Well, hello again everyone!
It has been a time around here and I have to say having energy to do much other than day to day activities has been really hard to find.
For one thing, we are just busy (like so many others) this time of year and it has been hectic getting the tree up, making Christmas cookies and all the things. And then we had a couple of curve balls as well.
For one, my daughter is going through lifeguarding recertification, so she had a complete course she had to do online for her written portion of the test. And, of course, her laptop decided to die in the worst possible moment. I haven't had much of a chance to figure out why it is stuck on the blue screen of death, but I'll get to it. So, to get her course done, I gave her my laptop to use. Since it is newer it is WAY more reliable and easier to use. It took her a few weeks to get that done, but she completed the course and I thought I could get back to blogging again.
And then my mom happened. She took a bad spill in Wal-Mart back East and ended up with bleeding on the brain from the incident. So, the last week and a half or so has been nerve wracking for me to say the least. She's up and moving around now, grumpy and frustrated, and waiting on insurance to give the go ahead to move her to a rehab facility as she's still shaky and has blurry vision. They ran a bunch of tests and they think the fall was due to really high blood sugar, although my mom remembers none of the incident, so it is kind of hard to tell if there was another issue going on.
Then my mother-in-law took Armina out to the movies (which was fun and I'm glad she did it), but that night my mother-in-law started getting sick. Turned out she caught Covid. With Armina having to go through her physical testing for lifeguarding the next couple of weeks I've been watching her like a hawk and praying she doesn't get sick (so far, so good...knock on wood).
Top it all off with Alvah deciding to give up sleep with the exception of like a few hours a night and being really grumpy about it and dude...my brain has been shot the last bit. I thank the good Lord that I started writing things down that I needed to remember YEARS ago or I doubt I'd remember to do essential stuff. Phone calendars with reminder alarms are the best invention EVER!
So, when it comes to money saving things, I did get a couple of them done and wrote down, so let's recap those really fast.
1. I made sure we ate at home despite being stressed out and really tired because I knew we didn't have the money to go out to eat all the time (I get grey hair every time we eat out anymore...I mean it's nearly 80.00 to eat out now!). Luckily, my husband is okay with eating left overs and I ended up punting and making tacos and things some nights, but we are doing okay overall. I made a beef roast a few days back and I'm going to use some of the left overs (we've already had French dip sandwiches with the leftovers as well) to make beef fajitas for dinner tonight (if I have tortillas...I've got to check the freezer).
2. I did end up taking advantage of the Amazon black Friday week long deal sale and was able to order some bras for the daughter and I at a significant discount. I was even able to add them to Subscribe and Save for January, so I saved 5% off of the sale price and also put off having to pay for them for a little bit.
3. I used some of my Amazon associate fees to order some things to fill in holes in my pantry (thanks again to those who order through my associate links. I appreciate it!). I was going to use said associate fees toward Christmas gifts, but I decided to stick with my original budget that I had saved and bought gifts through that instead of using the associate fees as well.
4. My kitchen sink broke. The sewer line was slipping and anytime I poured a pot of water down the drain it was surging up and over the pipe and into my sink cabinet. It was a mess when I caught it. My husband looked at it and this weekend got the parts and fixed it, which was a relief (I had a bucket jammed under the pipe to catch the water in the meantime) and while I had everything out from underneath the sink he put in the new kitchen faucet! I had bought the faucet ages ago and the old faucet was leaking, creating water hammer problems (vibrated the pipes with a gong type sound when you'd turn off the tap) and would just randomly vapor lock and not work for a few moments until it decided to work again, so to say I'm thrilled to have a working kitchen sink again that is SO much less frustrating is no exaggeration!
5. My husband changed out his headlight bulbs as one had burned out on him. Always grateful to have a man with skills that can do the work himself and save us time and money.
6. I got a check from our mortgage company because we had overpaid on our escrow (a lot of that was probably from changing insurance companies). I ended up having enough from that check to pay off a credit card (it didn't have a huge balance), which was an upper to say the least. I even had enough left over to buy a beef roast for Christmas dinner, which was great as it freed up some money in my grocery budget by doing that.
7. I cut my husband's and my son's hair.
8. While having a ladder out to hang up Christmas decorations, I took advantage of having the ladder to deep clean the high (and pretty big) celing fan in our living room. I was glad I did that as it needed to be deep cleaned. I regularly dust the fans around here, but they still build up dust in areas you can't reacn and get gross, which I'm always worried about how that will effect the motor in the fans. So, it was good to get that fan deep cleaned for sure.
9. I was able to get a free turkey for Thanksgiving dinner by spending more than 150.00 in one shopping trip (since I shop every two weeks, that's really easy to do). I used the free turkey for Thanksgiving and then took inventory to see what else I might need. I already had cranberry relish in the freezer from when I put together all of those freezer preparations a while back, so I didn't need to buy cranberries or oranges for that. I already had potatoes that I could use for dinner as well and frozen green beans. I even decided to go cheap and use dried herbs instead of fresh in Thanksgiving dinner this year (I just pre-cooked the apple and onion I stuff the turkey with some dried herbs and then for the potatoes au gratin dish I prepare I just used a bunch of dried herbs to season the cream with before straining and adding to the potatoes...it worked great actually!). I found that the free turkey I had was a 20 lb bird and I couldn't fit anything but the turkey into my oven when I went to bake it, so I ended up baking the potato au gratin dish in the toaster oven...and actually that worked really well and was WAY easier to clean up when it overflowed a tiny bit into the oven than it would have been had it done that in my big oven, so I might just do that again next year.
10. I started taking everything out of bathroom drawers and cabinets, going through everything and getting rid of stuff that was really expired and things to make things more functional. I finished the upstairs bathroom this weekend and was super happy with the results, but still have some stuff to do down in the master bathroom downstairs. I'm hoping to get things as organized as I can before the end of the year this year, since I failed to make it happen last year. Here's hoping!
And I'm going to stop there as my son is super grumpy today (lack of sleep anyone?) and I need to take care of him. I hope you all are having a great holiday season and are able to find an opportunity to relax a bit.
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