To do list and not the best day

Hello everyone 

First here is next week’s to do list.

I truly don’t expect to get all this done but I wrote it down as a goal.

I think it’s the messiest list I’ve ever blogged but I had those tasks running around in my head and writing them does help me to stop fretting over them.  

The poor mopping woman is missing her feet and part of a spool of thread is missing - my handwriting and stamping were both off this morning.

And it’s because this cold is still slowing me down. 

 I slept all night which is great. 

I felt up to cooking eggs and toast for breakfast.  

Then I thought about the rest of the meals today.  

So I mixed up a Starbucks copycat recipe for lemon loaf. It’s a very easy stir and bake recipe. 

It sunk in the middle-don’t know why but it tastes really good.

And I baked a few Rhodes rolls and thankfully they turned out just fine. 

We watched church online and I fell asleep during the sermon. 

That sums up my day.

Tomorrow will be better 

❤️ Rhonda 

Shopping in a bigger city and cooking afterward

Hello everyone,  

I woke up yesterday with a very mild cold.  I’ve been told there is a mild, short lasting cold going around our town and I hope that is what I have.  My husband woke up with it today.  But it truly is mild and I don’t feel great but I’m still getting things done.  

My husband had a routine appointment at the VA Friday morning and I went with him.  Except I mostly sat in the van and stitched.  That hospital is huge and very busy and I don’t go in unless I just have to.  

Then we drove over to Midwest City.  My daughter needed powdered sugar and couldn’t get in in our town.  She also wanted butter and I had read about a butter sale.  So our first shopping stop was at Crest,  a discount food seller in the OKC area.     https://www.crestfoodsok.com/

I found plenty of powdered sugar and plenty of the butter that is on sale for………$1.25 a pound!  

This is a big store and they had cases and cases of butter.  So no,  I did not buy more than I should.  The cashier didn’t even blink when I told them there were 42 pounds..  

My daughter makes and sells ready to bake cinnamon rolls and she usually does them for holiday weekends.  She was thrilled to get so much low cost butter (so she will make more profit) and to find powdered sugar.

Have y’all heard about a sugar shortage?  


Then we went to the Air Force base and shopped a little there.  

I found Cora’s birthday presents at the Exchange - children’s clothes are nicely priced there and the price of these Bonnie Jean dresses is $20,  which is the same price I paid years ago  when I bought frilly dresses for Cora’s much older cousins, when they were little bitty girls.  

Then I went to the commissary.  I had a very short list and found most of them. 

The best deals at the commissary are on fresh meat.  

I bought 4 big packs of marked down ground beef that needed to be dealt with today and a tray of chicken breasts.  

I don’t buy meat anywhere else but I think $2.23 is a really low price for 80% ground beef.

The chicken breasts were $2.09 a pound

I pot the chicken in a crock pot with water and seasonings,   then cooked it until tender and shredded it.  

  

Now the chicken is in meal size containers in the freezer,  waiting to be made into chicken salad, chicken pot pie, etc.  

Half of the ground beef was browned and drained very well and seasoned with diced onions

Then I froze it  in 1 cup portions to make shepherds pie, goulash, etc

1 put 1 pound in 3 bags

Also made seasoned hamburger patties, quick froze them individually and then bagged them for hamburgers at home. 

  

I saw another blogger write about investment cooking and I guess that’s what I did.  

There are lots of fast home cooked meals in our future and the messy part is already done.  

If you have military eligibility,  I find shopping on base to be a great benefit. 

And if you live in the OKC area,  Crest is a great store to shop from,  

Hope you all are having a good weekend and I hope you all are cold free 🤒 😷 

❤️ Rhonda 

Spur of the moment trip

About the middle of January,  I was looking at our calendar and the weather.  We didn’t have any appointments and the weather wasn’t scary so we decided to drive to the Midwest and see our youngest grand child, Cora and family.  

We had a great time!

It was just so nice to see them, eat good food, see new sights and do some fun things. 

On the way,  I didn’t want to eat to at places we have around here.  

We ate at several family restaurants and we had a late lunch at a Culver’s.  This is a chain but there are none in Oklahoma.

Doesn’t Culver’s have the best graphics and slogans? 

The food was delicious.  I had a burger and my husband had a pork loin sandwich.  

We ate at a bakery in Indiana. 

It’s a 2 story building.  The bakery and counter are on the ground floor,  then you take an elevator upstairs to the dining tables.  I think this rolling pin mobile is really neat.  Their food was amazing too. 

Our main desire of this trip was to have fun with Cora and we sure did.

We did the 3 crafts in a Kiwi Co kit.  It was a subscription her parents bought.  The crafts were lots of fun and all worked just as they were supposed too.  The jelly fish is like a puppet and moves up and down.  On the window sill, are a glow bug and a mushroom - they both glow in the dark.

No idea how much a KiwiCo subscription costs but they do seem to be educational and good quality.  

The next morning,  we had snow ❄️ it was cold but the snow was light and didn’t cause any travel problems.

We saw a log cabin made with wide, hewn logs and lots of rocks.  

Our son prepared several delicious meals including this charcuterie board. 

The bread is from the bakery with the rolling pin mobile.  

Sorry, no to do list this week.  I’ll be back with that next week.  

I’ve caught up all our laundry and our house just didn’t get dirty when it was empty for a week.  



Are you all thinking about thrift right now?  

I’m thinking about doing all Frugal February posts.  

❤️ Rhonda 

3rd week of January

Good morning everyone 

No to do list on paper this week, just the list in my head as this week is a different week but I’ll have more in that later. 

               
Before                                                                                   After 

One of the jobs on last week’s list was to straighten this bookshelf.  I thought it was going to take a long time but it only took 5 minutes.  

It’s a tall shelf, taller than the door. My husband built it several years ago to fit a funny space in a hall.  

My mother lives in a retirement community and her meals are provided but she isn’t crazy about all their meal choices 

So yesterday,  I cooked foods that Mom cooked often when I was young- and took them for her lunch.   

Goulash which is ground beef, onion, elbow pasta, canned tomatoes and tomato sauce- very simple but delicious 

Creamed potatoes- I know it is a double starch but that’s how we always ate it.  My Dad loved potatoes and they were a budget food.

Apple salad- no exact recipe but it’s diced apple, cheddar, celery and pecans with a light dressing of mayo, sugar and vinegar.  

Banana muffins

I like to pack foods that need reheating in these Tupperware containers.  They are hard and won’t break, have handles for easy holding and don’t get hot in the microwave. 

After lunch,  I drove my van through a car wash.  My husband bought us monthly subscriptions and I could get my van washed everyday if I wanted to.  

It’s really weird as you have to put your vehicle in neutral, it’s dark and noisy in the tunnel  and the car wash tracks move the vehicles along.

But it does a great job and I do like having a clean vehicle. 

Other meals this week are from Every Plate.  I ordered ours with a deal our daughter shared with us.

I will caution you that I’m a very experienced internet shopper but Every Plate has a website where I ordered before I even knew I had ordered.  

But is OK and I will be very cautious if I ever use their website again 

Below is the food they sent and it all was fresh and high quality 

The 3 meals recipe cards

And the spicy shrimp I cooked compared to their photo- I added tomatoes and onions to the salad and I didn’t eat a full serving of the shrimp.  

It was good but was far from spicy 

There have been some comments I need to respond to and I will do that soon.

Hope you all have a good week 

❤️ Rhonda 

Buy Nothing Group, and few meals

Hello everyone 

I’m happy that most of the stuff on my to do list is done

I had a pretty big pile of discards and I gave most of it away on a local Facebook Buy Nothing group. 

As people claimed things,  I put them in grocery bags with their names outside our home.  

It’s all on the honor system but so far, things are getting picked up and it’s been fairly easy.  

Buy Nothing groups are local, by city and town.  If you have a Facebook account,  I think they can be a great way to give things away free  or to get things for free.  

We gave away an assortment-some was our stuff, some belonged to our daughter’s family. 

We still have our original doors and windows but have ordered new ones.

The front door will look like wood but I think it’s some kind of fiberglass.  

I wanted internal blinds on the windows but we have 7 curved windows and internal blinds aren’t available for them.  

But it is OK.  New doors and windows are expensive and having internal blinds almost doubles the cost.  
We found out today that we should have our new windows and doors installed in February.  That’s much earlier than we were expecting.  

We had homemade pizza one night with a 1/2 recipe of the dough in the link below 

http://ifyoudostuff.blogspot.com/2012/03/homemade-calzones-wonderful.html

And stuffed bell peppers another meal- they were still steaming when I took the photo. 

I used the recipe below as the base but it used 6 peppers and I only used 2.  

They were delicious and I should make them more often.  

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/235323/dis-stuffed-green-peppers/

Hope you all have  had a good week 

❤️ Rhonda 

Working on my to do list

Hello everyone 

I can’t say I’m going real fast but I have checked off a few things on that to do list.

My biggest job was deep cleaning the fridge.  

When there were 7 of us living here,  it was like a game of Jenga fitting all the groceries, leftovers, lunch things, etc in to this fridge.  

It seemed like it was always full to capacity. 

So yesterday, I took everything out shelf by shelf.  I also took out all the shelves and drawers and door cubbies. 

Everything got washed in the sink with Dawn Powerwash and and a scrub brush.  

I’m a big fan of the Dawn.  It really cleans off stuff with no effort. 

Before

After 

Besides cleaning,  I also refilled the tea dispenser, peeled a bag of tiny oranges, 

and brought more eggs and a bag of big oranges from the shop fridge into this fridge. 

I found multiple types of cheese that need to be used soon so we will be having pizza, tacos and salad with grated cheese on top this week.  

There are also 2 containers of sour cream so I should use some of it in something baked soon.  

I only cleaned the fridge side.  The freezer side still needs cleaned but I don’t think it will be a very big job. 

❤️ Rhonda 

2nd to do list of 2023

Good morning homemakers 

One thing on last weeks list that did not get done was a bath for our dog, Ducky. 

So, that was done first thing and now he is pouting and looking out the window.

Here is my to do list, what I hope to accomplish this week anyway, but as always, we will see. 

Hope you all have a wonderful week

❤️ Rhonda 

First week of January doings

Hello everyone. I hope y’all have had a good week. I have had a very busy week with that long to do list. I wasn’t expecting to get as much done as I did but I feel better now that it’s mostly done.  

Above is what the first spare bedroom looks like, it’s what we call the kids room. Ducky likes it now that I have the curtains open where he can look outside whenever he wants.

When two of our grandsons were living in this room, it mostly looked like this below picture🥴

Besides house work, I made two kinds of stock. I cooked the hambone left from New Year’s Day. I’ve never made ham broth but my son said he did and they liked it. The big crockpot has beef soup bones that we got from our daughter’s family when they bought a butchered cow.

I let the broth chill overnight in the fridge. 

When I checked on it this morning, I was pleased to see that the broth from the beef was like gelatin almost. Anyway I ended up with 3 quarts of beef stock and about a quart and a half of ham stock. It’s all in the freezer waiting to be cooked into something delicious.

This is last weeks to do list. I didn’t get much done in the master bedroom or bath this week but that can happen this coming week

In our dining room, is an accumulating pile of stuff that needs to leave the house, some of it is from our daughters family and some is from our home. So I will go through that this week, and list some of it on the Stillwater buy nothing Facebook list and some of it may go to Goodwill and some of it may go to the trash, we will see.

There is a lot to do at daughter‘s new home. Lots of boxes to unpack so it’s not ready for pictures just yet. But the kitchen is the first room they set up and it is a big beautiful kitchen. That island is huge! And you can’t tell it from the picture but it has three or four stacks of drawers on both sides so there is so much storage. And behind the stove is a walk-in pantry. The floors look wood but those are ceramic tile that look like wood.

That opening was originally supposed to be bricked but there is a brick shortage so the builder suggested wood as an alternate and I think it looks so nice! 

They were able to get just enough brick for the exterior after a wait, but to get enough brick for the interior was going to take much much longer.  

It’s a beautiful new kitchen, isn’t it? ❤️🏡❤️ 

I’ll be back tomorrow with a new to do list. 

❤️Rhonda 

First to do list for 2023

Good morning 

This is a pretty long list and it won’t all get done this week but it does all need done so at least I have a plan 

I’ve got plenty to keep me busy

Talk to you all soon

❤️Rhonda 

First day of 2023

Hello everyone 

I hope you all have had a nice first day of the year.  

We had our traditional black eyed peas, cabbage, rice, cornbread and a smoked spiral ham.  We don’t eat it because we are superstitious but because it is just a fun tradition.  And it tastes good! 

Our son in law really enjoyed it and asked why we only eat it once a year.  We eat all the components during the year but I guess we only eat the whole traditional menu on New Year’s Day,  

Thank you all for the complements and suggestions about our front door.  I’ll let you know as we order, etc.  The windows will all be custom made so I don’t think it will be a very fast project. 

This prayer is in my 2023 planner and I really like it.

And a good blogging development for me is, after a year or so of not being able to,  I can finally comment as my self on my own blog and on other blogs.  

That reply option has been missing and it’s been hard to talk back to you all and just took the fun out of blogging

I don’t know exactly what fixed it but I did adjust some setting on my iPad- even though I’d done similar things multiple times before.  

Who knows?  I’m just grateful it is fixed.  

I don’t know what 2023 holds.  I do plan to get my home put back to pretty much how it was before except even more decluttered.  

And I plan to blog often

❤️Rhonda