Yard Work -
We spent most of our weekend doing yard work. I was hoping to do some planting but instead we spent most of it digging out a tree stump that is in the front yard that is pushing the brick wall fence. We end up destroying a row of a brick edging in front of it, we had to it is the only way to get to it. I'm not too worry about destroying it because we need to re-do the yard anyway. It has needed it for years. We had drought here for a long time that destroyed a lot of our plants. Because we were in water restriction for a long time we didn't bother doing too much with it. Our water restriction these days is a bit more relax and we can actually water our plants now. And I have been buying more drought tolerant plants from garage sales in the last 2 years. It will take us months to do it but I'm hoping we can get it done by next summer. First thing is to get this massive tree stump out. It's been over a year since we cut it and have been poisoning it few times but it is taking forever to die and now the next door neighbour is complaining about it so that's first priority at the moment.

With all this bricks and soil around I decided that I will make garden beds out of them, I just want to experiment with it. If it turns out good then maybe I'll make a permanent feature of it in the backyard.

Saturday Night –
We went out with some friends for a 9 course meal with wine at a Thai restaurant. A friend that organise the get together bought a voucher so it was only $39 per couple. But parking in the area was highway robbery and it didn't help that our meal went on for 3 hours. It took 1 hour for the first dish to come out, so DH had to go out in the rain to put more money in the meter, ended up spending $12. It is a terrible area there is not many options for parking so the council just take advantage of it. We are not going to that part of town anytime soon. We all joked about maybe the restaurant has a deal with the council to get people to spend more on parking. Oh well, it was still great catch up. One friend I haven't seen since last year.

Sunday -
We went grocery shopping, didn't really get much (don't need much); grapes, onions, milk, eggs, potato, chicken and 10 kil0 bag of rice. We still got plenty of rice but they were selling for half price, thinking about it now I probably should have got 2 bags.

Coffee & "Business Meeting"-
While at the shops we stopped by at one of our favourite café, it is in the same shopping centre. Lately, we have been coming to this café once or twice a month. We like to come here and have a "business meeting". Business meeting for us is talking about our finances especially our stocks/stock market/investments. When it comes to our trading/investing we are both very involve with it. We both like to see what each other thinks about a certain stock, should we be buying, selling or just holding, etc.. We have also been discussing a lot about our mortgage and other financial stuff. This time we talked about getting our mortgage down to $20K next month. It is kind of the thing that I want to get /celebrate for my birthday next month. And we think we should be able to do it if we can get our 2013-14 tax refund (I'm 90% sure we will get it by then), that would probably be around $2000-$2500 after accountant fee. We calculated that we will need $5,500 to get to $20K. So the rest we can get from the 'extra pay' next month. It's not really an extra pay, it just happens that DH will get paid 3 times next month instead of only twice (forth-nightly pay deal thing). So if we use that 'extra' pay next month we should be able to do it without derailing out other goal too much. The other goal is to hoard cash in the bank (around $20,000) just in case DH's job contract might not get renewed in June. We got around $13 at the moment.

Stock-
We mainly talked about one of our stock that is doing a Share Purchase Plan (SPP) at the moment (due 24th of March). We talked about whether we should participate in it and where are we going to get the money from? Luckily, we have sold some stocks this year and we actually have enough to fully participate in the SPP. The SPP price is about $2 at the current price. The plan is to get the maximum amount and then sell half of it as soon as possible to luck some profit and then keep the other half long-term. This is one of our best performing stock so I am happy to add more of it in our portfolio.

We both really enjoy our meeting in this café, great atmosphere for it. The coffee is great and they have nice assortment of cakes to go with it. The servings are large so we normally just share a large coffee and slice of cake (DH decided to get NY cheesecake this time). All up it was $13.90. DH offered to pay for all of it out of his allowance since he was the one that really wanted the cake because I was still full from lunch but when it got to our table I still ate a bit of it so I said that we will split it. I actually have a lot of allowance saved up than him. Apart from weekends I really don't have chance to spend it before when I was working part-time it use to get spend a lot on coffee and snacks. I've actually now accumulated $500 but I have big plan to spend a big chunk of it for my birthday next month.

Oh my, this is a long post.