Spend, spend, spend

Today I ended up spending a bit more than I planned. This afternoon we drove down to the music shop where we'd bought DS1's clarinet (second hand) a couple of years ago. He started learning the clarinet this year, and playing in the school's training band. He's pretty good at music (playing piano, recorder and now clarinet), but not so good as to make it into a career. He enjoys playing in the band, but, being only eight, the instrument takes a bit of a pounding - especially last week when he left it standing on the floor and DS2 toddled past and knocked it over. Fortunately I bought a second clarinet at Aldi last year, so I could play along with him and teach him to play (I learned bassoon in high school, so I can teach basic keyboard and woodwind instruments - very handy given the cost of professional music lessons!). So for the next two week's he'll be using my clarinet while his is in the shop being repaired. DS1 earn a bit of extra pocket money busking on the weekend after his piano lesson - so I've told him I'll take out 50% as a "tax" to pay for the repairs. Hopefully this will make him take a bit more care with his equipment.

We then visited Aldi to buy some nappies, and while we were there ended up buying some unplanned "extras". They had a convection oven for sale at $49, which seemed a good price. We already had an old convection oven we've used for everyday cooking for the past ten years (we haven't ever used the stove oven!), so I thought it was worth buying a new one before the old one died (the fan has been getting a but more noisy lately). They also had a self-inking stamp kit for $8, which I bought for DS1 to play with. It's definitely not something we need, but he's having fun type-setting his name and address and can use it to label all his school books, and the occasional letter to his relatives.

While we were at the shopping centre I dropped in to the Electronic Boutique shop to browse for computer games. Although I don't really have much spare time to play games, I enjoy the occasional RPG and would like to see what the modern MUD games are like to play. Now that my uni assignments for this term are out of the way, I may be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of game play. I bought "Vanguard:Saga of Heroes" which appears to be Vista compatible (a lot of my old PC games don't work under Vista), and only cost $20. The game only works online however, so I'll have to pay a monthly fee if I want to keep playing after the introductory 30 day game subscription expires.

All up, an extra $77 of discretionary spending. At least I didn't buy the $139 hedge trimmer while I was at Aldi!

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