Frugal Date Night & Other Happenings

When you’re married, it can be easy to slip into a routine. To get caught up in the ebb and flow of daily routine and responsibility. To fill open spots in the calendar socializing with friends and family. While all of that is awesome and necessary – one of the lessons marriage has taught us is to make time to intentionally be together. As in, go on a date. Make googly-eyes at each other.

Since we’re kind of trying to hold on to all of our pennies right now, we’ve had to get creative. Sometimes it’s as simple as dinner in the backyard with cheap candles, delicious food and the peaceful sound of one of our neighbors using a chainsaw….nonstop. Cost = free

Other times, it’s a visit to one of our favorite local coffee shops to share a treat after hitting up the farmers market. Cost = $2-3.

Lately, I’ve been scoping out our local parks and rec calendar for fun happenings around town, and I’ve found plenty to choose from with free music, movies and moonlit walks. This weekend, we took advantage of a bike-in movie in the park down the street from us so it actually ended up being a walk-in movie :).

For movie-munching, we popped some popcorn on the stove, threw it in to a paper bag along with a handful of chocolate chips and several shakes of cinnamon.

See that melty chocolate? It was awesome – messy, mind you – but awesome.

On the way, we stopped to play around on the jungle gym. I’m definitely rusty on my monkey bar skills.

Once the light faded, the movie came on, and we settled in to watch Fly Away Home (which came out when I was in middle school – man, how time flies).

All in all, it was a nice, simple night and all it cost was some popcorn kernels, chocolate chips and cinnamon … Cost = ~$1.

Not bad, not bad at all. So, here’s your quick PSA to check in with your local parks & rec for some fun, free events.

The rest of our weekend was filled with (among other things):

– 7 mile training run during which I finished listening to the third book in the Maze Runner trilogy….totally disappointing. But on the bright side of things, the run was fantastic! Well, as fantastic as a hilly run can be. I’ve been working on my stride and footfall and it’s starting to pay off with a faster pace and minimized knee pain. More on that in a future post.

– Yummy eats

Love me some cacao nibs. Just wish they weren’t so darn pricey – I have to ration those suckers out.

Spicy lentil wrap. Mmm Mmm good. I followed this recipe with some modifications and threw in kale and roasted sweet potatoes. Cheap, healthy & delicious – you can’t beat that.

Well, you can if you add Tabasco Chipotle sauce on top. I cannot.get.enough.

– Wally’s first visit to the crick (aka ‘Creek’ for all you folks who speak properly)

Sherlock did not partake in the water adventures; instead, he was on a one-dog mission to smell every inch of the foot path as quickly as possible.

Gorgeous weather over the weekend combined with a day of cool rain yesterday seems to have given our garden a good kick in the pants. Everything is green and growing …  or at least was. Evidently, the sunflowers, which had just pushed themselves up through the soil, fell under attack to some sinister force and require some TLC and replanting. Off to the garden I go! See you soon with a new recipe!