Give Me Back My Five Bucks

Well, decorating and furnishing my townhouse is going well, and it’s finally starting to feel like home. There are still a few things I need to buy: – Office area: chair, lamp, rug. – Bedroom: 18×24 picture frames (4) – cheap from IKEA, and other decor items from Etsy. – Kitchen: some piece of furniture to fit in my kitchen nook (where the built-in desk used to be) … my dream is something like this. – Outdoors: some sort of chair. I saw two awesome options when browsing antique stores over the weekend, but both stores were asking $150. And … Continue reading →

Monday 1st – Oregon $20 Silver Salmon Restaurant (Astoria) $34.30 gas Tuesday 2nd No Spend Day! Wednesday 3rd $61.24 blender $54.12 groceries $12.23 photos Thursday 4th No Spend Day! Friday 5th + $856.84 freelancing/side income $344.92 IKEA $39.47 gas Saturday 6th No Spend Day! Sunday 7th $9.49 Waves $14.97 groceries WEEKLY EXPENSES: - $590.74 WEEKLY SIDE INCOME *: + $856.84 TOTAL: + $266.10 Whoa, expensive week! But I did finally accomplish one of my August goals of setting up my work space “nook” in my townhouse. In case you missed my random Friday night tweets, here’s all you need to know: Yeah. So Friday night I … Continue reading →

A few days ago, I noticed a $14.95 U.S. charge on my American Express card. It was from the Experian website (a credit monitoring website). Well, I thought that was odd, since Canadians don’t even have access to Experian – we only use TransUnion and Equifax. So I called tried to calling Experian first, because that’s what Amex said to do the last time I noticed a fraudulent charge on my card. But their phone numbers don’t work when calling from Canada. Awesome. (As a side note, I did tweet them, and they replied promptly – but by that time, … Continue reading →

First, I want to thank everyone for their suggestions on what to do in Oregon. It was a great road trip, and I only wish we had a few more days to explore all that Oregon had to offer. We spent Saturday in Portland. It only cost $3 to park downtown for the entire day (take that, downtown Vancouver!). We also ended up buying transit day passes ($4.75) because we didn’t realize the light rail system was free within the downtown core. We wandered through Chinatown, then down by the water where we found the Saturday Public Market, as well … Continue reading →

A bunch of fun, exciting things are happening in August – including a weekend trip to Seattle to watch some baseball, and a 5-day trip with my family to San Francisco. :) Other than that, I’m really hoping to go on a hike, and also maybe catch a Vancouver Canadians game. And a Salmonbellies game. August 2011 Goals: Make an additional $2,100 above and beyond my FT job. Someone commented that perhaps I don’t need to work as hard on freelancing if it means sacrificing other areas of my life. I’m going to keep trying to hit my targets for … Continue reading →