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 

first day of 2026

hello everyone

Don’t we all want to be more organized in 2026?

When I cleaned out the junk pantry two days ago, I found these paper sheets that I bought at Dollar tree.

I separated them and put each one on a piece of pretty paper. I also put our freezer inventory On some pretty paper.

Then, I used magnets to hold them to the refrigerator

This should help keep appointments and groceries on hand at the front of my mind, planning ahead to make the best use of time and groceries we already have

I used part of the paper. I cut off when I mounted the calendars and wrote out my grocery list.

I needed to do three errands yesterday and I stopped at Aldi to purchase groceries.

Kroger is going to stop delivering to Oklahoma and I am really going to miss it.

But I plan on using up the groceries we have and hopefully having some low spend grocery months for the first several in 2026.

New Year’s Eve is not a good time to go shopping. I got there about 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

So many of the shelves were practically empty, it looked like that store had been shopped hard!

there was one young man running a register, and I did not see any other workers in the store.


I mostly got what was on my list. I had to substitute the type of lettuce I wanted and I added cherries and strawberries because grandchildren will be here and they really like them. They were a good price too.

Our New Year’s Day tradition is to eat Black Eyed Peas, pork, cabbage and cornbread. My husband is going to smoke a spiral ham that I got on sale From Kroger for $.99 a pound. He also made some pimento cheese stuffed jalapeño poppers to smoke while he smokes the ham. He’s never made them before and he didn’t have a recipe. I imagine they will be very good

❤️Rhonda