I woke up to another day of working on the budget with Andrew. It’s soooooo tedious! Wayne, Jordan and Natale got ready and went to retrieve more firewood from the neighbor. Lauren and Sean went along as well.

They made a few trips and we invested hours into parsing and categorizing data. It sucked but finally it was time for lunch so I made some sandwiches while Andrew kept at it. The wood gatherers returned and were really hungry as well so I made sandwiches for everyone.

As we were finishing up lunch yet another person posted free firewood. They were very close and this wood was cut and seasoned! Wayne and Jordan took off to get it in spite of being ridiculously sore. What good guys! Andrew and I went back to the stupid budget. We got it all pretty much figured out except for January – April. Hmmm…we were missing bank statements but that’s when we switched our checking account to a trust account. Well crap! I would just have to call the bank on Monday and hope they have the data somewhere.

Wayne and Jordan came back with another truck full of wood. As they were just finishing up stacking it, Spencer messaged to say they were about five minutes from home. They were back from their trip to Arizona and needed some help unloading their trailer. Off Wayne and Jordan went to help! Those poor guys. Wayne did let me know that we are set for wood for next winter though 🙂

I had decided to make minestrone soup and bread sticks for dinner so I got the dough rising while the guys were gone. Wayne called and asked me for a list so he could stop at the store and get the other things I needed. They got home pretty quickly and I got dinner going while they showered and relaxed with a well deserved beer.

Dinner was delicious! I am not sure if I’ve ever made minestrone soup before but it was really easy. I used a pizza dough recipe for the bread sticks and they were a little light to me so I’ll try a different recipe next time. We all ate far too much food.

Dinner was done and it was time for me to head to a quiet spot so I could take a phone call. Erica Melzer from Lady Loves Tech wanted to interview me about the Ascend Project and learning to code as a woman and mom. We had a great talk and I hope we can meet up one of these days.

It was getting late but we still needed to sit down together and talk about our spending habits, what we could change, and what each of us needs in order to feel happy. I mentioned the things I knew I could do and the guys thought they were reasonable. We all agreed that we need to stop eating out. That will be a tough one to do here in Portland with so much good food! Wayne doesn’t really ask for much at all so he was just going to try and be more frugal with grocery shopping. Andrew said he would be more particular about gadget purchases and would maybe just go downtown one day per week. Wayne and I said we were happy and didn’t need more time off but Andrew definitely needs more down time so we need to figure out how to schedule some of that for him on a regular basis.

Today I learned that it’s more complicated to record a phone call than I had imagined.