I have had a few people e-mail me and ask where I have been. So here is the explanation.
Since 2007 when I first started blogging, I don’t think that I have taken more than a week’s time off in any given year for a vacation. That hasn’t happened in a while now. We don’t travel anymore. So we decided to take a week off for a staycation last week. However that did not work out because we had severe smoke here in our area coming from the wildfires in Canada. So we stayed home except for medical appointments. But I used that time to do some cleaning and work on my freezers. I am also reorganizing my big pantry.
We were going to take this week off but yesterday and today did not start out well. The smoke is here again. I am going to hope that the smoke gets better and that we will be able to get outside and do some things this week. If not, I still need a break from blogging. So I will continue reorganizing my basement and do some other household things. I am hoping to be back next week.
I hope you are enjoying your summer and not putting up with this smoke.
It has been a busy week. We spent Wednesday putting away decor from all of our rooms to get them ready for the painters. Just as I sat down for the first time in the day, Hubby was outside banging on the garage door. As I opened the door, there he stood with blood pouring down his face and his arm. I quickly got him cleaned up to see where the blood was actually coming from. Then I asked him what had happened. He said he fell after bending over to pick something up. His head and arm and shoulder hit the asphalt driveway. I looked him over well and determined that he did not need stitches to close up his face. There was quite an abrasion on his forehead, on one side of his nose, and on his arm. He was also complaining about a sore shoulder. I put neosporin on every wound and bandaged him up. He has had no headache which is good. Yesterday he was muscle sore in the shoulder. His abrasions are doing well. I am going to have to lock him in the house until he realizes that he can’t do the things that he used to be able to do. He still thinks he is 20. But he looks like he has been through the war.
On Thursday morning, we got Eloise all settled with everything she needed in our master bedroom and bathroom. The painters arrived and went to work. The prep work took over 5 hours because we have 9 foot ceilings. All the ceilings had to be taped and and all the walls draped with plastic so they could paint. Most of the furniture was gathered together and draped with plastic. Drop cloths were put on all the floors. They finally got some areas of the ceiling prepped and then put the first coat on every every ceiling except the breakfast room so that we would at least have a place to eat. Thankfully they rolled up all of the plastic before they left so that I could cook. We barely ate all day.
They will be back this morning to put on the second coat and do the breakfast room. Then they will start painting the outside of the house wherever there is trim, paint the doors, and the shutters. Then they will paint the shed. Hopefully they will get done today. If not they will have to come back to finish.
These men are really careful of our possessions, are every polite, and have done a great job painting. With just one coat, the ceiling looks so good. I have to thank my neighbor for giving us such a good recommendation for a painter.
Eloise proved to us last night that she can be in our room at night and does not bother us. She just sleeps in her bed and sits on the top of the recliner and looks out the window. So we can now give her full reign of our room at night and I will still get sleep. She never woke me last night and just got up when I did. She is 2 years and 3 months now and is now an adult cat and is acting that way. I am grateful for that.
Well, the painters will be here between 8 and 8:30 so I best make sure that Eloise and I are set up in the bedroom for the day and Hubby will probably spend the day in the office. He keeps an eye what the painters are doing too.
My grandson is coming around dinner time so I have to figure out what we will eat. He is staying until Sunday. We are excited to have him for a few days.
This is the first day that I have been feeling well in quite a while. I apologize for the lack of posts but I had to rest and try to get some sleep so that I would feel better. My body needed it. Every once in a while my back issues pop up and that does not let me sit for long periods of time.
I will see how I feel later and possibly put up a post. I have caught up my comment to you Patti. I apologize to you and to Chris for not responding to your e-mail. I hope to do that later Chris.
My administrator has been cleaning up my site. He found 100,000 users registered from other countries like China and Russia. He thinks a bot was running in the registrations. They are now gone. My site is limited to the U.S. and Canada only now.
He purchased a new server for his home. The one he was using was getting very old and needed replacing. We run our computers on his server so that was important to us and we appreciate all that he does for us. The website we use has been up and running since yesterday afternoon.
Unfortunately he had to run a script to clean up the bot and the registrations and he thinks it wiped out all of my subscriber accounts not just the bogus ones. You will need to sign up again. I apologize for the inconvenience but he had no good way to clean up the database and it was causing problems. There are precautions now in place so that these bogus registrations do not happen again.
Everything is up and running perfectly this morning.
When I was growing up, I had a very happy life. My mother left my father when I was 3 just before my sister was born. We had no money and my grandparents took us in. My mother got a good job, her college B.A. in accounting, and I lived with my grandparents until I married.
My grandfather didn’t make much money as a shirt cutter. But he owned his home( his father was a builder), a 2 story home with two flats. Relatives always lived downstairs. Most of the money my mom made was handed over to my grandmother for rent, food, and daycare. My mom was allowed to keep enough for transportation(2 buses each way) to get to her job, food for her lunches, money so that we could all go to the lake for the summer, high school tuition( everyone in the family had graduated from this private school because it was tradition), and just a bit of spending money. My sister and I wore hand me downs from my older cousin. I got my first bike when I was 12. It was a hand me down from that same cousin. I never felt poor but I knew money was tight for the things they wanted for themselves and us. My grandmother could make a penny stretch on food like no one else that I have ever known. Every meal was portion controlled. Rarely were there snacks or soda.
This way of life got me very interested in financial things in junior high and high school. I used to take library books out of the library that today would be considered frugality books. I learned about finances in college while I studied for my accounting degree. It was the first time I ever heard about a checking account. I just soaked up everything I could learn. The two biggest things I learned was to never spend more money than you earn and to use credit the proper way. It was okay to get a mortgage for your first home but to furnish it with credit cards was a bad idea.
When I married my Hubby, he came from a different background. He lived in a very nice suburban neighborhood that was considered one of the best places to live. But as I found out over the first years of our marriage, they weren’t rich either. They did pay their home off quickly so they owned it. That was a lessen that Hubby and I loved. We paid ours off early and the last two, we paid cash.
So when we married, it was the 1960’s. Hubby owned a car with a car payment and was paying off a small student loan. I did not work the first 6-8 months of our marriage. We found an attic apartment for $ 80. a month including heat and electric. We had a cheap phone bill because Hubby worked for the telephone company. I brought not $1.00 to our marriage because I worked long hours to go to college and every penny paid my way through those 2 years. Those years before I worked, I read every thing I could find in newspapers and books on finance and frugality.. My mother in law gave me a few cookbooks from the WWII era and I made almost every recipe from them. I had exactly $25. a month grocery money. We had no more in the budget because we had to pay all the bills and we were saving for two things that were very important to us: For Hubby to get his B.A. degree in Engineering and to save for a house. Living in that hot apartment made us want to get out of it quickly. So we squeezed every penny we could and made that grocery budget work. We saved money religiously every month for our two goals. I got a job at the telephone company too but not where Hubby worked. I bussed it. I had no driver’s license. Hubby went to school nights and we saved my income and what was what left in his for a down payment for a new home.
We purchased our newly constructed home in the suburbs 1 year and 10 months after we married. We had saved enough money so that we could purchase with cash a bed, a refrigerator, a sofa, and 6 unfinished chairs to use with the used table that Hubby’s mother gave us. I had used green stamps( does anyone remember them?) to get a card table and 4 chairs so we would have a place to sit in the kitchen and eat. His mother also gave us an old dresser. Hubby purchased a door that had been damaged and made and stained 2 end tables out of it to go on either end of the sofa. They were so sturdy that we used them for 32 years. We sold them when we moved to Arizona. I wish I still had them.
We furnished the house as we saved cash to do so. We never ran out and used credit. I worked and got a ride with the man next door who actually was my boss back and forth to work.
I quit my job due to a miscarriage just before Hubby was hit by a car while walking from the parking lot near his work. He had serious damage done to his knee and was in the hospital for weeks and home recovering for weeks. He had switched jobs and hadn’t worked long enough to get full pay for long so we lived on 1/2 pay for a long time. We made it through without borrowing a dime from anyone. But it was a big wake up call. We had some money saved besides money for furniture. But we used almost all of it up while Hubby was out of work.
That wake up call was our journey towards financial independence. We set up an annual budget that paid us first every paycheck. That has been a line item in our budget to this day. We never wanted to wonder again how we were going to make ends meet! We had always been frugal but we turned it way up after that. We still had money set aside for entertainment and things to make life enjoyable every month. We have never felt like we were giving anything up.
Fast forward one year and my first son was born. Fast forward 2 more years and my 2nd son was born. Now we had 4 people in our family so we had to up the grocery budget. It went up to $80. per month. But it included all food, OTC meds, cleaning products, all soap products, cat food, and and personal care products. I only purchased Pampers to use when we went out somewhere. I washed diapers and hung them to dry for years. That saved us a fortune. Up until just before my first son was born, I went to the laundromat every week. But we had saved and set aside money for a washer and dryer. It was our first scratch and dent appliances and with babies I was so grateful for them.
As our money grew, we found places to invest it so that we could make more money. We continued to save every month and it just kept growing. The best part was all of the passive income we made every month.
Yes, we had emergencies come up but we always had the money to pay for them and we still do.
This is getting long and I need to prep our chicken parmesan that we are having for dinner, so I will continue to write more tomorrow. This is a blog post that I decided I was going to do way back when I started blogging in 2007. Now is the time!
There is nothing I love more than using recipes from old cookbooks. This recipe is from The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo Cookbook published in 1962. My sister-in law gave me the book for a bridal shower gift. This is not my original copy. Mine fell apart from using it all the time. When we moved here, I figured someone out here in Buffalo would have a copy they were selling and sure enough I found this one. It is in much better shape than mine was although the binding is coming apart. So I may take it to get it rebound. That is how much I love this book. We have used many, many recipes from it. I think the reason is because most of the recipes use simple ingredients, are easy to put together, and taste so good.
So tonight, we are having this dish. But for the first time, I am not following it exactly. I am not going to bake it at 300 degrees for 3 hours. I am going to cook it in the crock pot to save energy. But I will use the electric skillet to brown it and then transfer it all to the crock pot and add the other ingredients.
I did not have a round roast in my freezer so I thawed a chuck roast which I will cut into pieces. I always have flour, salt, and pepper. Since we eat a lot of bacon, I save my bacon drippings to cook with so we have those. The only other ingredient that I will substitute is the cooking sherry. I don’t have it but I do have red cooking wine.
We will see how this comes out. If it doesn’t taste as good as when I roast it in the oven, I will try to cook it in the toaster oven next time.
My mouth is watering just thinking about serving this on rice for dinner. I will try to remember to take a picture when we eat it and show it to you in another blog post. We should be able to have this for at least two meals.
I try to use what I have when I cook all of the time. I don’t always have all the ingredients so I substitute. I definitely don’t run out to the store for a couple of ingredients and waste time and gasoline. If I have a substitute on the shelf, I would much rather use that than spend money on the proper ingredient.
When I was a kid, my grandmother was the cook in our home. She made a roast almost every Sunday. Usually it was a roast beef or a pork loin with whatever vegetables she had on hand at the time. I never really learned how to cook from her but I do remember her using up all of the food. She and my grandfather had a young family during the Great Depression and they never wasted anything. She knew how to stretch a roast into other recipes like beef stew, or beef or pork chop suey, etc. Nothing ever went to waste! So over the years, I have done what she did. I try never to waste a bit of food and to serve the proper portions. For a meal, we would be served a small piece of meat, a small piece of potato and a couple of spoonfuls of whatever vegetable was in season. There were rarely seconds.
We also rarely had any kind of treat. A quart of soda that my Mom would buy would last at least a week for her, my sister, and I. And she would not buy it every week. Once in a while, she would make a dip(Catalina dressing mixed with cream cheese) to go with a bag of potato chips or make popcorn on the stove. We sometimes would share an apple or an orange. And ice cream was a treat that I looked forward to but that didn’t happen often either.
There wasn’t a lot of money when I grew up, but there was always food made and served with a lot of love. The difference between then and now is remarkable. 99% of our food was made from scratch back then, most people weren’t fat, and people really knew the value of a dollar. Today we have an obesity problem, convenience food is the norm, and people waste food and money without even giving it a second thought even going so far as to put food and their wants on a credit card that they can’t pay off each month. If you have to put food on a credit card, go to a food bank. Quit buying wants!
Because of this we have a credit crisis in this country today. Both our government and so many people are collapsing our economy by their frivolous use of credit. Most people didn’t have credit back when I grew up. If they wanted something, they saved cash for it. We would be so much better off if we lived like our ancestors and saved cash for our needs and our wants. Don’t use your credit cards unless you can pay that bill off each month.
Our government tells us everyday that things are just fine. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Things are not fine. Our government is trillions of dollars in debt that we have to borrow from countries that don’t like us. China has started to sell the debt that they bought from us. China, Russia, India and some other countries are no longer using the dollar to buy things. The value of our dollar is going down every day. Soon it will be so inflated that we will be paying $10. for a loaf of bread(not me, I will be baking my own) or $ 15. for a gallon of gasoline.
Please don’t waste food or your money because bad times are coming. I don’t believe that we have seen the worst yet. I follow a person who has dealt in commodities for many, many years, and he is predicting a bad recession globally by 2025 which will go into a depression that could last 7 years or longer. He believes it will start around April of 2024 when the stock market will crash. At first I took his word cautiously but I am seeing more and more bank CEO’s warning us and many economists too.
So I will take them at their word and you should too. I have no debt but if you do, get it paid off as fast as you can especially your home. During the great depression, many people not only lost their money but they lost their homes. I have been beating this drum for years but I don’t know how many people have listened and it is just scary for me knowing that this will happen to people.
The only other advice I can give you is to stop spending on anything except food and other items that you will need to keep your home and car in good running order. If you can find some room, stock up some food and medicine. Don’t waste any of it. If your furnace or any other appliance needs some repairs do them now. If we do go into a recession or depression these things will become extremely unaffordable.
I apologize for getting somewhat off topic but my heart told me that I need to warn you. If you would like to see the video from the man I follow here it is but I will warn you that it is not for the faint of heart:
So many of you have wondered why I disappear so often and don’t post for days. Well I am going to come clean today.
First getting old is a pain in the rump! If it isn’t one ache or pain, it is another. I had another birthday this week and I will soon be 80! To get there is a few years but time flies.
Last Fall, I ended up in the hospital with severe sciatica. I could not walk for 4 days. That pain comes and goes and right now it is giving me a very hard time. I found out at my Dr.’s appointment yesterday that it may have caused another issue. I need to go to physical therapy so I will be setting those appointments up today.
But that isn’t the worse part. Just a year ago I was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease in the ER of one of our hospitals. This lung disease took my mother’s life. I immediately found a great lung doctor. He looked at the cat scan and has been following me. So I have a lot of appointments there too. He does not believe that I have this disease. But now that it is a year later, he has ordered and gotten approved a specialized cat scan that should tell us for sure. I am having that done next week and following up with him a couple of weeks later. This doctor is good and in high demand so appointments are a wait.
So if any of you pray, please pray that my CT scan does not show that the area involved has spread. I am having it done on next Tuesday. Thanks for your prayers.
Meanwhile, I post when I am up to it and when I actually have anything of value to say. I have to go to pick up some prescriptions today(pain patches are a big help when going out) so I will stop at the market and let you know what I got later.
My son was going to have us for Christmas. He lives about 1 and 1/4 hours from us. However, between my illness and Mother Nature’s wrath, we couldn’t get there.
It started raining on Friday which turned to ice and then snow. The temperatures dipped down to about 7 degrees. The windchill was about -1l We got so much more snow than Buffalo. The snow band sat over us for two days. The winds which gusted up to 71 mph were horrid and lasted 2 days. A State of Emergency was declared all weekend. No one could go on the roads. The blowing snow made it difficult for even an ambulance or anyone else to drive. Sadly a number of people died because they couldn’t get emergency vehicles to them in time.
It stopped Christmas morning. By that time we had about 5 ft. of snow on our front porch which the wind had picked up and deposited. The same against our garage and about 2 ft. everywhere else. Fortunately, we never lost our power. It blinked a few times one day but we never lost it.
Our snowplow driver showed up about 2pm and got all of the snow away from the garage doors and then plowed the driveway. At least we had a way out in case of an emergency.
I had nothing thawed for Christmas dinner. So I took a small pork tenderloin out to thaw and I made a hoisin sauce concoction for it. Hubby was happy and so was I. We had about half of it leftover so I froze it and a small dish of the sauce to make a meal in a week or two.
My son and granddaughter are on their way out here right now. The trip is usually 4 and 1/2 hours but it is snowing here and has been for about 5 hours. The Thruway was still closed this morning from Exit 36 to the PA border but it is supposed to open soon which will make it easier for my son to drive here. I don’t know what kind of snow they will encounter on the way out. So I am praying they get here safely. My son has a class to teach for his business in Brockport tomorrow so we always look forward to them coming out after Christmas.
I had planned on baking a ham for them for dinner tonight. However, my son called yesterday and he had baked a ham for he and Alexa. So I didn’t want to feed them ham again tonight. I took a large turkey tenderloin out to thaw and I will roast that and serve it with mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, stuffing, corn, and honey carrots. I have ice cream and cookies for dessert. All of this will be easy for me and Hubby will help.
The 13.44 lb. ham will get baked later in the week to give us a nice dinner and I will use the food saver to make many meals with the leftovers.
Our Christmas with our other son has been moved to the middle of January barring any snow storm. He is going to have us and Katie’s parents and brother for the fondue dinner that we always have there because we all missed Christmas. He is even keeping the tree up. Katie’s parents live in NH and they couldn’t get there either. We will exchange all of the presents then.
One more thing: Walmart cancelled my delivery order that was supposed to come today. They did that on Saturday due to weather. It had all the special things in it to treat my son and granddaughter. I was very disappointed but understood it was because of the weather. Luckily, I was able to get a delivery from Top’s this morning with what I needed. Top’s was closed from Saturday until this morning. Wegman’s is still closed and I have no idea if Walmart has reopened.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. I just wanted to check in while I had a few minutes before my family comes. Stay warm and stay safe. I will be back posting on Thursday to talk about the New Year.
I looked at the news at 4am when I got up this morning and this is what shocked me. I have to ask why would they do this and on our soil? And why put the information out there so close to the midterm elections?
Perhaps now some of the conspiracy theories out there don’t look as outrageous.
