Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap (Times...whatever)

First, I want to thank everyone who has written me the last few days to make sure I'm alive and to apologize for not getting back to you.  I'll e-mail you back as soon as I have time to breathe regularly again.

It has been crazy the last few weeks around here.  And, unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of good that came out of it.

Let's start with the top photo shall we?

Our small block freezer died and took a bunch of food with it.  That was not a good day.  The bright side to that train wreck is that I was eating down our freezers and had transferred most of the meat out of the small freezer into our larger standing freezer downstairs.  So, at least we didn't lose tons of meat.  Enough to make things depressing for sure, but not enough to justify a nervous breakdown.  I was able to save a few things from the near bottom of the freezer that were sitting on top of the bag of ice left over from when our ice maker died and we had ham for a few meals (since it was a whole ham it didn't defrost too much), my husband had a steak for lunch at work that night and we had tacos for dinner that night instead of the pork chops I had planned on.  We also had some Otter Pops in the freezer for when the husband or the daughter get sick as they like them for sore throats and since they were in plastic tubs we dumped the entire lot into the bathtub with some hot soapy water, washed them all really well and then dried them before putting them into new freezer bags and placing them in the freezer downstairs.

In the money saving department, I quickly decided to not replace the freezer and am just going with what else we have around the house.  I'd rather save the 200.00+ a new one would cost to save for the next thing that breaks.

In other news we are developing our own junkyard out on our back deck as things just seem to keep breaking around here.  I'm getting tired of it.

The other things that broke were my son's old rocker recliner and my husband's recliner.  Mind you they were both old.  We got the son's chair used and had repaired it multiple times, but it was still a recliner from the 80's.  The husband's chair we had bought new when my daughter was a baby, so it's over a decade old now and it has been used hard over the years.  The earthquake was just too much for the son's chair after it got an entire bookcase of stuff dumped on top of it and buried it, I think.  I thought there was only a main spring in the rocker that needed to be replaced but when I started looking at it I realized that it was one of many problems, including springs popping through the upholstery and things, so I finally realized we had to replace it.  I couldn't not replace it as the son has become dependent on that chair over the years for sensory stimulation.  So, we went to our local furniture clearance outlet and ended up getting two floor model recliners (it saved us even more money buying the floor models) that had a few small imperfections.  They don't match at all, but the son is happy with his rocker recliner that swivels 360 degrees and the husband has a recliner he can sit in with the kids again without someone getting hurt and supports his back, which he needs.  The son's new chair (seen above) I am counting as personal property replacement on the disaster loan, but the husband's chair was already splitting and having multiple problems before the quake, so that one I put on credit and am paying it off.  The husband took the old chairs to the dump last week as they were in too bad of shape to donate to a used store (we did ask them, though).

The next thing that has been going on is that the son came down with a stomach bug with staying power.  It's all lower intestinal problems so far, but I ended up sleeping upstairs for a good week out of necessity to be able to jump up when the son would need help and I'll be bedding down upstairs again tonight, unfortunately.  School starts tomorrow...I'm seriously wondering if the son is going to make it.  Not a good start to the school year.  Sigh.

Then there was my Prime Day order with Amazon.  I am so fed up with Amazon at the moment that I'm not ordering anything from them unless I absolutely can not find it locally, no matter how much more it will cost me buying it local.  Stick a fork in me.  I'm done.

Amazon shipped my Prime Day orders in one box...a big one I'm assuming as it had pillows, lights, toys and other things for the kids for Christmas and such.  The package hit the internal Amazon shipping lanes in Kentucky and then proceeded to disappear off the face of the planet.  I ended up having to call Amazon who then replaced nothing in my order, pretty much, because it was Prime Day deals and they couldn't match the prices on the replacements.  So, refunds again.

I then sat down and ordered things as close as I could to the Prime Day things I had gotten, trying to keep within the budget of those items as I didn't really want to spend more than what I had already spent.  And Amazon shipped me items that had been obviously opened, leaking (I ordered a small paint set for my daughter) and a mess.  I ordered a 12 pack of 1 subject notebooks for school on an Amazon warehouse deal as the price was good enough that I wouldn't have to go to the store for notebooks and would still get about the same price for the notebooks.  I got a pack of 8, not 12.  Refunds again.

After that entire sequence of events I'm just determined to get what I can locally for gifts this year and if I can't find it locally I won't be ordering it from Amazon.  I'm done with them unless I can't find it anywhere else and it is worth the gamble that I'll actually get the darned things I order in decent shape.

Oh and Amazon had me send back the opened and leaking paint set and the notebooks, which I could understand the notebooks but was baffled by the paints.  I didn't get my refund back until, believe it or not, the big box of Prime Day orders that was out in limbo finally hit the postal system and USPS sent the box back to Amazon.  As soon as they received that yesterday suddenly my refunds are going through.  Between that and the one Amazon associate I had to deal with trying to get my order replaced when it originally got lost and his attitude like I was stealing from them...I am ticked.  Pure and simple.

I've been burning the candle at both ends and that candle is broken into about sixteen pieces of late.  I'm tired and my son hasn't been sleeping well, but I'm still having to function like a human being.  I'm stressed and trying to get things done around the house so at least we are making forward progress on our disaster loan things we have to get done.  Doing that stretches my back in weird ways so I end up hurting on the nights when I'm actually able to get some sleep.  It hasn't been a lot of fun, but it's getting done whether it likes it or not.

For instance, I got the master bathroom repainted.  We sat down and realized that our home just has too many design elements from the 70's in it (which is when the majority of it was built) and we finally decided to just go with it instead of trying to make an old home look modern that would just end up looking weird in the end.

So, the master bathroom got to be painted burnt orange.  I know, it sounds odd (and might look a bit in the pictures), but the orange looks really good in there!  It goes with the floor well and the real upper to the color is that the light in the bathroom has improved about 18 bazillion times.  Don't worry.  I'm not going to go crazy with avocado green anywhere.  I swear *laugh*.

While I was painting I repaired the shower.  I had to adhere tiles that had pretty much come off the wall by the bath tub there and then I dapped/caulked around the tiles after I stuck them back to the wall so that the tiles would be protected from mold.  The sheet rock was cracked along the baseboard and the paint had started to come off from the wall in a few places, but I managed to repair it and make it look pretty good I think.  We still have to hang up new hardware in this bathroom, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out as there was a lot of nails to put back into the walls  and a lot of cracks to deal with.  I REALLY need to remember to take more before and after pictures just for the sake of having a record and making me realize how much I really did get done in each room, but hey I remember to take a couple of pics of the kitchen before I started on it (that's my newest work in progress)...

Sneak peak of one of the cracks.

Anyway, I think that gets us somewhat up to speed when it comes to our lives around here.  So, let's get to a few things I did to save money the last, what, three weeks?

1. I made the mistake of washing the kid's shower curtain again.  Every time I did that I'd forget that the thing would shrink EVERY SINGLE TIME you washed it and this time it got short enough that I wasn't too keen on putting it back up.  So, instead of going out and buying a new shower curtain and rug, I went and raided my closet to see what I had put away for spares.  I found a tan bathroom rug (that is now downstairs in the master bathroom) and the old striped shower curtain I had in my master bathroom for a while.  So, I put the shower curtain up in the kid's bathroom (sorry for the pic with all the wrinkles in it...they steamed out pretty fast with everyone taking showers upstairs while I painted the bathroom downstairs) and then took the dark grey rug from my master bathroom, replaced it with the larger tan one, and put the dark grey on in the kid's bathroom instead.  I think, overall, everything works okay together and I didn't have to spend a dime to get there, so I'm happy.

2.  Carrs had blueberries on sale for 5.00 per two pound container.  Since blueberries were one of the things I lost in the freezer dying, which depressed me, I was happy to find them for that price and got three containers.  I now have enough blueberries for a while to make things like blueberry muffins with, so that was a good purchase.

3.  Carrs had a bunch of different things you could buy with gas rewards this month and they had given me four times the normal amount of gas rewards one week so with our two week shopping trip I got like 11 fuel rewards.  I cashed in some of them to get a free gallon of milk, a free pound of butter (which I needed both) and 7.00 worth of meat (which I got some chicken and steaks on reduced with it) and still had enough fuel rewards left that my husband was able to get a decent amount off per gallon of gas.  We were running really low on meat, so I was really happy to add more back into our stores.

4.  I watched a bunch of free programming on the internet, including going back and watching some episodes of "Victorian Farm", which was a nice distraction from a sore back as I was trying to sleep on the love seat in the living room when the son kept stealing my makeshift bed I made on his floor.

5.  As the son has battled the stomach bug, instead of running out every time I think he might be better and getting new toothbrush heads, I instead have been just sticking the heads in boiling water to sterilize them.  Since they are nearly brand new I figure this will be a good way to get us through without reinfecting ourselves until he's officially over it and I can replace the toothbrush heads for sure.

6.  The daughter's Kindle stopped playing Prime videos for some reason and we tried trouble shooting it with Amazon to no avail.  I finally talked it over with the daughter and we just reformatted the Kindle back to factory defaults.  That fixed it and stopped me from having to buy, yet another, new Kindle.

7.  I cleaned out my e-mail and managed to get the thousands and thousands of junk mail messages out of the e-mail.  It's nice being able to log in to the e-mail to a whopping 30 mail messages you have to go through and delete off before your inbox is clean again.

8.  I had my daughter go through her school supplies from last year.  We cleaned her old pink erasers really well, got binders relabeled and checked lead levels in her mechanical pencils and things.  I doubt we saved a ton of money doing that, but we did save some money, the daughter is happy with how things look and I'm happy we saved some pennies.

9.  I read some books through the Gutenberg project for free.

10.  When trying to figure out colors for the rooms in the house I went online and found that Sherwin Williams had an online paint simulator where you could see what the paint would actually look like on walls when it was done.  After the upstairs bathroom I was happy to find it and was curious to how accurate it would be when I did the downstairs bathroom, but am happy to report it worked well and the paint came out looking like it did online.  I'm going to be curious to see if the rest of the paints come out with a similar level of success as the master bathroom.

11.  My vacuum cleaner started having some major issues the last week and I was really worried I would have to go and get a new vacuum somewhere.  My husband stopped by the Kirby store in town and found that we could get ours serviced and get all of the replacement parts that we know we need right now 150 to 200.00.  Since a new vacuum would cost that or more and I'd have to gamble on the new vacuum not dying on me in a year or so (I have TERRIBLE luck with store bought vacuum cleaners.  I even ended up getting refunded for a couple under lemon laws my luck was so bad) and this vacuum has lasted about a decade with constant use and abuse, I'm going to gamble on getting the Kirby serviced and pray that it will fix it and bring it back up to snuff.

I am sure there is more in there that I plain forgot as I'm writing this as things are nagging the back of my mind, but I passed tired about two weeks ago and my brain is pretty much shot by this point.  If I remember some other things I'll snap some pictures and do some recaps, but for now I'm going to call it good and try to get the daughter to bed since she has school tomorrow.

So, yeah, I hope you guys have had a decent run of time since the last blog post and have great things to report :).  How did your three week stint go?

Totally Saving Tuesday: Money Saving Weekly Recap (x2)

Okay, since it's Tuesday it would TECHNICALLY be times 3, but I'm calling it two as I'm hoping to get another Frugal Friday post up this Friday, so it'll all work out in the end.  *Messes around with beads on abdictus* yeahhhh...we'll go with that *laugh*.

Anyway, what have we been up to the last few weeks.  TONS would be the short answer.  Some good, some bad.  So, let's break it down.

First there has been my husband's health, which has been crazy of late.  First he went to the free clinic that his union provides to get his ankle checked out.  He'd folded his other ankle when he was climbing off of a ladder, so he was worried he'd hurt the other leg somehow, but found out that basically he's getting older and just needs better inserts in his shoes.  While he was there, however, they took his blood pressure and it was pretty darned high.  He felt fine, though, so the doctor on duty told him to go home, wait a day, take his blood pressure and if it was still high to go and see our family doctor.

Well, in short he checked his blood pressure as directed and it was still really high, so he went into our family doctor.  He then told the doctor all of the things I'd implemented to keep our diet decently low in sodium and the doctor pretty much told him "congratulations, you're a victim of genetics" and put him on blood pressure medication.  Which, after messing with the dosage the last couple of weeks, I think we are on the right track and his blood pressure is doing a lot better.  Bright side as well is that they did a bunch of blood work on the husband and found that his cholesterol and sugar levels were good, so all of the effort I've put into keeping our diet decently healthy seems to be working :).

Then last week rolled around and the husband woke up on Wednesday to find one of his eyes all swollen up.  He tried Benadryl and that didn't seem to do much, so he went back to the doctor to find out what was going on with it.  The doctor was pretty sure it was allergies, but put him on antibiotic drops just in case there was an infection.  It seems like his eye is finally doing better *knock on wood*, so hopefully we're on the mend with that.

Then there was the home front stuff on top of that.  I went downstairs one night to see the cats doing their best to dig through the walls at the bottom of the stairs.  I was kind of confused at first, but when I went into the laundry room I found the distinctive pile of mouse droppings.  I looked and sure enough there was a hole around where the stairs met the floor at the bottom of the staircase.  I immediately went and shoved aluminum foil into every gap and hole I could find, much to the vexation of my cats.  The next day I went outside to try and figure out how the buggers were getting in this time.  Well, I definitely found it.  The earthquake really moved the front of our house, I guess, and the front porch acted as added weight to move the house back and forth.  As a result under the front porch, where the mice got in last year, was woefully unprotected.  The brick I had put over the hole had moved a good foot off of the hole, the aluminum foil, though, was in place.  The biggest problem, though, was that the foil was now useless as there is a good sized gap between the dirt and the foundation where the earth had gotten compacted forward during the earthquake.  I went and grabbed gravel and filled up the hole down as far as I could around the ground wire hole (where they had gotten in last year) and planted the brick over it, but otherwise there isn't a whole lot I can do at the moment as we have fencing around the bottom of the porch with gaps just large enough for me to fit my arm through, but I can't reach as far as I need to to fill in the gap that developed.  So, I did the best I could and will make sure to be vigilant looking for any telltale signs of mice.

Bright side is that I DID go in and look around the pantry and didn't find any evidence that the evil disease ridden creatures were getting into the pantry at all, so at least the steel wool and aluminum foil are doing their job so far.  For the time being, however, the door to the pantry is wide open so the cats have full access to ANYTHING that they might need to deal with.  I'm taking no chances.

There was also my truck.  The service engine soon light has been on in the truck pretty much since the moment we bought it as we have a fuel vapor leak in the truck somewhere.  It hasn't been a problem in the truck running, but it does make the service engine soon light come on and stay on.  Then we went to go out last week and the truck just ran awful and now the service engine soon light was blinking.  Not good.  The husband went and plugged in his code reader and found that the 8th cylinder was misfiring.  He then started trouble shooting the problem, found it was the coil, went and got parts and fixed the truck.  We spent about 65.00 between the part and buying a testing device for the coil, but if we had brought the truck to a garage we would have paid at least 100.00 just to diagnose the problem.  Once again I'm so thankful to have a husband who knows how to do things :).

So, yeah, this is definitely going to be a year where I'm going to be trying to figure out how to access our health reimbursement account through our health insurance as I'm going to need it to pay for all of the medical bills that will be coming down the pike.

1.  And then there was my big project over the last couple of weeks.  I've been really kind of frustrated and helpless feeling that I can't help the husband with the chimney and I kept trying to figure out how to help him get things done as we have so much to do.  So, I figured I could take a nail set around the house, start nailing nails back into the ceilings and walls, patching the holes and then start painting one room at a time.  So, this week it was the bathroom.  Since I'm the one painting, I'm picking the colors.  Bwahahahaha!  When we bought the house the entire house was white inside and textured.  I hate textured walls by the way.  Anyway, I made sure that the rooms for both kids were painted before we moved in as I wanted to them to feel like the rooms belonged to them, but when it came to the rest of the house everything remained white.  I'm still going to be stuck with the main part of the house being white as it's such a wide open area I really don't have much of a choice, but I figured I could at least paint the other rooms.

So, I went and nailed all of the nails back into the walls and ceiling, sealed up the cracks in the drywall (let's hear it for DAP, or bathroom rated caulk for those who don't recognize the brand) and then applied a good coat of oil based primer (basically Kilz, but the store version of it).

And might I just say that this process took FOREVER with the texture on the walls.  I ended up with two days just into putting primer on the walls.  The texture and old paint on the walls just absorbs paint, so it took a lot longer than I had hoped.

Bright side once the primer was on the paint went on great.  I had picked a light silver color.  I ended up with a blue grey color instead (why doesn't the paint ever match the color on those little sample cards?).  Bright side is that it still matched at least one shade of grey in the shower tiles and on the floor, so it worked out.

Ways I saved money while doing this project?

• I did the work myself instead of hiring a contractor to do it.
• We got a discount on our painting supplies by getting things on sale.
• The only brush we bought was a four inch brush and we bought some inserts for our paint roller.  Otherwise we used tools we already had around the house for everything else. 

The final color on...

And how the bathroom looks now after a good thorough deep cleaning (and scraping off of the tiny little dribbles of paint that always seem to find their way onto objects no matter how well you put down drop cloths...

We also ended up getting a new towel rack and things for the bathroom as the old ones were cheap  wood ones and were REALLY falling apart after the masses of pounding they took in the earthquake.  The vanity is also going to need to be replaced as the bottom is falling in bad since the quake (not sure why, but it was cheap to begin with as well).  I screwed the vanity back tight to the wall again and then took an oak board I had and put it across the bottom of the vanity so I could at least put things under the sink again without them trying to fall down into the middle.

2.  I went out and foraged in the yard and did find we had a few raspberry bushes actually produce some raspberries (more is the miracle with how low they got chopped down by the moose last year).

I picked enough for the daughter to have a small snack and while I was out I picked some rhubarb and some wildflowers.

3.  I attempted to make Old Fashioned Rhubarb Pudding Cake with the rhubarb I picked.  Attempted should be the word of the day there.  I was distracted by my kids.  My daughter forgot how to do everything on her own but breathe, so it seemed and the son was running around like a maniac, dumped a DVD into my cake batter...it was nuts.  So, I read the recipe completely wrong and put the cornstarch and sugar concoction on the fruit instead of over the batter (I'm sure my mind went to pie making and was like, "Right, rhubarb pie filling on the bottom...").  Turns out if you do that you end up with an odd tasting rhubarb cobbler instead of a cake.  So, now you know.  Anyway, I ate a bunch of it myself as my family wasn't keen on eating it, but I did find the almond extract to be overpowering in the recipe.  So, I'm going to try the recipe again, but I think I'm just going to double the vanilla extract and call it good.

3.  So, Prime Day came and went last week.  I actually, for a change, found things that I needed.  I made out a list beforehand to see if any of those items went on sale decently cheap on Amazon, and was actually able to check a few things off of my list.  I got a two pack of gel pillows (which I have one that my husband and I end up trading off, along with the down pillows and then we end up compromising on who gets what when he has his nights off) for less than 20.00, got a six pack of battery powered, motion detecting LED lights (for the pantry as one of my battery powered lights got crushed in the quake and the other one doesn't really light up the entire pantry all that great), an art kit for the daughter for Christmas and some toys for the son for Christmas as well.  I was even able to find the husband a watch that they had on special for 28.00.  I know it's not a GREAT watch by any stretch, but he hasn't had a working watch in a while, so I figured it'll do :).

I also took advantage of Prime Day sales on Seventh Generation products to get some super concentrated laundry detergent for less than 10.00 for a bottle.  It's scented, which I normally don't get, but I'm looking forward to trying it as I haven't bought scented anything in YEARS.

4.  Used shopping went well a couple of weeks ago (I am still searching for a new shower curtain for the kid's bathroom as the one we have in there right now keeps shrinking every time I wash it and it is developing holes...it's really old and I got it for free years and years ago, so I can't complain, but now I need a new shower curtain.

I did, finally, find some prints to replace the prints I had made for Alvah for his room as they got wrecked in the earthquake.  I found these really pretty sailing boat prints, so I got them and hung them up where the old prints used to be.  Since I'm thinking of going for a "things that go" type of theme for his room, I think the prints will work well in there when all is said and done.  With the race car banner I made it looks like there's a regatta going on instead of a car race, but it'll do ;).

5.  While at the used store I also ran into a nice fake plant that would fit on top of the towel cabinet in the hallway.  I was thrilled as I really wanted something like that to finish up the look of the cabinet and I could put my stereo away unless I was using it (thus saving it from getting dusty).

6.  Shopping went well this week.  I had a personalized price on Rotisserie chickens, so I took advantage of it as they were giving them to me for 5.00 a piece.  I went in and got four of them, two of which were on reduced for 50% off (who can beat 2.49 for a whole chicken????).  I put them into the freezer whole in freezer bags and will take them out when I want a quick and flavorful dinner.

There was also a coupon online that you could load to get a container of ice cream for 1.49, limit of one and while at the store getting milk I got a coupon that printed off at the register for 1.25 off of the new style of ice cream for Carrs (the not-quite-half-gallon size).  I combined the coupons together at check out to get a thing of ice cream for .24!  Yeah!!!

Just4U also offered me a free box of blueberry Cheerios this week, so I picked those up yesterday as well when I went to get groceries.  My husband refuses to try them as he doesn't like fruity cereals, but I'm kind of hoping that the daughter might like them.  I'm curious to see what they taste like myself.

7.   We got our refund check in from our home owners insurance this week.  I get mad at them for doing invoicing our bank for the full amount and then proceeding to send me a refund check, but they have been doing it so long it ceases to surprise me when it happens.  I talked to my mortgage company on online chat and asked if I put the money back into escrow would it make a difference when they went to calculate the mortgage payments at the end of the year and he said it wouldn't make any difference as they go off of the invoice that was given, how it compared to last year and then they figure out the difference between the home owners insurance and the property taxes, add a cushion in on top of it, recalculate the escrow and then the mortgage payment comes out of that.  So, I decided to just bank the refund monies and use them to go toward school supplies and back to school clothes for the kids instead.

I went online one day and found that Land's end was having a sale of 40% off of regular priced items and they also had some really good clearance sales on t-shirts and things.  Both kids needed clothes and rain jackets.  Between the discount code for 40% off I was able to get rain jackets for less than 25.00 a piece, got t-shirts for about 5.00 a piece in different colors for each child and other things (like another bathing suit for Alvah and another in the next size up for him).  I spent more than 75.00 so I got free shipping on the clothes as well.

The daughter needed a new lunchbox and desperately wanted another back pack as hers was falling apart even after light use last year.  Her aunt had gotten one for her for Christmas, but it is still a bit big for her (the daughter inherited my short gene), so I went on Land's End when they were having a 50% off sale on backpacks and lunch boxes a few days ago.  I was able to get a back pack that I THINK will fit the daughter well (I hope it's not too small for her...she's at an odd height at the moment), got an embroidered unicorn on the pocket for her as well (she saw one in the catalog and fell utterly in love with the idea of having a unicorn on her back pack) and got her a new lunch box and I still, even after shipping, paid the same amount as the back pack would have been normal price WITHOUT embroidery or anything with it.

8.  I mended three t-shirts that had holes in them this week.

9.  We were invited to dinner by my in-laws and I got to see one of my sister-in-laws and her children as she was invited too.  It was a lot of fun, the kids had a blast and I didn't have to cook.  Always a nice change of pace :).

10.  I darned one of my socks.

11.  I cleaned out the drains in the bathrooms to make sure they continue to flow well.

And there you go folks.  A quick recap of what has been going on around here.  How about you?  How has the past couple of weeks treated you all?

November 2018 Earthquake Update

First and foremost I want to thank everyone.  Your kindness and support during this time has been one of the few real bright points this entire week, so thank you SO much for that.  I needed every bit of it.

This has been a real ride this last week and just crazy and stressful.  First there was the aftershocks.  So.  Many.  Aftershocks!  We topped up over 3,000 yesterday, I think.  Up until a couple of days ago the aftershocks were just constant, which kept me in a constant state of shot nerves.  I finally slept downstairs last night instead of bedding down on the son's floor on a pile of blankets and I still felt unease about it.  Nerve wracking doesn't even BEGIN to cover it.

Then there was the son's stomach bug, which turned out to be a nearly week long affair (I called his pediatrician and I guess it's a nasty bug going around), so that was fun with a broken toilet.

I got so dehydrated on Friday just from not thinking to drink much and then not having water available TO drink (my emergency water somehow surfed from my pantry, across the hallway and was jammed over by the hot water heater in the laundry room) that by the time I went to the doctor on Monday I had a pretty significant urinary tract infection and kidney infection.  I didn't realize how badly it was effecting my ability to think until the nurse asked me if I was on the keto diet (as I had worrisome amounts of protein in my urine) and I couldn't remember what that was and other things that I should have known, but for the life of me couldn't remember.  Just as an aside I want to thank you all for your donations to my paypal as due to that generosity I was able to pay for that doctor's visit and BOY did I need it!  

Then there was the home owner's insurance.  Which turned out to be as useful as a screen door on a submarine.  I went from calling them Friday and them telling me to put things on credit card and take plenty of pictures and they'd get an adjuster out to confirm damages to calling them on Monday and them acting like I was insane for even thinking that I might be covered for earthquakes in an earthquake zone.  The insurance is going to cover 100% nothing.  I broke down for a while after getting off the phone with them and then tried to think of what else to do.

At least my husband's classic car insurance through Hagherty was worth something.  It sounds like they are going to fix my husband's car, which at least we have that going for us.  We had a guy show up and take pictures day before yesterday and they are getting quotes from body shops and things.

Cracks, cracks everywhere.

After finding out that the home owner's insurance was going to cover 100% nothing, I called FEMA, but our Federal government hasn't, in all of their infinite wisdom, declared Alaska a national problem, so I'm worried that's not going to happen either especially how quickly Alaska got on the ball and started to repair roadways and things to get the state back up and working again (nothing shuts this state down and after this quake it really showed how much Alaska could get done when the brakes were taken off).  Governor Walker, on his way out the door (literally, we were right in the middle of transitions for our state government this week), declared a state of emergency for the state and the old and new guys in office came up with a disaster relief grant program you can apply for.  It went live at 8 am on Wednesday, I believe, and I was awake at 6 am and called when the thing went live at eight (and then called, and called and called again that day until I got a person instead of an answering machine) and applied for the disaster relief.  The grant you can get is limited in what they cover, but I'm praying they might pay to at least replace the chimney and maybe the man door to our garage (which we use as the main door in and out of the house) as you have to basically kick the door in to get it to open now and there are gaps in the door frame and a few other necessary repairs that we're not sure how in the Heck we are going to pay for.

We told them about the hot water heater as it kept going out for no reason after the earthquake and wasn't cycling right.  You had to actually drain the tank to get it to refill and fire.  It finally just out and out quit night before last.  So we went and bought a new hot water heater on the house account and my husband installed it yesterday.  I have to say it was nice being able to take a shower for the first time since the earthquake (I had been running lukewarm baths for the kids instead of worrying about showers and using up what little hot water we'd have for the day doing that).

My mom called and told us she'd bought us a toilet and we could pick it up at Home Depot.  I cried when she told me that.  As gifts go that was one of the most heartfelt gifts I'd ever received.  My best friend bought me a new canner.  That also brought tears.  Blog readers paypal donations came in with different messages of encouragement...more tears.  Thank you, everyone.  I can't say that enough.

I finally got courageous enough to go and check the outbuildings yesterday.  I found a miracle while there.  We had foam insulation left over from building the chicken coop and my husband had put it in the shed so it was protected from the wind.  I don't know how that foam insulation fell in such a way to protect the lawn mower, but it did.  I was so grateful when I found that as there was NO way we could have afforded to replace the lawn mower (seen up top).

The 40 ft van was bad, but not as bad as I'd fear it would be.  Some of my family heirlooms might have survived from the look of it, but it's going to be a while before I can get back into the van to fully check the damage as it's going to take a lot of work to get through all of that.

The other two outbuildings, though, are gone.  The shed actually sank/shifted and bulged it's sides out and the barn cracked the main roof supports in the quake.  We're just going to worry about demolishing them later.  That's all we can really do at this point.  

On top of everything else, Mother Nature decided to have a version of, "Hold my beer" when it came to Alaska.  Friday we had the quake.  Saturday we got 60 mph gusts of wind.  Temperature went up to unseasonably warm weather which melted snow, quickly tanked the temperatures to create wonderful amounts of ice and then dumped about 8 inches of snow on us.  All in a couple of days.  So, I'd like to apologize to any neighbors who might read this and ended up in possession of pieces of our gutters as I didn't have the opportunity to clean them up before they blew away.

Cleaning has been slow and hard.  Having a sick son and me being sick on top of it just didn't help me out much, never mind the aftershocks and things.  But, I'm getting there.  

The mice in the pantry ended up being a blessing in disguise as I didn't have much food to lose compared to how it would have been.  I did end up losing a bunch more jars and food, but due to the shelves being away from the walls and all of the jars being stored with their rings on and in boxes with high sides...I didn't lose too much there, which was a miracle.  

It took me days to get the kitchen in enough order to actually cook in it again and I'm still cleaning and working on it.  We ate out a LOT this last week, which we just put on credit card and will deal with later as we really didn't have much of a choice.  Poor Alvah has been freaking out in his own way since the quake and one of the main things he desperately wanted was to do was get McDonald's french fries for every meal once his stomach let him keep them down.  I think it's because McDonald's is familiar and comforting to him.  

Both of the kid's schools are still closed and will hopefully open at the end of this coming week.  The head of education for the state came out and said that the kids will not have to make up the school that was lost due to the quake, so we'll see how it effects second quarter grades once the kids get back to school.  In a way I am dreading the kids going back to school as I don't know if I'm ever going to be okay with letting them out of my sight for the rest of my natural life, but I also realize how important it is for the kids to get their lives back to normal as much as possible during this entire mess.  

I've had a couple of people e-mail me and ask me if I had a wish list on Amazon yet on items we still needed so they could help out in small ways.  I just wanted to say I'm working on it.  I'm compiling lists as I go along and will put one on Amazon when I can.  Honestly I think that's going to be the best way for ME to keep track of everything that I need to replace.  I lost a lot of spices and herbs and such. Bright side is that my everyday plates and bowls (well some of them anyway) were in the dishwasher when the quake hit, so I have plates that are a bit chipped and things, but usable.  

As things go that life can throw at you, this one is financially devastating on a level I hoped to never have to deal with.  So much for paying off bills and getting ahead *deep sigh*.  I'm just grateful as it could have been so much worse as there are others up here who are.  We have a bunch of homes in Jewel Lake that are being condemned due to earthquake damage, people lost their homes to fire and aren't covered because the fire was due to the earthquake, etc.  

Earthquake November 2018

Note:  This post was started to be written yesterday (Saturday), but I didn't finish it until today (Sunday) due to me wrenching something in my back during the earthquake which resulted in a TERRIBLE headache all day yesterday and then my son was vomiting all day, so yeah...I was pretty busy and miserable.  The fun never ends.

Yesterday (November 30, 2018) started out not a whole lot of fun.  I got Armina to school like normal but the son woke up with lower stomach issues, so I called him in sick to school.  He seemed like he was starting to feel better and my husband and I started talking about maybe taking him shopping later in the day with us as it was our normal shopping day.

And then, in a heartbeat, everything changed.

The earthquake didn't come in like a normal earthquake tremor.  It didn't start out as a gentle shake.  No, it hit the house like a jackhammer and it just got worse.  Honestly, I can only equate the whole experience to what it must be like to be inside a jack hammer while it is running.  The husband got to the son's room before I did, grabbed Alvah and held him in a death grip in the doorway.  I was able to see that much as I rushed down toward them before all the lights went out.  I got the crap beat out of me as things flew off the walls, doors popped open and things fell out at me, but after a few whollops I got to the doorway and we just held onto each other and held onto that doorway for all we were worth.  

I have never been that scared in my entire life.  The force of the hammering the house took was awful.  My husband and I didn't say it out loud but we were worried the house was going to go if it kept up much longer as the force of the quake was just that severe, but we also knew there was no where you could run to get away from it.  I mean all of the land in every direction was moving.  All you could do was ride it out.  And pray.  Boy did I do that.

That was the longest moments of my life.  We waited out the initial quake and then were trying to figure out how to get down the hallway and find some type of light source when the aftershock hit which was nearly as bad as the initial quake.  Once it was over we quickly formulated a plan on getting some clothes for Alvah (since he'd just about gotten up when everything happened) finding coats and things and trying to get to the school to see if Armina was alright after my husband ran outside fast and made sure the gas line was still secure and not leaking.  I called the school about 18 times as I rushed to find clothes for Alvah, but all you got was a busy signal.  Everything was just chaos.  All I can say through this entire event was thank GOD for the invention of the cell phone and also for the fact that we never got rid of a real land line with a corded phone, because those things were so important yesterday.  

I was frantic to get to the school and see if it was still standing and if my baby was alright as tsunami warnings for anyone near rivers or water to get to high ground lit up our cell phones and we fielded calls from family.  It just seemed like it was impossible to get out of the house quickly, which was driving my husband's and my anxiety up to new levels.   Things were just everywhere.  Anything that used to be off the floor was now on it, or so it appeared and there was broken glass pretty much everywhere.

Sorry for the crappy quality of the photos.  My phone didn't like the dim light and then the new "app" version of Photoscape is vexing me on trying to figure out how to convert things properly.  I managed to, in the dim light, fight the laundry room door open, hoping to get clothes from the dryer for Alvah as my bedroom was a huge pile of...everything...and just saw stuff.  It was awful.  We had standing water all over the floor about an inch deep (the hot water heater had sprung a leak in the earthquake and shot water everywhere) and the freezer had flown open and dumped food everywhere.  Luckily, it seemed, all of the meat that hit the water was still sealed so I was able to shove it all back into the freezer and shut the door somehow.

I then realized that water was leaking from somewhere upstairs and later found a bunch of standing water in the kid's bathroom and realized that their toilet tank was gone.  We drained the toilet tank as best we could and will have to get a new one on Monday somewhere if we can.  For now we're using a five gallon bucket of water from the tub to flush the toilet.

Then my daughter's boyfriend's father called and said he was at the school, Armina was safe and would I like me to have him take her home.  That man is getting one Heck of a Christmas gift somehow, that much I can tell you, as that moment of pure relief was only compared when Armina launched herself out of the truck and into my arms.  Her winter coat and all of her school stuff is still at school as they quickly evacuated the school and just handed out blankets and sweatshirts and things to the kids to keep them warm until they could be picked up.  We've since gotten an e-mail stating the school is out till at least Wednesday and an e-mail from her orchestra teacher saying all the instruments are okay, so that was a relief for her to hear.  All the schools in the borough, the superintendent said in an e-mail, put their earthquake protocols into effect efficiently and with great speed, all of the kids did stellar and only minor injuries were reported.  That was a good thing to read.

Once Armina was home we all piled into the truck and got warm while we waited for daylight so we could go in and survey the damage better. It is so dark so late here right now, that we realized that there was really not a whole lot we could do in the house for a little bit, so we came up with a game plan of sorts.

We piled into the truck to see if the highway was open so my husband could go into work as he learned the airport was shut down and they were asking anyone who could make it in to do so as they needed everyone they could get.  We drove down to the round about down our road only to see flashing lights all over the intersection to get onto the way to the highway, so my husband turned around and headed back to the house to see if he could get some info on how everything was shaking out on his emergency radio.  While he drove my husband started by calling his brother to see how they were as I'd already exchanged texts and things from my mother-in-law and found out they were safe.  While talking to his brother my husband found out that there was collapses on the highway, bridges were out and other stuff that was going on.  When my husband realized that they had the highway shut down going into Anchorage, he gave up on going into work (since the only way into Anchorage is the highway) and we went back to the house.  It was then we finally started to really LOOK at the damage.

The chimney, my husband quickly saw when we were pulling into the driveway and had some light to see, was missing brick and was possibly separated from the house.  On closer inspection it definitely was, so he went and shut off the gas to the furnace.

The power came on for a little bit and we felt a lot of relief as it is a lot easier to see what you are doing with lights on and we could run the electric heat since the furnace is out of commission until a big question mark.  And then the power went out again.

We were without power most of the day after that.. Thank God it was decently warm out for this time of year.  I cleaned up the remains of our life in objects as best I could, trying to dig out our supply of emergency water (everything on the shelves by the door in the pantry was on the floor, we had a bottle of teriyaki sauce break all over the hallway, I just found our emergency supplies by the hot water heater at nearly the end of the day yesterday as cleaning up the laundry room and pantry took hours.

With the sunlight we could get coming in the windows we did the best we could with a broom, a dust pan and our bare hands (goodness knows where work gloves were in the garage...everything fell, lighter fluid broke open and other things) while my husband scrambled to get out and find parts to hook up our generator to the house, in case we didn't get power on for a few days (as our electric company was scrambling to get 20 substations back online and repair as much damage as they could) and get some groceries.  He found a store open and got what milk he could, got some eggs and got the things on our shopping list the store had since we knew we could at least run a generator to keep the fridge going.  We didn't realize at the time that a lot of local stores got hit hard and are going to be shut down for quite a while possibly.  Target is closed due to water pipes that broke and possible other damage, Wal-Mart was closed for gas leaks (not sure if they are open now or not, honestly), a part of Carrs roof in Wasilla completely caved in...it was a whole lot of not good.  A section of Vine road in Wasilla just fell in, some roads have parts that just kind of disappeared.  

We even have a small fissure along the side of our road, but I'm hoping it's just the snow pack that broke.

I sent the family on a mission to find the cats.  My husband quickly found Prince when he shut off the gas to the furnace as Prince jammed himself behind the furnace and wasn't moving for anything, but I was worried about Belkar as well...she's kind of stupid and I was worried she got under one of the 18 bazillion piles of things that fell and had gotten killed as I was expecting her to be meowing up a storm and all was deathly silent.  My husband found her jammed into a small ball under our bed, safe and sound, thank goodness, so after that I just concentrated on one pile of broken things at a time.

Most of the photos shown were taken after I'd actually cleaned up a lot and the husband reminded me to take pictures for the insurance company (oops on not taking them ahead of time).  We lost a lot of stuff.  My husband has tools that flew out of drawers, off of shelves and anywhere they could and hit the classic car he's had since he was 16.  It's got some pretty substantial damage to it.  A lot of the tools that hit said car, broke in the process.

My kitchen was one big pile of broken glass.  I lost vintage Corelle, Pyrex and milk glass pieces I'd been collecting forever, regular dishes, every single serving platter I have, you name it.  The microwave and everything on, or in, the sideboard flew and landed on the floor.  The microwave is KIND of working, but I'm not sure why it's under-powered like it is (or so it seems to me).  All I use it for anymore is really defrosting meat and popping popcorn for the son, so if it dies I'll figure out an alternative. 

In all of this, one thing kept coming out of my mouth, "Thank GOD I collect Tupperware!"  That stuff saved my flour and sugar containers from being lost and even kept their lids on, those dishes flew out of the cabinets and bounced.  The only thing that even popped it's lid was the container of popcorn on the sidebar and that's because (I'm relatively certain) it had the silverware and microwave bouncing off of it.  Something hit my brand new Misto bottle I had just gotten in from Amazon and actually darn near punched a hole through it, but the old Misto bottle was still on the counter and so I just switched out the parts.  My new laptop somehow managed to stay on my desk and nothing heavy flew on top of it, so I'm typing on that right now.  I'd just gotten it in the mail Thursday night, so I'm glad that it survived long enough for me to at least fire it up and start to figure out how it works.

NOTE:  The following is written on Sunday, after getting some sleep, a couple cups of coffee, having a son that's not throwing up and feeling less like my head is going to explode.

The biggest worry for me when we were without power and we were being warned that MEA (our electric company) might not have power restored for a couple of days (thank GOD for smart phones and being able to pull up their Facebook page to get updates on my phone), was food spoiling.  Our generator is a nice big one, but electric heat takes a lot of power to run, so we knew we could at least heat necessary spaces to keep the pipes from freezing, get the well running so we'd have water and stuff, but my husband was worried he wasn't going to be able to run the freezers while doing that.  We figured we could try and stagger what we were running, but weren't sure how well it would work.  Normally I would have considered canning as much as I could, and thank goodness a lot of my empty mason jars survived (I hope...I haven't opened the box yet, but it seemed the box itself made it through the earthquake without getting crushed by anything).  But I am not going to be canning much anytime soon.  Dang, I'm tearing up as I type this.  My wonderful Presto pressure canner...old reliable, that I have had for about as many years as I've had children, didn't make it.  I'm not sure what fell on it, or how far it flew and whacked off of something, but it's now more egg shaped than circular, the top was broken...it's just gone.  Armina's TV is broken beyond repair and we're not sure about how well her DVD and VCR work because...well...her TV is broken and transferring things to another room to check on the status of those items has to wait until we can get to and from those places easily again.  The new TV in my bedroom fell over, but not off the shelf it was on, so it survived and the other two TV's...the wall mounts did their job and did them well and they rode things out okay.

I'm not sure about the state of Christmas gifts at this point.  My closet is one big cube of stuff when you manage to get the door open enough to see, so I'm not sure what might have fallen and broken stuff in the process.  The gifts under the tree...some heavier things fell into them from the wooden ledge above, so I have to check those out, but tying up the tree because it leaned all the time actually saved the tree from going over.  The star fell over, but the tree seems to have survived the onslaught and somehow came out straighter after the fact we think.  I've still got to try and see if the son's closet will work on it's track still as it's kind of sitting not right and his door is definitely not closing and out of whack.  The man doors on the garage are nearly impossible to open now and we have a hole in the door frame where wood cracked and popped, but at least it's a small one.  What was left of the gutters popped so many nails that I'm worried about solid chunks of ice filled gutter are going to come down on us at any moment so I'm rushing the kids out of danger every time we go outside.  We might have to tear down the barn.  There's cracks where there aren't supposed to be and the roof is dipping in the middle where it shouldn't, but the husband hasn't had a chance to go down and really do a complete survey of the damage to see how bad it truly is.  We haven't even cracked open the shed or the 40' storage van to see about the damage, but I'm honestly figuring all the stuff in the 40' van is probably gone at this point.  There is NO way the shelves didn't collapse in that type of a quake.  I have family heirlooms in there we didn't have room for in the house and I'm already bracing myself to accept that things like the dollhouse my grandfather made for me when I was a little girl, and was hoping to pass onto my kids, is probably gone.

The retaining wall along our driveway is just gone and needs to be completely redone.  I'm hoping our well casing came through okay because our wishing well protector thing really jammed into the well when everything hit.

This is rough guys.  Really rough.  I'm so overwhelmed I went past "I can't even" about two days ago.  I'm like a lot of other people up here right now.  I just tackle one pile of stuff at a time and am trying to remember to document things as I find them.  I had gotten organized, thank God, and had put all of my home owners insurance information into a binder in the den and was able to get to that.  The big sewing cabinet with all of my material in it actually popped the doors open on it, but rode the earthquake okay, somehow.  All of the material kind of packed around the glass jars I had in it so they didn't fly out and break....which is a relief as I have a big jar of buttons in there that would have resulted in a much bigger mess in the den and I was able to get to the binders for insurance since they were in that.  I've been carrying around a piece of paper with our insurance companies number on it from that binder ever since.  We have a claim filed with them and will hopefully see an adjuster on Monday (they are closed on the weekend) and my husband filed a claim with his classic car insurance online (they are closed for the weekend for an event...sigh), but at this point I have no idea what they are going to cover and how much we'll be able to fix with what we get.  FEMA money might cover what they don't...I don't know.  I know that right now we're putting everything we need on the one credit card we have (Care Credit switched one of our cards to a Mastercard a few months back) and we'll just deal with it all later.  It's all we can do at this point.

I haven't eaten much of anything in two days and didn't drink enough on Friday in the way of non-sugared beverages, so I'm probably going to have to go to the doctor's on Monday to check for a UTI and make sure my back is okay.  Goodness knows if I can get in with everything that has happened, but I'm probably going to have to try.

We didn't sleep the night before last.  We got so many aftershocks, a lot of them bad enough to wake us from a sound sleep and preparing to launch into the nearest doorway, that sleep just wasn't happening very well.  My husband and I slept on the floor of our bedroom in the one corridor of floor we could find, piled the kids in our bed and luckily with the help of his Clonodine at least Alvah was able to get some sleep before he woke up vomiting yesterday morning (with a broken toilet that was even more not fun than it would have normally been).  Last night was at least better on the aftershock front.  We had a couple of good ones that had me bracing to launch myself to get Alvah and Armina into doorways if needed (I slept on Alvah's floor last night while my husband went to work to try and help get the airport up and running) and Alvah woke up a lot which had me waking up ready with a bowl if necessary, but we got through it a lot better than the previous night.  We're still getting aftershocks and every one that hits just makes your spine stiffen, adrenaline spike and your stomach bottom out as you wait to see what will happen.  It's this part of Alaska's new normal for the time being, I think.

I have gotten e-mails and messages on Facebook asking if there is anything people can do to help.  At this point, guys, the year has officially broken me when it comes to stuff happening.  I'm done.  If you want to help and can, please do (just please do me a favor and don't do the GoFundMe route as I guess that can really screw up your taxes and things and I just plain don't need more to deal with at the moment).  At this point, I am not turning down help if it is offered.  Period.  If you want to ship me something, e-mail me and we'll figure it out.  If you want to donate, I have paypal. The e-mail is

alaskanbargainhunter@gmail.com

Sorry I didn't reply to all of the e-mails and things that have poured in.  It's been insane here.  I'll try to provide more of an update later.  For now, though, I'm out and off to try and get my living room somewhat livable so I can get the kid's lives back to a bit more of a normal status.

Thanks for the e-mails, the concern and the prayers.  Please, keep the prayers coming.  Alaska, and my family, needs them.

Erika