June was a fairly relaxed month in the finance realm, with one exception. I didn't pay enough attention during the middle of the month, when everything that is going out, goes out. Ended up having to make a transfer from savings. That was heartbreaking, as we haven't had to do that in months. However I was able to put it back fairly quickly. We had to make some minor car repairs, as well as renew the City Parking Sticker, so expenses there were up. We also had to take one of the cats in for regular check ups, so we didn't have as much extra as we would have liked at the end of the month. All in all we didn't make much progress, but we also didn't slide back any, so I'm satisfied.

Next month, we will (hopefully) have all our Credit Cards paid off. (We may use one to rent a car for our trip to Oregon.) We will hopefully see our net worth cross the $0 line next month, or the month after. We're very excited.

And, sometimes, they come back a zombies, and you have to hit them in the head with a shovel several times before they'll stay down. What can I say, I've been a slacker this month. I've done very little of what my goals are, and I've found other bad habits creeping back. Here are the problems as I see them right now.

1. I did not set solid, measurable goals.
2. I did not set goals that I can share with, and get help with from, TBWITWW
3. I have allowed myself to be comfortable with things as-they-are rather than as-I-want-them-to-be
4. The weather has been sucktastic

1) Because the goals are not specific and measurable, I have no good way to track them. Which makes it easy to take a "close-enough" attitude towards the goals I have. For the remainder of the month, I am going to ride the stationary bike a minimum of 20 minutes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

2) This is directly related to #1 as it's hard to encourage me to meet my goals when they're not specific. My secondary goal was general house keeping. Could that goal be less specific? For the rest of the month, I'll focus on the following: When going to bed, nothing on the Dining Room table, coffee table, office chair, or couch that doesn't belong there. Bed made each morning, Dishwasher run each night. Also, on Monday, Wednesday and Sundays, I'll spend 20 minutes working on the middle bedroom's mess. We got new shelves so, by the end of the month, this room should be useable again.

3) This one is mostly financial. We got to the point where we got our savings built up a bit, and after the bills are paid, there's money left. We've taken to spending that money again. We've been eating out, not doing grocery shopping, and generally not being careful. I've also been much less consistant with entering data into Money. That needs to stop. That's how I've managed to ruin my financial health more than once. Reciepts need to be entered daily. When I look at the budget, I'd like to tighten a few things (we downgraded our cable plan this week) I'm seriously considering downgrading our Netflix plan as well. (or replacing it with Amazon UnBox on the Tivo). I'll probably also increase our automatic deductions that I have setup right now. I'm considering adding a bit in the sidebar to track the savings account so I have a reminder every time I log in.

4) Well, there's nothing I can do about the weather, but I need to stop letting the crappy weather put me in a crappy (and lazy) mood. Too often I'm tired and lethargic when I get home, so I sit down at the computer and putz around rather than spending the half hour to get some things done. I need to stop that as well.

All together, I actually am fairly proud of how far I've come. I've still got a long way to go, but I'm getting there. I just signed up for twitter, and I think I'm going to use that as a way of providing other people with an insight for what I'm doing. I'll post my exercizing and cleaning time so you can see if I'm actually doing it. I'll get that up in the sidebar as well soon.

Well... March is a wash. I'm declaring it now. Although I've been on the bike a few times and done a bit more housekeeping, I've made no real effort this month. We've generally been lazy, slovenly and cranky.

But the birds are getting annoying, we're going to work in t-shirts and leaving in stocking caps and gloves, sleet is alternating with rain, which can only mean one thing in our fair city of Chicago. Spring is Sprunging. So, expect more pictures and more rants as I find some energy.

So, between now and the end of April expect posts on:

• Sites I read regularly
• What I'm reading
• Fun with music
• My new diet plan
• More finance stuff
• Fun with Photography
• and more
• Baseball's starting too

So.. We'll pretend, for the for the sake of the challenges, that April starts tomorrow and the challenges will be the same as I set for March. If I make my challenges for April, May and June. I'll take July off.

So there.

Well... we're off to a roaring start, as I haven't even gotten around to making this post until the month is 1/3 over. So, I'm getting to a late start, but I think that the rest of this month is going to be a good one. My major goal is quite simple this time... 20 minutes a day on the bike trainer, at least 3 days a week. That's it.
Minor goal is house keeping. ie litter boxes, dishes, vaccuuming, etc.

So there's that.

Enjoy.

Edit: We're also going to start posting on the food blog again, which is really just an excuse to use my new camera more.

First off, I've made an executive desision. Since Feb is a short month, I'm extending my deadline till Friday. Surprisingly, what I still have to do on my major project is relatively minor. While there's a difference between what I've got done and what I'd like to have done eventually, I think I satisfied the goal. The recipes are all in sheet protectors, in binders and sorted. (That's three 3" Binders FULL). Also all of the CD's except the holiday music are entered in the database and stored. We need another binder since we've got about 150 disks that are still in Jewel Cases. But they're in the racks in the office. Eventually we want to create an index of the recipies with cross references and everything, but that's a whole project in itself. We also got a 1/2" binder to keep the recipes that we're planning on cooking into for the week. I still have some data retreival to do for the CD's and then there's a lot of data entry for the stuff I'm not able to grab automagically. So there's that.

I've been posting a bit more (not as much as last month, but since last month's goal included a lot of updates, it inflated the count.) I've been trying to link to some outside stuff as well. My trafic numbers haven't changed much, but I think I'm building a base. We'll see what grows.

I'll post March's Goals soon.

I'm crediting myself with this month's goals, so I'll be making a donation to my mother's “Team in Training” fundraising efforts.

I have to admit, I've done very poorly on my accountability challenges for this month so far. TBWITWW and I are still not 100% recovered from our illnesses, and it's been stupid cold thus far this month, so we've mostly been huddling under the covers. However, the road back is in sight and I'm not going to admit defeat this month quite yet. We have purchased and filled a CD binder, and cataloging is underway. I may need to pick up one more binder though. I've decided purging the collection is going to wait to be another challenge, and will not just be CD's but other media as well (Books, Videos, CD's). I'll set specific numerical goals for that one.
The recipes are underway as well. The most difficult part is coming up with a classification system. Ethnicity is vauge, as many of the recipies are adaptions and so don't fit cleanly into one. Ingredients doesn't work well either as we have many recipes which can be made with chicken, shrimp or tofu. We'll figure something out though.
As far as the increasing traffic to the site, I've been trying to post more. (Again, the general bleah that is February hasn't been helping.) But I've got a few more things in mind to become regular entries to help me post more regularly. I've got a new camera on the way, so there will likely be a lot more photos soon. And I'll be creating a regular music game to encourage participation from the readers.
In related news, I've been reading a lot of personal finance blogs and getting a lot of good information, so I've been considering adding a personal finance category to this blog. So you'll see that soon also.
If you have any thoughts about things you'd like to see me post about, feel free to let me know.

For February my Major Challenge will be to organize two of our "collections". Our CDs and our recipies. We have about 400 CD's at last count, and a 3 binders full of recipies.
I'd like to pare down the CDs somewhat, and switch from the jewel cases to keeping them in binders. I also want to make sure they're all ripped to the computer and those files are organized sensibly.
The recipies need to be sorted (especially the ones we've just torn from magazines) and a system for marking which ones we've tried and such would be good. This part will definitely be a team project.

It's going to cost a little bit of money to accomplish this. We'll need dividers and page protectors for the recipies as well as folders for the CD's

My minor goal is to increase traffic to this site here. I'll document what I'm doing to actually accomplish that.

My Charity for this month is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I'll be donating (assuming I succeed) through my mother who is participating in their "Team in Training" program.