Frugal Friday - the Sunday Edition!

My son took this photo of a lone little red tree a few weeks ago out of our rainy car window.  I'm already missing the fall colors - our weather is glorious and being outside is fun but I feel like I missed the "real" fall!

Friday was a bit of whirlwind and so was Saturday so this got written WAY too late on a Saturday evening.  We had a thankfully quiet week and I'm hoping for another quiet week before a couple of busy weekends and weeks ahead and the rush of the holidays.

Here's what we did this week in the frugal realm:

* Redid the budget for the next 10 months. Ouch.  We had some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication about what John would be earning while in residency this year and needed to revamp everything.  It was really difficult and more than slightly disheartening to see those numbers in black and white. We have several costly things that we really need to complete this year and now we're not sure how we're going to be able to do them.  Time to get creative!

* Picked the last two winter squash from our garden - an acorn and a butternut.  I wasn't sure they survived the freeze we had a few weeks ago, but they did and they're now in the pantry for later use.

* Made ribbon headbands for my daughter's Christmas stocking (she asked for some to keep the hair out of her eyes in her dance class) and some decorated pony tail holders for our Operation Christmas Child boxes.

* Did a lot of cleaning up, tidying up and putting things away.  It's amazing how this just doesn't get done sometimes!

* Wore two skirts I wasn't sure I liked or if they fit anymore to work this week.  They both fit but I didn't like them, so they went in the donate basket.

* Made two meals in the crockpot this week so they would just be ready when we got home.  Love that!
* When we cleaned out the furnace room in August, we realized that we needed a second storage shelf in there.  We had hoped to save up for one but then we realized that if we rearranged some things in the garage, we could move the existing shelf out there and two of the shelves we have in the garage into the furnace room.  That works perfectly and no money spent!  Bonus: The shelves in the furnace room now match each other.  Storage that looks good counts for bonus points, doesn't it?

* Cleaned out the coupon file and reminded myself what gift cards we have that need to be used.  I looked up balances online and wrote them on the card with a permanent marker so we know what the balance is.

* We were gifted 3/4 of a tube pan of banana bread.  A friend baked it for a fundraiser and it didn't make it out of the pan in one piece.  She didn't want to sell it at the fundraiser, so she asked if we'd like it.  Yum!  It's made for a great breakfast the last couple of days.

* I ate one meal at a meeting at work this week.  I'm so glad that lunchtime meetings have a catered lunch so I don't have to figure out when to eat lunch on those days!

* With the focus on cleaning out the deep freeze in the basement, our upstairs freezer-over-the-refrigerator has become quite the mess.  We cleaned it out and were pleasantly surprised with what we found!  That included: frozen bananas and blueberries, a pork roast, lots of cooked turkey (we knew about that one but there was more than we thought), and a few other random things that we thought we had already eaten.  Now we can use those things!

*  Worked on two other Christmas gifts - one embroidered, one sewn.  Hope to complete those this week and move on to another gift or two this week.

* Returned a huge stack of library books.  The children have quite a bit of reading from school and I have several books at home already that I can read so we didn't check out any before coming home.

* We watched several online television shows and a movie on Netflix.  My husband and I watched a video we already owned and love for an at home date night this week.

What have you done this last week in the frugal things realm?