7QT: Cancelled Plans and Hot Deals

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This past weekend, I was supposed to get a weekend ALL TO MYSELF. B had Drill and was taking Cora down with him for Grandma to take care of. I went to a mom's night out at a martini bar (the most overpriced and pretentious thing in this town, but I was happy with the complimentary valet!), and then woke up the next morning sick sick sick. I couldn't even talk. So I was so glad I didn't have to take care of a kid! Or a husband. I laid in bed all day and finished book #2 of the year!

A memoir, a conversion story, and a handful of quick birth stories
Check out Clan Donaldson for more from Cari!

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But then. Of course there's a BUT THEN. Around noontime on Saturday, while I was still lying in bed, B texted me to tell me that his Sunday drill got cancelled due to an impending snowstorm that was supposed to drop 6-12" on Indy. He and Cora would be coming home that night. We were both miffed, since if he doesn't have Sunday drill, he doesn't get paid for that day. He was happy to have a day off of either job on Sunday, though.

So he slept until 10am. Which means, on my 'me' weekend, I was up feeding breakfast to my kid at 7am. Then we had to shovel our way out to get to church. (At least I had help with that.) My MIL texted and said we'd try again for his drill in April. If it snows then, I am done with you, Indiana. So done.

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After doing the 7 posts in 7 days challenge, it seems I've run out of stuff to blog about. Luckily, we're taking a mini 3-day excursion to Louisville next week, so you'll get a recap of that. My husband took the entire week off because he just 'needed a break'--he's right, he does. He worked 26 out of 28 days in Feb., and one of those days off was to attend a funeral. (He had another half-day off due to illness.)

I wanted to go somewhere close enough but south of here where they just might not have snow on the ground. Fingers crossed, but I have lots of museums and indoor activities planned. Including a trip to Krispy Kreme when the 'HOT' sign is on. Not kidding.

Of course there's an app for that

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I booked our Louisville hotel through Hotwire.com, and I made out like a bandit! I did the deal where you don't know what hotel you're getting, so you get a better rate. They had a promo going where if you book through the app, you got $25 off $100. I was getting a $51/night hotel for 2 nights, so this was perfect. With all the taxes and whatnot added at the end, it came out to $100 even, and I had even figured out which hotel it is. Hopefully it treats us well. I was really just looking for somewhere with free breakfast!

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This post needs another picture.

Yes, B is wearing my "Queen of Everything" apron

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I have been messing around a lot with apps that make money and getting stuff for free. Just yesterday, I cashed out the money from my Ibotta app using Venmo, since there was a $5 bonus incentive. I then used a promo code from deal site Hip2Save to sign up for Citrus Lane (for Cora) for $9 for the first box. B went to Kroger and did some deal where he bought 3 boxes of his favorite cereal and it made the milk free. Then I got 50¢ back on the milk through Ibotta and 50¢ back on a 40¢ yogurt through Checkout 51. And then I decided to try Bulu Box (for me) for free by using my EarndIt points. And some awesome person used my Ting referral link, so we'll be getting another month of a cheap (maybe even free) smartphone bill.

If that wasn't enough, I currently have $30 worth of Amazon gift cards I've earned through Swagbucks and Bing Rewards that I'll be using for something soon.

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That entire last take probably proves I'm nuts and/or speaking a foreign language, but it was a pretty good way to spend naptime. I'll throw in the disclaimer here that this post definitely contains affiliate links. Feel free to comment or email me asking about any of those. I don't feel like launching into 20 explanations right now. But here is the link to the post I wrote about our awesome cell phone company Ting!

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Were anyone else's ashes really wet this year? I know it makes a better cross instead of just a smudge with dust in your eyes, but it felt wet for a good 10 minutes afterward!

Our #ashtag selfie. Hard to see Cora's, but it's there!

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Meal Planning for March

I've done it!

I've successfully blogged 7 posts in 7 days! I've shared how we chose our daughter's name, asked some not-so-burning questions about food, shared my journey to finally calling myself a runner, dumped the contents of my purse for all to see, invited my readers to play Oscar games on Twitter with me tonight, and even gushed about my cell phone plan (no, really).

And today will end will end with a look at the future. The future being March, and what we will eat for dinner during it.

I started meal planning a month at a time recently, and it went okay. There were some weeks I had to tweak a lot of it due to life happening, but it was nice to just be able to hop back on the plan without having to scramble.

I'm sure you notice the scribble on the side--Lent starts this week, which means all Friday meals will be meatless this month. It actually isn't all that hard for us since I have been incorporating more meatless meals into our plan lately.

Some of the abbreviations on the list above are All You--meaning from All You magazine. I love this magazine, and most of the recipes from it have been superb. The "5DD" means the blog 5 Dollar Dinners. All of the recipes I'm using from it are from this post: 20 Meals From Costco for $150. We don't even have a Costco membership, but I liked the idea! (However, this is where some issues cropped up since most of those recipes contain meat!)

This week we have:

Monday: Italian Chicken & Potatoes in the Slow Cooker. (Recipe) I haven't actually gone grocery shopping yet, snow refuses to stop falling, and I'm horribly sick to the point where I can hardly speak above a whisper, so I'm not sure this is actually going to happen.

Tuesday: Mardi Gras Pancake Feast! I used to make my own pancakes, but decided last month to get a box mix to make my life easier. I bought the Meijer store-brand buttermilk mix, and it is soooo good! I'll probably add in some chocolate chips. And of course we'll go full-out with bacon, eggs, and whathaveyou.

Wednesday: Simple Soup After Church. (Note: that's not spaghetti like it says above, since I took this pic before we went to mass this weekend and found out about this). It's Ash Wednesday, and in the Catholic world, that means fasting and abstinence. Abstinence means abstaining from meat, and fasting means only one actual meal, and two smaller meals that don't equal your 'big' meal. Our church is doing a simple soup meal in the parish hall after the service, so that sounds good enough for us.

Thursday: Husband cooks! Not sure what he'll do. If I actually cook on Monday, we'll probably still have leftovers so he'll get off easy. If not, he seems to like cooking chicken in different ways.

Friday: Baked Penne with Vegetables. (Recipe) The recipe ingredients read like a lasagna, but it doesn't seem like nearly as much work.

Saturday: Leftovers. We're also going to a party at a pizza joint that afternoon, so I'm not quite sure how hungry we'll be for dinner.

Sunday: Ham and Mashed Potatoes. After reading Green Eggs and Ham to my kid for the billionth time, I realized that I cannot shake the southern pronunciation of the word. Hay-am. 2 syllables. Yes, I'm from Georgia, and yes, my Hoosier husband probably thinks I'm nuts.

Why I Brag About My Cell Phone Bill (And How You Can Too)

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. I was not paid to write it, and all opinions are my own.

I'm probably turning into a broken record, but when something awesome happens, I just have to brag.

Remember how I decided to join the 21st century and delve into smartphone-land??

Well, I did a TON of research. All online during naptime, of course. I knew I wanted a no-contract plan. I learned that if you don't always want the latest and greatest phone, then that's the way to go. Contract plans give you free or discounted phones, but the price of them is just being rolled into your plan. I've had the same dumbphone for 4 years (the background picture on it is one I took of B when we were engaged--that was 2009), so I'm quite obviously not a latest-and-greatest addict. The no-contract plans that run on Sprint's network (Sprint MVNOs, the technical term) seemed to be the best bang for the buck and most were rated quite highly. Just as I was about to pull the trigger and join Virgin Mobile, an internet stranger on a forum pushed me toward Ting.

Smart, smart, smart internet stranger. I had a learning curve to all this, but he explained it all and even gave suggestions of which phone I should get and how buy a Ting-compatible one on Ebay. (It was actually rather simple.)

I settled on the Samsung Galaxy S3. Ting sells devices, but it's kind of expensive, Instead, I bought a refurb (with a warranty! and chargers!) on Ebay for $175. I know this phone is a freebie on most of the contract plans when you sign up, but it basically gets rolled into your heavy phone bill.

$175/24 months (the length of most contracts) = $7.29 per month (keep this number in mind)

My new pride and joy, complete with purple otterbox

Setting it up with Ting was super duper simple. They don't have any physical stores so it's all online. I haven't had to call their customer service yet, but everyone online raves that a live American person picks up after a few rings. I even got a new phone number since I was tired of having a number that belonged to the area I haven't lived in since 2006.

The thing with Ting that scares a lot of people is that you pay per usage. Not what you think your usage will be, but what it actually is at the end of the month. My bill for my first month with my first smartphone on Ting was . . .

 . . .

wait for it . . .

$24.45

Don't believe me? Well, here's my actual bill with usage price plus fees.

Yes, that includes all the wacky taxes and fees. So add my $7.29 (monthly cost of my phone) to that, and it was $31.74 for the full cost of my phone for my first month.

Also, I said above that this plan works on Sprint's network (so I had to get a Sprint phone, which was no big deal.) What I didn't say was that this plan also roams onto Verizon's voice network. At no extra cost! This is one of the main reasons I chose Ting over Virgin Mobile.

That means you're covered by 2 of the nation's largest networks when making a real live phone call. I put this to the test shortly after I got it. My in-law's house has notoriously bad reception with Sprint--my BIL says he has had to walk down to the end of the driveway (which is a looooong  one) to take a phone call. It's winter in Indiana, so that was just not an option I wanted to entertain. But then a few hours later, there I was happily chatting away on the phone with my mom while in my in-laws' kitchen, nary a care in the world about crappy reception.

My husband B decided to join in on this after an unfortunate work-iPhone-in-the-toilet incident that left him phone-less for a bit, and now we have 2 devices on our plan. He also bought the same phone off of Ebay, and our bill this month look like this:

Like all wonderful things, there are definitely a few drawbacks to Ting. The first one is that with multiple devices, you still get charged for each person's use (as far as I can tell). So if B calls me and we talk for 20 minutes, we get charged for 40 (there's no differentiation between incoming/outgoing in the billing). Same with texting.

Also, if you're a super-de-dooper heavy user in any category (2GB, 4800 texts, 2100 minutes), Ting is probably not for you. Here's the rate table:

I highlighted what we used last month, so the figure at the bottom is our total.

Although I just did the math on heavy users and it's not bad. $15 for 1GB, 25¢ for 100 extra texts, and $1.90 for 100 minutes.

I've been surprised by how many megabytes we DON'T use. Since I'd never had a smartphone, I had trouble gauging what my data usage would be. Well, it turns out that almost everywhere I go has wi-fi. And with the winter being the way it has been, I haven't exactly been sitting on park benches checking Twitter. B even showed me an easy way to disable data on my phone so it isn't constantly searching if it loses the wi-fi signal. When I know I'm not near wi-fi and need data, I just go to my settings and turn it back on. In 2 clicks, I have 4G LTE speed data. This simple trick dropped me from 97MB in the first month to a whopping 8MB in the second.

Ting's website has a handy-dandy savings calculator, if you want to see how much you could save.

Some other cool things about Ting is that there is a referral program, so if you use my link, you'll get a $25 credit, and I get a kickback, too, of course. (So, yes, my first month was actually FREE, thanks to the that!) I'd probably still be writing this post even without the kickback, since I heart frugality and I'd call this one of my better decisions. And if you want to get out of your contract and switch to Ting, they offer up to $75 to help with that. Ting also is easy to use and you can cap your amounts in each category or just set up alerts. I can check my usage any time on the app on my phone.

So, I'm obviously very, very happy with Ting! Other low-cost plans that I seriously considered were Virgin Mobile and Republic Wireless, so those might be a better fit for you. Reddit's NoContract forum was a big help. New plans seem to crop up overnight, so I'm sure I'll lose touch eventually, but for now, I'm happy that I finally joined smartphone-land/the 21st century without breaking the bank.