Loosening the reins of spending felt a bit odd, but I went with it. Unfortunately we "lost" $300 out of the budget, so it made it seem like we spent more than we really did. I'm trying to remind myself that's not the case!

We used the carshare twice; that will come out of our monthly line item, but it did take us through our April amount, so I'll need to go into May (or take from unallocated funds) for when my sister is here next weekend. (I promised her one trip to St. Paul.)

We started the weekend with $589 in the unallocated category and ended it with $103. Trying to retrace my steps:

Registered the girls for another session of swim class: $168.

We spent $29 on bday gifts for two kids from our daughters' daycare. We were going to their joint party, and they'd brought gifts to both of our kids' bdays recently.

We spent $29, oddly enough, at the hardware store for gardening gloves, a light switch and a shovel.

AS and I went to a big publishing happy hour (conference was in town and her old job was hosting a night) where we thought drinks would be covered, but we only got one drink ticket (and that's because a friend of hers gave us one). They were all out of drink tickets a half hour after the thing began! So we spent $26; AS covered $15 with her spending money and we took $11 out of the unallocated.

AS got a medical bill for a recent visit: $98.

And I discovered a nearly $200 accounting error in my budgeting spreadsheet! Somehow I'd messed up the balance on the Amex card that we use for groceries. I've never made an error that serious before. I combed the spreadsheet for a clue as to how that could have happened. I have no idea; it could have happened weeks ago for all I know. I moved a few things around to lessen the blow, but most of it had to come out of our unallocated fund. That left us with $103.

So the only truly frivolous things were the bday gifts and the drinks. But it still felt like we'd spent a ton when that number went down so drastically. Ah well, AS is expecting several freelance checks that may come in this next week.

Today we (along with our downstairs neighbors) got a ton of work done in the back yard. We raked up a bunch of old leaves, shoveled up cedar chips, uprooted husks of old plants, scraped away a large collection of bird poop in one spot, cleaned and organized the storage area attached to the garage, removed old birds nests from the porch, trimmed away twigs and vines coming through the fence from the other side, took up some cement chunks that had been used to border a flower bed, and swept the whole area.

Our neighbor is going to get quotes on fencing in the back yard. We plan to split the cost of that. It's going to be so great once it's fenced off and really feels like our space!