Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

This is one of those posts where I'm going to back date it to Friday of last week.  Mainly because I REALLY wanted to get this post done on time, but unfortunately for me I didn't get to it.  Why?  Well, turns out that doing all of that moving of furniture all the time and other feats of strength will not only make you put on some muscle quickly, but in my case I threw out something in my neck doing so and ended up with my bicep tendinitis flaring up its ugly head this week.  So, instead of a date with my blog and getting caught up in that regard, I instead had a date with an ice pack and a heating pad (and many doses of Ibuprofen) the last four days or so.  Not ideal under any circumstances.  So far I can still move my arms above my head (thank the Good Lord for that), but I'm feeling it.  If I can stave off frozen shoulder I'll deal with the pain, honestly.  Pain I can deal with.  Inability to move my arms at more than like a ten degree angle...that's hard to deal with.

I'm somehow still managing to hold the line with the bugs, although I've had to rely on the daughter more to get some sweeping and things done.  Unfortunately, I didn't get very far in additional cleaning chores due to my body telling me "No, I ain't doing that" , but at least I was able to keep the cleaning I have done in tact.  Not exactly easy with the son running around busy as can be, but I'm doing it.

Some interesting things happened on the money saving front this week, though, so let's get to that!

1.  Let's start with a really remarkable piece of customer service.  I had recently used some of an Amazon giftcard I had to order my son a replacement/back up blanket to augment his beloved baby blankie that he's had since he was a baby and really does look like it's been through about four post Apocalyptic futures.  The biggest hiccup I had with finding another blankie for him was that his was a very distinctive shade of green and wasn't made any more.  I had found one on Amazon that I thoguht might work, so I ordered it, in green.  When it came in the blanket was obviously blue and someone had covered the UPC code up and had then stuck a "green" inventory sticker over the original sticker showing that the blanket was blue.  Well, when I went onto Amazon and realized that the "not getting a green blanket" was a complaint more than a few people had, I decided to return it, wrote my own nasty one star review (this is like the third item in the span of a year Amazon had done the "bait and switch" tactic on it and I was mad) about the whole color thing being important and how upset I was about the blue versus green blanket (as returning it to Amazon requires me to run to the UPS stores, which is always a lot of fun when you are busy).

I was shocked when I checked the mail and found a mystery package there one day, and was doubly shocked when I opened the package to a very nice letter from the owner of the company stating how sorry they were that Amazon had messed up my order and with the letter was a free green blanket.  So, yeah, if you are looking for a nice green baby blanket (or pink, or blue) and want to support a small company that has some VERY nice people running it, check them out on Amazon (the picture is so you can look them up...my computer is being funky, so I can't get it to copy the link).

2.  Next up is shopping.  This was a week for more free meat!  I checked the Carrs app when my Just4U coupons didn't work this week (that is another level of frustration, which luckily Carrs was nice enough to refund my money when I showed them what I was SUPPOSED to pay).  When I checked the app, I was shocked to find two more free coupons for meat, this time for the other two products in the "Mighty Spark" line of products.  So, I got a free thing of ground chicken blend and a free fresh bratwurst!  I used two loaves of bread to eat up the 1.99 of overage from each thing of free meat to get the bread for .01 per loaf, so after tax I paid .56 out of pocket for two loaves of bread and two things of meat.  It was pretty awesome.

3.  I got my latest mission in the mail from My Magazine Sharing Network and was able to redeem the coupons they sent for a free loaf of bread and a free box of sandwich bags this week (which is great because I needed the sandwich bags BAD!).

The kit also came with a very nice insulated lunch tote, which I'm hoping to use to help make packing smaller lunches for my husband easier for him to carry.

4.  While at Fred Meyer to redeem my other coupons, I also redeemed my one mission coupon for a free thing of Grill Mates seasoning blend.  I was happy to find a flavor I haven't tried before, so I'm looking forward to trying it out :).

5.  I received some free samples this week.  The cat food was actually kind of a surprise as I don't remember requesting it (although I'm sure I did at some point) and to my surprise Belkar, a cat who hates to eat and barely eats enough to keep herself alive (I like to half joke that I have a cat with an eating disorder) LOVED the new cat food.  So I'm definitely going to keep my eye out for it at the store.

6.  My daughter outgrew her favorite Ever After High jeans and of COURSE no one carries anything like that anymore (I mean it got cancelled in what, 2016?), so instead of going onto E-Bay and paying goodness knows what for some clothes, I instead asked her if it would be okay if I just embroidered some things onto her jeans.  She was thrilled with the idea, so now I'm working on some custom embroidered jeans.  I pray they come out okay looking as it's been kind of hard to concentrate this week between the arm pain and lack of sleep due to the arm pain, but we'll see how it goes.

And I hate to cut it short here, but I'm going to call it good for now as my son is DEMANDING a bath and is not waiting for me to finish without throwing a huge fit, so it's definitely time to call it a night and get this kiddo to bath and bedtime.

How about you?  How did your week go?