So, have I mentioned that I auditioned a few weeks ago for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Well, I did. Needless to say, I didn't make the cut! After standing in line for about an hour, they shuttled 400 of us into a room to take a 10-minute, 30-question scantron test. Of the 400 who took it, they called out about 15-20 people who passed. Ouch. At least I tried!

And I promised a while ago that I would talk about my budgeting thing. Not that anyone other than myself remembers, but that's okay. Dan and I haven't been the greatest at budgeting and after reading some good articles in the Ensign, decided to work harder. We took a look at our expenses from previous months and found that we were spending much more on groceries than we had thought. Our plan, then, was to set a goal to not go over on groceries. On June 1, I walked over to Bank of America and took out the grocery money in cash. For the rest of the month, I only bought groceries using that money. (Or if I accidentally forgot, I would take the appropriate money out so that we were still on track.) It worked! We spent over $100 less than the previous month.

Since I was gone a lot of July, I went to B of A today and only took out half of what we used last month. So far, so good. It feels nice to know we're being more mindful of our finances - especially since we're buying a house in a few weeks. I'd heard of the cash concept before and I'm here to say that it worked for us! I just hope that we keep it up.

And on another unrelated note, I just wanted to mention that Sam can now say two words - dada (Dad) and daga (dog). He says mama a lot now, too, but I'm not quite sure it qualifies yet. He also says dada a lot for other things, but he always says it to Dan so I think it's legit.