Monthly Archives: July 2023

July in Review

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July is one of my favorite times of the year.  I have the entire month of summer break!  Ad of today, I have 17 days left until I return to work.  I do have some fun plans for August, but I also have alot of task that need to be completed before I return to school. I have just started with massive food perseveration from the garden.  This year has also been different due to Matt losing his job the last day of June.

Groceries- Budget = $975.   $1090.77   Goal not met!  I am working to stock the freezer for the school year. My thought is that everything will even out in a couple of months.

Auto/ Gas. Goal -= $600.  Goal Met!  We have spent $359.02 this month. Matt and I are both driving less. This does include our trip to Oak Island and also the trip to Atlanta.

Blogging- 15 post per month.  10 post this month.  Trying to live in the moment and enjoy more than posting. I will be better in August.

Exercise-  7 days of exercise makes this the best month this year! We also have a YMCA membership through Lily so I am going to hope to continue this trend.

Summer Goals- These were established in June so this will be a good way to keep up with where I am at.  I will say that we ended up cleaning and organizing both Matt’s building and the dinning room closet.  Next up is painting the living room.

  1. Get 100 dinner meals and an assortment of other food items prepared for simple cook and eat meals.   I currently have 52 dinner meal. Not sure I will hit 100 but I am going to be close.
  2. Organize the office and shred any paperwork that is no longer current and relevant.  I need to go through and shred the items in the top drawer but otherwise this is almost complete.
  3. Redo our master spreadsheet.   No progress
  4. Organize and delete pictures from my phone in order to free up space.- I may need to make this a yearly goal.
  5. Earn a $50 gift card from Fetch.  I am almost 75% there!  Slowly but surely this is working.

August here we come!

5 Things Friday

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  1. I am going to call this the summer of just enough. My garden is producing but not an abundance. Today we harvested about 5 pounds of tomatoes, just enough for breakfast and a batch of spaghetti sauce. Just peeled and chopped up all the cucumbers from the week. We made a cucumber salad for a party tonight and have enough for a second batch but not enough for pickles. I planted 5 plants of zucchini and 5 plants of yellow squash.  But yet we are only getting enough squash and zucchini for fresh eating.  I have frozen 2 packs of zucchini for bread but that is not the abundance I was expecting. Just for record keeping, the local farm stand is advertising a sale on tomato for $2.50
  2. After much thought and debate, we are headed to Florida to visit Haley before the school year starts. Lily is not able to go due to work. Matt will make his decision based on his two interviews next week.
  3. IT is HOT!  Like 95 plus degree and we have not had a rain that added to our rain barrel since our beach trip so almost 2 full weeks.
  4. Summer Goals were a high propriety this week.  I currently have 51 dinner meals in the freezer. I am adding spaghetti sauce every couple of days as the tomato come in.  I have had a request for salsa next so I will plan on that instead of spaghetti sauce on Sunday after we return from Atlanta.
  5. We purchased a 12 gallon water tub for the chickens last week at Tractor Supply.  The chicken drank at least 8 gallons in a week.   I am hoping between it and the feeder we can decrease the amount of time and energy spent on the chickens.

Day In The Life

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Today, I spent the entire day at home. Yay this is one of the things I like most about the summer. Unfortunately, today did not include reading a book or watching television or even enjoying some much-needed downtime.

This morning, I had already planned to make breakfast bowls. Yesterday, I had made gravy biscuits, saving some for today.  I ended up using 16 eggs and I found “bo rounds” which made these bowls even better!  Next up I spent about an hour in the garden, wedding and harvesting.  I sent a 5-gallon bucket to the chickens!

I have harvested 8 pounds of tomatoes in the last 3 days, so I started a huge crockpot of spaghetti sauce. The current plan is to make a couple of “million-dollar spaghetti pies” tomorrow and bag the rest for the freezer.  Matt made potato salad, while I made a squash casserole and a huge pot of chill.   Last night we had purchased a chicken from Costco so the squash casserole and potato salad along with a jar of green beans made an awesome lunch.  The chili used four pounds of ground beef that Matt cooked on the Blackstone along with supper last night.

I pressure canned 8 2oz jars, 4 half pints and one quart of chill for future use. After lunch I tossed the chicken bones and carcass was tossed in the insta pot with water and placed on low using the slow cooker function. So far I have pressure canned 8 pints of chicken stock with the insta pot cooking for another 12 hours.

I did discover that my food processor is broken. We dug out the kitchen aid attachment and shredded the LARGE zucchini for making a loaf of zucchini bread later in the week.

Matt was in charge of cleaning the front and back of the older refrigerator and also used his new shop vac to drain the water from the AC system.  I was in charge of deep cleaning the deep fyer.

Matt made a regular load of bread and I have a loaf of sour dough to finish tonight. Zach decided to deep clean so that also meant I placed 17 nerf guns, a box of legos and a huge hot wheel track on Facebook to sell.

I am tired!

 

5 Things Friday

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  1. Today is County Swim meet for the older (11 and above).  This is Lily’s last year as a swimmer. It is also the first time ever that all three kids have swam in the older day.  Several times we have been on vacation or the girls were at Life (a youth conference).
  2. Summer Goals- I have 40 prepared dinners in the freezer. At least 50 individual breakfast meals and 4 individual lunches.  This makes me happy. Especially since our tomatoes have not came in as expected.
  3. We, especially Matt have spent alot of time cleaning and organizing this week. He was able to complete the top of his building which is a huge effort.  Yesterday, he spent most of the day, removing all items and building new shelves in the dining room closet. This made a huge difference. I am waiting on a couple of basket but will plan to insert a picture of the final project later.
  4. I have four more weeks before returning to work.  We are planning on a weekend trip to Atlanta for a baseball game but I hope to also enjoy lots of pool and nothing time!
  5. We are doing really well in the area of budgeting!   I am so proud that we have been able to stock up but stay on budget!

Tuesday Thoughts- Groceries and Summer Goals

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When we returned home, I knew that I wanted to get busy on preparing food for the school year which is one of my summer goals.  I was very hopeful that we would return to a ton of ripe tomatoes. That did not happen but I still knew this was one of the weeks that I wanted to focus on getting things in the freezer.  Sunday morning Matt and I went to the store. I had planned to re-stock our pantry and see what deals I could find.   I was so excited to find that Food Lion had lots of good things on sale.  One item that I wanted to get in the freezer this week was at least 4 Baked ziti.   Without tomato sause I did not think that was possible. Buy 2 Get one Free made the Ragu jars $1.33 each so we purchased 12.  The ziti pasta was on sale for 54 cents along with a 25 cent digital coupon!  English muffins were BOGO and we found sausage patties on clearance. This was probably one of the high spending single trips to Food Lion in 2 years or more. I spent $201. But this should assist with 12 dinner meals and at least 3 breakfast meals.

Monday morning this summer have included a trip to the Bargain store as everything is $3.  Followed by grocery shopping with my Mom.  I had planned to grab a couple of items that are usually cheaper there.  What I did not plan to grab was chicken breast. These were on sale for $2.29 a pound. I decided to go ahead and stock up. I ended up spending $78 at Aldi with over $50 of that in Chicken breast. I came home and with help from the kids I bagged up 2 bags of Italian chicken for the grill, 1 bag of chicken teriyaki and 5 bags with 2# pounds each. We also started Pineapple Chicken in the crockpot for dinner.

Today I have spent most of the day chopping veggies. Matt and I made philly cheese steak casserole (one for dinner and one to freeze). I will also get omelet bags in the freezer this afternoon.  Tomorow the plan is to make 5 Baked Zitis. We also got 15 English muffins in the freezer yesterday!

It feels awesome to be able to work toward a goal and stay on budget!

Vacation Week

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We have returned home from our annual family beach trip to Oak Island NC.  It was an awesome relaxing week with lots of fun! My current plan is to post some pictures today and then some each Wednesday for the next couple of weeks.

Braxton went down with us on Saturday and came home with his mom on Wednesday!  We spent lots of time just hanging out on the beach!

Everyone enjoyed reading books and eating candy!

Walking on the beach was also fun!

The weather was awesome with Monday being our only rainy day. We shopped most of that day!

We managed to eat out only 4 times 1. Fishy Fishy on Monday 2. Olivers on Tuesday 3. Pops in Carolina Beach on Friday and our favorite 4.Old Bridge Dinner on Saturday morning!

We spent all day Friday at Fort Fisher touring the fort and the aquarium.  I will do a whole separate post on that one!

 

Wordless Wednesday- Garden Update

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The garden looks awesome and is the size that I remember. Given that information, this is likely the last picture update for the year.

The sunflowers are taller than the tomatoes. We are starting to see lots and lots of little tomatoes.  Which is so exciting, in reality we are probably 3 or more weeks behind where we normally are. I am hoping we get lots and lots of tomatoes!

The plants behind the greenhouse are starting to look better. I have planted a variety of vegetables. We are going to decide if this is a good spot to leave this or if we need to move to a different spot next year.

Watermelon and cantaloupes.

Both of the Green stalks have filled out nicely. I definitely like them for flowers, herbs and strawberries!

We are finding 2-4 cucumbers a day right now!  YAY YAY YAY!

Cucumbers

This week I have harvested and frozen 4 quart bags of green beans.  This is the first of 3 plantings!  I am so excited for these!

We are also starting to find small peppers!

We are harvesting squash and zucchini on a regular basis but they are small!  We also have a spaghetti squash and a butternut squash!

Love Love Love summer produce!

Tuesday Project

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This building was here when I first purchased the house in 1992. It already was insulated and had electricity with it’s own breaker box.  Matt has re stained it once.

It contains both freezers and our riding lawn.  The only problem is that is collects things. For example, left-over work items from Matt losing his job in 2010 and everything we brought home when we cleaned out the buildings at my parent’s house after my Dad died in 2017.  It has become rather full and dirty!

With barely room to walk and there is no way we know what is actually in here! So the first big family project was to clean out and organize this building.

2 large trash cans
4 hours
2 showers later we discovered enough nails to build a house and we now can locate most items we need.

We will need to pull out and toss alot of items from the ceiling of the building but decided to wait for another empty trash can before attempting that task.

But man Happy 4th of July!