On Sunday, Andy and I were invited over to a new friend's place to watch the Olympics. She asked if I would bring a salad or some type of fruit/veggie side. I've spent so much time on Pinterest lately that of course I had to try and do something Olympics themed! I wanted it to be pretty quick and easy and not a dessert, so my options were somewhat limited. I went to the grocery store with only the colors of the rings written down and decided to just see what foods in those colors struck my fancy.

Here's what I ended up with:

An Olympic rings salad!

The snap peas came in the salad kit I bought, and the red and yellow rings are bell peppers that I simply cored and then cut into rings. The black ring is made up of olives on toothpicks--that one was the most difficult, between getting them to stay on the toothpicks and then getting the straight toothpicks to somehow form a circle! The blue ring was a stretch. I thought blueberries would have been weird in a savory salad, so I used blue cheese. I know, I know, it's more white than blue, but it's the thought that counts, right?

I jostled it as I was getting it out of the fridge to take to your get-together, but luckily I had snapped this picture earlier! And I think it still got the point across. Simple, healthful, tasty, and fun.

Have you been watching the Olympics obsessively like I have? What food would you bring to an Olympics-themed event?

I'm linked up to Balancing Beauty and Bedlam's
Tasty Tuesday Parade of Foods!

I visited both CVS and Target this past week for some deals that were too good to pass up. I read on Passion for Savings about free Yardley soap, which I planned to go pick up for my Operation Christmas Child boxes. But thanks to some lucky coupon printing and a friendly store manager who decided to accept my expired ExtraBucks, I was able to snag the 2 bars of soap, a bottle of body wash, and a pencil sharpener for free!

Bought 2 Yardley Soap at $0.69 Used 1 $2/2 any soap or body wash coupon from CVS Coupon Center =FREE + $0.62 overage

Bought 1 CVS brand body wash at $2.37 Used 1 $2/1 CVS brand body wash =$0.37, but overage applied to make it free

Bought 1 manual pencil sharpener at $0.99 Used $1 ECB =FREE + $0.01 overage

I ended up at -$0.12, which I could have used toward another purchase, but I let it slide and got the items “just” for free. The pencil sharpener was a really fortuitous find because I was only able to pick up 9 of them at $0.10 from Office Depot last week, and I want to make 10 shoeboxes this year!

I headed to Target for cheap Ortega taco seasoning and free Papermate pens but ended up with another treasure for my shoeboxes:

The taco seasoning was supposed to be on sale for $0.67, but at my store it was still a whopping $0.77. I decided to use my $1.00/2 Ortega products coupon anyway to get 2 packets for $0.27 each.

The pens were marked $1.00 on the bin where I picked them up but unfortunately rang up at their normal price of $1.27, which I didn’t notice until I got home. :-( But with my $1.00/1 Papermate writing instrument coupon from Target’s website, I only shelled out $0.27. Not bad, but since I already had pens for my boxes I’m a little disappointed they didn’t turn out to be free like they were supposed to.

But the find of the day was the 5-pack of Hello Kitty socks on clearance for $2.38! I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good deal on socks for the shoeboxes and had just about settled on getting a 6-pack from Marshall’s for $4.99 but was wavering because I really only needed 5 pairs. It’s become habit for me to peruse the clearance sock bins at Target and today I happened upon these! They’re a little silly, but I think they’ll be a fun addition to the boxes for a young teenage girl somewhere in the world to get for Christmas.

My total at Target after sales and coupons was $3.41. I can’t complain too much about that.

Y’all have heard my thoughts on the Dave Ramsey cash only school of thought, but as I continue to be exposed to advocates of that lifestyle, my thoughts continue to evolve. And I’ve realized something else about using only cash that makes me nervous.

Andy and I keep very close tabs on our finances. We use a program called YNAB (an acronym of You Need a Budget) to keep track of our budget, our savings, our goals, and our spending categories. YNAB is a sort of grassroots budgeting software that grew out of one man’s budget spreadsheet that he built for him and his wife. As it kept getting more and more complex, he realized how useful a tool this software could be. It’s not the simplest program around, but it has a lot of features that we’ve found to be very useful. Plus, I like its backstory!

ANYWAY, all that to say, we literally know where every penny goes because “Andy Cash” and “Laura Cash” are accounts in our budget just like “Visa” and “Bank Account” are. So if I spend $3.00 at the coffee shop, I record it as being spent out of “Laura Cash.” And I have learned that I’m notoriously bad with cash! It seems like a lot of times cashiers don’t automatically hand over a receipt when you spend cash as they do when you use a credit card and have to sign something, so unless I’m diligent about asking for one (or writing my purchase down on a napkin immediately before I forget…yep, I’ve done it!), the expenditure might slip my mind. AND THEN, I’ll come to find that YNAB says “Laura Cash” should have $22.00 when in reality I have $0 in my wallet. NO BUENO. (For the record, it’s never been that far off. But just about every month when we reconcile, I am off. And then I have to dredge my memory about where that $8.91 could have possibly gone. We often end up having to just write the small differences off, and it’s frustrating.)

If I used the cash envelope system, EVERY SINGLE PURCHASE I MADE would be with cash, and I would run into this no receipt problem much more often! I think that part of the point of using the envelopes is that you simply spend the amount in there and don’t worry about where it goes…but we like to worry about where it goes. Worrying about where our money goes is what allowed Andy the freedom to quit his job in Huntsville without knowing he had one to take its place. We were able to precisely track our expenditures for the previous 6 months and extrapolate precisely what we needed to live on for the next 6. We also were able to pinpoint areas of spending that could be cut if necessary. If we only knew vague spending categories, we would not have felt nearly as comfortable taking that leap as we did.

So I once again find myself at odds with Dave Ramsey’s cash-only suggestion. I personally feel far less responsible with cash than I do with cards, because it has a tendency to slip through my little fingers, never to be remembered again.

How do you keep track of your finances? Do you feel more comfortable spending cash or using a card?

P.S. The YNAB link above is our referral link. If you use it to purchase YNAB because I’ve convinced you that it’s awesome, you’ll get a $6 discount from that link.

P.P.S. As far as my cashflow problem goes, having the YNAB app on my iPhone has helped a lot. When I don’t get a receipt, I can record the purchase in there and it syncs to our budget file in Dropbox via the cloud. Whew! That’s a lotta technology!

The most recent book I received from Bethany House Publishers as part of their blogger review program is called Relentless Pursuit by Ken Gire. It jumped out to me from among the titles available because of its subtitle: God’s love of outsiders, including the outsider in all of us. Especially since our move, but really always, I have struggled with feeling like I have a niche, and so I was interested in reading this author’s take on how to deal with those feelings of being an “other.”

I have to say, Bethany House hits the nail on the head with covers. I loved what I found when I opened the mailer it came in and couldn’t wait to dive in!

The prologue intrigued me, as it hinted at the author’s own struggles with feeling left out and different, but the first chapter found my eyes glazing over a bit as he delved into a somewhat literary and academic analysis of the poem “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson. I’m all about some literary analysis and poetry, but it was not what I expected from this book, nor did it seem to fit the bill of what I was looking for.

However, after that, the book picked up for me. I normally skim over the study questions at the end of chapters in Christian lifestyle books, but the ones in Relentless Pursuit were well-written and particularly relevant to the preceding chapter, so I found myself underlining many of them for further contemplation. And the literary and philosophical references in the rest of the book were wonderful, introducing me to some authors I had never heard of but now want to explore and providing me with some beautifully thought-out definitions for a life of faith.

Though I was into the premise of the book, I found the execution to be a bit pat. I wanted either deeper exploration of the biblical nature of God’s love for the outsider or a more nuanced depiction of the author’s life story (more of a memoir). Instead, I found both of these elements lacking: the “God stuff” was mostly vague and not detailed, and the personal recollections were scattered and didn’t really show me how the author had come to believe so deeply as he does. I also struggled with the precise definition of “outside.” It felt like the term was used throughout the book to mean one of several different things, and “outsider” was applied to both people literally outside of some group or another AND those of us who just feel like outsiders. All of the above are valid, of course, but I wanted a more concise use of the term. All in all, though, if I hadn’t been enjoying the book for the most part, I wouldn’t have cared that these bits felt shallow.

Throughout the book, I gleaned bits of wisdom and particularly apt turns of phrase that I’m looking forward to considering as I continue my walk of faith. But I unfortunately don’t feel any more convinced of God’s love for the outsider than I did before reading Relentless Pursuit, and this is coming from someone who already knows and believes that to be true. It seems like this book was written more for those who are “inside” but struggle with feeling like they’re not accepted. I can’t imagine what takeaway someone of another faith might have from this book, and that seems to betray its purpose. I’d share this book only in a setting where there could be open discussion about it, or with someone else like me who enjoys adding new thoughts to their repertoire.

Just about every night last week we had wild thunderstorms here in Atlanta, and I had trouble sleeping because I was nervous and on edge because of them.

I’ve always been anxious about storms. When I was growing up, my bed was up against the wall between my room and my parents’ room, and my dad and I had a signal that I could knock on the wall to get his attention. Sometimes we used it to be goofy and “communicate” with each other, but more often it was used as an SOS when thunder woke me up in the night or when I had a bad dream. My sweet daddy would diligently come to my rescue, and either let me sleep in their bed or reassure me that I’d be okay. But if he didn’t come quickly enough by my standards, I would leap out of bed and race down the hall into their room, fear dogging me all the way. When the forecast called for storms, he came to expect that he would hear the pitter patter of my feet coming his way. Either way, it was such a comfort to know that just on the other side of a wall was my safe place, my protector.

Because I’ve always had such a strong relationship with my dad, and felt so loved and cared for by him, I often struggle with the attribute of God as the Father. A lot of people take refuge in Him because they’ve lacked a father figure and crave that…but I have a daddy! In fact, I have to say I’ve got the best dad ever (though I’m probably biased). But I found myself thinking about the fatherly characteristics of God last week when I was weathering the storms alone and missing that sense of being protected.

I can’t say it’s true for me that a short prayer to God for comfort immediately made things better, but it’s definitely biblical to seek shelter in God during times of strife, weather included. (See: 2 Samuel. See: Psalms etc.) It would easy to say that it’s so comforting to know that God is just a figurative wall-width away and He makes me feel safe all the time, but that would be an untruth. Most of the time I don’t feel nearly as close to God as I do to my dad.

I read the portions of the Psalms where David is taking refuge in the Lord with great skepticism that he found discernible refuge in God. It’s sometimes a struggle for me to bring this ethereal being (God) and insert Him into my everyday reality. He does not always respond to knocks on the wall immediately, and even when He does it’s not often in ways that we can readily understand. But I guess rather than feel like I don’t need God to be my daddy, I should feel like I know exactly what He has to offer, because I’ve had it displayed to me through my dad my whole life.

So I try to choose faith. I try to remember to knock, even when it seems like no one is on the other side. And if I really need to, I can leap out of bed, and I can run to Someone, because He’s anticipating the pitter patter of my little feet.