Long post, I just kept typing away!

Today is payday. I got up about a half hour earlier than normal (a work from home day). When I first got up there was no internet and apparently an area outage with an estimated time of 11am. GAH! But within a few minutes it was all back up and running.  I paid all my bills online. Later this afternoon I just need to mail off my home equity loan payment and get DH's monthly "allowance" out of the bank.

It's a gray rainy day and according the the weather, it's gonna be like this for a week. Bleh! Oh well, better than drought, like last summer, that's for sure. At least it's gradually staying a bit lighter longer each day. My car is so dirty. I've been going to stop through the car wash, but it's always raining. Guess I'm going to have to do it anyway, even though it will just turn around and be dirty again.

I'm going to start buying LED light bulbs to replace the bulbs in our house. They sure are pricey, but I want to see if they reduce the electric bill any noticeable amount. Has anyone else done this? I think we have LED in the shop. I can't remember what DH replaced in there. I know one of our outside floodlights is LED. We try to keep lights off in the house when not in use, but the bedroom that the birds are in (DD's room) the overhead light (2 bulbs) is left on all day, otherwise it's too dark in there for them, especially in winter, when even keeping the blinds open it's still too dark and gray outside to give much light into the room. Plus we leave our porch lights (1 front and 2 back) on all night and during the days I work at home I leave my desk lamp on all day, while I'm working. In the evenings the table lamp is on.

I was stressing out a bit over the best way to pay my upcoming $600 dental bill. I realized I can just use what I have available on my FSA balance. I think I overestimated some (since I didn't know exactly when/how much the Crestor will go down when it goes generic this year). I really didn't want to have to use my Care Credit charge account. I have 2 more payments on the last charge I put on there ($300 for cat's vet bills at 6 months no interest) and I really want to not owe anything on it (even if it is no interest). But at the same time, using it probably does help my credit score.

I'm working on my weekly grocery list.  I plan for 5 dinners made at home and 2 take out. Here's the weekly menu:
Tonight: Steak and baked potatoes
Sat: Hamburgers
Sun: Chicken pot pie (new recipe from DD to try)
Mon: take out
Tues: tacos
Wed: Sloppy joes
Thurs: take out (this is just for DH. I just eat leftovers or whatever)

I tried to plan the hamburgers and sloppy joes in the same week, so I can try to use of most of the hamburger buns. If we just have hamburgers, 3 get used and I always end up having to throw the rest out. I find they don't thaw out well, if I try to freeze them. So, I am trying to plan 2 meals to use them up. Any other ideas on what I could do with them, rather than having to throw away 5 buns?! Same thing with tacos! DH likes hard tacos and I like (barely - I'm not a big taco fan) soft tacos. He does eat quite a few (like 4 hard and one soft) but I end up throwing out the rest of the hard shells and while I put the soft shells in the refrigerator, most of the time I don't have tacos again for awhile and end up throwing it out, after I've used one or two of them! So much waste! Can those be frozen? I'll bet they can.

I've been really good about taking leftovers to work for lunch (or we get fed at work due to a training session going on or something). I used to buy soup at hand or other stuff to take, but I haven't bought anything specific for lunch in quite awhile.  I keep one soup at hand on hand, just in case I don't have any leftovers. I took it with me on Monday, but one of our company owners (who likes to cook) had brought a big pot of spicy tomato soup and french bread. OMG! it smelled so good in our kitchen. I ate it, though the soup was a bit spicy for me (I'm not a spicy food person, at all). Tuesday I brought leftover tuna casserole and Thursday I brought leftover homemade mac & cheese.

No plans for this weekend. I'll probably be spending some of it working on my side job, trying to get caught up. I was behind at the start of the week and with not being able to access the program I needed to get my work done for 4 days, now I'm really behind. I did get November all finished yesterday and will try to power through December's stuff today, but I doubt I'll get through it all.