Have you subscribed in a feed reader or by Email? Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter! And, you can “Like” me on my Facebook Fan Page! Might as well subscribe to my newsletter, too!I hear it almost weekly:

“I wish I could use coupons, but I just don’t understand how you get those savings.”
“All of that math just confuses me.”
“I’m not smart enough to use coupons like that.”

And, my personal favorite:

Stunned look on face – “I don’t know how you figure that stuff …

I have a design dilemma.  I can’t STAND my vaulted ceilings. When we built our house, my 6’4″ husband felt like he just had to have them, and I didn’t have a problem with it, so we put in vaulted ceilings.  Of course, now that we have been living in our house for about 6 years, we both know that we would never put in vaulted ceilings again.  10 foot ceilings? Yes.  Vaulted ceilings? No.
Why do I hate them?  Because it is SO hard to make a room feel cozy …

We are going camping tomorrow!! I’m SO excited!!  I love camping.  This time, we are camping at the beach.  Hopefully it won’t rain all over us!!
I had to buy the basics this morning.  You know. BACON.
I miss free bacon!  Remember when I got free bacon?  Bacon is NOT CHEAP, people!  Oh, and I had to buy syrup.  Does this stuff EVER go on sale?  WHY is it so expensive?  Good grief.  If syrup ever goes on sale, I’m stocking up, because $3.39 for the store brand is ridiculous.
I’m posting about …

July was a month in which:

We attended a little friend’s birthday party.
We went to a Volcanoes baseball game and watched fireworks on the 4th of July.
(layout is linked to credits!)
We went to many track practices and delighted in the speed of our precious boys.  Grant tells me that he hums “Oh the deep, deep love of Jesus” in his head while he runs and it helps him win his races!
We watched the weirdest storyteller at the park as part of the library summer events thing.  I totally didn’t get it.
We …

What does 46 pounds of peaches look like?
Honestly, I had NO idea. I was going for more like 20 or 30 pounds. I had never been to an orchard to pick peaches before. I just knew that in apples, it was more like 2 apples=1 pound, right? Peaches, though, I’m clueless about.
I’m not a canner, aka: “food preservationist”. Is that a word? It should be, because I just rocked it in a sentence.
I get a little granola mama every once in a while, though. …

I just had to share. I hope you don’t mind.
Today I took the boys to the last of the free summer movies “in town”, aka Salem (I hope you’ve enjoyed them in your area, too!), and then popped on over to Kohl’s for some nephew-birthday shopping. Had to swing into the clearance jewelry isle on my way to buy marked down sunglasses (I know, I’m all over the place – and I DID find a toy, too, thank-you-very-much).
Kohl’s clearance jewelry. LOVE it. Seriously. If you …

Safeway usually has a couple of great deals at stock-up prices on the weekends. The trick is that you have to wait until the weekend to buy them.  SO many people glance at the ad and then buy the “weekend only” item in the middle of the week thinking that they are getting the great sale price, but they are not.  But, hey.  It’s working for Safeway.  They are probably counting on that kind of thing happening.
Anywho!  So, I shopped today.

Yes.  That would be “junk pizza”.  Go ahead and …

I’ve been slowly but surely expanding my comfort zone when it comes to buying second hand. Remember when I bought my first Goodwill shoes?  That was a pretty big moment for me.  I’ve purchased some great clothes from Goodwill since then, but I find that I get MUCH better deals at garage sales.
I showed you my major jeans score for my son (and I’ve found even MORE since that post).  I’ll never buy brand new jeans for my boys again.  After all, I can always patch them up with my …