th.  We'll be getting the Moderna one, even though it throws you down the stairs on the second dose if you have an overactive immune system and sometimes if you don't.  After doing my research, I still feel it is the best of the ones available for someone with autoimmune diseases.

I am still following a meal plan pretty closely to keep food costs down.  I haven't posted them for a while.  As you know my normal grocery budget is $400 every two weeks for an adult family of four.  My goal has been to save $100 out of that into my fund to buy a side of beef, or maybe a whole one, by the end of summer.  I also save any extra from that grocery budget that I didn't spend.  For the month of February I was able to save $242 into my Beef Fund, bringing the total to $1002 saved so far.

Day One:  BBQ Pork Ribs (Hak's Organic BBQ sauce), baked potatoes, Normandy vegetables, apples

Day Two:  Mexican Food, MIL's treat

Day Three:  Gluten Free Baked Lasagna, salad

Day Four:  4 Meat Meatloaf, fried potatoes, green beans, apples

Day Five:  Homemade gluten free Pizza with pepperoni, ham, sausage, red onions, bell peppers, and fresh basil, pineapple

Day Six:  Chicken stew with parsnips, sweet potatoes, potates, celery, onions, garlic, thyme, poultry seasoning, salt and pepper, broccoli, and oranges

Day Seven:  Beef Chuck Roast, baked sweet potatoes, green beans, bananas

We had a whopping $2.75 in savings account interest this month.  I've added it the Emergency Fund.

$11,322.98 Previous Balance

+__,__2.75 Interest Added

---------------------

$11,325.73 New Balance

I haven't been posting much as I've been under the weather.  Both literally and figuratively.  We had a foot and a half of snow dumped on us on the 13th and 14th and the extreme cold caused a rheumatoid arthritis flare and a fibromyalgia flare at the same time.  Then I came down with a cold which feels like it might be heading into a sinus infection, because that's just how I roll.

Not much has been happening here, anyway.  I've been planning and purchasing online for the garden.  I've ordered my seed potatoes and my sweet potatoes for the summer.  I am going to be growing beauxregard (I think that is how it is spelled) sweet potatoes.  They are a 90 day sweet potato that does good in the north and stores well.  Most sweet potatoes take 120 to 150 days, so are not good candidates for here unless you have a green house.  I have not grown them before.  I hope they do well, because you can get a lot if you plant them properly.

For potatoes I ordered Kennebec, Yukon gold, red La Soda, and Gold Rush.  Kennebec and La Soda are good for long-term storage.  Under the right conditions they can last until the next growing season and our basement has the right conditions.  The others will be eaten fresh first as well as canned.

I've got five thornless blackberry canes coming and 3 huckleberry bushes.  I am pretty excited about both.  We took out the thorny blackberries two years ago and haven't had any since.  And I've wanted huckleberry bushes for ages.  I love huckleberries and they make a fantastic jam.  I don't know if there will be much production the first year, they said some, but I'm not sure how big the bushes will be.  They may be quite small considering I paid $25 for 3.

I am hoping we will get the seed starting station set up this weekend.  The grow lights have arrived so then all I would need was an extension cord, the seed starting trays and the starting mix to get going.  I'd like to start my peas, spinach, bunching onions, and lettuce immediately.  Then shortly after that the brassicas (broccoli, kohlrabi, cauliflower, kale).  In about two weeks I can start my sweet meat squash, tomatoes, melons, and zucchini so they will be ready to plant out at the start of May.

Also this weekend DH needs to go to the industrial part of town and look for free pallets, since we will be building our beds out of pallet wood.  Once a couple of the beds are built we can start filling them with spoiled hay and free one year old horse manure.  Plus whatever is in the compost bins and any branch trimmings from the rose bushes and apple trees (once it is warm enough to prune them).  Then we'll top them off with good garden soil.

My method of gardening is a cross between hugelkulture, permacutlture, raised beds, French biointensive, and lasagna gardening.  It works for me, but it takes a lot of biological input to build it all from scratch.  It's going to cost a lot to get it going, but after that it'll be down to just the cost of seeds each year and compost which I make a lot of myself.  And I can get as much free well-rotted horse manure as I need from the stables around here.  Which is great, since I no longer have rabbit manure available to me.

Building the fence and buying the cattle panels is what is going to cost a lot, but in the end it will all be worth it.

As you all know by now, we garden.  And it saves us a lot of money.  For the cost of a large packet of green bean seeds, I grow and can enough green beans for the whole year.  I grow enough corn for fresh eating and some for the freezer to have later in the year.  I grow and freeze enough zucchini most years to have it once a week all year.  And I grow enough tomatoes to do 52 pints of diced canned.

That's all well and good, but I need to grow enough for making tomato sauce and ketchup.  I need to grow enough broccoli for the freezer.  While I had a good potato harvest, it was not enough to get us through a year without buying.  And I skipped onions and long-storing winter squash last year.  And the amount of strawberries I grew was not enough.  Well, this year I need to grow enough of that, too.  And this year we'll be doing our own seed starting.

But first we needed to increase the size of the garden.  And we needed to start clean up on last year's garden.  We currently have a 20 x 48 foot garden, with 2 old broken down raised beds.  We need to finish tearing those out and then put black plastic over the entire area to kill the weeds.  Then we are going to bulid raised beds out of free pallet wood and use linseed oil to help preserve the wood, since it is not toxic.

And we needed to clear a new 20 x 20 foot plot just for the potatoes.  So that got weed eated, raked up, and then we put down black plastic on a 10 x 20 foot section.  We need to finish putting it down over the rest of that area as soon as we get another sunny day.

My son and I managed to get the corn stalks from last year pulled out as the ground was finally soft enough.  So our weed pile to take to the green dump is quite high.  The next nice day, the bean poles, vines, and strings need to come down, too, so we can weed eat that area and cover it all with black plastic.

It takes longer than you think to get the plastic put down properly and DH has to be available to help and not working.  At least the days are long enough to have his help for an hour or so after he is done with work for the day now.  And it will only keep lasting longer so stuff can really start getting done.  Presuming we have no freezes or snow in the meanwhile.

If you would like to see our progress I made a youtube video. 

Okay, so we have the actual numbers with the paycheck today and it was actually a couple hundered less than DH had calculated, but I am still able to make it work.  I have readjusted my 2021 budget template.  This is what went out today:

$271.48 Tithe

_500.00 Utilities

_400.00 Grocery Envelope

_300.00 Medical Fund

__75.00 Household Envelope

_280.00 Monthly Family Chiropractic Plan

_115.17 Internet

__65.90 Garbage

_150.00 Car Insurance Fund

_100.00 Gas Money Envelope

_100.00 Spending Money Adults

_100.00 Gift/Christmas Envelope

_100.00 Clothing Envelope

__90.00 Allowances Kids

__101.10 Emergency Fund

-----------------

$2747.65

That's more that went out than came in, but I had half the  money set aside for the garbage from last month's budget to cover that since we are only charged every two months.

I forgot to add interest income to the last EF update.  Even though my account balances keep going up, my interest income keeps going down.  It's sad.

$10,656.32 Previous Balance

+__,__2.28 Interest Added

----------------

$10,658.60 New Balance

Since 11/20/20 the retirement account has gone up $929.03, $220 of which was contributions.

$28,777.01 401K

+11,071.78 IRA

------------------

$39,848.76 Total Retirement (minus company stock)

$151.24 to go to hit $40K.  I hope things continue to climb so we can make up some more of the lack of progress that there was due to the Covid lockdowns earlier in the year.  And I hope the new lockdowns don't make it all tank again.

$318.59 Tithe

_400.00 Grocery Envelope

_300.00 Medical Fund

__75.00 Household Envelope

__71.99 Life Insurance DH

__60.46 Life Insurance Me

_100.00 Car Maintenance Envelope

_120.00 Allowances

_100.00 Emergency Fund

1600.00 Mattress Fund

-----------------

$3146.04 Total Money Out