Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

This week went down in history as one of the worst we've had with my son.  His moods have deteriorated the last few weeks, BAD, but this week took the cake.  We finally broke down and made an appointment to put him under at the hospital so his dentist can do any dental work that needs to be done (X-rays, teeth filling, etc) and potentially taking out wisdom teeth that might be impacted that might be causing his problems.  My husband and I are so torn about everything.  Half of us wants there to be wisdom teeth to take out and that would explain a lot of his moods and maybe he'll be BETTER after they are out, but the other half of us is dreading recovery from surgery so badly that we are hoping he doesn't have any wisdom teeth at all.   Either way, neither one of us are eating much and we are just sick with anxiety and stress right now.  Any prayers you guys could send our way that everything goes WELL with him getting knocked out and everything...man I'd appreciate it so much.  I'm a big ball of not good right now.  I am praying that they can zonk him good pre-IV and that Alvah is just not freaking out during the experience.  Praying HARD.  I want this to go well.  Please God, watch over us during this entire mess.  Amen.

After that is done we are going to switch the son's meds to put him on a medicine that he doesn't sleep on, but makes him really happy, in the hopes we can get his system detoxed off of the HORRIFIC amounts of meds I've been forced to give him and get him back to baseline.  Then we can figure out if we need to try switching his meds completely (I had an emergency pow wow with his mental health doctor a few days ago) or just being able to use his old meds once he's been off of them for a little bit.  Everything is an unknown commodity right now, and man I hate it so much.  I am one of those people that tries to make myself useful and being completely helpless like this is really hard on me.

My husband and I somehow managed to get some frugal stuff done this week, despite just living in a not great situation, so let's get to that and off of anxiety inducing, depressing matters.

1.  Alvah normally takes Zyrtec everyday for his allergies, but the store didn't have a coupon for the Zyrtec this week, while Amazon had a good coupon and a good deal overall for the pills.  So, I ordered Zyrtec from Amazon, saving 12.00 off the normal store price by doing so.

2.  I fixed a clogged bathroom sink.  The upstairs sink has driven me nuts for years because it gets clogged really easily and I could not figure out how to really clean out the drain with the drain we had in it.  I finally, quite accidentally, while trying to clear a hair clog from it, pulled part of the drain out with a paperclip and realized that you could remove that part of the drain to clean it.  It also made it MUCH easier to scour the drain pipe to clear soap scum if you did that as well.  So, next time I have to clean the drain it will be MUCH easier to do, which is nice.

3.  I fixed cracks in drywall.  Luckily we had picked up light joint compound a few weeks ago, because, unfortunately, it's come in handy.  I still have more patching to do, but at the moment, I just found it better to barricade the walls with stuff so they aren't so easily bounced off of and I'll worry about fixing everything when the son is in a better headspace.

4.  Husband fixed his MP3 player by soldering in a new battery (the old one bulged).

5.  Husband fixed a broken push broom with a electrical conduit strap and some ingenuity.  The handle had broken on said broom, but he got it up and working again, which is good as now that Spring is finally coming here, it'll come in handy to sweep the crud off of the driveway.

6.  Used up leftovers to make sure there was no food waste.  My daughter was out of the house this week to avoid the craziness here, so it was just my husband and I.  Neither of us has eaten much, so a big bunch of leftovers I had from earlier in the week just saw us through the week.

7.  Fixed a hole in a comforter.  Our washing machine isn't spinning things right and comforters get caught in it and end up getting holes torn in them by accident when I'm trying to switch between the washer and the dryer.  I managed to find one that had happened before it next went into the washer and I fixed it and then quilted through the inside when I did so to help hold the stuffing in place where I had accidentally ripped it.

8.  Daughter’s sneakers started to die and the top of her shoes was starting to disintegrate.  I, luckily, didn't have to order new shoes (man sneakers are spendy anymore) and was able to pul out a pair of sneakers I had in reserve that I had gotten for 25.00 on a pre-Christmas sale earlier.  I had actually stored them under my bed for myself, but my daughter is in between and 7 and a 7 and a half, so she finds she can wear either size, so she just took my 7 1/2 sneakers I bought and is very happy with them.  

9.  I par-baked some pizza crusts and put them in the freezer.  I was planning a pizza day a few weeks ago, but it didn't work out, so I had a bunch of sourdough starter to use.   So, I made up three pizza crusts with it and put them in the freezer.  This way all I have to do is defrost the pizza crust for a few hours, put on toppings and bake pizza normally in oven.  We are actually trying one out tonight so we'll see how they bake up.  I'm hoping they bake up better than freezing the entire pizza with the toppings and everything, because I find the crust gets too crispy while you are waiting for the cheese to melt in the middle of the pizza.

10.  The menu plan went flying out the window this week because my son’s behaviors went REALLY bad, but I still managed to make food at home, which is an accomplishment as take out was such a temptation this week to just not have to worry about one more thing.

And there you go folks.  Our frugal accomplishments for this week.  Sure hope your week went better than ours.

Enjoy.

What's for Dinner: This Week's Menu

The son is in a terrible state right now, so this week is a really "tentative" menu plan until grocery pick up at the end of the week (I broke down and am buying a few items to make some new dishes with the fish we got).  But, at this point in my budget, I need some type of plan or we are going to be getting take out near constantly, which we can't afford.

So, let's get to the menu for this week (after Friday, the menu will probably change, so I might update it later).

Menu for the Week 5/3 - 5/9

Monday:  Leftovers 

Tuesday:  Smothered Pork Chops (crock pot), rice, green beans 

Wednesday:  Baked chicken (balsamic honey, from freezer), rice, corn 

Thursday:  Oven fried breaded chicken (home made “Shake and Bake”), mashed potatoes, hot honey carrots 

Friday:  Pizza Night (already have par baked pizza crusts in the freezer for an easy dinner) 

Saturday:  Asian Glazed Salmon, leftover rice (we always have some), salad.

Sunday:  Crock pot pork roast with potatoes and carrots.  Home made bread.

 And there you go folks.  My menu plan for this week (even more tentative than normal).

Enjoy!

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

The son is doing better the last few days, thank goodness, so let's get to the few money saving things I was able to do this week!  I'm not going to be very wordy today, sorry to say, as I'm battling a nasty migraine the last few days...love hormonal shifts *blech*.

1.  Carrs has been hitting the "hey, order through delivery or pick-up and get good deals or sometimes free stuff" and one of last week's coupons (the ad shifts over on Wednesday) was 1.99 per (near) pint of frozen yogurt and there was a coupon for 1.00 off two on the yogurt as well.  So, I was able to get them for about 1.49 per "pint" ("pints" are now about 12 oz from what I have been seeing...the 1.00/2 coupon could be used like up to four times too, which was nice).  One pint is a good size for the husband, me and the daughter to all have a serving of something and the yogurt didn't have the peanut cross contamination of tons of other stuff, so it was safe to keep around the son.  So, I ordered 2 of each flavor that sounded good to us.  This is enough to give us a decent amount of desserts this summer and didn't cost me a ton (a container of ice cream that is safe from peanut cross contamination is like 6.00 for a not half a gallon of ice cream, so this was a good deal to me).

2.  The daughter ordered herself a paint by number with one of her favorite anime characters from "Full Metal Alchemist".  She finished the painting, which was on a canvas, but wasn't sure what to do about a frame.  With life the way it is right now and all of us watching our money (daughter is saving hers as much as she can), I looked at the Monet print I had hanging above the towel cabinet in the hallway and told her I had a plan.  I took apart the frame and flipped the Monet poster print over so it was solid white to surround her painting.  We then cleaned up the edges of her painting, stuck a few pieces of tape to the back of the canvas to help hold it in place as we put the frame together (I've found poster frames are actually pretty good at holding things still in them because they pinch together pretty tight, but we added it for extra security) and got it all back together.  For nothing out of pocket, I felt pretty good that my daughter could now hang up her painting without issue.

3.  I helped my daughter hang up her painting and while I was in her room she pointed at the painting of an English cottage that she'd had hanging up in her room for years and asked me to take it down as she wanted more room on her walls for things she was currently interested in.  There was no way I was getting rid of the painting as I really fell in love with it when I bought it years ago (it really has a Beatrix Potter cottage feel to it, which I love...it was a steal at like 5.00 when I bought it and it is numbered and everything on the back.  

So, I looked at the wall where the Monet print had once hung and thought, "Hey, I bet it will look good there" and hung it up.  And voila!  I have a really cute spot in my hallway now :).

4.  We redeemed our rewards with Red Robin to get 10.00 off my son's french fry obsession when we took him to the doctor, which was a welcome savings as it was money I had not planned on spending this week.

5.  We were gifted some fish!!!  

I am so thrilled with this that I can't really express here how happy I am about this!  Fish has been HARD to put in the budget since, geez around Covid, as it went up in price and just didn't go back down.  So, I took out the occasional meal of fish and chips or other fish dish and just added in more chicken to the menu and we have just dealt with it.

One of my husband's friends at work gave us a bunch of fish that was in his freezer to free up room for other stuff (probably hunting seasons opening up soon enough).  We were blessed with a gift of salmon and halibut!  The only place we have halibut is on the rare occasion we get fish and chips on a take out order (which we'll get french fries for the son but we eat out VERY seldom...usually when we have a gift card for a birthday or something, as eating out is horribly expensive).  Halibut up here is like 24.99 a lb, so I was shocked and thrilled to receive some of it and my husband has been told to work salmon into his diet as he's supposed to eat more fatty fish, so that was a nice windfall as well :).  

I don't have much experience with salmon and how to make it not taste fishy, but I will definitely use it.  Anyone got any recommends on recipes that makes good salmon?

6.  I finished up a container of yogurt in the fridge by adding it to a container of, nearly empty, sour cream that I then made into beef stroganoff one night this week (menu plan went flying off a cliff this week).  

7.  I used an online shopping discount code combined with a gift card I had to get a Rifftrax movie for free.  My husband and I really enjoy watching things together when we can, and I LOVE comedies while my husband loves bad movies and comedies, so Rifftrax is the perfect thing for us to watch together *laugh*.

8.  I've been enjoying listening to new vintage music playlists on Jake Westbrook's Chanel on YouTube.  I like to put them on my laptop, so I don't have to worry about ads (I use the Brave browser) and then I bluetooth the music to a little radio bluetooth speaker in my kitchen so I can listen while I cook or do dishes :).

I've also been listening to The Legend of Uh audiobooks that the author was nice enough to post up when I can.  So far I'm enjoying them (I'm still early into the first book :).

And there you go folks.  I'm calling it good there as my ability to think is greatly reduced at the moment.

Enjoy!

When Money is Tight: Meal Prep Time!

 With how tight our budget is right now (and getting worse), I thought I'd share what I'm doing to help mitigate against meals getting too boring or too unhealthy.  For a short while there, I was buying a lot of frozen (and as minimally processed as I could find) food, but those items quickly went up in price and it got to the point that Alvah in a horrible mood or not, I had to come up with other alternatives around here to make sure we had snacks (or the husband develops a nasty vending machine habit at work), easy breakfasts and the like.  So, I thought I'd go through the meal prep I managed to do for this week (before Alvah went into meltdown mode).

1.  Recently, I was offered a really good personalized price on a new product that has cottage cheese on the bottom compartment and fruit on the top and you add the fruit to the bottom and then you have a high protein snack.  Traditionally, I'm not really a fan of cottage cheese...remember eating it a lot as a teen as my mom liked it and it would be in the house, but I've never been like, "Yay!!!  Let's go and eat some cottage cheese!" type of person.  But, I did find I was the only one who was eating the cottage cheese snacks because I didn't want to waste them, whether I was thrilled with cottage cheese or not.  Oddly, I found that while the texture wasn't something I would actively seek out, the protein in the snack did help to keep me satisfied in the afternoons and was making it so I wasn't falling asleep on my feet by 3 pm.  When I looked at the normal price on the cottage cheese snacks, however, there was NO WAY I was going to pay like 2.50 each for teeny little snack packs.  

So, instead this week, I bought a container of cottage cheese, separated it out into containers and then added a can of diced mangoes I had in the pantry to the top of the cottage cheese so I could just pull them out and have a high protein snack.  It works well, although I doubt I'm going to purchase diced mango again anytime soon as there was a LOT of pulpy mango in the can I had.  I'm going to try canned peaches next time as that is a favorite around here.

And yes, I'm doing my grandma's habit of recycling plastic containers from the store to store food in.  I'm using a dry erase marker to keep what is in them straight.  I find the small sour cream containers I buy are the perfect size for snacks.  The glass bowl was actually the last portion that I ended up eating for a light lunch.

2.  I bought fresh strawberries on sale on our last shopping trip, but the strawberries this season haven't been very good and these were really sour tasting.  So, I ended up cutting them up, added in a bag of nearly empty frozen strawberries, macerated them in sugar and turned them into a jug of smoothy mix to drink over the coming week.  I like to add greek yogurt for the probiotics (for the sake of the daughter's gut health), a bit of milk and the fruit with the syrup included and blend it all together.  I also added some collagen peptides I bought on a good deal a while back to help with my husband's and my health (and heck, the daughter will benefit too).

We have all been drinking a small glass of smoothy with our breakfasts all week and it's been a nice change of pace.

3.  I took some of the various things of sausage I had found in the freezer and made a big pot of sausage gravy (if you look at the menu for the week photo from a few posts down you'll see a half gallon of milk in the photo...I bought that on sale for cheap with the express purpose of using it in baking and meal prep and it worked FABULOUSLY!).

I then separated out the sausage gravy into four, individual servings for my husband for breakfast for the week.  It worked great and kept him from grabbing things from the vending machines at work.

4.  With the gravy, of course, I had to make biscuits.  I made plain ones for the husband for his breakfasts and the daughter as well (she loves biscuits).  I used the food processor to mix the dough to make life easier and made the plain ones first and then the cheese ones, so I didn't have to clean it between recipes.  I decided to make them square this time to just make my life easier as that way there was no wasted dough and no re-rolling the dough.  Worked great.   I did make them super huge by accident as it had been a while since I had made biscuits, but ah well.  I also made a big batch of cheese biscuits and we had some with dinner that night and I put the rest in the freezer to turn into cheddar bay biscuits with future meals.

5.  I make all my own bread now a days for the most part (I do buy the son hamburger buns to destroy as he's less likely to choke on the all air store bread), and I love making the dutch oven style sourdough bread that I've made for a long time now, but the daughter asked me to make some loaf bread so the bread would fit in the toaster better and sandwiches would turn out more uniform.  I found that Farmhouse On Boone's Sourdough Sandwich Bread was a great recipe to use.  I make it exactly as written, but I end up adding about 1/2 cup extra flour to make the dough into a soft, workable bread dough and also add 1 TBS of SAF instant yeast.  The dough only takes about 1 hour to rise in the first rise, and then I found you need to separate the dough into 3 loaf pans, not two, or you end up with super huge loaves that might nor might not get jammed into the top of your oven (ask me how I know).  I then let the dough rise for about 1/2 an hour longer, split the top to let the steam escape in a controlled way, add the egg wash the recipe calls for and bake at 375 degrees F for 35 minutes.  The loaves turn out perfect every time, the sourdough adds the best flexibility to the bread so you can cut it into really slim slices without any crumbling and it is wonderful stuff.  I end up freezing the third loaf most weeks to pull out when bread is getting short, which works great when you end up with a few loaves in the freezer that way from different weeks and don't have the time to bake bread for a few days one week.

On weeks where I don't want to look up a recipe or have time to soften butter and stuff, I do just make my go-to dutch oven sourdough recipe, but it is nice to have a good sourdough sandwich loaf as well.

I had other plans for meal prep, but life got in the way this week.  So, that's all I got done.  

Enjoy!

Weekly Goals Update

Man guys and gals, it has been a week.  Not a great one, but a week.

First off, the court interview/visitation went well on Saturday.  Luckily she had experience with kids like Alvah so knew what to watch for before things would escalate with him.  After some rearranging of the seating, he was fine through the interview and I got some helpful information on stuff, which was good.  Next step is our court date in June and the court will do all the document collecting and stuff on their end, so hopefully we won't have anything else to worry about.  My husband can even call into the court instead of us having to show up in person with Alvah in tow, which will definitely make things a lot less stressful.

The rest of the weekend, Alvah started acting weird and by Monday he was not doing well and not stable.  After a few days of more medication than I wanted to give him, a lot of outbursts and more walls to fix, yesterday he woke up and started trying to shove entire blankets and clothing down his throat.  I was scared to death he was going to inhale that crap into his airway and we were concerned that maybe he had strep again (since the last time he tried shoving things down his throat was when he had it), so we took him to the doctor's yesterday.  The test came back negative, but my husband thought maybe Alvah had a sore throat either way (I mean your tonsils can be swollen without strep, of course), so we decided to ride it out as much as we could.  He didn't sleep last night and started doing the same thing at 3:00 in the morning, but after a lot of struggling to stop him from hurting himself and a bunch of medication, he finally settled down.  He woke up this morning in a much more stable condition and has been eating and drinking like normal so far, so hopefully whatever the heck was going on is past.  

During one his outbursts, I threw my hand up between his head and the wall to stop him from hurting himself on a wall that had no hollow spot behind the drywall, but all 2x4 structural stuff and I ended up bruising the crap out of my hand as a result.  Typing hasn't really been in the cards this week (thank goodness I didn't have any new paperwork to fill out).  My fingers are turning wonderful shades of technicolor purple now, but I'm way more mobile, so I'm glad I can finally get some stuff done in the way of typing and such.  

So yeah, carpeting Alvah's closets was DEFINITELY out this week with everything going on, but I did manage to get the desk cleaned off (still need to dust it, though...yeah it ain't perfect, but TRUST me it is a vast improvement over where it was...it had become a catch all for everything and you could barely fit a laptop on it...sure the shingle sample is still on there, but we'll need that) and I got a bunch of old paperwork cleaned out of our file cabinets that we didn't need anymore and put those into the "to be burned" pile of paperwork.  I got a bunch of stuff printed out and organized for Alvah's new stage in life so I can better keep track of records and such and know where to go to take guardianship classes and things online (husband has to take them too, so doubly nice to have it in an easy to find location).  

As for the locating of the panelling, that certainly didn't even get started.  I'll have to see if we can find it this weekend or something.

It's definitely been a mixed bag of a week.  But, hopefully, looking up.  Be prepared for more than one post today as I'm going to be doing a bunch of catch up today since the son is in an okay mood.

Enjoy!

What's for Dinner: This Week's Menu

I was hoping to share some frugal things I did this week, but my week got derailed by the court scheduling to do a guardianship interview this weekend with us,  So, instead of doing mending and things, I've been working on deep cleaning the whole house from top to bottom so that we can, hopefully, put a good foot forward.  Alvah's kind of unstable the last few days, so it won't be our best foot...but hopefully we'll do alright.  My anxiety is eating my stomach lining, so I hope it goes well.  

So, instead of sharing frugal things that happened (I'll, once again, save that for Monday), I figured I'd instead share our menu for this week.  

It was grocery shopping week this week.  We went and got groceries yesterday, so I have a good idea of what I have in the house now (I tend to wait on grocery week until I know if I'm going to get what I ordered or not before I think on things too hard) and that makes it easier.

So, let's get to it, shall we?

Menu Plan for Week of 4/23/26 -- 4/29/26

Thursday:  Home made chicken strips with honey mustard dressing (I just do equal parts honey and mustard and do it that way), salad.

Friday:  Teriyaki chicken burgers (from freezer that I have made up) on home made bread, chips (bought a bag of plain potato chips on sale).

Saturday:  Ham, cheese and spinach quiche (from freezer).  Salad.

Sunday:  Chicken fried steak (using cube steaks from the freezer), mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans.

Monday:  Pizza night (daughter works that day, so it's always nice to give her something she really enjoys for dinner)

Tuesday:  Chimichurri Chicken (I just mixed up the sauce, poured it over chicken thighs and froze the chicken to bake later.  It comes out really good...great way to use up cilantro that I have left over from like Pad Thai night or something without anything going to waste), corn (from freezer), bread/rolls/something starchy.

Wednesday:  Creamy sausage, gnocchi and spinach soup.  This is using up a big bag of frozen spinach that the store subbed for frozen onions one day...no idea...and some of the sausage I found in the freezer that needs to be used up. 

And there you go folks.  Our basic dinner menu for this week.  I am hoping to get some stuff done on Sunday that I can share (I am cutting my grocery budget by 1/3, basically, this pay period and next to make a 500.00+ radiology bill that came in the mail, so meal planning and meal prep is a must right now), but this is the start for my weekly plan.

You all planning on anything good for dinner this week?  I'm always looking for inspiration, so feel free to share!

Enjoy!

Last Week's Goals Update and This Week's Goals

I have to say, when it comes to last week's goals, I feel rather proud of myself.  No, I haven't completely finished Alvah's carpet yet.  I still have the closets to empty, remove the old carpet from, and lay carpet in them.  Which also means I have to remove the track from his mirrored closet (scary since those things are heavy) to get under it.  Then I also have to have my husband's help in getting the transition strip for the doorway between Alvah's room and the hallway to get everything so you won't trip on a loose carpet edge.

We did not get to cleaning the shingles from the yard last week as we are still getting snow and/or rain here *cue horror movie scream* and it made working outside just not a pleasant, viable experience.  We'll get to all of that soon enough, I'm sure.

But, let me show some pictures of what I DID manage to get done around here.

Doing the carpet was a daunting task with doing it around furniture and a grumpy teenager, but I decided to tackle it in two parts.  I just did the half that needed the most carpet put down (the half of the room on the same side as his door) and I decided (smart or not) that I was going to do it in one day so that the doorway was done (didn't want to glue myself into a corner if possible so worked my way toward the door).  That was a long day and man it took a toll on my sciatica that night...talk about no sleep to be had.  

The next day was a bit easier as I just started cleaning up the carpet on the next section of his floor so that the edges were as "puffed up" and evened out as much as possible to line up the new carpet squares with.  Man, with the carpet squares, boiling water is SO much easier to use as a cleaner than trying to use actual carpet cleaner on to get ground in gunk (Alvah is very good at ground in gunk) out...it worked well and got the carpet nice and clean to work with for later on.  I waited for the carpet to dry out (basically took a day) and the next day I cleaned up the floor and scrubbed it with soap and Borax like I did the other half of his floor.  I then used the floor leveler I had to fill in some gouges in the floor that might have made the carpet dip in weird ways and waited another day for that to dry and set.  And then, finally, on day three (which ended up being Sunday instead of Friday as we had errands to run and frustration to feel on the garage roof), I put down the rest of the carpet in the main section of his room.

I have been LOVING having a full floor of carpet in the room.  You don't have to worry about your footsteps echoing as you are doing something in his room when he's sleeping and being scared to death you are going to wake him up.  It looks SO much better.  And it is so much easier to vacuum a room when all of the flooring is the same level.  We can use one vacuum now instead of worrying about switching between the broom (we end up sweeping the carpets before vacuuming because son throws food everywhere when he eats), the small shop vac we have and the Kirby (Kirby to remove dust and deep clean things, Shop Vac to get under the edges of the room to get anything that might be hiding, etc).  Definitely saves time cleaning the room now.  

Oh and note:  If you are wondering about the mattress against the wall...that's to protect both the son and the wall.  He tends to get frustrated and beat on walls (as you can probably tell) and recently has been running full tilt at a wall and can put his knee through it.  So, I put the mattress there for now to protect the wall and his knees from damage.  I think, once we get the panelling up, my plan is going to be putting in a wall of bookcases that I can affix to the wall for safety (of courses).  He doesn't run into bookcases as they aren't a level surface to go after, and it will give me space to put out a bunch of his toys and things that he could use better access too...and protect his head and other body parts from getting potentially harmed when he's in a state.  Just need time, and money, to get to that point...story of life, really.

The color of the old carpet vs the new definitely does not match due to its age, but his bed covers like 90% of said carpet anyway and it is clean (even though it looks aged really badly now next to the new stuff), so I am just going to leave it for now.  If and when a certain tile gets too bad, we can scrape it up and put a new carpet tile down (why we went with this system to begin with) and it'll all start to blend in time soon enough.

So, yeah, now that the update on last week's goals is done, let's get to this week's goals.

Goals for the Week 4/19 -- 4/25

1.  Clean out downstairs desk of old paperwork that is no longer needed.  Put into a box to burn later on.

2.  Print out all paperwork received from the courts so far on Alvah's guardianship hearing coming up and get it organized (we just got a court date for June and then suddenly are getting court officials e-mailing us paperwork and stuff, so I have GOT to get organized for the sake of my anxiety).

3.  Work on carpeting closets in Alvah's room (if I can find time and Alvah's not too grumpy).

4.  Figure out where husband put the paneling for the son's room in the garage so that I can start pulling it out and getting it installed as soon as the weather permits (am going to need to cut it outside due to the size).  

And there you go folks.  My goals for this coming week.  What about you?  Got anything exciting planned?