Since I blogged. I am home and loving it, but I really thought I would be further along in some of my goals. Buy why would I be? You actually have to WORK AT THEM.

I am making a commitment to myself. This is hard because I never keep commitments to myself, but I am an all or nothing kind of person.

So I am all in. I am going to blog every day, even if it is 2 lines. I have 3 areas that I am going to keep my commitment to myself this year.

1. Year of Ultimate Frugality. I came upon this idea from a you tuber person, Coffee with Kate. She lives in the same state I am in so I relate to her. She brought up this idea of a Year of Frugality and I decided I am going to do it. This involves a year of buying NOTHING that is not needed or essential. For instance, I saw someone post or something about Evergreen Glade to help the house smell Christmasy, I initially thought oooh I have to get that since we have a fake tree. Is this needed? NO! so I'm not buying it. The Christmas presents that were purchased before November 1st are the only gifts my family is getting. (This is the date I started).

I have unsubscribed from all my online shopping portals. I will find ways to do things cheaper. For instance I make french toast casserole a lot and especially on Christmas. My 10 year old granddaughter asked if I was going to "make it like last year". Last year I made it with cinnamon bread. Cinnamon bread is $5.99 a loaf at Costco! I am going to make some cinnamon bread or cinnamon rolls and use that which will be cheaper than $5.99!

Since food is an area that can vary widely from family to family, and my husband loves to cook, my goal is as little food waste as possible. For instance we bought a bag of avocados at Costco, but there was no lettuce (the whole romaine scare thing), so I should have put them back, but I didn't so now I have 5 ripe avocados. We are making guacamole and freezing it! We made ham and beans from the Thanksgiving ham. We cooked the turkey carcass, my husband picked it clean and we made homemade dog food with it. I had a few apples from our tree getting soft. I chopped them up and gave them to our 4 chickens. They gobbled them up! I knew they would because they were actually jumping up and pecking them before they were ready to pick (some of the branches are hanging quite low).

I'm finding it easier to just not buy anything than have a "budget category" for something. I don't have a lot of will power when it comes to certain items, so it is much easier to just not buy anything than buy a little (fabric I am talking to you).

2. Weight loss. I am a WW member. I have been gaining and losing the same 5 pounds over and over. I have about 10 pounds to lose. I am giving myself until the end of March to do it. Then I will cancel my membership or go into maintenance. I really like my group and it so much more than just weight loss. I have done it before (gotten down to goal weight), but at that time in 2014 I still had 4 pounds to go! Then they changed the weight chart. That weight would be my goal weight now (highest amount I should weigh for my short height). So I am keeping that commitment to myself!

3. Decluttering. I had to get out of bed the other night to charge my fit bit or go to the bathroom or something. I swung out of bed and literally almost fell, catching my right leg in a box that had a bunch of crap including a plastic dishpan in it. In doing that, I pulled everything off my tiny end table which included 4 stacked books, hand lotion, my lamp, my iPad, some earrings and other smaller crap. It hurt like hell and since I already suffer from chronic pain, the last thing I need is more pain! I woke up the next morning and realize that my bedroom only has a narrow walkway around the bed. It is insane how much crap we have. Usable crap true, but do we need it? See #1. No we probably don't need a lot of it.

So that is the third area I am working on during my Year of Ultimate Frugality. I will donate to our local animal rescue thrift store that is only a mile from me. They accept donations Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings. They know me well enough that they take all my stuff because I throw yucky stuff in the garbage! I started with throwing away 13 pairs of shoes, 11 of them were mine, one was a pair of old sandals that were my daughters and a pair of worn out little Mary Janes that were my 10 year old granddaughter.

I am not sure what switch was turned in my brain, but the more stuff I don't buy, the easier it is.

I'm hoping the more I throw stuff away the easier it will get. The more I eat healthy, the easier it will be (actually I feel like I already eat pretty healthy, I just eat too much).