Weekend Update:
SPORTS
- It was supposed to be a really busy day yesterday. Ethan had 2 volleyball games in the morning ( 8 and 10 am), and then Ivan was going to take him to a soccer tournament all afternoon (an hour away). Well, it snowed again, as it does on April 2 in Wisconsin sometimes. 🙄 So it ended up getting cancelled.
- (It’s back on for Day 2 today- slightly warmer and sun out today, and they’re playing on a turf field, not real grass). Ivan and Ethan had to leave by 6:15 a.m. though to make it there….his team got the very first game slot. UGH. I generally enjoy the boys’ activities and sports, but I am NOT a fan of the super-early-on-Sunday-morning game thing. Fortunately, Ivan volunteered to go, and I’ll stay back and go to Asher’s (much more reasonable) 2 pm volleyball game.
- Both boys had their first ever volleyball games yesterday. Both teams lost. Haha. Oh well. They had fun and I thought they did pretty decent, all things considered!! Volleyball is not like soccer, at least not around here, where kids start playing at 2 years old. So it was pretty much everyone’s first time playing a real game. I found it mildly entertaining, as a past volleyball player myself. 😉 Okay, so there’s definitely room for improvement, but overall, not bad!!!
LUNCH!
- After Asher’s game, we were headed home and he said he was “starving” and asked if we could get Chipotle. I wasn’t planning on lunch out, but I looked in my Chipotle app and saw I had a Reward for one free entree to use! Score. So I said sure. 🙂
MONEY
- I spent a bunch of time in the late afternoon updating our financial spreadsheets. It was kind of a disorganized mess, due to lack of attention for too long. I still have a bit to go to get it fully caught up/ re-organized, but I made a ton of progress. Obviously with this big trip behind us, there will be oodles of charges coming through, so I wanted to get everything squared up and updated ASAP.
- I have a tendency to kind of….ignore updating our financial spreadsheets for long stretches of time. Because, I really don’t like $$ stuff. It’s boring, I’m not that good at it, finances give me a headache. But that’s not the best plan, because then it builds up and is even more work to straighten out. So I’m determined to STAY ON TOP OF THIS going forward!! It’s really not that hard if I just make sure to do it frequently. (*I could delegate this to Ivan, but I have certain ways I want it done…probably overcomplicated ways….and I created all the spreadsheets….so he sort of just lets me have at it. He monitors everything day to day/ keeps on top of all our accounts, balances, etc., but I do all the actual organizational piece.)
BLOG!
- You might have (maybe? hopefully?) noticed a NEW LOOK on my blog! I decided to move my blog from a self-hosted site over to a more simple WordPress.com site. It’s a long story, but basically I was having some technical issues on my old site (I think due to my hosting provider) that caused my blog to not pull in to (blog reader sites) like Feedly correctly. It would give an error message and never update with my new posts. So, my millions of followers (🤣😂) couldn’t see that I was posting.
- I tried and tried and tried over the past year to fix this- I spent way too much time AND money on this problem, to no avail. Finally I gave up and moved my site. Having the Support staff at wordpress.com able to help me troubleshoot things is worth a lot to me, too. I just don’t have time or the ability to become a website designer or coder in my spare time. This is a hobby, not my fulltime job. I need it to be easy.
- Hopefully you are seeing the new site (which I did actually set up/ lay out myself! Should be pretty similar to my old site, with some upgrades). And if you’re a Feedly user, check and see if you can see my new posts! They’d better be there…. hahaha.
- P.S. (A quick little self-promo plug: Feel free to subscribe by email!! There’s a spot right on my site to add your email so you can get every new post in your inbox. This is actually my personal favorite way to read blog posts- email subscription! It’s like a little treat then every time I see a new post from a favorite blog. 🙂 )
- P.P.S If you’re a fellow blogger and don’t have a “subscribe by email button” on your site, please consider adding one! I’d love to subscribe to yours too- I am way more consistent reading posts I can get in my email and am bummed when that’s not an option!
BONUS PIC:
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for the wordpress.com support people!! I got “so far” on migrating my site and then got very stuck with a few last bits. After emailing the support, I woke up this morning to find everything resolved- they literally just did it for me! Hallelujah.
GRATEFUL KAE 
looks so neat! loving it!
I try to do monthly finance the first 5 days of the new months so I don’t forget it. I like to keep track of our spending (income is rather fix) to be more aware of how we spent our money, whether it’s aligned with our values.
I used to hate personal investment, but now I take it as family duty that I cannot delegate, so I try it do it every 3 months or so, or depending on market development.
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Yes, I think I need to just put it on my calendar or block out time like an appointment. It’s one of those things I don’t really ever “feel like” doing…but if I treat it like any other obligation, maybe I’ll actually do it more often.
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If you can go long time without staying on top of your finance spreadsheets, I suspect that your financial situation is pretty comfortable and you don’t *need* to be on top of it all the time. That in itself is a win 😉 (I like spreadsheet and finance stuff, so I usually look at it very frequently!)
I like your new blog layout (and I have given you some feedback on the Feedly situation – your blog post showed up, but apparently it took a few hours after posting… I don’t know what the regular schedule is and how often WordPress sends updates (or how often Feedly pulls new posts), but I wanted to let you know that it did show up. So yay? 😉
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Thanks again for monitoring Feedly for me! I so appreciate that!! 🙂
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Love the blog update! Looks great and hope it is smooth sailing for you 🙂
I used Old Reader (an alternative to Feedly) and some people’s posts get pushed right away and others are delayed by almost 24 hours. I never understand how it works!
We have a snow day today but I’m actually…kinda happy about it. It ended up being a very busy weekend and a friend is bringing her 4 kids over to play outside (and then they were already scheduled to come for supper this PM), so it should be fun and relaxed and HOPEFULLY the last snow day of the year.
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Have FUN!! We are having cloudy weather/ some rain this week here, but I’m also okay with it- I have lots of work to do and things to get done around the house, and that type of weather makes me feel a bit more in the mood to cozy up and just get things done inside. 🙂
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Hi! I just stumbled on your blog from The Shubox (I keep scanning comments looking for new blogs to check out!). That’s so interesting about moving from self-hosted to WordPress.com. I’ve been trying to post more on a WordPress.com blog and am running out of storage in my free subscription, so I was trying to decide if I should do paid WordPress.com or move to a hosted WordPress.org option. You have me thinking I should stick with WordPress.com and just try to find ways to use less storage space (since I also just want to blog as a hobby, not as a full-time job)! Do you mind me asking how you handle photos? Do you upload them directly to WordPress or do you use something like Flickr and then insert photos with URLs? Thanks for any tips you can share!
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Hi Heather! Well, I’m no expert here, but in my case the big reasons I switched over to wordpress.com were #1: My old site/ host would NOT operate right with Feedly! So this was extremely frustrating and I felt preventing some people probably from following my blog, which I didn’t like. and #2: On self-hosted sites, you have to do everything yourself. With WordPress.com (at least with the paid Premium plan I got), they have great support. So that was huge for me, too, to just be able to message a question or have them do stuff for me.
If you’re already with WordPress.com and generally like your site, I would say to just go with a low level paid plan on wordpress.com. If you go to a self-hosted site, you’ll definitely have to pay anyway- your domain, plus the hosting fees…and if something gets goofed up, like mine did, you might end up having to pay someone to help you! For my new wp.com site, I got the Premium plan, because I post a lot of photos. Too many photos, probably. haha. I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount/little something for this hobby blog though because I do really enjoy it. A free site wouldn’t have had enough space for me, I’m sure.
RE: uploading photos, I just have the WordPress app on my phone, and then I add whatever photos I want to use directly from my camera roll into the Media Library in the WP app. Super easy. Then when I go to post, I can just click “image” in the block editor and they are all there to be inserted. I am not sure if this is the smartest/ most space saving way to do this, however. In fact, I was going to research this a bit, too. I don’t know if there’s a better way to compress images or something to save space….sorry!!
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Thanks so much for all this information! It’s really helpful!
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I wish I had set my blog up in wordpress years ago, but moving it sounds so overwhelming as I have over 10 years of posts! I like how wordpress has an option to notify people if you respond to their comment (I don’t see that option below this comment form but I’ve seen it on other wordpress blogs so I know it’s possible!). So I end up commenting over email but not consistently because the commenter needs to have an email associated with their profile and that is not always the case. But this reminds me that I should look into the subscribe by email option. I remember you saying that did not work for you so I will see if I can get that fixed in case others use it. I use feedly and your posts are showing up there!
Snow in April. Bleh. We got a little bit on Monday morning but it melted. Now it will rain all week which I will take over snow I guess. But I am craving warmer temps, like 50 would even be amazing!
Our finance management situation is sort of similar in that Phil looks at it about daily, I think mostly through mint.com. Then I re-classify things as mint doesn’t always do that correctly and I pull together the annual spending summary and share that on my blog but I do not share it with him because honestly he would say – ‘WE SPEND TOO MUCH MONEY’ which I do not believe is the case. We met w/ a financial advisor back in 2020 and he commented on how little we spend but Phil was like – eh, we could spend less. I think in reality he knows we don’t spend too much but he spends so little money that even a below average level of spending seems high to Mr. Frugality!
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Because I have a WordPress.com account, all new comments on my blog pop into my email and ALSO I get a little notification on my phone, because I have the WordPress.com app. I really like that! I also like that it’s really easy to comment on other WordPress sites from within the WP app…you don’t have to type in your email or URL or anything, because it auto-populates from within your account. I love that! Like with your blog, it’s harder, because it’s Blogger- so I can’t do that. 🙂 So I always just comment on yours from my computer, but then sometimes if I see /read new posts when I’m browsing on my phone, I feel like I can’t comment easily! Oh well! I try to always just wait and read yours on my computer, anyway…but sometimes I get tempted to read ahead on my phone. 😉 If you ever did convert it over, it really doesn’t matter how much content you have- it does this auto import thing. So basically, if you have 1 post or 1000, it’s the same process….it just would take longer to do it with 1,000! But it’s just basically a big file transfer. Is your Blogger blog still totally free, with all the photos over the years?! That’s incredible.
It definitely doesn’t sound like you guys spend too much money!! You seem to be very, very sensible about spending. We could probably take some lessons from you guys, LOL!
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I am so happy you got the Feedly situation sorted out! I would sort of forget to check in with you because it would never update in my feed, but now your updates are showing up daily. Yay! Although what a hassle it sounded like for you to deal with it!
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Me too! I need to start using Feedly more- I have the same issue as you. I tend to subscribe by email to blogs I read regularly, but not all have that option, so then I just tend to pop in. But it’s hard to remember as I read more and more good blogs, so then I forget to check them…esp for those who post more sporadically. So I’m trying to get more used to using Feedly also. It really is handy.
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Kae, I’m so sorry. I owe you an email about Feedly. I am now seeing your blog daily – YAY! But I see it twice! So I need to check my feed settings. 🙂 Sorry that you never got anywhere figuring out the issue – and I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to figure out why Feedly worked with my blog (and its exact same set up) and not yours! It’s so, so strange. I’m glad you figured it out – and the new site looks great!
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