1. Line dried one load of laundry.
2. Sold 1 dozen eggs.
3. Ordered a free Snapfish 5 x 7 photo book. Last weekend they ran a promotion for a free softcover 5 x 7" photo book. Because the book was smaller, and not hardcover, I decided to do a little "Renaissance Farm" album to take to farmers markets instead of making a travel album.
Though the $13.00 book was free, I still had to pay $4.00 for shipping. I'm excited to see how this one turns out compared to the Walgreens and Shutterfly albums I've ordered in the past.
4. Sold my new book on Amazon! While we were gone on our trip to Wisconsin, I did a free book promotion in order to get some reviews and downloads of my new book, The Housewife's Guide to Frugal Food. On Monday the promotion was over, but sales have still kept coming. During last week I kept track of the book's Amazon rankings. These are updated every hour, but I just checked them once or twice a day. On Saturday, the book hit #4 in Kindle Store > Budgeting, #5 in Books > Budget Cooking and #23 in Books > Budgeting and Money Management. That was VERY cool!!!
5. Collected pop cans to recycle while walking/biking.
6. My order of Frugal Food print books came in the mail! I saved the packing paper to use for packaging material.
7. Listed two things on Ebay, and some more used books on Amazon.
8. I did a lot of cleaning this week. I started following my friend Esther's cleaning schedule, which has been a big help. Last week I just did the basics (picking up/dusting/windows/etc.), but this week the rooms will be decently clean already, so I can work on more deep cleaning and organizing. This is dreadfully needed, because with harvest time, farmers market, book release and then travel, my poor house has been neglected.
9. Started using an RSS feed reader. This is kind of an obvious thing to do, but up until last week I was still going to each of my favorite 7-8 blogs individually and looking for new content. What a waste of time! Now I get a notification if one of them posts and update. I will never miss a single post this way, but nor will I waste time checking for new posts or binge-reading old posts.
10. Made quiche with leftovers and extra eggs. In early October our chickens really slacked off on egg production, and I barely had enough eggs for my customers, let alone any for us. I cut down to only selling a dozen eggs every week. Now we have a good amount of eggs every to use, which makes me super happy.
For lunch one day, I tried making quiche (recipe in the back of my book) with our Vitamix blender. It worked wonderfully. After blending the eggs, milk, flour, cheese and spices, I added the veggies and just pulsed it a few times to mix them in. Then I poured the mixture into a greased pan and added some leftover taco meat by hand.
11. My sister and I found a bunch of tea on sale at Walmart from between $0.90 and $1.25 per box. Tea is one of the packaged "luxuries" that I spend some of my grocery money on when it goes on sale. Though I do grow my own herbal tea and that is cheaper, the hourly wage is only $2.40/hr. That means it is more worth my time to grow garlic, sell stuff on Ebay, write books, make yogurt or even make cloth napkins than it is to dry and package herbs to be used as tea.
I ended up buying four boxes for myself and a box for my mom, who also likes tea. The boxes were at LEAST 50% off, if not more. I bought two kinds of chai, one cinnamon-apple flavored herbal, and one herbal cocoa-flavored tea.
12. Ordered a book from the library interloan system.
13. Hubs and I watched a docu-drama series on Amazon Prime about John Adams. I am not a huge fan of TV, but I'm a sucker for a good documentary. I especially liked this one because it was based off David McCullough's book, which I was able to finish last year. I don't like TV because most of it is a waste of time, but it takes far longer to read a book than it does to watch a documentary. We spent about 8.5 hours watching the miniseries, but I probably spent at least TWICE that amount of time reading the biography. While a few of the historical facts were incorrect (John's relationship with his son was over-dramatized, Nabby was diagnosed with cancer ten years early), the basic ideas were still the same.
Hubs has Amazon Prime for shipping business stuff, so watching the movies are a nice, free side-benefit for us. It saves about $10.00 per month not paying for a subscription service like Hulu or Netflix.
14. Brought in tomatoes and green peppers from the garden, and made acorn squash soup from an acorn I found out there. Also started cleaning up and refilling some of my raised beds with organic matter.
Whew! I think that's it!
What were some of your accomplishments this week?