The last full week of February was an exercise in spending where my values are.

The main event of the week was last Sunday, when I met up with a long-time friend at one of the local garden centers. We spent a few wonderful hours catching up, geeking out over plants, and supporting a locally-owned business. Needless to say I came home with a few more plants, including a spectacular pink Camellia for the atrium. But that’s OK, because gardening is one of the priorities in my budget, and so is supporting local businesses. And meeting up with good friends should always be a priority.

The second event of the week was my first in-person office meeting in over four years, which led to the realization that my office-appropriate wardrobe has dwindled to almost nothing. For this short visit I was able to pull together a simple outfit of khaki slacks and a plain colored t-shirt, but I’m starting a list of items for a careful, mindful expansion of my work wardrobe. My goal is to keep it as simple as possible, and align with my normal casual wardrobe preference of jeans, t-shirt, and fleece as much as I can. Currently this looks like adding one more pair of slacks in a dark charcoal color, a plain black t-shirt, and probably 2-3 simple shirts to wear with one of my pairs of slacks.

Besides the garden center, there wasn’t much other spending this week: I ordered a box of disposable gloves for applying Pixie’s transdermal Gabapentin, a cable net to install under my desk to keep Finn from chewing on my computer cables, and a replacement for the camera lens cap that I lost a few weeks ago.

Here are the final results for this week:

Food/Groceries/Dining Out:

  • Meal Plan – I meal prepped last weekend using pantry and freezer stock, and that plus my smaller “backup” meals and some of the groceries from last week’s order were enough for all of last week. Meal prep for the upcoming week is entirely from what’s in stock
  • Groceries – after the previous week’s excessively large bill, I was able to adjust the meal plan for the rest of the month to use what I have in stock and skip the grocery shopping entirely last week. However I did stop at Whole Foods on Sunday to pick up the allergy-friendly mayonnaise I can only get there, since my spare jar was used to replace the one spoiled in the power outage. $40 total for two jars of mayo and a couple bottles of my favorite salted caramel ice cream sauce
  • Dining out – no dining out last week, yay!

General Spending:

  • Save instead of Spend – while there were no actual transfers of money to savings this week, I did save some money by re-arranging some garden pots to use the ones I had and reduce how many I want to buy
  • Reduce Amazon orders – there was one Amazon order this week, it was the simplest place to get the few random things that were needed for the house and cats
  • House projects – these are still on hold

Cats:

  • Food/litter/supplies – the regular monthly Chewy auto-ship processed, including a case of canned food so the total was higher than usual. But this budget category is well funded, so the extra cost was no problem
  • Cat toys – no new cat toys, yay!
  • Vet bills – amazingly, no vet bills! The pet insurance refund for Pixie’s Solensia processed, but no medication refills were needed and we finally had a week without a trip to the vet’s office.