Batting 0.500

Trying to use up some ingredients that I had in my pantry, I tried out two new recipes this week that I found using the ingredient search on allrecipes.com. One turned out great, the other was pretty much a flop. The flop was Pork Chops Deluxe. Now I guess I didn't really know what golden mushroom soup was, but between that and the diced tomatoes, this was really tomato-y, and we're not big tomato fans. And it was just tons of sauce. Now it all got eaten between dinner and lunch the next day, but I certainly would not make it again. The success of the week was Hashbrown Breakfast Bake. I found this by searching for a recipe that used ham, eggs, and hashbrowns. I had ham in the freezer from Easter that I wanted to use up, and Walmart had forced me into buying a dozen eggs instead of my usual half dozen (since all the half dozen ones were broken) so I had a lot of eggs without a plan. This turned out really tasty and pretty easy. I did not do the pico de gallo or sour cream on the top at the end. I had some more for lunch today and it was just as good the second day.

So 0.500 isn't too bad, and either way I made progress towards cleaning out the pantry.

Thrifty Tuesday 6/28

Well I went a little crazy today and spent a whole $4.50! Which for me garage sale-ing, is really quite a lot. I hit 15 sales today by myself as my partner in crime has VBS this week. My office-mate Christin was having a sale, so I bought some lemonade from her son Wesley for a quarter. My next quarter went for a thing of cute ribbon...white with a black flowered print. I love being able to wrap up presents with some cute ribbon. It seemed like it would be really cute with some bright colored paper. I spent two dollars on two books by a new-for-me author James Scott Bell. One of the other author's I really like, Terri Blackstock, has Bell in her list of "If you like my books you might like..." It appears he also writes Christian Romantic Suspense...my favorite genre :) Last I bought a funeral chair (wooden folding chair) for a dollar and a six gallon western stoneware crock for a dollar. The crock is not in great shape, but I thought it would be fun to use outside somehow. This guy had a bunch of crocks in different sizes, all $3 or less, but I couldn't decide if I really needed or wanted them. So one for $1 seemed like enough for today.

So all in all, some good times. I was pretty excited to find some new books as I just finished my last garage sale book, The Time Traveler's Wife, today and don't have any other books in line. If nothing else I need some vacation books!

C25k - Big Step Up for Week 4

So in week 3, the ratio of total jogging to total walking was 9 minutes to 9 minutes. This week, that stepped up to 16 minutes of jogging and 8 minutes of walking. That's a big step up! The 16 minutes was in four intervals: 3 min, 5 min, 3 min, 5 min. So 5 minutes is my new longest run :)

It felt pretty good overall today. I always feel tight that first jogging interval and feel much better the last one. I guess at the end I'm just looser and relaxed, even if I'm more tired. With all these extra minutes of jogging, I also covered more distance today. I always walk to down to Country Club as my five minute warm up and do my workout in there...less traffic, less jumping in the ditch. About a quarter mile in there is a road that makes a big loop, so I just do laps there. I had been making two laps and then heading back out to Sheridan, but today I got in three laps before heading back out. I'm not sure how long the loop is...maybe like a half mile. So I would say walking and jogging combined I'm somewhere around two and a half miles.

New Morning Routine

This summer we have kind of a weird morning routine that changes depending on the day of the week. On Mondays and Wednesday I'm up early and out the door while Brad is still in bed, and the other three days I'm usually still in bed when Brad heads out the door. Whoever gets up first is always responsible for the dogs - get them out of their crates, put their collars on, let them outside, and feed them.

So after that all occurs and person #1 leaves, Lucy has decided the next step in the routine is for her to come upstairs and get in bed with person #2. And if Lucy comes up, you know Sad Dog won't be far behind.

I'm not sure how I feel about this routine. It's not that I don't like the cuddling, I just would like to have one place in my house free of dog hair, and if I can only have one place, I want that place to be my bed. Though it is hard to turn down a snuggly puppy...

Walgreens Deals 6/26

I haven't tried to snag any deals at Walgreens in a long time. They had a few things I needed on sale this week so I thought I would work up a plan and head over. Which chatting at my parents after lunch, I made a little flow chart of how to work my transactions for the best deal...and yes, I am that kind of dork.

However, since the last time I was there, Walgreens has changed several policies. One of which effects how the Cat discount card works with the register rewards and also changing how you can use register rewards to pay for future purchases. So I had to ditch my flowchart and work a new plan...good thing I'm pretty good at math :) Though not really all that good at arithmetic :/

I did one transaction of everything that had a register reward and skipped the Cat card...three deodorants, two packages of twizzlers, and two toothbrushes for about $23. At Walmart this would have cost $26, so not a big savings, but I also got $9 in register rewards. So I got things I would have gotten for about the same prices at Walmart and then got two packages of hot dogs, a case of bottled water, hamburger buns, a bag of Lays, and two packages of peanut butter sandwich crackers for free with my register rewards.

So while not quite as good as the plan I had originally worked I still got some stuff we needed and some stuff we can use at our 4th of July party. I must say, Walgreens doesn't give me the same happiness that Aldi does :)

Couch to 5k - Week 3 done!

Well I got out there this morning before church and did my last workout of week 3. It was a gorgeous morning, I went sans dogs, and I felt great. I did ten minutes of running total split into intervals of 90 sec, 3 min, 90 sec, 4 min. The workouts next week step it up quite a bit with 16 minutes or running total in intervals of 3 min, 5 min, 3 min, 5 min. And for the first time the walking intervals are half the time of the running intervals. Most of the previous workouts the walking was equal to or longer than the jogging. So this should be good. My friend Natalie is starting the program tomorrow (right Nat?) so it will be fun to have a C25k buddy these next few weeks. The first long run comes at the end of week 5 - so in two weeks I've got a 20 minute run. One day at a time... :)

Winter project perhaps?

Natalie showed me this fun site yesterday with free plans for building a whole variety of furniture. I started out looking for chairs we could build to go with our patio table and got sidetracked with this: Farmhouse Kitchen Island

It has all the things I've been looking for in an island...some closed storage, some open storage, and space for two stools. The plans are for a 2'x5' island, which I think would be just about right for our kitchen. The plans seem pretty straight forward - I think we could handle it. And for the top we've already scoped out walnut butcher block tops. We saw one a couple months ago at Lowe's and really liked the look and found them online for pretty reasonable prices.

Maybe in the meantime I should keep working on ideas for patio chairs, seeing as though it's only June...