The Littlest Egg & Frugal Accomplishments

mini egg with chicken gifts from a friend

Hello, friends.  On Monday, all the boxes collected over Christmas were taken out of the house, and  the tree needles vacuumed up.  I glued two ornaments that needed mending, before packing them away.  Two loads of laundry were done, and hung on the line.  Books were requested from the library.   I made an online purchase, using a 20% off coupon and 6% cash back.  Our kitchen faucet had been leaking intermittently, and totally failed the other day.  As he did with the shower head recently, J checked with the manufacturer, this time Moen, and they are sending us a new cartridge plus another needed part for free.  It pays to ask, and it's great to have a handy husband!  Well, it turned out we need yet another part, which they are also sending.  It's now been 9 days without a working kitchen sink.  Soon, I hope.

sunrise

It's so nice to notice the days getting longer.  2200 swagbucks points were redeemed for a $25 amazon GC.  With amazon and a few other places, you can redeem the first GC a month for 2200, instead of 2500 points.  I often forget to mention it, but I continue to get a few points on swagbucks daily, and shop through them if they offer cash back equal or better than ebates.  It adds up, and it's always nice to receive free gift cards.  Here's my referral link, if you'd like to check them out:  http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/Lauriel8.  I've enjoyed taking morning and evening walks with the pups, and gathering lichens to create with. J found a tuft of usnea, which got added to the tincture jar.

After work in town, I picked up library books.  At Walgreens, I used a $1.25 coupon for Kleenex, got leggings marked down to $2.99 and half gallons of 100% juice 2/$5, found wrapping paper I could use all year at 70% off, used a $5 reward, and received another $7 in rewards.  Gathering eggs one day, I found the smallest chicken egg I've ever seen.  It was 1 1/8" long, and the cutest thing.  I suppose it was one of our youngest chickens first egg, but not sure.  Two more items were listed on ebay.  I did all the preliminary stuff... cleaning, photos, research, then figured shipping for a third item, but it came up as $50 shipping (!), so I'll need to see if I can figure out if any smaller box will work.  Otherwise, it will be donated.  Most of these items are glass, and either vintage or antique, so I pack them really well for shipping, which adds to the bulk.  Trying to come up with boxes that are in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes is sometimes challenging.  Update:  I did find a smaller box, which also weighed less, and shipping now comes in at about $20.  Still may be too high to sell, but it's worth a try.

With J's initial dietary changes, yeast bread is off the list.  I found a recipe for naan without yeast, which was decent.  We enjoyed it with vegetable soup, which used jars of our tomatoes, vegetable broth, summer squash, and frozen okra, along with other pantry items.  With temps going into the low 20's, I harvested some carrots, kale, three rutabagas, collards and parsley.  I also dug up two parsley, potted them and brought them in the house to see if I could continue to harvest them indoors these next few months.  I recently came up with an idea that is working well for me.  There are a few kitchen chores, like bringing eggs to a boil, and heating milk to temp for yogurt that require me to not stray far.  I've decided during these times, I'd pick a small cleaning/reorganizing/decluttering chore to do.  So far, I've cleaned a kitchen drawer, which now opens easily again... imagine that, and the drawer at the bottom of my stove.  While it was out, I vacuumed underneath the stove, which is an area that doesn't get near enough attention.  It feels good to be accomplishing these little bits.

sunset

Another day, I used the time waiting for yogurt milk to come to temp to clean the racks in the dishwasher.  After cleaning the dishwasher not long ago, it made me smile every time I opened it.  But the racks still needed attention, so that task is now taken care of.  Though my photos don't do them justice, there have been some lovely sunrises and sunsets, with lots of pretty pinks.  On Saturday, I made two pans of roasted root vegetables.   I used the older, store bought carrots. But, the potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutabagas and beets were grown here, as well as fresh thyme and rosemary.  We kept enough out to have as leftovers, and the rest went into the freezer.  While we both can eat eggs, we made omelets Sunday morning, and quiche for dinner.  Good thing we're not having cholesterol checks this week!  Wishing you peace this week, friends.