What D wore to the wedding, and phone considerations

Well, after tallying the votes, and taking into account the advice from a couple of wise moms that D would probably make use of both sweaters, we ended up bringing both! Initially, I had her in the gray one, as shown below. Later on, though, she mostly wore the purple one, because we had a bunch of family photos to shoot outdoors, and it being November, the possum-merino blend turned out to be warmer than acrylic. Yes, I said possum. It's from New Zealand, which makes it awesome. (The dark girl you see with us recently returned from NZ. You wouldn't know it to look at us, but we are in fact of the same parentage.) I have a whole ball of possum yarn left, and I'm resisting the urge to knit a matching hat and mittens for the baby, seeing as she's almost outgrown the sweater. Those sleeves aren't meant to be 3/4 length.


The night before the wedding, we had a lovely time at the rehearsal. I gave the bride and groom their gift, and it went over tremendously well. I foolishly neglected to photograph their jubilant faces, but here's the final product sans recipients:


The fact that the blanket took me about three and a half months to knit up, with a couple of interruptions, makes me want to create one for our little fam. We love blankets here, and although we have a bunch, we don't have one made by me. I probably wouldn't knit the exact same one, but I have another one in mind. We'll see how I feel once the year of no new yarn is over.

In other news, our grocery bills have been getting up there lately, and since my income is quite reduced now that I'm no longer on EI, we're looking for other ways to cut our expenses. Since I do child care two days a week, some of those groceries can get written off, but still. This week's bill was 150$! That's not good. Granted, it was a week where we needed to buy meat, and cheese was on sale for 4.44$/500g, so that kicked it up a bit. Also we got our turkey for Friends Thanksgiving, which is a one-off.

Where to cut back? A few friends of mine now have gotten rid of land lines altogether and gone with a cell phone. I am somewhat averse to this for three reasons: 1) I do not tend to answer my phone. 2) I do not tend to keep my phone charged. 3) I do not tend to have my phone readily accessible. So to get a hold of me via cell phone, you need an unlikely trifecta of ideal circumstances. Also not many people have the number. Also I'm on a 10$ pay-as-you-go type of deal, and am comfortable paying only that much.

But then Hubby told me we pay 40$ a month for our land line, and if I switched to a plan that was, say 20$ or 25$ a month, it would be a net savings of 25$-30$ a month. And if I stay with the same company, I wouldn't have to change my phone. I think a lot of cell phone companies are scams anyway, with the way they try to make you covet the newest and coolest phone. Sign a three-year contract and you get the phone for "free"! You'll pay much more than it's worth in minutes and text messages anyway! I especially love when people describe their plans as having a certain number of free texts or free calls. Not so much free... that's what you're paying for.

I have an almost-two-year-old flip phone that I bought outright for maybe 50$ (including a 20$ phone credit), and I'm quite content with it. I recently learned how to scroll to a different word in t9word or whatever. Instead of typing the word out letter by letter. I am a techno wizard. So maybe by the end of the month we'll have it worked out. I'd like to make sure I give out our cell numbers to everyone who needs them, and not forget, say, our mortgage company, or my school board. Or my good friends, or my tutoring student.