Insomnia Over Money Plans

Yesterday I managed to trace a long lost Cousin through Facebook, he is now almost Seventy years old and quite unrecognizable to me. The last time I saw him was in 1972, when he came over from Ireland to Scotland to spend some time with this not long married Cousin. At the time he was Tutoring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,s children while they were making a movie in the UK, I still have an autographed photo of them which says " To Maureen from Richard and Liz " it,s one of my most treasured possessions. He is a published Author and as far as I know he is unmarried.
It is really hard to feel close to someone I barely know, he is my Mother,s Sister,s Son, still it will be interesting to learn a little more of my family from America. My Mother was born in the States to Scottish parents, we are a far traveled family, itchy feet I think !!!

My Australian Christmas theme is of course the beach, lots of Aussie families spend Christmas Day on the beach, for a picnic lunch and a good game of cricket, followed by a sleep and a swim once Dinner goes down.
My little Scottish decoration reminded me of one my Mum and Dads tree had on it, it seemed there was a story behind every ornament on the tree, as they were collected with love over their married life, many of them are still going strong, as are my parents after 65 years of marriage. Happy memories.


I hardly slept a wink last night, my head was full of ideas and plans for my finances in 2011. I feel as if I have been writing about saving for months and in fact have managed to save absolutely nothing. But then I thought, we have just had a Wedding funded by cash and now it,s Christmas funded in the same way. We have no overdue bills and plans are in place for making sure 2011 is a saving and debt repayment year. So why the sleepless night ??? Excitement I guess, I just can,t wait to get on with it.

Many of you girls asked about my Weekly spending tracker, and I added a footnote to my comments. However for those of you that missed it. I track my daily spends in www.spendingdiary.com it is a very basic straightforward easy to understand website. And at the end of the week, which runs from a Sunday to Saturday , you click on reports and then onto this week or last week depending on which day you are blogging. then you just cut and paste your information straight onto your blog. I put my own heading in and miss out the pie chart. But it gives me a nice clear understanding of exactly where my money is going, as you can name your own categories, go in and have a look there are a couple of us using it now and it really makes tracking easy.

On a personal level a very dear friend of mine has just discovered this week that her 18 year old Daughter has a very aggressive form of Leukemia, they found out on Wednesday and by Friday they had started her chemo, they are hoping to have caught it early enough to give her a really good chance of survival. However they never had enough time to harvest her eggs, and as a result even if she makes it through she will never be able to conceive, what a sentence to give a young girl. So could you please include her and her parents in your prayers this Christmas


ONLY 5 SLEEPS TO GO