Smart

Around Christmas, Nathan's phone finally kicked the bucket after breaking bit by bit over the couple years he had it. After doing a lot of research and with the help of birthday money, odd jobs, and selling things on Craigslist/Amazon, he was able to buy a smart phone (I jumped on the bandwagon a month later when our tax return came in)! We didn't think we could afford to have smart phones because the data plans are crazy expensive ($30-$40 a month, typically), but Nathan discovered a company called Republic Wireless that offered plans for $10 a month! The apps that require internet only function on WiFi, but we get unlimited talk and text anywhere, and no limit to data on WiFi. Obviously we had an initial investment in the phones themselves, but we're paying less monthly than we did with our "dumb phones!" Anyway, we're thrilled with these new gadgets that can do practically anything! I've been having a lot of fun with Instagram and other apps... I even used an app to make the collage above! I know a lot of you are probably thinking it's adorable that I'm so enthralled with this new tech because you've been carrying the world in your pocket for years, but I'm still amazed by this magic machine! I know this sounds like an ad... I'm just excited :)

Our last turtle died recently, so Nathan put a LOT of effort into cleaning the aquarium up (we have really hard water and it had terrible mineral deposits) and we were able to sell it on Craigslist for more than we originally paid for it! Nathan surprised me by using some of the money and buying and assembling a new bed for us! We've never had our own bed frame, so I'm pretty excited :) We ended up having to go back to Ikea to get slats to hold up the mattress (it was way too high with the box spring), but when we got there they were completely sold out of slats in the size we needed! We were so bummed out (Ikea's not exactly down the road), but devised a brilliant solution: go to Home Depot. We just looked up the size of our box spring (betcha didn't know Home Depot has WiFi!) and had an employee cut boards for us. We figured out that we could get one and a half bed widths out of each board, so we did some math and I think we ended up getting ten boards cut, and it only cost about $20. The cheapest Ikea slats were around $50, so our misfortune turned to our advantage! We simply laid them out in the frame and stuck the middle ends of the half-width boards down with glue dots so they wouldn't slide, and voila! Bed slats! Bonus: we got the cool art shown above on our trip to Ikea, so it wasn't a total loss :)

Overall, I'm feeling pretty smart. Heh heh... ;)