My Accomplishments

We took a chance and drove down to my Mother's house yesterday.  We live west of Baltimore, and she lives south of Quantico in Virginia.  Her part of Virginia was supposed to receive more snow than we were.  After taking a good, long look at the forecast, we decided that we could risk a trip down there and back up again.  We left immediately after the first church service, and left at 4.

It didn't start snowing until we hit the MD/VA line.  And then, it kept snowing.  Fortunately, it didn't stick to the road while we were driving home last night.

The view we had coming home. 
It's a little before 6 here, and the visibility is horrible. 

This is the view out of our front windows this morning.
There is a street on the other side of those trees.
Guess what?  No school again today!

So, I was planning on planting peas in the garden today.  According to folk lore, the peas should go into the garden as close to St. Patrick's Day as possible.  They will not be going into the ground today!  (Probably not tomorrow, either.)

My accomplishments this week:

The new floor is down in the hallway and entryway.  All that is left to be done is the closet floors.  Since husband has today off work due to the snow, hopefully he'll be able to finish one of the closets!

I found a sale on the little cans of tomato sauce for 25 cents each.  I picked up 15 cans of sauce over the course of the week.  (I don't like to buy all of the sauce at once, I like to leave some for other people to pick up.  On the down side, I went to the store on the last day of the sale, after 9 pm, hoping to pick up a rain check, and they still had sauce on the shelves. I picked up the last of the sauce while I was there.)

I made a huge pot of bean soup last night in the slow cooker.  Soaked the dried beans overnight, added onions, celery and spices before we left to go to Mom's house.  I was honestly thinking I'd have beans left over to mash and use in taco salad on Tuesday night.  Unfortunately, I neglected to take into account the fact that the boys are home from school.  We went through the entire pot of soup last night.  On the plus side, the ingredients for that pot of soup cost me less than $2.  Not bad for feeding five people.

I can't eat gluten anymore, but I've been making gluten filled bread in the bread maker since the boys got home from school.  They've been going through a loaf a day.  So glad I have a bread maker to help me out, especially since I don't want the flour (read gluten) all over my hands.

I picked up a large honey baked ham at Aldi's last week.  We've been using that for sandwiches since the boys got home.  The entire ham cost the same as two pounds of lunch meat from the grocery store.  Even better, I'll have a bonus ham bone for bean soup when we're finished.

Husband is taking oldest child to look at a graduate school later this week.  They are going to drive up on Thursday night, speak with the Physics department on Friday, and then head home.  We cashed in some honor points to pay for the hotel on Thursday night.

We used our bonus points from the grocery store to take 40 cents a gallon off the price of gas to fill the van.  Nice little bonus considering the drive down to Virginia and back yesterday!

Husband van pools into work.  I can't even begin to tell you how much money we save on gas since he only drives the 5 miles to the park and ride every day.

The thermostats in the house have all been moved down to 60*.  We've had a fire in the wood stove twice this past week - one really cold day earlier in the week, and again today.  It does make the house so much warmer than the electric heat does!

Oldest child will be living in an apartment again this summer.  (He lives on campus during the school year.)  Since he spent last summer eating nothing but what I sent home with him and peanut butter sandwiches, I have made it my mission to teach him how to cook 5 easy, healthy things while he is home this week.  Last night, husband taught him to make yogurt parfaits.  That's one.  (He already knows how to make oatmeal, but I'm not counting that.)  Okay, honestly, I'm leery of teaching him to use the stove too much since he's been known to read a book and forget about whatever it is he has cooking on the stove until the smoke detectors go off, so we're going for easy, healthy, and microwaveable. 

We made a trip to the library on Saturday afternoon.  The kids checked out the episodes of Dr. Who that they haven't seen yet, and I have the first season of Downton Abbey.

What did you accomplish this past week?