I haven’t written since we were busy preparing for our drive from Alaska to Colorado and what a drive it was! It will test your marriage and your sanity. The toy treasure chest worked out beautifully, we didn’t even get to everything I stuffed inside. We did use the DVD player a lot towards the last half of the trip. Mia was done by day three. We drove for six days, so three days of DVD’s really isn’t so bad!
We have a decent Freecycle network here, but there are a lot of “wanted” ads that far outnumber the offered/recieved. I don’t know if there are just more people, or if there are just more greedy people. We did manage several pairs of shoes in Mia’s new size that are in stellar shape. I don’t have to buy a pair of sneaker that will be destroyed at preschool!
There is so much to do here and so much of it is either cheap or free. We had a blast at the Colorado Balloon Classic last month. Hundreds of hot air balloons lift off en masse at a local park at a festival. It was unique and free and offered an opportunity to get some amazing photos.
My neighbors and I went to a charity event at the Castle Rock outlets that required you to purchase a $20 ticket that donated to a charity of your choice. With the ticket you received special discounts at stores as well as the opportunity to buy raffle tickets. For twenty bucks I came out ahead! With my own tickets I only won a $25 gift certificate to Fossil (I did badly need a watch!) and my neighbor who has two older boys gave me her $50 for Stride Rite and $25 for Hartstrings. However I think I cancelled out the savings when I bought a Coach handbag. Let me explain! First, I never splurge on myself like that. The deal was that it was an outlet store doing a 40% sale on a newer selection. You can’t even get a good deal like that at the base PX! The PX has things around 20% off which puts it around the normal outlet price. So I got a $300 dollar handbag that I had been coveting for a third of that. Plus tax,but you know how that is. Know what something is worth and know when to bite!
We decided to live on post since we still have the house up in AK. We only just got renters in which means we were paying a mortgage on an empty house for the entire summer. Yes, that punched the finances and jacked our credit card back up. However, that lovely hush-money…er…PFD from being an AK resident helped tremendously. Instead of going after a new TV or something that we really don’t need, we paid off the Subaru! No more car payments! We turned around and replaced it with a preschool payment, so really it’s all the same financial feeling right now, but it’s a good feeling to get out from under a debt that has interest to it.
Another perk of living on post is the bills. I’m not saying I love bills, quite the opposite. The housing company has a neat way of doing things. Most utilities are covered as long as you stay within an average. For each season they have calculated the average cost of a specific bill and as long as you stay within their calculations, you do not owe money. If you go over, you owe the difference but if you come in under the average, they pay you the difference. It’s pretty neat, we get about $20 a month during the summer. I think the biggest help is not using a clothes dryer. We had to buy a new washer when we got here because the housing doesn’t come with a w/d, but opted out of buying a dryer because of the cost and the fact that the air is ridiculously dry. We bought two extra drying racks and our clothes were usually dry in half a day or overnight. I don’t know how well it will work during the winter but we’ll give it a shot. They have a lot of windows in the house so I rarely use lights unless I’m in my closet or it’s evening. We’re probably the most energy efficient family on post.
I’ve also been back into the Ebay thing. I loved Value Village in Anchorage. There were always great deals on high end items. Here, the ARC Thriftstore is the place to go! There are Goodwill stores too, but they seem to get the whatever items. In Denver there is an ARC store near the hospital that we frequent and I found two Diane Von Furstenberg dresses and a few Hanna Andersson dresses that I put on ebay. I made my money back over and over. On craigslist, a woman put an ad up for “three pair of european shoes”. I wondered if they were Dansko and sure enough they were…and she was only asking $15 for all three pairs! They were brand new. I made my money back and then some! People don’t buy a lot off of craigslist though. I blame the economy. It’s just too easy. I did manage to sell some of Mia’s toys that she has outgrown, but it took a long time.
