Frugal Friday

First of all, keep those of us on the East Coast in the direct path of this blizzard in your thoughts.  I live in the part of Maryland that is already under a Blizzard Watch.  Cool - it's been 6 years since we've last been under a blizzard watch!  For those of you who live in naturally cold climates, take a look at this video of what happened in Washington DC on Wednesday night when we had and inch - you read that right - ONE INCH - of snow, and you'll understand why we're all concerned!

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Dinners this week were easy - spaghetti with homemade sauce, pizza made from the leftover homemade spaghetti sauce, thirteen bean soup, burritos made from the leftover soup and the leftover rice we made for dinner last week.  Nothing spectacular, but nothing that required grocery shopping, either.  We had all of the ingredients on hand in the house.

Photo: Bettina W.

Our biggest plan for this storm is to work on husbands quilt that his Mom gave him when he graduated from high school.  It's a tied quilt, and it's made from used blue jeans.  We need to replace the batting and the backing.  We had all the materials around the house except for the darning needles.  I ran out and picked up a couple more needles so that we can all work on tying this quilt together.  I'll post next week about the process.  I'm not looking forward to sewing the edges closed.  If anyone has any suggestions on a "quick" way to do that, I'm open to them all!

On the getting more crap out of the house front, daughter and I went through the pile of stuff in the basement and pulled out her stuff that she wanted to keep, but didn't need out right now.  We packed up old soccer trophies, stuffed animals, and other mementos from elementary and middle school, and tucked them safely into boxes and tucked them into the basement.  We took care of over 100 items between the two boxes and a trash bag.  I'm going to claim only 100 things for this week... Combined with the 73 item total from last week, that's a total of 173 items cleaned up and or taken out of the house.   I have hopes of getting the big, messy room in the basement cleaned out before we get dug out from this storm!

An adorable Little Free Library!

One of the most crucial things we will be doing during the storm is keeping the basement steps cleared of snow.  When that snow starts to melt, it could easily come into the house under the door.  Husband and I stopped by Home Depot last night and found some big pieces of sturdy corrugated metal to prop over the basement stairs today. (at an angle)  Hopefully, this means we won't be shoveling over a foot of snow up the steps from a walk-out basement every couple of hours.  Trust me, that gets old really fast. 

In other news, we headed up to visit oldest child last weekend.  We met several of his friends, had dinner at a great Vegan restaurant, explored the town a little bit more, and spent some awesome time together!  His school has a fantastic weather wall, that shows real time weather around the world.  It's very, very awesome.  I need one of those in my house!

We dog sat this little cutie 2 weeks ago!  Photo: Bettina W.

We dog sat the greatest little dog ever.  His parents were taking their girl back to school - so it was just a one day - 6 hour - commitment for us.  We took him out for a long walk, went to a coffee shop and got him a snack, and took him home with us to watch some football.  (Can you believe that the coffee shop actually sells organic dog treats?  And they welcome well behaved dogs in their store?)  We had a great time with him, but we were glad to give him back!

One last note - I'm writing this on Thursday night, timed to open on Friday morning.  As of tonight, most of the gas stations in our area are out of gasoline, and our stores are out of milk and toilet paper.  I'm so glad I hit up the grocery stores earlier this week!

If we have power, I'll post this weekend.  If you don't hear from me, you know our power went out, and I'll update you on things once the power comes back on!  If you're one of the millions of people living in the "bulls eye" of this storm - stay safe and warm this weekend.