tidbits & some Friday photos

sheesh. I have been horrible about blogging this week. I feel like all my posts lately have been fluff, so I apologize. I need to get back into the swings of things. my spring semester class starts tonight, but it's a 13 week class, so I won't be as stressed out as I was over the winter semester with that damn sociology class.

I'm going to make an effort to take better photos, and in doing so, I'm going to try my hand at participating in as many photo challenges as I can. I hope they encourage me to work harder at taking nice photos and being satisfied with them enough to publish them here on the blog.

there's a lot going on at the FoFinn household lately. we've recently reaaaaally started to budget ourselves and cut back on frivolous spending. I'm proud to say that I have not bought lunch at work one time this week, and it feels great. we're allowing ourselves a certain amount of cash to spend every week, and we can do what we please with it. I decided that instead of buying lunch everyday, I'm going to save my money and buy myself a Vera Bradley agenda calendar, haha.

this is a lot of text, so I'm going to break it up with some photos. I took my camera out the other evening and got some good shots of the meows, so I thought I'd share them for my fellow crazy cat ladies, along with a few shots from a Mardi Gras themed party I attended over the weekend.

__________________________________

the prompt for today's Foto Friday challenge is Reflections. I took this at a friend's house over the weekend. a good friend of mine turned 30 on Saturday, and visited us from Louisiana, so we threw her a Mardi Gras themed bonfire party. it was the coldest day we had in a long time, so I made sure to bundle up!

_______________________________________________

this week's challenge at Living Every Moment is "anything." any time there isn't a specific task or item to photograph, the kitties get the spotlight. this is Bear's ALERT!!! face.

______________________________________________

the awesome ladies who hosted the Mardi Gras party on Saturday night did an amazing job with the favors and little trinkets. there were beads, masks, and the birthday girl even got a boa to wear all evening. I took this shot using my 50mm lens, and I was really impressed with how it turned out, so I decided to use it for this week's Give Me Your Best Shot challenge. 

(for some reason, the button for GMYBS is not working, but the link is!)

________________________________________

and since GMYBS and Photo Story Friday are linked together, I'll go ahead and post that one as well. this is Lily's spot on the couch. she will fight for this cushion, and the other meowers know not to even think about parking their asses here.

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli
_____________________________________________

last weekend, I decided to implement a weekly meal plan for dinners in our house and I really think it's helped us to stay on track. we were spending SO much money at the grocery store on a weekly basis on a bunch of crap that we didn't need. having a specific plan for meals has forced us to only get what we'll need for that week and is therefore saving us money each week. now... this only started last week, so I'm not an expert at this or anything, but it's working well damnit. 

as you can probably tell from my sidebar, I've been doing a lot of reading as of late. I made myself a rather ambitious goal to read at least 50 books this year, and I've already finished 3 books this year, and we're not even out of the first month yet. I completed The Help yesterday afternoon (three cheers for a snow day!), and it was such a good read. I'll be writing a lengthy review over the weekend, so stay tuned! I picked up 19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult last night and I'm hooked already.

I'll be back later today with a Fill in the Blank Friday post!

Happy Friday, ya'll!