Safely Gathered In

I've been experimenting with a bunch of different flours this month. I've even baked cookies twice!! Shopped til I dropped at the case lot sale. Bought a few small self rotating can racks for the store room. Tossed a few out of date items.....like the yeast TK used at Christmas. To be fair I didn't even know I had yeast in the fridge, but since it was more than 10 YEARS out of date I guess I'd better start wiping down the doors more often. LOL The shelves need to get the once over much more frequently too.
Anyway this is all leading up to a bit of a very funny article I saw in my LDS newsletter. Go ahead laugh a bit...I spit milk out through my nose as I was reading it.

Top Ten Signs you don't have enough food storage!

10 - The beanbag chair in your living room holds every legume in your house.

9 - Your plan for survival is to move in with your parents.

8 - The only items you have purchased that would last your family a full year are garlic powder and toothpaste.

7 - You are hopeful that your children will learn to savor the taste of boiled wheat three times a day.

6 - Your entire reserve of drinking water is sloshing around in your waterbed.

5 - You asked for a case of soup for your birthday.

4 - After being discovered, your year's supply of granola bars was eaten in just two weeks.

3 - You are extremely proud of your year's supply of salt.

2 - Every time you need flour your borrow it from your neighbor.

and the number one sign you don't have enough food storage---You feel carefree after stashing away a year's supply of pizza coupons. (Latter-Day Saint Wit and Wisdom, p. 21).

BTW if you want some fabulous ideas to use every inch of space for storage you owe it to yourself to go to Flicker.com and type in food storage and look at any photo tagged with Linda & Clark. This gal is awesome!! I've decided that she must teach this stuff somewhere because wow she's got some neat ideas. And I stole the photos from her.

Shades of Gray

Baby Sis sent these photos a few weeks ago. Her friend took them while she was watching him. She's a professional and took the ones of PG Tracy too. He is getting so very big!! I keep thinking I need to visit soon or I'll have missed all his babyness. Don't you love the little gray wolf outfit? They change so quick.
Emil is already talking pretty plain for only 20 months old. TD said they will be here sometime in April for Tara's brother's wedding. I don't know which brother but hopefully Auntie Vic will get to play with the kiddo while everyone else is busy. What wonderful ulterior motives I have....

Seventy Five Cents

That's the balance currently in my checking account after a $100 transfer from savings.
So no going to pick up meds tonite...no going anywhere that uses gas....seeing as how the savings only has the required $25 balance now.
Did I mention the extra $206.00 the mortgage company wants for the shortfall on the escrow account? Damn property taxes went up again. The good news is if I just pay that ahead before the 7th my actual house payment will go down about $15.00 for the rest of this year.
Good thing I've been doing a bit of stockpiling lately. We won't starve but I also don't feel much like eating from my newly re-stocked storage room. I did finally get over to Blue Chip Group and get a few GF items for right now. I'm impressed with their outlet store so if the mixes are any good at all I'll go back. They had elbow macaroni and linguine that I haven't seen before. So I got some, now if I'd only gotten some Kraft Yellow Death when it was on sale I could have mac and cheese by keeping the cheese sauce and tossing out the noodles, which is exactly the opposite of how I made it for the Frog. LOL
Did I mention pay day is Monday?

Thanks for the Memories

Got asked a question today about the worst meal the Frog ever made and if I was polite enough to at least try to eat it.
Thanks for the Memory......
The Frog got laid off from his job 2 weeks after we got married back in the 1900's (1979). One of my shower gifts was a big box of canned goods from Liz Taylor.......with All labels removed!! For a few weeks we were so broke that we literally each picked a can of something and made dinner out of whatever was in the can.
One night Stephen made dinner while I was still at work....tuna sandwiches and slimey spinach. I HATE Spinach cooked unless it's well hidden in a Artichoke dip and I've only recently decided I like it that way. There is nothing in the world that will get me to eat something that looks like it came from the back end of a cow....except maybe love.
It was so yucky!! He had apparently fixed it with a little vinegar only it was alot more than it needed. So I hurriedly took a bite of my sandwich only it wasn't any kind of tuna I'd ever tasted! Even he agreed that it was awful so we looked at the can again. There on the bottom was stamped Purina......it was cat food!!!
Thirty years later I can still laugh about it.

Busy Week

Ever take a minute to stop and just be? Not me. At least not this week.
I don't think I really accomplished much of anything around the house except to get some food storage items at Harmons Annual Case Lot sale. That's been my preferred way of canning for the past few years, bye the way. I think I really did well even though I forgot a couple of basics, baking soda and peppercorns....found that out when I went to make cookies on Wenesday. Yes! I have been known upon occaission to bake cookies! I don't like to do it but this was for YW Stake meeting that night.
No worries about the soda I just used baking powder...they came out a bit too crumbly for oatmeal cookies but that could be cuz I packed them full of chocolate chips, raisins and coconut. Did I mention they were Gluten Free? They went very well with our Hot Chocolate Tea Party. Found some darling Pink mugs. Also got everyone feather Boa's and little Tiara's. Even Bishop DeVries wore one. A Boa not a Tiara the man has some pride after all. Bro Heywood from our ward was helping to serve so he even gussied up with a Red feather clip in his hair for the rest of the evening. Don't worry I've got photos to prove it all.
So that was Wenesday.
Monday night I met Teresa and Gavin for dinner at the OLd Spaghetti Factory. It was a really fun visit and really good food and super busy!! Shortly after I got home Trina came in for a visit. I invited her to come to the Draper Temple Open House with me on Tuesday.
So that's what we did on Tuesday. Teresa and Gavin came with us and it was so neat to see his face light up as he recognized pictures he'd seen in Primary. We were quite hungry after dropping them off so we met Craig, Liz and Melanie at Q4U and had a good BBQ dinner. We didn't wait for them to come because we were so hungry but we ordered dessert and had a great cheesecake....Trina ate the crust.
The last couple of days have been hard. Alot of pain so I bailed on Scrapping with Patty last night. Today I've been laying about watching Seasons 1 & 2 of the Tudors and I've taken Lucy out for 2 walks in all the fog. I'm not sure if she is finally getting potty trained or I'm just not catching her peeing on the rugs but the puppy pad isn't getting used except late at night. She just jumps on me and then runs for the door and I let her out. Or I'll catch her staring out the window and wimpering a bit and she goes out and almost immediately does her stuff. Oh The joys of being her human.

More Resolutions

I thought of even more areas of improvement last night. Not that I really NEED to improve anything. After all it's just Moi and Mary P. that everyone wants to be. You know......Practically Perfect in Every Way.
However this is always a question we seem to ask alot this time of year so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon to self-improvement.
Since this years YW/YM theme is 1 Timothy 4:12 "Be thou an example...." I've decided to really work on my words and conversations and tackle my profanity problem this year. I'm pretty sure I'm intelligent enough to tell someone they are a total idiot without actually coming right out and calling them a Freaking Dumbass. I can borrow the many great ways of doing this from one of my favourite sites
I can for instance politely ask "Can you shift gears? or are you stuck in Stupid." Or use another great phrase "But if I agreed with you we'd both be wrong"
So dear readers if you think of any minor improvements that I need, please feel free to make a sugestion or two. Just keep in mind that "I used to Care but my give a Damn is Busted"