Life Update and Some Frugal Stuff Thrown In

 

Hello again fellow frugal warriors!

Sorry for the lack of communicado.  I have just been crazy busy the last few months and haven’t had much free time.  It has been crazy busy around here, don't know about you all.  Let’s get into some of what has been going on around the old homestead.

The biggest thing that happened was actually exciting.  My half sister and her adopted mom came up and stayed for a week last month.  She is the first family member from my side to visit me so it was great seeing her again!  Especially since the last time I saw her in person was right after my dad passed away over a decade ago.

We were able to save some money while they were visiting, for them and us, by having them over for dinner at our house every night.  It also allowed me to feed them healthy meals, which my sister is supposed to be doing as much as possible (she is battling major metabolic problems and other stuff).  I tried to use foods that I had around the house to also make the meals as frugal as possible.  I actually did really well, only having to spend about 30.00 on some extra chicken and some bell pepper for meals.  Having a well stocked pantry with staples you use all the time definitely pays off at times like this.

We crammed a lot into one week and showed them very cool, but inexpensive things that were local to us.  We went to the Wasilla transportation museum, the Reindeer Farm in Palmer (and we walked across Palmer and got to show them some fun things before that) and we went up to Independence Mine and toured it before driving over Hatcher’s Pass and working our way back home.  

Amanda and Cyndi did some fun stuff on their own in Anchorage and Whittier a few days, but we always ate dinner (or supper depending on where you are) at my house so we got daily visits in.

Amanda had a blast (Armina did too, especially at the reindeer farm above...tearing her away from the baby reindeer was almost comical *laugh*) and didn’t want to leave, so I feel good that we did our job as hosts well.  It was a lot of fun having family visit.

In other, more mundane, events, I did not get the deck 100% done this summer, unfortunately.  Close, but no cigar.  I only got a bit more to do, but the ever present rain started up and just hasn’t quit, so I am thinking that project is over for the year.  I feel good about what is done, though, and know the stuff I didn’t finish will make it till Spring without issue if I can’t get enough good weather to button it up in the next few weeks.

I have kept careful tabs on our finances of late.  My husband’s Union shafted him and others in their new contract and my husband has taken a significant pay cut (like 800.00 a month type of pay cut).  Luckily, when he got the pay raise a while back (to make pay more competitive with the private sector as the state couldn’t fill positions) we continued to live like we had before and just tried to keep up with inflation and scrape together a teeny, tiny emergency savings.  We are able to still make our bills (not looking forward to winter, at ALL because our electric company hiked base rates by 11% starting in July…no matter how you cut it that is going to hurt), but haven’t been able to save anything since the pay cut kicked in.  Two steps forward, three steps back.  

Honestly, I am just grateful that we are able to make our bills as I know there are SO many people out there that just plain can’t right now.  I have been there too many times in my life and I feel so horrible others are going through it.

I was going to start blogging regularly again starting at the beginning of the month, but I still had a ton to do.  We had appointments with Alvah’s OT from our contact school, Armina started working as an assistant swim instructor at the pool, I had to figure out how to input a phonics screen into Alvah’s LAMP program for his speech therapy (I did it, though, just took a bunch of extra steps as my program didn’t work the way the tutorials online did), got the curriculum for both kids in the mail and we officially started homeschool the last few weeks.  I still have TEFRA renewal stuff to do for Alvah, but I feel like I've been making forward progress.  I FINALLY feel like we are getting back into a regular schedule, so hopefully I can get to blogging regularly.  Here’s hoping anyway.

One area I have been working really hard on organizing and stocking well are my pantry and freezers and I'm feeling pretty good about what I've done, although it is still a work in progress.  I am going to do a pantry tour as soon as I’m done so stay tuned for that.

I have also worked hard on just decluttering and organizing throughout the house to make things work better, especially the kitchen.  I’ll try to do a kitchen tour if I can find a nice gap where I can keep it clean and tidy for five minutes without having to cook or bake something lol.

A few things we have accomplished around the house as well on the frugal front:

1.  My husband fixed the support spring system in our love seat(put in a wooden subframe made up from wood recovered when I took apart the old couch and loveseat…recycling at its finest) and fixed the legs while he was at it (again with recovered wood).  Alvah has been really hard on the loveseat over the years, so it was nice to be able to get rid of the stack-o-books-leg and you can sit on the loveseat without sinking into it weird and quickly realizing something was not right with it.  I still get a kick out of sitting beside Alvah and the cushion is nice and stiff and right where it needs to be.

2.  I mended a few pairs of jeans, a few armpit seams in some of my son’s shirts, fixed a few missing buttons on some shirts and adjusted a pillowcase that we got for free down to a standard pillowcase from a king sized.

3.  We celebrated my son’s birthday at home and I made him his favorite breadsticks for dinner.  He had a good time and blew out his candles a bunch (he learned to love that a few years back).

4.  I pulled the screens from the windows, took them outside and removed the copious amounts of pollen and dust from them before putting them back in the windows.  Next steps are to try and figure out how to put new weather stripping tape on said windows for winter prep (I have the weather stripping tape,  but really want to avoid removing the crank out windows to apply it because that would require scaffolding on the back of the house, sooooo I've got to figure out options here).  I also cleaned up the cold air duct for the furnace as well because it needed to be done.  I need to vacuum out the heating duct in the kitchen/dining area, vacuum out the furnace and place a new furnace filter in it and we should be pretty on top of things for this winter when it comes to the forced air heat.

I am going to call it good here as I have to get to making pizza for dinner in a few minutes, but I thought I'd pop in and say "hi" and let everyone know that I am, indeed, still alive...I was just really busy all summer long, unfortunately. The summer I had planned with relaxing periods in between the work just did not work out for the most part.  I had fun while my sister was here, but I have to say that it was tiring as they came with a list of things they wanted to do in the week they were here and we ended up cramming as much as we could from that list into the week they were here.  Doing that while also just trying to do the busy day to day things I have to around here...it was tiring, but worth it.  Just not very relaxing *laugh*.

And there you go folks.  A bit of a glimpse into the last two months for us.   How have you all been?  Well I hope?