Money I Spent: $40 on Amazon for parts for the garden irrigation system. Needed a ton more emitters and a main line hole punch tool. I didn’t want to have a spending day so quick into May, but I want to finish up the irrigation system before the tomatoes get too big, so time was of the essence here.
Extra Money I Made: eBay – 1 coffee cup for $17.
Don’t Go Into a Store: Success!
Exercise Every Day: Well, I didn’t have a formal exercise session, but I did work in the yard and garden ALL day long, so that counts for something.
Work Outside Every Day: Success! Moved 16 tomatoes into the hoop house and planted peppers here and there. Potted up a bunch of peppers into larger pots, and some other stuff here and there.
Thoughts: I think my thoughts are starting to repeat themselves. I was thinking about how happy I am that I canceled my Audible membership early this year. It was $15.75 or so each month, and gave me 1 credit per month to use on an audio book. So what happens when you are basically paying $15.75 per audio book is you want to get the most bang for your buck, which for me, meant choosing a very long book each month to listen to. Anything under 20 hours, I wouldn’t even consider. Over 30 hours was best. And also what this means is you are committed to this book, because you have paid $15 for it. So you better listen to it, whether you like it or not.
Anyway, I had an Audible membership off and on for the last 10 years probably. I did learn a trick a while back of putting the membership “on hold” for 3 months each year, typically Jan-Mar to coincide with the annual fiscal fast starting in January. But after hearing from a friend how much she loves her library membership, and how she can get audiobooks, paperbooks, and ebooks, I decided to give it a try. (Ed joined me, too, in canceling his Audible membership and getting a library card.) And I have to say, I love it.
The best things about our library membership are: 1) it’s FREE, 2) you can check out like a dozen things at one time, so there’s no pressure to finish something you don’t like, just return it and get something else, and 3) you can check out audiobooks and ebooks to different devices (I get audiobooks on my iphone and ebooks on my Kindle Fire). We don’t go into the library for paper books given the current virus situation, but maybe someday we will.
The only cons about going the library route vs. the Audible and Amazon route are: 1) they don’t have EVERY book every written available, so you may not be able to find the book you want, 2) sometimes there’s a wait list, so you place a hold and wait a while for your book, and 3) the longest borrow time is 21 days, and that’s typically not long enough for me to finish a book. Books will auto-return themselves when your loan has expired. But typically you can just go re-check-out the same book, and you pick up right where you left off.
So, an Audible membership would run $189/per year, or $141.75 if you do a 3-month “pause” on your account. Typically, I might buy 2-3 books per year via Amazon in paper format. Say, at $20 each this adds $60, which would bring my annual total to around $200. So not only is the library less pressure and just as easy as buying a book or having an Audible account, it saves about $200/year!
Fiscal Fasters 