Prime Day

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 Tomorrow is Amazon Prime day.  Amazon will be celebrating their 20th anniversary.  As part of the celebration, they are supposed to be offering more and better deals than they offer on Black Friday.  There's one little catch to the deals, though.  They will only be available to member of Amazon Prime.

Here's a cool little twist:  Amazon is offering a free 30 day trial membership to Prime.  I joined last week in anticipation of Prime Day.  In the meantime, I've been enjoying all of the benefits of Prime Membership.  My copy of Go Tell a Watchman shipped for free.  I've been streaming videos and music from Prime, and I've utilized the Kindle lending library.  I have 3 weeks left in my free membership, and I am planning on taking full advantage of as many of the benefits as possible.  I want to see if it's worth my subscribing to Amazon.

If you're interested in checking out Prime free for a month, check out the link below!

Grocery Expenses Week of 7/7 - 7/13

No trips to the grocery store this week.  That's a good thing, considering how much money we spent last week!

Dinners this week have been fairly simple.  We've had a couple of salads made with the lettuce we picked up the week before.
In addition to the two nights of salad,  we had:
Arroz con Pollo (my Mom's recipe)
Salmon Pasta Salad
Fish Tacos (where I used a tiny bit of the chipotle chili peppers AND the adobo sauce)
Scrambled Eggs, mixed with a lot of veggies

Saturday night, all of the kids were out at work.  Husband and I packed a dinner of sandwiches, watermelon, and chips and went down to the park for a picnic dinner.  Holy Cow!  It was just the two of us!  We were able to go walking after we finished eating.  It made me realize that I'm really going to miss everyone when they head off to school in the fall, but it will be oh, so very nice to have my husband all to myself again!

For dinner tonight, I'm planning on pulling out the waffle iron and making a big batch of waffles for dinner.  We can freeze the leftovers to use for breakfast later.  Even better?  The waffle iron doesn't really heat up the house.  That's an extra bonus!

Fun Fact: during our last shopping trip, husband picked up 2 huge packs of chicken thighs on sale. You know, the big kind that has about 20 or more pieces to a package?  He pulled the chicken out, skinned it, and then packed them 3-4 in a bag and ran them through the vacuum sealer.  We've now got 15 packs of chicken, packed in a single meal size, frozen in the big freezer.  The next time I need chicken, I can just pull out a pack and run with it!

Salmon Pasta Salad

This is one of our standard, fall back recipes.  I found the original recipe in The Woman's Day Cookbook.  I've tweaked it over the years to meet our own likes.  It's a very quick and easy recipe to make.  It's even in the book of recipes that I gave to oldest child when he graduated from college.

Salmon Pasta Salad

Lemon-Dill Dressing
2/3 cup vegetable oil
6 TBSP lemon juice
1 tsp minced garlic
2 TBSP chopped fresh dill, or 1 tsp dried dill
1 tsp salt

8 ounces pasta, cooked, rinsed, and drained under cold running water  (we use gluten free spaghetti, roughly broken into quarters before we drop it in the water)

1 red onion, chopped roughly
1 can (15 ounces) pink salmon, drained and skin removed

1 16 ounce bag of frozen peas
* NOTE - place the peas, frozen in the bottom of the colander before you drain the pasta.  The heat from the pasta water will thaw the peas out and give them just the right crunch.



Mix the dressing in a small bowl or large measuring cup, mix the ingredients for the dressing.

In a large bowl (or the pot that you cooked the pasta in), combine the peas, pasta, onions, and salmon. 

Whisk the dressing one last time, and pour it over the salad, stir gently to combine.

Serve immediately.

*another note* if you are using gluten laden noodles, this salad will hold well in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

Trapped in a parking lot!

(originally published on my now defunct blog, A Mom's View, on 5/26/2011)

Seriously, I was trapped in the Wal-Mart for a couple of hours last week.  I had just dropped by the church and thought I would run inside to pick up a thank you card for one of the kids' coaches.  That was my big mistake of the day.

Just about the same time I pulled into the parking lot, the back-hoe that was digging in the parking lot of the bank hit a gas main.  The driver of the back hoe hit the ground running, fearful of a gas explosion.  Unfortunately, he forgot to turn the engine of his machine off.  Since the gas main was leaking, no one was allowed close to the back hoe to turn it off.  They had to wait for the fire department, in full protective gear to show. 

The police officers and construction workers onsite were shuffling all of the shoppers out of the lots and into the Wal-Mart (which was deemed to be safer) while they were waiting for the fire department.  Needless to say, traffic came to a screeching halt while ALL of the roads were closed down. 

I was enjoying watching people whiz around the Wal-Mart lot, looking for a way around traffic when I was told I had to go inside of the store where it was "safer".

I'm no genius, but somehow, I don't think that cruising around the Wal-Mart for an unknown period of time, armed with a credit card is a good idea. 

I live in a fairly small town, so I actually had a pretty nice time cruising around the Wal-Mart.  I ran into my daughter's retired 5th grade teacher and her father.  I ran into my aerobics teacher.  I ran into some friends I hadn't seen in a couple of months, and I found a couple of employees who are home from college for the summer, that had been in Boy Scouts with my boys.  The Subway did a lot of business as we all bought our breakfast, and pulled the tables into one great big table and had a huge gab-fest.  People would get up and move around the tables periodically as they finished one conversation and began another.  Dates for lunch were set, plans for barbecues were made, and pictures were proudly displayed.  It was probably the best, most productive, and fun two hours I've spent in quite some time!

Eventually, the fire department sounded the all clear, and opened traffic on the main roads again.

I picked up the Thank You card for the coaches and headed out on my way.

I'm not certain, but I think being trapped in the Wal-Mart for two hours, forcing me to slow down and talk with friends old and new was probably the best mistake I have ever made.  I need to make more mistakes like that!

Smoke and Mirrors

I'm going to digress a little here. I mentioned earlier in the week that we should be keeping an eye on Greece.

Late this week, the news became dominated by Arianna what's her name licking a doughnut.  That was the top story on most of the news stations I listen to while driving into work. With that much noise about some stupid pop star licking a doughnut and claiming to hate America, I began to wonder what was going on in the wider world that we were trying to distract attention away from.

I checked the U.S. news, and the only other story I could find was about the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House.

I chugged on over the the BBC, and there I found it: China's Stock Market is crashing.  Desperate measures have been taken to halt the sell-off.  Even on the BBC, it wasn't top of the page news, but at least it wasn't buried behind several clicks.

When the U.S. news media begins to fixate on the antics of a celebrity, something big is going on somewhere else. Something that might "worry" you.  Unfortunately, these "things" that they are trying to distract you from are "things" of which we should all be aware.  Things that we really should be paying attention to.

Smoke and Mirrors.  It's what magicians use to distract you from what they're really doing.

Arianna Idiot licks a doughnut and professes to hate her country: smoke and mirrors.  "Don't look over here - look at THIS!!!"

Okay, end of rant now.  Enjoy your weekend.

China's Stock Market Bubble:  (worth your time).  There's a lot more out there, but these are the top news sources that I trust.  

Fear China's Stock Market Earthquake, BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33440565

China Stock Market Surges in Volatile Session, BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33456768

China Stock Market Crash is a Problem for the Whole World, The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/china-stock-market-crash-world-problem-struggling-economy-small-invesots

China's Stock Market Crash in Two Minutes, CNN
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/09/investing/china-crash-in-two-minutes/

My Blackberry Is Not Working! - The One Ronnie, Preview - BBC One

To brighten up your morning!

Affording College, again

No debt.  That's our goal.  To have our kids graduate with no overhanging student loan debt.  We've done our best. The first one is out, with no debt, and will be starting graduate school on a fellowship next month.

The middle one will be a Junior this fall, and the youngest one will be entering school in September.

Here's what we've done to minimize college expenses:

1) Taken AP classes.  The oldest two children graduated from high school with enough AP credits that they were Sophomores by credit upon entering college.

2) Concurrent Enrollment- daughter has taken AP classes as well as concurrent enrollment.  She has 12 credits of college credit from the community college, and 12 credits of AP credit.  That's 24 hours of college credit that she'll be starting with.

3) The Maryland Pre-Paid College Trust.  This savings vehicle locks in your tuition prices down the line at today's price.  We invested in this when the kids were young.  This pays the tuition and fees for the flagship university for the state of Maryland.  This has worked well for the boys who both went in-state.  It left us with only a small amount of money to pay out of pocket.  For daughter who will be going out of state, they will pay the amount of the mandatory tuition and fees for the flagship university for the state of Maryland.  We'll still have a difference to pay, more than what we paid for the boys, but not the full amount.

4) Work.  All 3 of our kids work part time jobs.  Not only do they pay for their own "fun" expenses, they also pay for their own books.  Oldest child was able to pull together enough money to pay for the difference between his scholarships and the total amount due for the last two years of college.

5) Scholarships.  Apply for them.  All of them.  Many colleges offer some fantastic scholarships.  Make sure your child applies to more than one college.  You will be pleasantly surprised.  We have young friends who began at the Community College, were accepted into the Honors Program at the Community College, and received some extremely generous scholarships from the Community College, and some nice transfer scholarships from their 4 year schools.

If we had to do it differently?

1) We only invested in 2 years of the pre-paid trust.  I had stupidly thought that I'd be able to get the grandparents to invest in at least one more year for us.  I should not have counted on that.  I should have gone ahead and invested in 4 years.  I also should have invested soon after each of them was born.  Unfortunately, that was in one of the first few years of the plan's existence, and I was waiting for a legislative guarantee before we invested.


2) I would have socked some money away into the Maryland College Investment Plan, or another 529 investment plan.  This account can be used for college expenses.  We could have used this to pay for that difference between the pre-paid college trust and the final balances, textbooks, and the computer.

Food for thought.