RBOChores and money

• Reminder:  if you haven’t in a while, now is a good time to clean out your dryer vents.  We just did and all of a sudden it’s only taking one cycle for things to get dry again.
• Second year of a big tax refund from me only getting half pay for half the year. It will be better to be making more money, but it is also nice not writing out a check to the IRS.
• Refund went straight to 529 plans.
• Do not put frozen pizza on a heated pizza stone.  (We recently bought a new pizza stone after shattering the old one.)
• DH recently bought a brush cleaning attachment for his drill.  It is AMAZING.
• DC1 has spent $0 on non-necessities.  No eating out.  No concerts.  No travel. No clothing (though we would pay for clothing).  No tchotchkies. The only things on the credit card bill so far are textbooks!  I spent about $1K a year on the above when I was in college, not adjusted for inflation (to be fair, plane tickets to see DH cost about the same then as they do now!).
• Update:  Hir friend took hir to a thrift store and zie bought a scarf and a jacket ($8).  Very exciting!  DC1 says zie needs to practice buying things and also it’s scary to use a credit card and zie doesn’t know how to buy stuff.  (When I was that age I was doing the family grocery shopping when I was home from school.)
• My friend with a kid at an Ivy spends a lot, though he’s also been making a ton of money.  And he’s got a really nice job lined up this coming summer as a rising junior.  (He applied to 250 places, got one interview and one offer.)
• We ran out of check registers for the first time ever.  I had to buy some(!). We write so few checks but I still have to record checking transactions.
• We don’t write zero checks because the music teachers both take check.  Occasionally we’ll have to write one for another reason though those are getting fewer and fewer.
• I would really like to move someplace nice for part of the summer but we’d need to be able to take the cats (or leave them with my sister but that’s a big ask and I’m not sure nice kitty could handle it since boy kitty is a bully).  And it would need to be somewhere cheap.  I’m guessing we could find a place that’s cheap in a college town up north, but the cats are kind of a non starter. It also sounds like effort.
• Maybe the weather won’t be as bad this summer.  SIGH.
• a lot still depends on what DC1 ends up doing.
• Prices for Spain over Christmas went way up once we got the kids’ winter schedules.  Then they went up even more.  So I suspect we will spend next Christmas in the midwest again.  It’s probably for the best.