I started the year with some ambitious goals. Among these were the monthly acountability projects as well as tracking finances in detail. I didn't quite accomplish the goals I set in January, but it was a good start. Also, two of my coworkers who were also very good friends left the company in January.

February again started with a challenge as well as a major step in my financial accountability project. February also was the month I got my new camera. I gave myself credit for February's goals.

March brought more goals and more photos. I also attenede a reading by Salman Rushdie and fired up the grill for the first time in 2007.

April saw the first public release of Habari followed by the release of Aiden's Theme for Habari and this site's conversion to Habari. I also took a look at my goal setting system, and decided it needed work and solidified my finanical goals.

May came with a financial wake-up call as well as a new garden. June was pretty darn quiet.

July on the other hand was big. Mostly because of my birthday. Turning 30 causes one to reflect a bit. I set some goals and one of my best friends had a baby! Oh, and my little brother got married.

August brought my first habari plugin and a reading by William Gibson.

September brought the 5th anniversary of TBWITWW and I's wedding. A trip to OLF and (although we didn't know it till later) a baby.

In October, joined the Habari PMC bought a new laptop, and ranted about several political issues.

November was a silly sort of month. I made an LOL Cat and grew a Mustache It was for the kids.

And this month, we announced that we were pregnant. Everything else pretty much takes a back seat to that.

This month is a great demonstration of what happens when we don't keep track of what we're spending. As i mentioned before, we got complacent this month. And we paid for it. Literally.

We spent more than twice what we had budgeted for Dining out. This, in combination with a few other things (We spent extra money on craft supplies, a little extra on groceries, and with gas prices being up) put us substatially over budget and we had to move money from the savings account to checking to make sure everything cleared. This had two effects. The first is that, obviously, we are further from our savings goals than we were before. The second is that I was was very stressed about it. Right now, getting things together financially on-track is a big source of pride for me, and this was a pretty big blow.

We've got a few categories we need to look at carefully. Gas, while not really something we can control right now, keeps going up, so that'll eat into the other categories. We've already spent almost 60% of what was budgeted for the year on Dining out. A lot of that is little things. $3 here and $4 there adds up quickly. We've also spent half of our Household budget for the year. Shelving and such. Hopefully this is about done though. We've been here a year and made the last purchase of shelving that we had planned.

Going on the theory that money that's already gone is less likely to be missed, I did what some people might consider counter-intuitive after being short last month. I upped the auto-transfers from checking to savings. Doubled them in fact. I'm still hoping that we can make our goal of $2500 in savings by the end of July. The credit card payoff is on schedule. Another one paid off this month. Two to go.

We've both committed to tracking cash spending again and limiting dining out as well. Hopefully May will be a good month.