I’m feeling a lot better today. My sore throat is entirely gone and my sinuses been a little less congested. I would say I’m at a 75%, which is pretty great considering where I was at the start of the week. After I got out of bed this morning and had a shower, I walked around the back garden to check on the plants. I was delighted to see so many more ripe blackberries, and large ones at that!! I reckon the rain earlier this week helped plump them up. Alex picked the blackberries while I harvested seeds from my flower bed. I collected a ton of hollyhock, lavender, and a few alium seeds in a few sandwich bags but I’m not sure when or how I’ll use them. It would be nice to have more lavender in the garden because it smells so lovely, so I’m sure those seeds will get used up eventually. I checked on the pumpkin seedlings I have growing in the planter on the patio and their leaves have gotten so massive! I’m crossing my fingers that they flower and then produce fruit but I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Tonight Alex and I were doing our finances and budgeting for September and it’s crazy how skint we are at the moment. We’re still trying to rebuild our savings accounts after our Vegas trip in April and although we saw a little increase in those accounts over the past month, we still haven’t gone a month without dipping into them. It doesn’t help that costs for everything have gone up and our weekly food shop for us and the cats doesn’t nearly go as far as it did a few months ago. One thing that’s been frustrating has been finding affordable wood pellet cat litter in bulk sizes. I’m definitely a frugal personal in general (I’ve been buying generic/own-brand everything since I started shopping for myself) but when that stuff is out of stock or the price goes up it really messes up our budgeting.

Anyway, just really feeling stressed about money at the moment. It sucks because my birthday is coming up at the end of next month and we just don’t have the wiggle room to go out for a meal or see a movie or anything. It’ll be okay in the end, but it’s just frustrating knowing that if we do dip into our savings to do something for my birthday or whatever, that’s only going to set us back further from our savings goal. Ugh! It’s going to be fine, really.