September 23 2018

Complete (Five Minute Friday)

This Friday was a travel day for me. We were up early to gather or things and get to the airport. We flew on a small plane with only 3 seats per row for the first flight and all was remarkably quiet. Then we got on the larger plane for the pond-jumping part of our trip. The international flight was on a larger plane with 6 seats per row. For that flight, I was stuck in a middle seat. The flight was uncomfortably long, over six hours and with the five hour time difference we lost a night of sleep. We arrived early on Saturday morning.

No overly long flight across an ocean would be complete without a constantly crying baby. I didn’t mind too much, the baby was probably as ready to be off that airplane as I was. Then with all the popping of ears with cabin pressure, it was probably scary and uncomfortable for the baby. I was just grateful that the baby was way up in the front of the plane and we were much nearer to the back of the plane which allowed the screams to be muted somewhat by the distance. I can only imagine how rough it would have been to be stuck in any seat near the little screamer.

I had to admire the parents or whoever was responsible for the little screamer because the mere fact that they had the guts to even think of traveling by plane such a distance with an infant makes them much braver than I. We took our kids to Disney in 2000 so they would have been almost seven and barely nine at that time. I couldn’t imagine trying such a trip with younger kids who didn’t have a concept of time or the ability to entertain themselves for hours. It was the kids’ first plane ride and the first I could actually remember as well. I am told I was about two years old the only time I flew on a plane before that and I have no memory of it at all.

Flying gets easier each time I do it. I’m still not crazy about the closeness we are confined to with so many other people. As an introvert, this is not an ideal situation to put myself into on a regular basis. Never knowing if THIS trip will be the last I get to take to such a destination, I try to make the most of any trip I get to take.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Complete
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

Category: Five Minute Friday, Travel | 2 Comments on Complete (Five Minute Friday)
September 13 2018

Saving Money on Food While Traveling

Last month, we went to an intense 3-day workshop in Atlanta that we knew would have long hours. We were also trying to continue eating reasonably healthy and trying to save money at the same time. So what did we do you ask?

Breakfast

Well, before we left home we were drinking green smoothies every morning for breakfast anyway, so I just made a few extra batches of smoothies and put each serving into a quart-sized zip-top freezer bag and put them into the freezer flat to freeze with the name of the smoothie and calories on the label. These did a dual purpose because they also acted as ice packs in the cooler on our way to Atlanta. They were only partially thawed, so when we got to our room, I left the next day’s smoothie in the refrigerator and put the rest in the freezer. Each morning we added a straw and drank our smoothie then pulled the ones for the next day out so they could thaw. That is how we dealt with breakfast, and it worked out very well.

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Lunch

Lunch was not much harder. We use a lot of the Ole Xtreme Wellness High-Fiber Low-Carb Wraps in place of bread in our house, so we threw a pack of those in along with cheese sticks and sliced turkey lunchmeat for wraps. We tossed in the avocado we had in the refrig so we could use it up. We also prewashed and bagged baby carrots, cherries, and pretzels in individual servings. This meant each morning all we had to do to pack our lunches was make our sandwich/wrap and bag it, then grab the additional things we wanted to have to round out our lunch that day. We also had a small selection of Clif Bars and some prebagged Orchard Valley Harvest Snack Packs Trail Mix. We had a couple of single serving sized bottles that we could fill with our own water or iced tea each morning to add to our lunch bag. Everything fit nicely in my Thirty-One Lunch Break Thermal bag and was enough to feed both of us.

This particular event offered lunch tickets for $20 a person to go through a buffet and fill a styrofoam carryout container to bring back and eat in the meeting room. Nobody really wanted to drive somewhere to get fast food because once you were parked you didn’t want to have to give up your parking space for the day as they really had a shortage of parking at this particular event center. Needless to say, Hubby and I were thrilled that we had been cheap and planned to pack our lunches and thus avoided the additional $120 it would have cost us to eat that buffet lunch for the three days of the conference. I’m not going to even pretend we didn’t think of that as a huge win! Continue reading

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August 23 2018

Loved (Five Minute Friday)

I did something this weekend with Hubby that we absolutely LOVED. We signed up a couple of months ago to attend a 3-day intensive workshop to learn more about investing the way Warren Buffet does. It was serious, it was 3 long days of feeling like we were back in school. We drove 9 hours to get to the Atlanta area. We spent much of the drive listening to episodes of the Invested Podcast that I had saved to my phone. We had read the books written by Phil Town and his daughter, Danielle Town. We already believed in their way of investing but we needed more to actually put it into action. When I was looking for more info on the websites I stumbled onto the link to apply for the scholarship and decided to go for it. I applied to an event a couple of months out and Hubby and I got busy preparing to attend and learn even more. We began turning after dinner hours into Turquoise Table learning time. We would sit and read or researching companies and sharing what we found with each other. I can honestly say we have never been so focused on the same things for so long. During the workshop, we wrote out promises to ourselves and the team collected and laminated them so they would last while we carried them with us into the future. We met so many people. It turned out that there were two gals from the same area we call home sitting just a couple of people away from us at this workshop. We call that a God Wink (affiliate link). The brakes were acting crazy shortly before we got to Atlanta, but we nursed them and they got us home safely. It was a great weekend! One of the best we’ve had in a very long time. We loved learning so much and gaining so much hope for our future and the ability to actually have enough to retire someday. We actually loved spending our weekend this way and both agreed we would love to go back and someday become coaches to others.

If you think you might want to learn more about investing in stocks or options, you should apply for a scholarship to attend one of Phil Town’s Rule #1 Transformational Investing Workshops.

If you want to grab this book, please use the affiliate link provided here.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Loved
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

Category: Five Minute Friday, Goals, Learning, Travel | 1 Comment on Loved (Five Minute Friday)
July 8 2018

Vacation (Five Minute Friday)

Vacation is a word that conjures up so many different memories. When we were kids, vacation meant our family of four kids and two parents piling in a nine-passenger station wagon without air conditioning and driving to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee or Mammoth Cave, Kentucky or even Santa Claus, Indiana. These were the kind of trips we took with our family as kids. Always fairly close because the cars were never newish or in great condition and there was always the chance that it would break down on us. The trips were usually only one or two nights in a single hotel room because more than that was NOT in the budget. As often as not, our family vacations were to Ohio to visit our cousins and/or attend our annual family reunion.

When we were kids, vacation meant our family of four kids and two parents piling in a nine-passenger station wagon without air conditioning and driving... Click To Tweet Continue reading

Category: Family, Five Minute Friday, Travel | 1 Comment on Vacation (Five Minute Friday)
April 26 2018

Review: Local Goat Restaurant

 As you can see from the texts they sent, the wait was less than estimated. I may indeed be culturally deprived as hubby always said, but this is the first time a restaurant has asked for my phone number so they can text me when our table is ready. The system seemed to work flawlessly, so bravo for technology!

Continue reading

Category: Review, Travel | 2 Comments on Review: Local Goat Restaurant