A Little Bit of This and That

-I wrote this a couple of months ago - but just realized I never published it :)

July has been a busy month (of course - what month isn't??). So what have we've been up to??? Well, we've been working on landscaping our yard. We planted grass last year & some trees and bushes. But the grass had gone to weeds this summer & we wanted to polish up the yard so it would look perfect to sell next spring. Of course, living in the Northwest - you have limited time to work outside (unless you like working in the cold rain). So July & Aug are the months to do outside work. Well, we are almost done with the landscaping, (then we (Don) has to finish the painting and the porch & decks. I think that is all of the outside projects). We'll post some picture of the yard as soon as we are done. I thought we would be done with the yard sooner, but it's a big yard (we're not doing the whole 5 acres of course, but its a good 1/2 - 1 acre that we are landscaping).

We've also been working on our food storage. Don found some 5 gallon food storage buckets for $2 each. They had other food (berries, yogurt) in them before, so they needed to be cleaned out. We used bleach water with a sheet of newspaper in them & soaked them overnight and the smell came right out. Don found a website that said to get smells out of a container put newspaper in and soak it overnight and the newspaper will absorb all the odors. We did an experiment and one bucket with bleach water and the newspaper and one bucket just with bleach water alone. The one with bleach water alone still smelled like yogurt the next day, but the one with the bleach water and the newspaper smelled like nothing. We haven't complete the process yet, as we need to get dry ice to put in the buckets before we can finish.


Cleaning out the buckets!


Food Storage - we've got 2 more stacks like this one - plus all of our church cans out in the shop - so now we're almost 100% caught up with food storage (we just need some more powdered milk).


We finally got all the food put in the buckets with the dry ice!! Yay!!

I'm hoping to get our food storage room all organized & most of canned food brought
in from the shop (so that we can start cleaning our shop out - another big project to do)

Our newly organized pantry with lots of whole grains - yummy!


Why would I take a picture of my engagement ring?? Because I lost it earlier this month. I took the kids swimming at the YMCA one night after gymnastics. I always take off my wedding ring when I go swimming. I put it in my purse in the pocket on the inside along with my other rings & my watch. The next morning when I went visiting teaching - in the middle of the visit - I remembered my rings/watch & went in my purse to put my rings & watch on. Everything was there except my wedding ring. Ok - so now I can't concentrate on the visit (luckily the person I visit is a good friend of mine - so she helped me look for it). We dumped my purse out, looked through everything & couldn't find it. My vt comp (Mary Louise) told me to go back to the YMCA & look for it not just call as if no one turned it in they wouldn't be as thorough looking for it. ML even offered to go back the YMCA & look for it with me. How sweet of her. Well I told her to just say some prayers for me & I said a billion prayers & went back to the YMCA myself. I asked them at the front desk if there was any ring found. He looked in the log & couldn't find anything. He went back in the office to double check, & I went back to the dressing room to see if it fell out of my purse when I was changing. I went back & looked - after a few minutes of unsuccessful looking :( the guy from the lost came back & asked me to describe my ring, because he found one that was turned in this morning. Of course, I described it perfectly & got my ring back. Apparently when I grabbed my keys which were also in the inside pocket, my ring came out too. The ring was found that morning about 5 am outside the front doors. How blessed I am to be able to find that, as I don't know what I would do if lost it - Heavenly Father does answers prayers even simple ones that are really not that important to anyone, but me.

I've always like reading, when I was homeschooling, I wasn't doing much reading for myself - just kids' stuff. Lately, since I've had a little more time I've been doing some reading. My new hobby - reading about vitamins, minerals, herbs, essential oils, etc. I found some great deal on Amazon for books ($.01 - yes one penny each), and so I bought a mess of books.


And since we restocked our food storage & got more whole grains - we're trying to eat more healthy - so we got some health cook books. And you know Don's hobby this last year has been cooking, so he has been picking up cookbooks here & there all year. As you can tell we have quite a few now.