A bright end to a cold day
The sunsets at my house rarely compete with sunsets at my parent's farm, but today was a pretty end to the day.
Today marks the official end of the holiday season for me. I thought a sunset photo was appropriate to mark the end of the season. I always loved sunsets at the farm, but they seem to pale in comparison here in town. However, today's colors at the end of the day were very pretty. I think the very cold blast of air that rolled in today probably contributed to the pretty sky so the beauty wasn't without consequences.
I spent part of the day setting up my budget spreadsheet for the year. It's based on the Google Family Budget Planner template. I set mine up a little differently so that there are tabs for each month to record the individual transactions each day. I've used Mint.com for a long time now to give me a good overall view of my financial position, but I've never done a great job of tracking the day to day stuff. Last year, I just think my spending got out of hand a few times simply because I wasn't tracking things so I'm committing to do a better job of tracking expenses this year. I'm also reading J.D. Roth's "Your Money: The Missing Manual" because - well - I need a textbook for everything and this seems like a good one. I've read J.D.'s blog for years and always found it to be a great resource so I think the book will be a nice read. [Note: on 8/31/2015, I was asked to remove the link to Get Rich Slowly (J.D's Blog) which I have done, so now you'll have to search in Google if you want to find the post - it's entitled Finding Financial Benchmarks and Milestones, by J.D. Roth, published 12/20/2010]
Today was also a day for planning for the year ahead. I did a good year end review of 2010 and put together a listing of my travel schedule for the year. If nothing changes (which, of course, it will) I'll be traveling 50 out of this year's 365 days - but there are some nice trips in there to places I've not been before as well as some great trips to a few places I love to visit so it really should be a great year.
The week will begin tomorrow with a little unpleasantness - Lindsay (my golden retriever) is still having trouble with her paw so it's off to the vet for us. Hopefully I'll just be giving the vet some money to have him tell me there is nothing to do except to keep letting her rest it a bit. She's much more playful - both yesterday and today - so I assume she's on the mend. But - it never hurts to have her checked out.
Have a great week!