I'm frugal so I look for free or cheap activities. Hiking tends to be free. Picnics are good although I rarely picnic in NM (too much dust and wind). I miss picnics.
I basically do the same things I did when I lived in a house. Home is home. My home is just smaller now and I don't have to do yardwork. But I do have to keep things picked up. I read. I have a tablet (#4) that I read on plus can tuck it in my backpack/purse to go find a good place to download books. I prefer being able to get online over just plain reading. I have had a used Pandigital tablet (out of business and then the tablet died), then a new Kindle Fire 6 (got stolen a month later) replaced it with a used Kindle Paperwhite that I can read outside in the sun with but hard to read at night with really dim light. Bought a used Samsung Galaxy Tablet that I currently drag around and have a good chunk of my books with. And I deal with my grief/depression, work on the bus with no money, look for work, mess on the internet far too much, watch too many movies. Started back making jewelry. Put on ebay, then put on my etsy store if they do not sell (a way to advertise my store as my jewelry description will say at the bottom, "see more at my etsy shop Lorndavi Jewelry" and my ebay listings all include the shop name in the jewelry description... gotta make money somehow, although it's slow going)
I use
eReaderIQ for my free and cheap ebooks. I set it up with the subject and genres that I am interested in. I get a daily listing for free and cheap Kindle books. I have Kindle for Windows on my laptop. I check my mail with my laptop, go online to see if the book is something I want to "purchase" (set up the "one-click purchase" for this). "Deliver" the book to the "Kindle for Windows". There it sits in my "library" until I download it to either my laptop (the free kindle app is on my laptop) or my tablet (also free Kindle app). So I have 3 devices I can read on. I like the paper white for cookbooks mostly. I occasionally buy books. I think I have paid as much as $2.99 for a book.
I also use Redbox extensively. Yes, I use it to watch movies. I almost never go to the theatre. One of my daughters took her sister & I to see The King's man. I about died at the price of the ticket and the drink! I am also use it to determine what movies I will add to my movie collection. I have well over 200 movies (including TV series). I use the free
Ant Movie Catalog software to catalog my movies. I keep them in 3" thick 3 ring binders in DVD/CD sleeves (8 per 2 sided page). I keep the movie disc, toss the cases. This saves me a lot of space. I have the binders and pages numbered. For example: the catalog says the location of the movie "For The Boys" is 1.15. That means it is in the binder designated as #1, on the page numbered 15. The TV series and the multi-part/sequal movies are in a separate note book. In that case, I only designate the first page the series starts on. For example the TV series "Firefly" is S1.01 (series notebook 1, page 1) as is the movie "Serenity" (finished up the series when they canceled the series). For something like The Lord of The Rings trilogy, I have each disc in a designated location (LOTR1 is S1.12, LOTR2 is S1.12, LOTR3 is S1.12 - the 4th space on the page will stay empty) I numbered each page in the regular note book (front page 1, back page 2, etc) but for the series book, I only count each page of sleeves (holds 8 DVDs per page) as 1. I separated the multi-parts/series movies because it is easier for me to find when I want to have a marathon day or week. I also hold spaces open and have the space labeled for the movies in a series that I don't have all of them. I use a label maker machine so the discs go back into the correct location. I buy the movies cheap. I use Redbox to see what movies I would like to watch over and over (at least once per year). I write the name of the movie in a little notebook I keep in my backpack/purse. The ones I might want to rent are in the back, the ones I need to buy are in the front. Then I watch the movie bins at Wal-Mart (love it when I can get a movie for $3) or at the thrift store ($1 each for Lord of the Rings #1 & #3). Family Dollar has boxes of movies. The regular ones are pretty cheap. But the paper sleeved "pre watched" are $2. You have to know the title you are looking for because these paper sleeved ones have no info, just what the face of the disc says. Redbox has saved me a lot of money since I started using it to pre-screen movies. And I do not buy movies until they hit "sell-thru" prices (several months after they first come out). I get a lot of discount codes from Redbox as well. At one point I was renting movies for about 1/2 price once I figured out how much I was renting and what it was costing me to rent. All those rent one/get one free, and the just plain free night rental. And I rent these off of a Wal-Mart money card I've had for several years, so if you don't have a credit card, you can get a WM money card, load it and rent like that ($3 monthly fee if you use the card or not).
Time to make lunch and watch a movie. The puppy is really getting hooked on the "lunch movie". I eat lunch and she sleeps while the movie is on. If I don't do the movie, she gets all pouty.
, dispose of the dishwater, etc. etc. So that takes up a bit more time.
