I’ve been clipping coupons for a while but I was not very good about using them effectively...so why save them?  My friend Michelle has been using Couponsense.com and has been saving a ton at the grocery store.  So I thought I would give it a shot also.  Couponsense lists all the grocery stores and drug stores in Arizona and helps the consumer organize their shopping trips while getting the most for their money.  Instead of reading through all the store ads each week I can pull a report that spits out which store has the best deal and which coupons I should use.  IT really makes it a heck of lot easier to get the most for your money.  Today, I went to Bashas, who for this past week was doubling coupons up to a $1.00, they had most of the General Mills cereals on sale as well as other things that we could stock up on.  I had several buy 2 or 3 cereals and get a dollar off, with the match I would get $2 off.  Then they had their own instore coupon for when you buy 4 boxes get $4 off your total.  After everything was said and done this is what I walked out with:

12 boxes of cereal
8 bars of Ivory soap
2 boxes of Crest toothpaste
1 gal milk
2 bottles of Karo corn syrup
1 box of popcorn
1 half gal of Breyers ice cream
5# bag of flour
1 16oz jar of Skippy peanut butter
Total:  $94.41
After coupons $42.23

We could have used the store coupon a little more effectively but we didn’t...lesson learned for next time.  Anyways I’m pretty happy about how much I saved.  Also on the savings front, I saved $360 a year off my Directv bill just by asking for a lower package.  And it only took ten minutes! 

If you are looking for good savings tips check out The Consumerist and I Will Teach You to be Rich. 

My group at work is holding our yearly meetings to get things done.  Last year I was only in the group about a month and I had no idea what the conversations were all about.  I just had this deer in headlights look the whole time.  This year, I actually know what I’m talking about.  It’s kinda cool.  I can actually carry on conversations with everyone about technical stuff and how to improve process!  I was in training all last week and I’m behind on all my emails and such but this makes me feel good.

I have pictures to post from Halloween which I will do later today.  Courtney and I also had some pictures taken for our Christmas cards so I’ll post those also.

The second job is going, kinda stinks that the retail industry has taken a nose dive because I don’t have any hours for this week.  Good thing gas prices are so low....which makes no sense to me why they were so high six weeks ago.  In the industry I work in I hear all about the economy, we have no choice it’s our business.  But all the talk has me stressed out about things that have not happened but could happen.  Lost of ‘what if’s’ running through my head.  I need to not worry about it and make the best of things.  I am thankful to be working right now.  I’m doing everything in my power to make sure that it stays this way!

Well I’m off to more meetings.  Photos coming this afternoon!

I’ll be hanging with the family tonight, passing out candy and watching all the fun.  Our neighborhood is lame, no kid traffic at all which is why for the past few years we’ve been going to the other Hannafin house for Halloween.  Now that the twins are older it should be more fun this year.  Cathy and I have got a TON of candy, probably too much.  I’ve got the cameras charging so I can capture all the fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve posted pictures from last weekend’s trip to Schenpf Farms.  The boys had a blast!  By the time we all got home we were covered in dust from walking around the farm.  I also have some video, I’ll probably get that uploaded this weekend.

What else?? I have training all next week...C# and ASP....more geek talk!  Work has been busy this past week for me which is a welcomed feeling.  My group is having a team event in two weeks, I hope I come away with a bit more direction in my daily tasks.  I hate feeling so unsecure about my place in the cube farm.  I have hopes that all the training that I am going through will keep me around for a bit.  The second job is ramping up, but looking at the economy the past month I doubt the holiday shopping season is going to be as busy as it has been in previous years.  I am grateful to have two jobs.

I dropped off my early voting ballot today.  It was a complete mess, thank goodness I got my ballot mailed to me, the wait is like four hours!  I went outside of comfort zone with my votes for this election.  Things need to change and I’m not sure either candidate is equipped to handle a makeover of our economy.  It’s the ‘lesser of two evils’ game for me.  Tuesday is going to be interesting and so will Wednesday at market open.  This is history in the making.

I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween!  Don’t eat too much candy!

Yep, life is just moving along like it should so I haven’t had much to blog about.  I’m still trying to find my place at work.  With all this crap going on in the financial world it makes me nervous.  The ‘L’ word hasn’t come up but I’m in a position that could be considered a luxury.  I’m trying to make a niche for myself so I will be indispensable.  I have good things happening but I don’t want to spill the beans about it just yet.  If it all works out it it could lead into bigger opportunities.  I’m WFH tomorrow hopefully I will find the motivation to get shit done.  UGH!  It’s still freaking 90 degrees here.  Seriously I need some fall temperatures, I have sweaters that are dying to come out of the closet.

It’s almost 5am and since I can’t sleep what better time than now to update my blog.  Sorry for not posting anything lately, life has just gotten in the way.  I’ve been busy, working two jobs and just trying to get stuff done.  The second job is actually going pretty well.  The last two weekends I’ve done really well sales-wise, too bad I don’t work on commission.  Everyone at the store is really nice and so far we all seem to get along.  The extra income is going to be nice for the holidays. 

The real job has just been crazy.  While I was on vacation my group went through a reorg and two groups were combined and then split up again.  I feel sorta out of the loop with the whole thing.  I feel like they are not sure what to do with me.  I’m trying my best to show what I bring to the team but it feels more like a scene from Office Space.  I’m in Linux training all this week and when I return to work next week I hope to get some real world experience to help reinforce the training.  My thought is that if I can take the crap work off the admin’s plate then it frees up their time and thus making me more valuable.  Plus it paves the way for me to move into a more technical role and more pay.  The training is going well.  It turns out that I already knew a lot of the basics just from playing with the backend of this blog.

I’ve also had a jolt of creativity with my scrapbooking lately.  I’ve got a ton to scrapbook from the wedding and all.  I’ve got some of the pictures from the photographer but I think she has more to send me.  The deal I had with the photographer was that I would do all the post production work because I wanted more control of how the images were manipulated.  She shot the event in RAW which will make it easier for me to make adjustments but last I heard she was having problems pulling the RAW images off of the memory card.  I have the JPEGs so it’s like the images were lost, it would be a lot easier on me if I had the RAW images.  From 250 images I’ve narrowed them down to 140 and I hope to get them done this weekend.

To encourage my scrapbooking habit I’ve decided to start another blog just about scrapbooking.  My plan is to make it more of a product review blog.  I’ve noticed lately that a lot of the scrapbooking blogs I read are becoming more about how much blinking advertising can I cram into my sidebar than about scrapbooking.  I want this site to be a place where scrapbookers can come to get real opinions from someone who doesn’t work for a magazine or isn’t on a design team.  A place where you don’t feel like you’re being pushed to buy stuff that doesn’t work or that you won’t use more than once.  I hope to have the first video reviews done this weekend.  I’ll post the link here when it’s up.

Boy, this is turning out to be a long post…

Today was a busy for me.  I got early, went to weigh in, had a bagel with Courtney, and then got ready to scrapbooking with my friend Stephanie.  I love scrapbooking, I really do.  I’m feeling a little bit more motivated to create lately and that is exciting for me.  I’ll post pictures of the layouts tomorrow.  We got a TON of stuff at the crop today since it was CKC weekend.  I love free stuff!

After scrapbooking I went straight to my second job at Sur la Table.  Yes, I went back, this time on the sales floor.  Its not many hours right now which is fine.  Things will kick up as the holidays approach.  It’s not a hard job and thankfully I’ve done it before so I don’t need much training.  Everyone seems nice so far.  It will be nice to have the extra $$ for the holidays.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done!

I remember hearing about this accident in the news and I didn’t completely make the connection.  Plus with all the wedding hoopla I didn’t have time to think much about anything.  I was reading Ali’s blog like I do everyday and she had a post about this family.  I don’t know the family but I am familiar with Domestic Bliss and their Blissful Studio, I am such a fan/admirer of what they have done over there for the creative community.  I am deeply touched by their outpouring of generosity to help.  I’m posting their information here to get the word out, I don’t know how much I can help but I am believer that every little bit counts.  Please say prayers for this amazing Arizona family.

If you would like to help or for more information please visit their benefit blog.

I’ll be blogging on the wedding blog this week.  Head over there for all the fun.

This has got to be the most craziest week ever in my life!  I have so much to do and so little time.  For my wedding guests that read this blog, head over to www.hannafin.com/blog for wedding updates right up to the big day!

There is a lot that I want to say about what has been going on but this isn’t the right venue.  I will say that I am not at all angry or upset over recent events.  Very disappointed?  Yes.  I’ll leave it at that. 

Overall I’m clam but I have had a few mini-freakouts, yesterday was the worst.  I’ve made plans for the orchard tour the day after the wedding, and I made my list of stuff I can’t forget to do.  The list is huge!  And I feel a wee bit overwhelmed.  And now Courtney and I are coming down with colds.  Great, super, fabulous!  I can’t be sick, I need to keep moving.

We went down to Tempe Splash park first thing this morning with the twins.  The park was reopened today so I figured if we got there first it will be the cleanest it’s ever been.  You can see Courtney, Reilly and me in the video, and there is a couple of shots of Jack from far away.

We weren’t there for very long, right when we were leaving vans full of daycare kids showed up.  That would have been totally crazy if we had stayed.  The boys had fun.  I’ll post some pictures later.

**UPDATE** I took down the video because it was causing errors and pissing me off.

I got four pages done last night which is a lot for me.  I normally have a hard time getting my ideas on to paper, but last night once I got going there was no stopping.  I haven’t scrapbooked since March and not since I started my meds.  I really felt energized and creative, I haven’t felt that in a really long time.  I posted the layouts on TwoPeas.  I still have more to scrap but of course now I’m distracted.  It doesn’t help that G4 is running a Heroes marathon today.

Fern and David are in town this week.  Tonight it’s dinner at the other Hannafin house, BBQ chicken, yum!  Phoenix is getting the leftovers from Dolly so it’s freaking hot and humid today.  So not fun but I guess that’s why we all have pools.  Pools don’t do much good when its this hot, it’s like swimming in bathwater.

I have SQL training next week which will get me away from the office for a few days.  Hopefully I can gasp the information and it sticks.  I really want to figure out if I’m cut out for programming.  The Cisco classes helped steer me in that direction.  What stinks though is that I let Snapper do all the work on our labs.  I really need to take the last two classes over or at least do all the labs so I can grasp the material.  I’m going to start taking on a bit more at work.  Hopefully, that will give me better ammo for a promotion next January.  The other path is project management.  Snapper thinks I’m perfect for that role, and he’s probably right, it is a natural progression for me.  The thought of having the success of a project hinge on me makes me ill.  That’s what what stressing me out in my last role.  If I made a mistake then someone might not get their bonus, and I hated that feeling.  I would much rather be told what needs to be done and get it done.  I do have project management training in two weeks, if anything it will help me have a better understanding of how things get done.

Have a safe weekend!

I got this nasty gram from my ex-friend Joey yesterday afternoon.  I won’t go into details but basically he read the previous entry and was now upset.  What puzzels me about it is that I thought this was all done and over with like weeks ago, I didn’t understand why he had such a delayed reaction.  When I told him that our friendship was over a couple of weeks ago I thought I had made myself pretty clear.  I’m not sure if he just decided to not believe me or what.  Whatever.

Moving on....Just over thirty days until the big day.  I have a feeling that time is just going to fly by now.  The dress fitting went really well.  They are making the bustle and I should have the dress back in two weeks.  The menus are done and have been sent off to the Inn, just waiting on the cost now.  Courtney still has to decide on what color of Vans the guys are going to wear.  I’ve got him down to two, red or black, I think he’s leaning towards black.  Maggie’s flower girl dress arrived and is now being sent back because the bodice is the wrong color.  It came in ivory when it should have been red like the skirt.  No biggie.  The twins have their ring bearer outfits done, they are going to look so cute!

Speaking of the twins, they are growing so fast.  Their birthdays are coming up and they have asked for special cakes this year.  Reilly wants a farm cake and Jack wants a robot cake.  Cathy and I are going to have our hands full making those.  Which reminds me, I need to order their birthday presents soon.  So much to do!

I’ve had little spurt of motivation today.  I’m slowly clearing off my craft table and once it’s clean maybe then I’ll have the motivation to actually scrapbook a little.  I still feel like all the scrapbook stuff is out of control in that room.  I still haven’t figured out a good system for storing the embellishments and such.  Everything needs to have a home and right now that’s not happening. 

Tomorrow morning I am going to a wedding dress fitting.  This is after they have done the first round of alterations and to decide on the bustle.  It’s all getting too real.  In six weeks everything will change.  Courtney’s wedding ring has arrived and it’s really nice.  We decided that each of us will pick out the rings and just be surprised.  Although I have given Courtney a few nudges in the right direction.  We are still undecided about the menu for the reception.  One would think that two chef’s could figure something out by now.  I think I’m putting too many expectations on it, it just needs to simple, and reflect us. 

There will be one less guest attending the wedding, which I knew was coming but I had hopes that he would prove me wrong.  Joey has made the decision not to come.  The excuse...because he’s too new at his job and he can’t ask for the time off.  Whatever, that’s all crap.  My family and friends have known about this wedding since last August.  Joey made the choice to remain unemployed all winter and didn’t get a job until just recently.  This was completely in his hands and he had plenty of chances to choose a different path.  This may sound really harsh for those who don’t know the history, but it’s time for me to end this relationship and move on.  There were several emails back and forth and he said that I was stupid for ending the friendship.  It’s been a few weeks and I still feel that it was the best decision for me. This is bigger than just not coming to the wedding.  Joey has consistently let me down as a friend and each time I looked past it.  Not anymore.  I’m done. 

I also decided to get a second job.  I’m freaked out about the state of our economy and I just want to put some extra $$ in the bank for emergencies.  I’ve applied at a couple of places and so far I’ve only had one response, which did not lead to a job.  The wedding conflicted with the training, which totally stinks.  There is one job that I will be really excited to get, and it’s only 1/2 a mile down he road.  Cross your fingers for me!