I haven't been posting much as of late, but that does not mean I haven't been trying to keep up my frugal ways! It's mostly been the usual stuff: bringing tea to work in my travel mugs, bringing my lunch to work, putting in all my hours at work in three days to minimize driving. We've been pretty good about cooking at home, with the exception of one lunch this past week from the local, summer-only, burger and ice cream shack.

The biggest frugal was figuring out how to fix my laptop after it went on the fritz a few weeks ago. I thought I might finally be forced to retire my old laptop and buy a new one, which is not an expense I want to incur right now. But I figured out how to fix it -- woo-hoo! So I'm going to try to limp along for as long as possible.

We were able to hold out on using the AC until just this past week. And even now that we've been using it, we've been keeping it set to at least 74 degrees if not warmer. And we've been diligent about closing all the blinds and opening our awning over our south-facing windows. Those few simple steps definitely go a long way in keeping the house cooler throughout the day and that means the AC runs pretty minimally.

I got accepted to attend a conference in August on contemplative pedagogy. Fortunately, I am local to the conference site so the fee for the week is only $600 as opposed to $950. They want to encourage attendance by community college faculty and since community colleges often don't provide faculty with funding to attend conferences I applied for financial aid through the conference itself. But they had already distributed all of their available monies by the time I applied so I thought I was out of luck. But I followed up at the registration deadline and they had money available so I received $275 in financial aid to attend -- woo-hoo! Very happy about this because I will lose out on my hours at work that week and that plus the conference fee would be a good sized hit. Now it's been mitigated slightly and I'm going to ask if I can make up the hours the week before and after the conference and see if my boss will approve that, which would be pretty awesome.

That's all for the moment. Will try to get back to posting more regularly!