Thrifty Thursday: Thrift Store Finds

Thrifty Thursday!  Here's a topic we haven't had in quite a while around here.

Before I get down to what I have bought at the used stores lately, can I just go on a rant about the price of used items at thrift stores anymore?  I mean, holy cow, are they expensive!   A used pair of pants should not cost 10 to 12 dollars!?!  Seriously, and this is sad, I was able to get my daughter a new skirt (on sale) for less than a used one costs at the used stores right now.  I know that resellers (do not get me started on that topic as they are wrecking the entire POINT of used stores) are driving prices up, but dang man!

Anyway, it has been a LONG time since I have found anything at the used stores that I was willing to spend my money on.  Part of it is the prices, but there is also the fact that people are holding onto their items more, so there is less inventory.  And the last reason I haven't bought much is that I'm really working on streamlining my home to function at the highest efficiency possible to just keep my sanity trucking along in tact.  At this stage in my life, I need that.  So, my rule of thumb is I will buy something if I need it (which I always have a short list going) and/or I have a space to put it in my home.  Period.  I'm just not into buying something because it is cool and then I'll find some place to put it later when I get home.  Nope, that ain't how my home is functioning for me anymore.  I just find that clutter gives me anxiety and I don't need more of that in my life, so I'm avoiding adding to it.

So, what have I actually run into at the used stores lately that was worth buying?  Some baking dishes!

I've been searching for a particular size of Pyrex dishes for a long time.  I have a few small like 4.5 x 7 dishes that I use all the time for, of all things, defrosting meat.  They are the perfect size to put meat into to defrost in my small fridge spaces and, if needed, fit in the microwave beautifully.  And the ones I have have either a nice lip on them to use for handles or they have handles.  But they were a bit small for longer pieces of meat like pork steaks and I'd end up with water (or worse, meat juice) that I'd have to clean up after defrosting the meat in them.  

And lo, and behold, I was able to find, not one, but TWO longer baking dishes that would fit my needs within a few weeks of each other.  One is an Anchor Hocking Brand and the other, with the nice handles on it, is an old PYREX (all caps, baby!) baking dish.  They are, if I'd have to guess, like 5 x 8 in size...an odd size now a days to get, but they fit right in the space where the other dishes sat in my cupboard and I can stack the other dishes right on top of them.  I've already used them several times now and am loving having more variety in my sizes of meat defrosting containers :).

They were three and four dollars respectfully, which I had me kind of undecided on getting them, but I am glad I finally decided to get them both as they come in handy (and if I ever make jello dishes they'd be the perfect size for that, I think).

Next up is a pyrex (lower case, so newer and not as good) lasagna pan.  I actually bought this to roast chickens in so I can fit vegetables in with the chicken when I roast it.  A regular 9x13 pan is just a bit too shallow to fit any vegetables in with the chicken and expect it to bake well.  I bought a small metal roasting pan, but it is way too deep on the sides so anything you want to bake in it takes twice as long to bake as it should as it reflects the heat too much.  So that one is going away and this one is sitting in it's place in my cabinet.

I put a quart jar of marinara sauce in the pan so you can see how deep the pan is.  I'd measure it, but honestly with my life at the moment, finding a ruler to measure is just going to take a bit too long.  So, enjoy the jar for scale.  I like how deep the pan is.  It is also just a teeny bit smaller width and length-wise then my older 9x13 pans, so it stacks in them alright.  I have my pans stacked in a kind of weird upper shelf in my lower cabinets in my kitchen, so I have to be careful getting it in and out of the cupboard, but it DOES fit, which is all that matters to me.

The pan cost me seven dollars, which made me consider leaving it at first, but my husband convinced me to buy it as I'd been looking for something like it for a long time.  Hopefully it comes in handy.

And there you go folks.  My finds at our local used stores the last bit.  I hope your thrift shopping has gone better than mine the last few years.

Enjoy!

December Wind Storms of 2025 and Life Update

Ugh.  What a year it has been so far.  And it's only April.  Seriously...ugh.

Delays in blogging were actually really easy to explain (not fun, but easy).  I had a ton of paperwork and stuff to do this year as I am trying to get everything in the works to get adult guardianship of Alvah sorted before he turns 18.  Seriously when did my kids grow up?  Anyway, that paperwork got submitted and now we wait from word from the court to start investigation proceedings to make sure Alvah is disabled enough to warrant needing an adult guardian and then we have the court date to get through.  They kind of want a neuro-psych eval for adult guardianship cases, from what my pediatrician was telling me, but we are on about four different waiting lists now and haven't gotten anything from any of them, so we are doing what we can with what we have.  I at least got a letter from his psychiatrist submitted with his paperwork to the court to hopefully make them happier about the situation.  Then there was IEP paperwork for the year, his 5 year review meetings and paperwork for that to get done and stuff.   Finally got that all done...it was a lot, honestly.  

And then March rolled around and we all got horribly sick.  It was like a flu that would not end.  My husband got it first and was over it within two weeks or so, which was definitely a good thing.  Meanwhile the kids and I went down like the Titanic.  Armina kept taking steps backward, so I finally took her to the doctor and we found out the reason for the duration of the thing, why it had different symptoms that effected us and such.  We caught a Covid variant.  We were down, no joke, all of March with it.  We are still trying to get over the residual fatigue and congestion, but I was so happy to get my sense of taste back completely (well, nearly...some things still taste weird to me) last week that I kind of don't mind fighting the cough on and off.  Somehow I managed to keep on top of housework (to a point...clean clothes stacked up and I had a huge folding day when it was all said and done and the downstairs needed to be deep cleaned when I was feeling somewhat human) and got the paperwork submitted to the court for Alvah, but boy howdy it hasn't been fun.  

Combine that with a record breaking cold spell in March (my electric and gas bill definitely reflect that...ouch), high winds (though not as bad as December) in the first three months of the year, and our tax return being a little over 100.00 this year (losing the daughter as a dependent and Alvah getting old enough to nearly lose the child tax credit...that creamed us...at least we didn't owe anything)...it's been a depressing year on a lot of fronts.  

So, anyway, now that you are up to speed on the last three months (more or less), let's get onto the last of our year in review from last year.  The winds of December.

I remember some of the quotes people were using during those wind storms...

"Whoever is holding onto December's beer, please pour it out.  They are already drunk."

"Who hurt you, December?"

"Man, not again!!!"

The last one was the most commonly repeated.  

We had winds, high high winds, for 19 days out of 31 in December.  Over 80 MPH winds on a lot of days.  My husband spent his Christmas vacation watching as things flew apart around here.  It was not fun.  At least Christmas Day was relatively calm, which was nice as we were all eating Cortisol like crazy and we desperately needed a break.

Damage on our end part one is that we are going to have to repair our garage roof as it lost about 1/3 of it's shingles.  No joke, you drive around the Valley and look at roofs 9 out of 10 roofs have damage to them.  It's nuts.  We have homes built to withstand wind out here as wind is a regular occurrence around these parts, but the wind was horrible because it blew in EVERY direction for way too long.  No joke.  You'd look out the window and you could watch it change direction three times as you watched it.  It was crazy.  We, along with everyone else, lost trees (luckily none of ours fell on anything important).  People were without power for days, some for weeks, on end.  Thank goodness Alaskans tend to be prepared, as pretty much everyone had to use their wood stoves/alternative heat source and generators this winter.  We were lucky in that we are right off the main power line, so we never lost power for too long compared to everyone else.  My sister-in-law down the road from us wasn't so lucky and was without power a lot.

Other than the roof, our biggest loss was our barn.  It is done for.  The roof finally gave up the ghost, split in half and is now sitting inside the building (RIP old friend).  

We lost part of the side of the building too, but at least that got lodged in some trees and didn't go too far.  Honestly, I'm just amazed it's still standing at this point.

The roof on the shed lifted up in a few places and really wanted to come off, but by some miracle it held.  But, yeah, my husband's plan at this point is to buy material to put in a new floor for a new shed, use the wood from the barn as much as he can to help reduce costs, and just make us one building to replace the shed and the barn as they need to be replaced with something we can actually use reliably (the shed is not in great shape by any means, but at least still has a roof).  We desperately. need to reduce costs and save money as much as we can.  The lack of a tax return (I used the 160.00 we got to buy the daughter a much needed new mattress), medical bills for my husband (MRI on his shoulder to test for a need for a shoulder surgery, heart tests to make sure he was okay as his blood pressure was really high, etc), licensing fees for my husband and other bills just have been put on credit card because with the cost of everything else going up...well I am wracking my brain on ways to save money little bit by little bit to get things paid down as quick as possible.

Back to damage on a lesser scale.  We lost the bottoms to two of our downspouts.  I found one jammed under our camper, but the other one flew to OZ, I think.  We'll have to figure that one out later.  No picture as the picture got corrupted.

Our well cover/wishing well, flew off during the wind storms and is currently sitting at the front of our yard until we can figure out how best to rebuild it.  It is in a lot better shape in the photo I'm showing than it actually is after all the wind storms.  It's pretty flattened at this point and in pieces for sure.  At least the wood for it stayed in the yard (I hope...we'll see when we rebuild it if we are missing some).

Honestly, I am depressed about the damage, but try to count my blessings.  Everyone, it seems, has some type of damage they suffered in the Valley.  We got creamed pretty good, no doubt.  So many others got it worse, though.  I found out that at least 1/2 of the Valley with the wind and just record cold we were having all winter (wind would blow away snow when we'd get it, so not enough insulation on the ground for the consistent below zero temps), had sewer lines that were completely frozen up.  This was as of last week when we found out a friend of ours was having that problem.  Thank goodness we didn't have to deal with that.  I had to climb up on the roof to secure a chimney cap that was going to bend and fly off because it lost some bolts in the wind and my husband had to climb up on the roof to break some ice on our sewer vent pipe as the wind had blown too much ice and crap down it and it was plugged (weird having your toilets not flush, but the sinks still work when that happens...it was a first).  But, at least our sewer still worked.  We didn't have a fence to blow down (a LOT of people did) and we didn't have sheds that blew completely apart and hit things on our neighbor's property (also a thing that happened)...at least our barn roof stayed with the building for the most part, so at least we can use the wood to rebuild something in it's place.  We didn't completely lose the roof to our house and have to go and live in a hotel until insurance could help to replace it (also a thing that happened to poor people).  It's a bright side to our personal dilemma and I'll take any bright side I can get.

So, yeah, house repairs and projects are in our future, so I'll try to take you all along for that.  Hopefully it all works out.

Enjoy.

Picture Year in Review (2025) Part 6: Winter

 December, unfortunately, is going to get a post of its own, but I here is some photos from the rest of winter so far.  It is snowing like crazy today, but we haven't really had a lot of snow so far this year.  My husband managed to get a cool picture of the Northern lights one morning when he was heading out to work, though, so enjoy that!

A shot of our first real snowfall of the year.

I got a bunch of different baking projects done this winter, when I could squeeze in a moment or two and gave away some as gifts this holiday season.  Our neighbor across the road and we exchange gifts every year, pretty much, so I gave him a loaf of cheese bread this Christmas :).

Thanksgiving rolls turned out so pretty, I had to take a picture.

Rustic sourdough loaves that I used for French bread pizzas a few times.  They came out sort of flat, so it worked well for that.

Cheese bread.  I just took my normal bread recipe and when I was shaping the loaves for their second rise I incorporated a bunch of cheese into the dough.  Worked well.

Lastly is a little frugal thing I did.  I had bought some mandarin oranges that were on sale really cheap, figuring my daughter would eat them.  She did not, of course.  So, when the oranges started to look not great, I juiced them all, turned them into orange juice and used them in a few recipes.  I made orange chicken one night and then I used the rest to try Princess Diana's overnight oats recipe (I'll let you look that one up, if you feel the need).  The oats were good, I have to say.  I used dried cherries as I have a lot of them, and pecans in mine.  I also used my seven grain cereal mix instead of straight oatmeal.  It worked well and it made enough cereal to last most of the week.  I just heated the cereal up, added some greek yogurt to cool them off and added honey or maple syrup to sweeten and then added my garnishments.  Worked for me as I'm not a fan of the cold overnight oats.

And there you go folks.  Pictures of winter, 2025, sans December, which I'll get into in a later post as it is going to definitely bleed into this year.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review (2025), Part 5: Fall

Well, the biggest thing that happened this fall was our platinum plated cat *sigh*.  

Sepp managed to get out on Halloween (we had gone swimming that day and left the door open longer than normal because we were wrangling Alvah and he got out at some point in that kerfluffle).  I didn't realize he was outside until late when he hadn't touched his food and I called him in a few times.  He came in, but seemed to be moving a bit slower than normal, but it was kind of cold out, so I thought he was just cold and tired (felt terrible about the whole thing at the time...felt even worse about it later).  Fast forward to the next day (Saturday) and I lost track of him during the day due to being busy and then realized he hadn't touched his food all day long that night (he eats in the kitchen, so easier for me to keep track of it).  He had been sleeping on my bed downstairs when I left him in the morning and when I went down to check on him he was still sleeping in that location.  I immediately got worried as he's not a lazy cat by any stretch and is usually bouncing off the walls.  I picked him up and quickly saw he was disoriented when walking and he was favoring a back leg.  I brought him upstairs and made sure that he got food, and most importantly, water, down him and checked him over for wounds.  I found one on his back leg, but it didn't seem to be infected or really that bad, so I thought maybe he'd gotten. a bruise in his muscle from some fight or other.  By the time Sunday rolled around, he was WAY worse.  I had to basically feed him water and got him to lick some tuna and that was it.  He couldn't walk on his back leg at all and I was really getting scared he was on his way out with how bad he was getting.  

We got him into the vet first thing Monday morning and the vet had the same problem I did.  He was in bad shape for sure, but she couldn't find any wounds on him (not that he was cooperating either).  She gave him an anti-inflammatory and a long lasting antibiotic shot and we headed home.  After that Sepp improved immediately.  A few days later I noticed his tail up by his butt was wet and couldn't figure out how he did that until I saw the injury.  He was tore up on his back leg, like bad and the wound had ruptured.  The vet was able to fit him in and we ended up in surgery with him to suture up a couple of gnarly wounds on his back leg.  Fast forward to the sutures dissolving, the wound reopening and a second surgery to fix that and dude that poor cat spent all of November in a cone and we ended up in debt to get him fixed up.  He's only 2 1/2 at this point and a really good cat (kills lots of rodents), so it was worth it, but yet again, not an expense I saw coming.  Enjoy the pics of coned cat as he was desperately trying to get back outside all of November, probably to go after the cat who had humiliated him previously.  Poor cat still has a basically bald spot around his neck where the cone was and his backside is going take forever to grow back in.

Here are some other pictures that happened this fall...

Stuck with a small pie pumpkin for our Jack O' Lantern this Halloween.  Saved all of the pumpkin pieces, roasted them and used them to make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.  Worked great and I plan to do that going forward.

Canning and other projects just aren't in the cards for me at this stage in my life, but a friend of ours was nice enough to gift us a pint of applesauce.  We ate it with pork chops one night and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was able to return the jar to her with a thank you note since she does a lot of canning.  

And one last pic of the fall foliage.  It was wet this fall too, but the trees held onto their leaves pretty well for a while, so we got to enjoy the leaves changing color.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review (2025), Part 4: Summertime

Happy New Year, everyone.  This post took a bit to put together due to being busy with beginning year paperwork.  I got PFD's filed for the year, got psychological evals done for the son for his three year review period for the homeschool and other things, so it's been busy on top of the weather being insane the last bit.  I'll get into more of that later (ugh, December), but in the meantime, let's get to some random summertime pictures around here.

One big thing that happened this summer, which wasn't something I had planned on and wasn't thrilled about, was our well pump started to die in a big way and we finally realized it needed to be replaced when it wouldn't keep pressure up no matter how my husband adjusted it.  That was a hefty expense to replace, but it was due (it was over 20 years old by the date on the old pump when it was pulled up).  We called up Arctic Pump and Well to get the pump replaced as my husband knew them and knew they did great work and would have as good of quality parts as could be sourced now a days.  Jim was really nice to deal with and we've been really happy to have well pressure again since then.  Fun fact was that he knew the previous owners of our house (I used to talk to the guy who built this place at the kid's elementary school every day, so it was fun to find that Jim was friends with them, too) and remembered the last time he had replaced the pump and stuff.  I just find it kind of cool that we know so much about the original owners of the property.  I know Allen, the guy who built our house, is a really cool and nice guy and it was fun finding out more of the background of Carol, the woman we bought our house from (Allen and Carrol had divorced years ago).  Just as a side note, forgive the state of our lawn.  It was so ridiculously wet this summer that it was too wet to mow and quickly went crazy.

Anyway, yeah, it was an expensive year around here (and we are still dealing with 2025 to date...double ugh).  Onto other pictures.

Armina graduated this summer, which was a big accomplishment for both of us.  I was happy that she had excelled so much in homeschool as when I pulled her out of public school her reading abilities were abysmal and she was falling further and further behind in math.  Math is still a sore spot for her, but her reading abilities I'm very proud of as she reads for pleasure all the time now.

Alvah's favorite hobby this summer was playing in the grass and rolling all over the yard.  I apologize for the blurred face, but Alvah is old enough that I really don't feel comfortable showing his face so much as he, obviously, can't consent to his face being online.  The graduation photo I don't know any of hte people in it, so wanted to make sure to blur their faces for privacy as well :).

Schoolwork this year has been a lot of Leapfrog videos with how bad Alvah's mood has been.  Luckily, he likes Leapfrog, which makes it easier.

On the rare event we went through a day without rain (somehow I did manage to get a bunch of grilling done this summer, despite the wet, which was nice), our skies were beautiful but had some crazy cloud formations.  I included a coulple of them for fun.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review, Part 3: The Garden

I decided to do this section in it's own post, as these are some fun pictures that  I kept hoping to share.  Our little 2025 container garden.

A few things I learned by accident this year.  One, Swiss chard can grow a lot closer together than you have been told (I put three seedlings per small pot and they actually gave me a nice yield overall when it came to harvest time).  Two, it is amazing how far caterpillars will travel to do destruction.  I had one lettuce plant completely eaten through right above the dirt by one of those buggers.  In a planter.  Up on a second floor deck.  I was impressed.  Three, growing basil indoors is the way to go.  I was able to harvest Basil all summer off of my tiny little basil plant that I grew on my kitchen shelf.  It was awesome.  My herbs out on the deck didn't do well at all.  We had a cold, wet summer and they did not like it.  I was impressed that the tomato plants grew honestly.  I was able to harvest enough ripe tomatoes to eat with salads over the summer and got a small bag of green tomatoes at the end of the season that I'll use to make something with later in the winter.

Armina's hanging basket did well again this year, although we fought blight numerous times with how wet and crappy it was.  It hung on like a champ, though.

So, onto the picture highlights...

And there you go folks.  Our 2025 garden.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review, Part 2: Springtime

 I am going to hit you guys with a bunch of pictures here, so be prepared.  Today's post is what we did in the Spring of 2025.  At least the hightlights.

Alvah was so bad mood-wise, even before Spring showed up, that we bit the bullet and took him on a trip (he loves car rides and going places).  We decided on Homer, hoping that he'd be away from the "usual boring stuff" for a few days and maybe would have a really good time while we were there and just plain give all of us a break from his bad moods.

Spoilers:  It didn't work.  He hated the AirBNB we rented and would not eat or drink anything while we were there.  Thank goodness there was a McDonalds in Homer or I don't know what we would have done (other than go home and eat the cost of the AirBNB).  The only time he was in a decent mood was when we were driving around.  At the AirBNB he'd just pace and demand to leave until he'd collapse (after more medication than I really ever wanted to give him) for the night.  He'd wake up about 2am and start the whole process again.  After that trip I needed a vacation to recover from the vacation, I kid you not. 

But, Homer was really pretty and we did get to see the town a bunch since we drove around for two days straight.  I am including a few highlight photos of the spit for your enjoyment.

A shot of the spit from far above when we drove into the surrounding areas...

And a picture of some of the boats...

We didn't get out of the truck much because it also rained a very cold rain the entire time we were there.  There was also nothing open, even though we were there at the beginning of May because I guess nothing opens before Memorial Day (good to know for future reference, I suppose), so there wasn't a ton of stuff to visit on the spit while we were there.

At least my husband had fun.  He really enjoyed driving around and looking at stuff while we were there.

Next up is the "Adventure of the Tree" I guess is the most dramatic way to say it.  

We had to cut down the big birch tree in our front yard.  I'd been putting it off because I really loved that tree and got a kick out of seeing it every morning in the summer and fall, but it was old, starting to rot in places and losing limbs. Then, one day I was out in the yard and I heard a huge crack.  I looked over to see the tree starting to list toward our power line.  I quickly called a few tree outfits, including AAA Tree Service who had given me the advice last year that the tree would need to come down soon (highly recommend them to anyone local, by the way).  They showed up quickly, got the tree felled in record time (while I, paranoid I was going to see a lumberjack get hurt hanging from that sucker, sat by and watched form inside my house to stay out of the way), got paid and were out of here in record time.  I was really happy with how it was done so well and so fast.  They made sure the tree was out of the driveway and the road and cut it into manageable chunks that we could then move to the backyard to use it for firewood later.  That came in handy when we needed to burn wood this month, I'll tell you what.

I still miss looking at the tree, but am so, so glad it worked out the way it did and it got taken down when it did.  We had seasoned wood to burn this way, and most importantly, we've had horrific winds this month and if that tree had still been standing it would have fallen into our house and well for sure.  So, yeah for divine providence in this case.

Since moving the tree to the backyard, these guys have shown up more than once to much on the, easy to access, tree branches...

And there you go.  Some of the highlights from Spring 2025.  

Enjoy.