Soft and squashy . . . what can it be?
Don't worry about the light area--that was my mom shining a flashlight on the design, trying to get it to show up better for the picture. Thank you, my dear friend L. They are lovely and I appreciate them and you.
Tonight for Family Home Evening we are writing thank you notes for the gifts we received for Christmas. I know lots of people don't write thank yous anymore, but I want my children to know that's the proper thing to do.
As I said, a delicious day.
Since my girls are out of school, I let them choose a place to go today. They wanted to go to the local mall, so we did. After window shopping a bit C wanted to buy a pretzel at one of the counters. She had $2 and you'd think that would be enough to buy a twisted piece of bread, but with tax they were about $3. She was pretty disappointed and asked if there was anything at the mall to buy for $2. I remembered McDonald's in the food court and thought they'd probably have their dollar menu sundaes. She was willing to pay for hers, but I bought one for each of the girls and a fruit and yogurt parfait for myself (trying to be good). When I opened the bag I almost laughed at the tiny size of the yogurt. The cup has gotten such a narrow bottom on it it practically fell over. There is at most 2/3 the yogurt there used to be in the old ones and although there was a good amount of frozen-munchy strawberries, there was exactly one blueberry in the fruit mix.
Don't ask me why, but I have never enjoyed putting up a Christmas tree or decorating it. Starting a couple of years ago I was able to get my girls to help me with the task and that made it more fun for me. This year it was getting to be about the time to put it up, but we had one evening activity after another and it kept getting put off. Yesterday while I was working they asked if they could put it up themselves. When I had a break between students I went out to the storage shed and got the boxes and they took it from there. No help from me at all. (yippee) They were very pleased and so was I.
The minivan was sold today, so we had about three weeks of being a three-car household. That's one more than we need, so we were glad to say good bye to the van.
Here are half our new family members. To tell the truth, I'm scared to death to have them! I've never really had a pet (only a dog for a couple of teenage years that I didn't have to take care of) and although I have lots of children, I know how to care for them. I don't know how to care for pets, chickens specifically.
The gray Barred Rocks are about three weeks old and the RIR and the one I'm not sure about (C's, pictured here) are about a week old. They have to grow quite a bit before we can expect to see any eggs. They say 18-20 weeks is about average. If so, that means we should be starting to see eggs around the first day of Spring.
S's chick is the same variety as mine--Barred Rock. She went to see a stage production of Charlotte's Web today, so her chick is named Charlotte. I'm going to find out how to say "chicken" in Korean, and if it is pronounceable to me, that's going to be my chick's name.
Here are all the ladies eating dinner.
My girls have about 28-30 pairs of socks amongst the three of them. [Say this in your best David Letterman voice] Here in my left hand I hold . . . TWENTY single socks. Yes, twenty. If my girls would find the other twenty singles, they would have a boatload of socks instead of scratching to find any to wear, let alone ones that sort of go with what they are wearing.
As Robert Heinlein put it, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Johnny Cakes
How do I know if I'm going to need them? I go to afullcup.com and I find out what coupons I'm going to need and where they are. THEN I cut them out of the advertising inserts or print them off the Internet. It's just easier that way. The extraneous coupons in my file come from the little blinking machines in the store, magazines, inside product packages, and previously printed off the Internet. I'd say 60-75% of my grocery store shopping is done by looking for a sale and also by looking for a sale and then matching a coupon to that sale to really get rock-bottom prices.
My first stop yesterday was at Fry's. It's a Kroger-family store.
Pineapples $1 each -$.50/1 mq x2 Fry's doubled each coupon to $1=FREE.
Brownie mix $2.49 each -$.75/2 doubled to $1, -$.75/2 ecoupon with a $1 bonus from the ecoupon company, -$1/1 Betty Crocker mq because I complained about a product's quality.
However, Fry's made a mistake in my favor. They charged me the regular price for the brownie mix so I marched myself (and three dds) right over to the customer service counter and asked for the correct price. For their mistake they gave me one box for free and refunded the difference. I walked out with the four items free and 28 cents extra in my pocket thanks to the coupons and the free item.
Albertson's was playing games this week. Hold on to your hat and I'll explain this one. Buy 10 Kellogg's/Morning Star/Keebler products for $3/each and get $10 off your order (=$2/each). Then you get a $10 Catalina coupon good on your next order at Albertson's (=$1/each). THEN you use coupons. I mostly had $1/2 mqs on the cereal and $1/1 for the Morning Star items. 
I had coupons for all the other items as well, either Albertson's newspaper coupons or Albertson's coupons + mqs. My total for all of this plus 2 gallons of milk was a hair over $37 AND I still have a $10 Catalina coupon for my next trip.
So here are the ups and downs of this kind of shopping. The downside is that coupons tend to be on processed, packaged food. The pineapples were a rarity in the couponing world. Another downside is that on a trip-by-trip basis or even a weekly basis, the food I buy is lopsided. Lots of cereal this week. No soup, beans, eggs, and so forth. Because of that, I devote a lot of space to food storage. Over several months' time, it all evens out, but I have to be able to store it to have a balanced supply of food at any given time.
The upside is that my family likes processed food and I balance it with homemade bread, cheese and other dairy products, lots of fresh fruits and vegatables, and meat. The other obvious upside is that my cost for feeding my family is quite low and I always have lots of food on hand in the house.
