Surgery update

Obviously I went shopping LOL. Above is what I needed to cover the baseball game potlucks Monday and Tuesday. Yep, if they win tomorrow we do it for a 4th time on Tuesday. We can't believe it either. Below is what I got at Giant Eagle for us. Bread, 5 bags of shredded cheese (can't really grate my own right now and it was $1 a bag!), crackers, kleenex, watermelon, tomatoes, peaches, 4 boxes cereal, 2 things of juice, and a newspaper. The total for everything was almost $50. So I am over budget by $55 for the week. I will try to be well under budget on my Wal-Mart trip on Friday, but I really can't stress about it very much right now.

Here is a picture of what Michael and Luke made me to try and make me feel better today. Knowing my boys, I am pretty sure they were hoping I would share, which of course I did, because even though I love chocolate all of that would surely make me sick!

The surgery went well I am told. It was about 45 minutes, much longer than the 10 he had said it would be. It was more of a reconstructive surgery because my finger didn't heal right and was very painful. They removed some of the nail again as well as the side of my finger that was growing up over my nail. This surgery was not nearly as painful as the other surgeries afterwards. My guess is because there is no infection this time. It did however bleed a lot and is still bleeding a good bit everytime I change the bandages, which is frequently.

I ran/walked the race on Saturday. I figured I would see how it felt and walk if I needed to. My dad really needed to run this race and I wanted to be there with him. Every time I felt like I was struggling I walked. I kept my finger upright the whole time and it didn't bother me at all. Michael went with us and was supposed to stay with me if I needed help. Yeah, right. He hasn't run in a year but as soon as it started he took off and ran the 3.1 miles without stopping and left my dad and I in the dust. I won a large watering can as a door prize. My dad won a t-shirt.

My dad and Kevin are busy getting ready to install signs tomorrow, which is why my dad is out here. I would love to take advantage of the cooler temps and bake, but cooking is hard right now, so I won't worry about. Cereal will be our breakfast of choice this week, good thing it was on sale - 4 boxes for $5. Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Wal-Mart trip #3

I can't tell y'all how much I appreciate the support and motivation today. It really helped me stay focused. I went over my grocery list with a fine tooth comb. I had hoped to get some things each week to take to the beach with us in August. I crossed most of those things off my list today. Instead I concentrated on this week and foods that are easy for me or Kevin to make. Also, to feed a crowd and my dad. He is on a high protein, low carb diet.

I had a bunch of coupons and the cashier did not want to look up the price for the Starbucks ice cream and I couldn't remember how much it was. She looked at the coupon and it said a max of $5 so that is what she entered. I said I didn't think it was that much, but she wouldn't look it up. Turns out it was only $2.50. I also had a free dannon yogurt coupon and got the 12 pack of yogurts with that.

I came home and made up 2 meatloaves with the ground beef and stuffing (2/3 of it anyway) and have them in the oven right now. kevin will heat 1 up tomorrow night and the other will be in the freezer. Saturday night when everyone is here I will grill up 3 lbs of chicken tenderloins, slice up the watermelon and make deviled eggs. My sister is bringing something too, so that really helps. Sunday night I am on my own for dinner with the kids, so frozen pizzas it will be - total for that was $8.75. Monday is the potluck, so dinner will be there. I don't know yet what I have to bring, but I got marshmellows to make rice krispies if I get dessert duty. I have plenty of the cereal left from last time. But I just realized I forgot chips. Darn.

Anyway the total I spent was $79.50 on food only. Again, I really appreciate the kind words helping me to regain focus and do the best I can. Here is a list of exactly what I got today.

stuffing
pretzel bites
animal crackers
pretzels
large box of triscuits
marshmellows
4 sobe life waters, used b1g1 coupons
teddy grahams
bagels
breyers ice cream (my dad's favorite)
2 starbucks ice creams, used 1 free coupon and 1 $1.50 off coupon
OJ concentrate
popsicles
2 beef hotdogs
2.25 lbs ground beef
2 dozen eggs
12 pack yogurt
grape juice
dressing
2 pizzas
tomatoes
grapes
milk
plums
blueberries
bananas
watermelon
5 lbs potatoes
chocolate chips (not pictured)
summer sausage
huge thing of ricotta cheese

Bargain Meal of the Week

On Thursdays I post a bargain meal of the week for the Giant Eagle in NE Ohio. This week's ad is a very good one and I could totally go crazy with the sales. Here are some of the best deals.

• 8 oz shredded cheese $1 a pack
• bread for $.99
• Betty Crocker brownie mixes, $2 each and there are $.75 off 2 coupons, making these $1.25 each
• Ocean Spray grapefruit juice for $2, there are $.55 coupon, making these $1.10 each
• Ronzoni Bistro B1G1 - there are coupons out for these too
• peaches $.99 a lb

For the bargain meal of the week homemade pizza sounds so good right now.

2 8 oz pack of cheese $2
homemade dough - estimating the cost to be $.50 for 2 pizzas
a can of plain tomato sauce is $.79, I doctor this up with my own seasonings

total for 2 cheese pizzas is $3.29. You can either clean out your fridge for toppings (a great way to use up odds and ends of veggies) or buy a topping of your choice. Peaches are $.99 a pound and would make a great dessert for this meal. For more bargain meals of the week, check out $5 Dinners.

Do you ever feel like blowing your budget?

With surgery looming, my dad coming for 4 days, my sister's family coming for dinner, and me not really able to cook for a few days I am seriously frustrated with my self imposed low grocery budget and am so tempted to blow the whole thing and just go buy a bunch of convenience foods to make my life easier for the next week.

Top all that off with yet another potluck for 150 people on Monday and I don't see how I can keep within my $75 budget. We are seriously depleting my stockpile. I had planned on using this month to live off our stockpile to some extent, but can't believe how fast we are using it all. I am sure I can come up with something to feed all these people and I know Kevin is willing to cook for us, but it would be so much easier to not have to count my pennies and try to plan so much. Please give me some motivation to stick with my challenge! I need all the help I can get right now.

Random thoughts

My life never seems to slow down. Am I the only one that feels like that? Whatever happened to the lazy days of summer? Here are my random thoughts for today.

• My dad is coming Friday for a long weekend. We are running a 5K on Saturday. I am training for a 10K and he is training for a marathon. Hopefully it will go well. Except...
  
• I am having yet another surgery on my finger on Friday, so running might not be the best option the very next day, but I am going to do it anyway. In the meantime I am drowning my frustrations in chocolate, which means come Saturday I will really need to exercise.
  
• Michael has his second World Series game tomorrow night. I wonder how far his team will make it.
• I don't understand how I planted 4 cucumber plants all exactly alike, with the same tags on them but I have 2 different types of cucumbers growing. 2 plants are producing long and skinny cukes and 2 are producing short, fat pickling cukes. Weird.
• I was concerned about the cost involved in getting 4 kids ready for school, but CVS has been helping with that lately. I have gotten free glue, rulers, pens, pencils, scissors, pencil sharpeners, notebooks and tape.
  
• I can't believe it is blueberry picking time again. We are still eating berries from last year, so I am hoping to not get as many this year. But I think I said that with the strawberries and still ended up with 43 pounds.
• Half of me can't wait to go to the beach and the other half is dreading it. As my sister put it, I will be on death watch the whole time and won't be able to relax for a moment.
• I am going to start working my way through an online offer, like Money Saving Methods does all the time. Hopefully in a few months I will have a $500 giftcard to show for it. Has anyone else done these?

That is everything going through my brain today. I can't believe summer is half over. Where is my to do list?

100 Ways We Save Money - Part 2

I am doing a series on ways we save money around here. You can read the first part here. You will notice though that most of the things we do are small things. BUT they add up to big savings over time.

6. We try not to buy disposable products. I rarely buy paper towels, 1 roll lasts me 6 months or so. I only use it for greasy foods. We use cloth napkins. We used cloth diapers. I use tupperware when I can. I do use ziploc bags, but I wash and reuse them when possible.

7. I garden. My garden gets bigger and bigger each year. We eat fresh foods from the garden for several months and I put up what I can in the freezer or can it. I save $10 -$20 each week, sometimes more, buy eating from our garden.

8. I gladly accept hand-me-downs. Even for me. This has saved us hundreds of dollars over the years, probably thousands.

9. To save money on transportation costs we do a few things. Kevin will ride his bike to work a couple of times a week in the fall and spring. We carpool when we can with friends going the same place as us. I try to combine kids activities, so that I am not running all over. For example, I made sure to sign Luke and Claire up for swim lessons back to back, not on different days of the week.

10. I sign up for free samples whenever it is something we will use. Kevin's snacks frequently are free samples I have gotten in the mail.

11. We use what we have whenever possible. For instance we needed stepping stones for our flowerbed. We looked around the yard and found 2 large round stones that work perfectly. It isn't exactly what I wanted, but they work and they were free. We also needed edging for a different flower bed. I had the kids go around the yard and collect all the bricks they could find. (these are prevalent on our property for some reason) These will be the border for a flower bed that I am hoping to keep Ralphie out of.

12. I cook from scratch whenever I can. Homemade pizza costs about 1/2 of frozen and 1/5 of delivery. Store bought muffin mix costs $2.49. Homemade, the ingredients are less than $.50. The list could go on and on here.

13. We rarely drink soda. When I have family coming I will usually buy a 12 pack of Coke or Pepsi, but we never buy it for ourselves. We drink water mostly, but also iced tea, coffee brewed at home, milk, juice or lemonade.

14. Kevin makes his own beer. The cost of the equipment upfront was expensive. But by the third batch we had recovered our costs due to the savings over store bought beer. Now Kevin can have a beer at half the price of store bought.

15. I use the Diva cup. While I do get feminine products for free sometimes with CVS, it isn't enough and I find most don't work as well for me as the Diva cup. I save about $5 a month using this instead of disposable items.

Best laid plans never seem to work, do they?

Today was my second week shopping at Wal-Mart only, supposedly anyway. Again they didn't have some of the things I needed. This time cantaloupe (had to have for the fruit salad I have to make for the game) and MILK! I do have to have milk you know. The only skim milk they had was $5 a gallon, which is not in my $75 budget. In light of that I had to make a trip to Giant Eagle too this week. If this keeps up, trying to shop at 1 store only will be pointless.

I separated the pictures because I have to bring a lot of food to Michael's World Series game tonight. Our team is hosting a potluck for 150 people. In light of that, I put a separate line item in my budget for this. $25 to cover a fruit salad for 20 people, a dessert for 20 people, a 7 lb bag of ice and a bag of chips. We were assigned what to bring, I didn't get to pick. I got grapes, strawberries, blueberries and 2 cantaloupe (not pictured) for the fruit salad and made rice krispie treats for the dessert.
With my $100 I got the following.

box of quart storage bags
peanuts
box of pasta
can of corn
generic pam
2 bloxes kleenex
2 packs of muffins
5 lbs sugar
goldfish
2 BBQ sauce $.23!
taco seasoning
can of beef broth
honey
1 lb black beans
capri suns
teddy grahams (this is an easy, on the go snack that even Emma can eat)
4 pack yogurt
4 pack yogurt with granola
frozen OJ
starbucks ice cream $.10!
eggs
2 soy milk
6 pack of water
16 pack of sliced cheese
hotdog buns
loaf bread
2 pints blueberries
1 lb strawberries
onion
cucumber
tomatoes
carrots
bananas
2 lb nectarines

Plus the items for the game tonight. The total at Wal-Mart was $79.68.

The next stop was Giant Eagle where I got 2 cantaloupe, 3 gallons of milk and ice cream for Emma. They didn't have that at Wal-Mart either. They over charged me for the cantaloupe, so I ended up getting 1 free. I had another $5 off on my card, so my total for those items ended up being about $7. Total was under what I had anticipated, coming in for the week at about $87. Not sure if I will carry the $13 over to next week, or what. Since I was over what I had hoped to spend, due to the game, I am not sure if I should include it. WWYD?

*Edited to say that Michael won his first game and they host again on Wednesday. We have to do another potluck for 150 people! So that is where the money will go. To buy whatever I am assigned to bring to that one.

What do you do when you get a high electric bill?

When I opened our electric for April, I was very surprised to see that it was fairly high. A good $20 more than normal, at a time of year when we should be using less electricity due to longer daylight hours, no AC yet, etc. I didn't really have much time to analyze, other than thinking it was high and also noticing on the graph they provide, that it was indeed higher than the previous April.

Fast forward to the May bill I received a couple of weeks ago. Wow, this bill was really high. $20 higher than the April bill, so $40 or so higher than normal. I looked closely at the graph they provide and this May was almost double what we used electricity wise last May. Yikes! Time to do some thinking.

Here are some of the reasons I came up with for our high electric use and what we can do about them.

We had lots of company. My parents and brother came for a week to replace the roof. I did a lot of laundry that week, and there is going to be more usage with company in town. Kevin's parents also came for a weekend. Not much I can do about this one though.

Kevin plugged in the dehumidifier in April. It wasn't until early June that I realized it was running 24 hours a day instead of the on 3 hours, off 3 hours like we normally have it set. I quickly fixed that one.

After all of our computer problems in March and several people suggesting our problems were due to turning the computer off each night, creating wear and tear on the components, we decided to leave it on all the time. The same people all told me that computers use so little energy that it wouldn't make a difference in our bill. I beg to differ at this point. We have so many things attached to our computer that use energy. Speakers, printer/copier, phone, wireless box, monitor, etc. We have figured out a way to turn everything off except for the modem and phone box. Hopefully this will be a good compromise.

I noticed the kids getting pretty lax with the lights. I was just turning them off as I saw them on, and the kids kept leaving them on. I reinstated my policy of paying me a quarter if you leave a light on. Just doing this a few days has made them all more aware, and I have a little more money in my change jar.

We have quit leaving our front porch light on all night. I have always done this for safety reasons and it bothers me a little to not have it on. But it does use electricity for 8 or 9 hours a night.

We have our TV, VCR, DVD player and playstation all on a powerstrip. Ideally it should be flipped off each night before bed. Usually Kevin is the last one upstairs and he was pretty bad about flipping the switch to these energy vampires. He too had noticed the very high electric bill and is now doing much better at turning these items off.

Our electric usage is generally higher in the summer, due to fans, AC, canning, and just having Kevin home all the time. Hopefully we have solved some of the problems with our bill and can lower it over the next few months. Instead of ignoring the higher bills, analyzing why and making changes to help lower them works for me. If anyone else has any ideas, I would love to hear them.