To do list and home things from last week

hello everyone

Above is my to-do list for this week.

I may do more than is on the list but maybe not.

My energy levels are just not what they used to be so I hope to do everything on the list and maybe I will do a few more things too

I’ll let y’all know

I picked up three of the grandchildren after school and then they had a sleepover.

I planned ahead for the evening meal. I decided we’d have hamburgers and baked potatoes.

So that morning I fixed up some topping and relish plates, and I washed potatoes to bake

I baked extra potatoes because we like to make hashbrowns from them

Sometimes I peel the cold leftover potatoes and cook them right away for hashbrowns. Sometimes I grate them and put them in a bag and freeze them for future hashbrowns.
Another day last week I knew I needed to be gone part of the day, but we would want supper.

I had written down this very easy pizza dough recipe.

So I mixed it up real quick before I left, then I put it in a bag with a little bit of oil in the refrigerator.

I copied the recipe down from somebody else online, but I don’t remember who.

It’s not a dough that you have to knead she said.

I do recommend the dough. It was very easy, and very Thrifty.

It made a tasty supper for the two of us

About The mixer bowl covers, I’m sure there are many tutorials for them online.

I made this one for our KitchenAid mixer several months ago and then I made the neutral color one for my daughter’s big mixing bowl

I just cut out two circles of fabric. For the KitchenAid mixer bowl, I Drew around a pizza pan for the circle pattern

Then machine stitch the two circles together, right sides together, close to the edge, leaving an opening to turn

Turn them right side out and again stitch close to the edge, leaving the opening unstitched

Stitch about half an inch away from the first stitching, but go all the way around this time

Insert quarter inch wide elastic Into that casing you just sewed,  adjust the elastic for the right amount of tension for your bowl, and finish it off

I made this bowl out of two different fabrics so I can display the holly fabric at Christmas and the chicken fabric the rest of the time

These are a quick and easy sewing project and would make nice gifts I think.

I saw a purchased Bowl cover on a big salad That a friend brought to a gathering.

The outside was a pretty Fabric and the inside was that water resistant fabric that they use on cloth diaper covers, it has a name, but I don’t know what it is.  

I like to have succulent plants in planters on our patio in the spring and summer.

This fall, I brought some of them into the house and put them in one of the bedrooms

It’s not a particularly sunny room because even though there is a big window, that side of the house is in shade most of the time

But I am very pleased with how well the plants are doing, and it’s not because they’re getting a lot of loving extra care from me.

I try to remember to open the curtains every day, but sometimes I forget

And I just water them every 10 to 14 days

See all the babies in this aloe plant?
These succulent leaves are turning into new plants. They are so interesting how the ends produce a new sprout. You can’t see it, but there are little roots right underneath the new sprout going down into the dirt. I will put them in small pots when it gets warm

I think this plant might be called a silver dollar plant but it’s putting off a new baby down in the dirt too.

My mom has crocheted most of all of her life.

She pretty much only does small projects now, but she still crocheting everyday.  

She made these Snowman heads Several years ago, they were probably supposed to be Christmas tree ornaments I’m guessing,

Anyway, she decided she wanted them put on a wreath.  

She had an 8 inch wooden embroidery hoop, and she crocheted around it. Then she wanted me to hot glue the snowman heads onto the wreath.

I didn’t like the idea of putting hot glue on them. So I got a big needle and put some yarn in it and sewed each head to the wreath

Now it is hanging on her front door in her retirement home.  

my husband has  good day and bad days.

He recently got new hearing aids from the VA and they have done wonders helping his tinnitus.

This morning he cooked our breakfast and it was delicious!

I don’t believe it was in the weather forecast, but we woke up Saturday to a very light dusting of snow. It wasn’t enough to hinder traffic, it just looked pretty

hope you are all having a good start to your week

❤️ Rhonda 

a slow week

hello everyone

I didn’t mean to let a whole week go by without blogging, but I guess that’s what happened

Last week was kind of a shopping week. For me anyway, it was a lot of shopping.

  once again, here is an AFTER photo of my newly organized pantry.

Before this photo, the  canned goods were not sorted. So the first thing I did was sort and count all of the items

I was really surprised to find out we had no canned fruit of any kind except for two cans that were in the refrigerator.

And we had no refried beans. Sometimes I make homemade refried beans, but it’s nice to have them in the pantry.

these photos are not in the order of my shopping, but I’m just going to leave them in this order and y’all are smart enough to figure out what I did.

I went into Dollar tree and walked every aisle and bought the above five items.

The shelf stable cream is a new item.

The strawberry cream savers are my granddaughter’s favorite candy, they are hard to find, and she was very excited to see these. She said she had never seen them in a roll, they are usually in a bag.

This is the back of the cream container.

It does contain carrageenan.  It is an ingredient that adversely affects some people

I am a fan of shelf-stable milk.  I’ve kept it in my pantry for years.

It was so nice to have it when my grandchildren were little and liked milk in their sippy cups. if we ran out of fresh milk and I couldn’t get to the store, there was usually some shelf stable milk from Dollar tree in our pantry back then. 

I do remember one of my grandchildren suspiciously, eyeing that shelf stable box when I filled their cup. But then they tasted it and realized it tasted just like the fresh milk.

My husband went with me to Aldi

 I especially wanted to stock up on canned fruit and refried beans.

Canned foods are not as popular as they used to be. I remember when we first started shopping at Aldi, maybe a dozen years ago or so.

Back then, the canned food aisle was huge.

Now the canned foods are just part of one side of a aisle

But we did buy canned peaches and mandarin oranges and refried beans and tomato paste.  This is part of what we bought.  The perishables had already been away.  

We tried the box of Belgian butter cookies, and they were delicious!

The box only weighed 3.5 ounces and the cookies were not much thicker than a potato chip

But they are very flavorful and I do recommend them if you want a small butt yummy dessert

OK now more about some of the shopping I did over the last week.

My daughter told me about a Walmart on her side of town. She stopped there on her way to work and she said they had Christmas marked down to 90%.

I was already up and dressed, and I wasn’t busy so I drove over there.

I didn’t buy much, but I did buy these gingerbread house kits

We are hoping to have a family Valentine party and decorate gingerbread houses like a Valentine village
 I also found a few toys that were 90% off..  My grandkids are pretty much too old for all of these, but I got them thinking about putting them in the shoeboxes for next Christmas or any other need for toys that might come up

I didn’t take any photos, but I also shopped at Hobby lobby. My daughter wanted the New Year’s decorations that were marked down 90% off. 

pretty much since 2020, I have done the majority of my shopping online, I’ve done Walmart pick up. I’ve done Walmart delivery and I really enjoyed Kroger delivery. Sadly, for Oklahoma, Kroger is going to stop their delivery service for Oklahoma at the end of January

So I may have to go back to more grocery shopping in person. What I discovered during all of this shopping though was, I don’t really like shopping anymore.  

While we shopped at Aldi, I did look at their produce, and I was pleased with how nice most of it looked.

So I may go in there and get my produce once a week and then maybe do Walmart pick up for the rest of the stuff. 

I don’t know. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I have been cooking and that fridge and freezer inventory I did earlier this month have certainly been useful.

One night I made fajitas with cooked roast beef strips from the freezer

Those turned out so good! There was enough here for two meals

Another day I made goulash with some cooked hamburger from the freezer And I used up a can of tomatoes that we opened by mistake and had to be put in the fridge for a few days.

This meal also made enough for two days

That’s all the news I have 

hope you are all having a very good week 

❤️ Rhonda 

some planning, cleaning and sewing

hello everyone

yesterday I cleaned And organized our two refrigerators. I threw away a few old leftovers, but it mostly just needed cleaned up and organized

And of course, I never remember to take the before picture, but here are after pictures

There is a lot of empty space in both of these refrigerators but I’m not rushing to the store.  

We really don’t need much but we do need eggs.  

I’ve needed to plan out meals for awhile.  So yesterday,  I just sat at this little table and worked on a list of main dishes to cook.  

At the top of the list is a Monday through Sunday plan that another homemaker said works for her family but after looking at what I picked out,  her exact plan won’t work for us.  

I do like Taco Tuesday and  Pizza Friday.  I’m still thinking about it but I think a chicken day and an oven baked casserole day would suit us.  We like burgers too.  

If we have leftovers,  we tend to eat them the following day so I don’t know if set plan like this would really work for us anyway.  

I printed off about a dozen recipes I’d like to make soon.  They are all from sites that mostly have weight watcher type recipes,  I just like they are a little lower calorie and all the ones I printed mostly use groceries we usually have.   When I cook them,  if they are good,  I’ll share a link for them.  
After I cleaned the fridge,  I wrote a list of produce we have.  This in on the fridge by our freezer inventory and calendar.  Hopefully it will help me use use them all up and not forget them.

I took a photo with my phone of what I cooked for supper but it doesn’t seem to be in my photos on my iPad yet. 

I did use some of the fresh broccoli and leftover rice from New Year’s Day in a baked chicken and rice casserole for supper tonight.

It wasn’t fancy, but it tasted really good.

in the sewing room, I did some more work on those strip quilt squares.

My daughter bakes and sells sourdough bread.  

She didn’t learn that for me, she picked it all up on the Internet and she does a great job with it.

She has a giant bowl that she wanted a cloth cover for it, like the ones that I made a while back for my KitchenAid mixer.  

I think she lets big batches of sourdough rest in this giant bowl for a while before  she forms them  into loaves.  

I told her I had some really cute chicken fabric that I thought would make a cute cover, but she wanted a plain one.  So I sewed one up today out of this neutral  fabric below.

I don’t have a bowl that big at my house so I can’t take a good photo. I’m sure she will take a photo and I’ll share it later.

One of the things I was hoping to do in 2026 was so more.  We are only eight days in, but so far I have been in the sewing  room every day except one.

We’ve had unusual weather since Christmas. It was very warm on Christmas Day and then it got cold.

Today we woke up to warm temperatures and a lot of rain

Then the wind blew hard all day.

I had thought about going to a few other thrift stores today, but I did not want to be out in the wind.

So I did 3 more loads of laundry and sewed and cooked and watched at little Youtube.

Home is my favorite place to be anyway! 

I hope you all have had a good day

Thank you everyone that has been leaving such sweet comments

❤️Rhonda 

Tuesday - breakfast and a few errands

Hello everyone 

We had a slow morning getting around.  I baked a Dutch Baby for our breakfast and it was delicious!

My husband got new hearing aids from the VA today.  They are rather fancy with lots of parts.  I hope they will help his tinnitus,  we’ve been told they do help some tinnitus cases.  

No photos but I went to Hobby Lobby for some yarn for my mother.  

I also browsed Ollie’s,  it’s a few doors down from HL.  

As I drove around town,  this is our current gas price per gallon at multiple stations.  

I live in Oklahoma,  oil country- and in general, the cost of living here is lower than average

But not for home insurance,  we have some of the highest home insurance because of wind, fire, tornadoes etc.  

After I visited my mother,  I went to 2 thrift stores.  One had all Christmas things 75%off
I bought the snowmen for our current winter themed tree.  
These are all Hallmark ornaments and have the nicest details on all of them.  

I don’t think I’ll hang them on a tree but will set them as a little village.  

They are very detailed front and back.  The bank even has a safe upstairs.  

At the 2nd one,  I found this pretty blouse for me.  I’ve actually been wanting a pink checked blouse.  

This is a screen shot of another pink checked blouse that I saved 4 years ago.  

Now I have one!  And I’m ready for spring.  

I rarely do that many errands in one day and I’m rather tired tonight.

hope you all have had a good day 

❤️Rhonda 

  

not too exciting …….

I’m hoping to blog almost daily and I’ve been somewhat busy but it’s not too interesting written down, 

but here goes

Saturday,  we had a big pile of laundry.  A little dog was our houseguest last week so we had a bit more laundry than usual.  

I’m pretty particular about  sorting laundry ( and nobody is going to change my mind on this). 

So I sorted and got it started.  

8 loads later,  it was all done.  Our bed was made with clean sheets and blankets and all the laundry was put away.  

I made a big salad and peeled a pound of carrots,  the carrots are for snacking or will be cooked with a meal.  
At supper time,  my husband went to Chipotle and got a build your own bundle.  

It was delicious and we’ve been eating it ever since.  

In the sewing room,  I’ve been working on strip quilt blocks.  I want to make 2 matching quilts for our guest room with 2 twin beds.  

I finished 1 quilt top in 2025.  I hope to sew all the blocks for the second quilt and then fully finish both quilts, maybe this month.  

We will see.  

❤️ Rhonda 

2 big meals and a crazy shopping event

Hello 

To start off the year, we cooked our traditional meal Black Eyed Peas, rice, cabbage, ham, and cornbread.

There were seven of us here to eat

Today,  I made breakfast for 5 as 3 grands slept over.  

15 year old Elizabeth spent most of her time here working on a little scrapbook project for a friends birthday. 

we weren’t sure how to put the pages together in a book and I had read online that Hobby Lobby’s Christmas clearance went to 90% off this morning.

so we went to Hobby lobby in hopes of finding something to bind the pages together or to get a small photo album to put the pages in. 

They opened at 9 AM

We got there at 11 AM

I think all these serious clearance shoppers got there at 9 AM.  

I kind of glanced at what was left in the Christmas aisles, there was not much left and a good bit of what was there was broken. 

The lady at the front of this line had at least three carts of Christmas clearance.

By the time we checked out, she had been loading her purchases into her little car for a while. And apparently all of her purchases would not fit in her car as she was pushing one of the shopping carts still full of her  clearance purchases back into Hobby lobby. We guess she was going to try to leave them there while she went home and unloaded her car.

That’s a lot of shopping!

All we bought was one Purse size photo album.

And if I ever think I need 90% off Hobby lobby Christmas Clearance, I will plan ahead and get there at 9 AM. 

But I probably will not ever go there again to Hobby lobby on January 2, the day they traditionally mark everything 90% off

So, did any of y’all go out bargain shopping?

If you did, I hope you found what you wanted

I don’t think I needed a single thing on the Christmas markdowns anyway.  

❤️Rhonda