Forgot to take my lunch to work one day this week, and I resisted the temptation to buy lunch. (I remembered MMM's funny post about "lift up your shirt and look down folks, and you'll see that your next meal is pre-installed", and I remembered how tough Linda from Norway was last week when she had no food at work.)
Today I'm going to use up a ton of aging stuff in the fridge to pre-make a huge pot of stew and freeze it, so I'll have lunches for a week.
I love it when we inspire each other around here, and I think it's great that you gave credit where credit is due! I posted this elsewhere last night, but yesterday I realized that because my bills and spending have been lower so far this month than I'd expected (I only get paid once a month and I'm halfway between pay periods) that my budget isn't as tight as I'd thought it was. But, I'm working on paying down debt. So, inspired by a case study thread started by dashh, instead of loosening my budget, I went ahead and made an extra payment on my CC, which will reduce the interest slightly on my next bill.
The big accomplishment of the week was replacing my Macbook display, which cracked when I tripped over the power cord. It was still sort of usable, but extremely annoying to have a 4 inch spider web shaped black area at the top, plus flickering lines running all across and down the screen. Getting it fixed at a local store would have been something like $650, but I ordered a used display online for $200 which looks like new. I had some setbacks installing it, as I didn't have the right size Pentalobe screwdriver (but found a tiny flathead which worked in most of the screws) and then one screw wouldn't come out so I had to go to the Apple Store where they "loosened" it for me as a courtesy... but I had to pay $3 for mall parking.
Then I had to find a window of time where my kids wouldn't disturb me while I took my laptop apart. But thanks to iFixit's excellent instructions, I now have crystal clear window to the world again!
This is amazing! Broken electronic devices scare the heck out of me, but I will have to try iFixit the next time something breaks.
I am really hard on my laptops and phones, and have broken screens more than once. For the phone, one time I paid $100 to get it replaced. The second phone (my current one) the crack wasn't as big, and I have one of those plastic film screen protectors on it (which is helping to stop the crack from getting worse) so I have just kept using it.
But last year I dropped my fairly new work laptop and cracked the screen really badly. I took the "Geek Squad" guy's word for it that it wouldn't be worth fixing due to the cost, and got my work to buy another one. But I felt really bad about the church having to spend that money. If anything like that happens again, I'm going to look into fixing it myself!