December Goals Accomplished

 

In December I shared with you a few different goals that I was working on. It is now almost the end of January but I thought I would share with you how those goals went...

    First off, I had made the goal at the beginning of 2022 to spend time practicing on/learning to play a different instrument each month and then record it and share it on Youtube. Following that as planned lasted maybe 2 months but I did work on different instruments more throughout the year and I put in some heavier practice in on a couple of different instruments but over all I did struggle with this goal. In December I decided I did truly want to see if I could still accomplish it. That was finally completed today. So I went a month over in the goal but I did get it done.

   In my dreams I was going to be super proficient in each of the instruments that I played. That did not happen. I simply didn't have the time (or choose not to sacrifice in other areas in order to make the time) to practice enough to make that happen. So some of these videos I was rather embarrassed to post. But over all (other than sharing my imperfections!) it was a fun goal for me. I had fun with working on each of the instruments. Here is a video of each instrument (with two for violin - actually 3 as it is in the Church musicians concert as well).

Another December goal was to clean out (declutter) 2 spaces each week. That went well. This year I am working to do 3 a week which has been going well this month. Hopefully I can keep up in the busy summertime. It always does feel good to go through things, clean and get rid of things that we don't need.

 Making handmade Christmas gifts was another goal. That went pretty well and was fun. You can see my post that includes the results to that here.

As you can imagine I had a lot of fun with my financial goal. It went well. In the end their was $290 worth of gas stamps so we didn't really have that hard of a challenge. I used that for gas and all of our groceries. I see that I forgot to mention in the first post that I was also giving myself $12 cash to pay for overages when I didn't hit it on the dot exactly (as that would be pretty hard to do and they don't allow you to use a gas stamp card for say 93 cents. It has to be a dollar or more.  I did also use the gas stamps to buy salt for our softener and our softener was having issues that month so we had to buy salt quite a few times. Thankfully it seems to be doing better now.

   This ended up being just a fun challenge for me and Megan got in on the fun some too. I would come home from work and report on what I managed to get for $10 that day. Several times we splurged on truly unnecessary items.  One time she was wanting candy for making a gingerbread house so we went shopping after church on Wednesday night. We went to Menards and used my rebate there to buy a couple of bags of salt for the softener. At Marketplace I gave Megan 10 filled cards of stamps and she was able to get what she wanted with that and meanwhile I got some things that we needed/wanted with another 10. Then I got $10 worth of gas. Then we looked on the back of our receipts and there were coupons to get a free hot chocolate at the gas station next door. So we went and got that. We came home with gas, groceries, candy, salt and hot chocolate in our tummies and we had enjoyed our shopping spree. I think I spent 37 cents in overage that night and Megan spent around 25 cents. 

  Anyway that is the scoop on our December challenges. We had fun, saved money and according to Megan's college classes I improved my brain with playing all the instruments. So life is good!