I got my wish for New Year's; we're staying home. Usually we visit friends of ours who host family and friends -- lots of people and babies and pets coming and going. It's kind of a zoo, really, and it calls for shopping for and preparing a dish to share with the group and getting by with a lot of other carb-y processed food that we're better off not eating. The hosts like to make an afternoon and a night and a morning of it (more carb-y processed food and a long lingering goodbye). It may sound as if I don't like these people; I do, for the most part (we don't discuss politics and now I can discuss babies). But a solid 24 hours of being cooped up in their house... DW wasn't up for that much partying this year, either.

So instead we're staying home. On NYE I'm cooking a steak, sweet potatoes (as steak fries), and broccoli, all of which was on sale at the local market. On NY Day I'm cooking a soup called ozōni, traditionally served in Japan for New Year's. I had to buy a few ingredients, but I had most of them in the house already. So it will be a low-cost low-energy low-drama New Year's.

Lots of no-drive days lately. Still cooking lots of meals out of a freezer stocked with sale items. My mom is emptying her basement freezer and is giving it to us because she just doesn't get to the food in it fast enough. I think we will, so we're happy to take it and it comes at the best price (it's also new enough to not be an energy hog). And it will help with my goal of reducing our food expenses 10% next year.

Last year we started replacing the 40-plus-year-old windows in our house. The first window came with a bit of sticker shock, but we chalked that up to it being by far the biggest window in the house. But even with two estimates for the next windows to be replaced, sticker shock is setting in. The payback on these windows will be far longer than we ever anticipate being in this house. And most of the windows are still in decent shape. Taking cost out of these new windows will leave us with windows that aren't be appreciably better than the ones we have. So I think we're putting the brakes on a purchase that would have cost us around $10 grand over the next few years and just will replace the windows that fail.

On to a more frugal 2016!