Cranking Up the Decluttering P*rn Again

I just looked and I haven't declutter-ed anything since late June.
Egads!

I'm going to be cranking up my efforts again as soon as I get the 2 oldest off to college and the youngest back to high school in the coming week.  By next Monday #2 son will be back in class and his brother and sister will be on the other end of PA living la vida college, so I'll get my quiet sanity filled days back.
Or something like that.

Here is what has left the house this week......

a mohair Gund Bear
John Glenn HotWheels car/spaceship set
Alice Cooper Hot Wheels sized car
ceramic mug/hot cocoa gift set
2 vintage baby care government booklets(this are hilarious!)
a pair of vintage White Gloves
a Bamboo Serving Set
a set of kid's Shrek Dishware
4 gold plated Racing Champions Cars-that's what's in those white boxes
a Dr. Seuss Watch
4 Correlle Bowls
7 Plates-1 Correlle/6 Melamine
6 packs of stationary

a throw blanket in a zippered case...like for football tailgating and such

2 Zen Rock Gardening sets(what was I thinking...Zen?....here??)

Assorted Power Ranger Party Goods (#2 son liked PRangers when he was 6, making these OLD!lol)

2 Boyd's Bears resin Broach Pins

6 Rolls of Wallpaper Border (from my misguided attempt to camouflage wall damage in the dining room)

1 Beanie baby

6 Happy Meal toys

Also a box of 93 Happy Meal toys I thought left in June and I photographed back then but they didn't actually get into the trunk of the car until now.lol

Look for a lot more Decluttering in September.

How are your decluttering efforts going?
Did you get anything sent off this summer?  How much clutter do you have left to deal with at your house?

Sluggy

Week 3 Spending for August....Hitting the Food Spending Ceiling

My food spending seems different this month.  I have been ignoring most of the "deals" at the grocery stores.  I can't recall the last time I bought a boxed, processed item....well, except for those frozen pizzas that kids want.lol
I have just been buying ingredients as needed these weeks along with produce, meat and dairy buys I find.  Throw in a trip to the bread outlet and I've spent $88.18 of food in Week #3 of August.

I spent $4.78 on 6 bread items at the outlet that would have run me $22.74 at the grocery store.
$4 at the Dollar store in snacks for daughter to take to college later this week. 
$20.10 at the local market for hot dog rolls, OJ, lettuce and frozen pizzas(at the kid's requests)and 4lbs. of ground beef for lunch burgers.

My big expenditure last week was at a new restaurant/party supply warehouse on Saturday.  Daughter requested I cook ribs in the smoker for her before she leaves for school, so I got ribs, as well as 5 more pounds of ground beef, a big bag of onions, 2 lbs. of bananas, a 40 count bag of pot stickers and a pork butt.
Cost?....$59.31.
I made 42 meatballs with half of the ground beef and browned/crumbled the other half for tacos/beef pie/sloppy joes. I now have 5 meals + leftovers worth of meats ready to go from that ground beef.   I smoked the ribs on Sunday, along with making baked beans and cornbread from scratch, and we have enough left for another full meal.  The pork butt will be made into a Pork Ragu this week at #1 son's request when he gets home in a couple of days. This pork/pasta meal will supply another full meal in leftovers. The pot stickers are a quick lunch item for this week.
Next month I'm hoping to see some chicken and/or fish deals since we have been light on chicken and fish the last month.

I made the leftover steak from a week ago Thursday into Beef Stroganoff on Saturday night.  We have almost another full meal of this for leftovers.

So here is what I am starting this week with in leftovers or precooked  foods.....
1-Beef Stroganoff w/Rice
2-Taco meat
3-Meatballs
4-Beef Pie meat
5-Sloppy Joe meat
6-Ribs(from last night)
7-Squash Casserole
8-Green Beans
9-Baked Beans
10-Cornbread
11-Pickles, always!lol
Plus I have the Pork Butt.

Here is my Meal Plan.....

Sunday--Ribs, Baked Beans, Cornbread, Pickles  done
Monday--Sloppy Joes, leftover veggies(squash/g beans)
Tuesday--Leftover Ribs meal and/or Stroganoff
Wednesday--Pork Ragu, Salad Greens
Thursday--Dinner out before kids leave for school
Friday--Assorted Leftovers
Saturday--Spaghetti Meatballs or ?, Zucchini

I have frozen veggies to add in where needed, so the only items I need to buy for this menu are more salad greens and zucchini.
Imagine that?...I need to BUY zucchini!lol
Along with milk, some more fruit for snacking(I'm thinking watermelon and peaches)and we are done with shopping for the week and hopefully the month.
$20-$25 should do me.

I've spent $262.33 up until now in August on food.
If I add in my $14.19 so far in rebates and my Toluna check for $20 into my food budget, that gives me $284.19 in the kitty.  If I can spend $21.86 or less for the rest of August, I'll still be on budget.

I am feeling the frugal burnout lately.  Inflation has made it harder to find deals and stay on budget. 
I am just tired of working so hard on this. 

We will be down to feeding 3 people again after the oldest 2 leave for college, so I am hoping I can still keep my $250 food budget for awhile longer.  Or am I being unrealistic in this economy to spend so little on food?
What do you think?

Sluggy

Garden Update & Don't Believe Everything Your Spouse Tells You

Seems the garden is petering out here already.
Except for 1 item.
Can you guess what that is?.....

4 more cukes the other night and I have 3 Hubs picked last night sitting on the patio table outside.  Still on the vine I saw 6 more this morning, not counting the ones we missed along the way that have bloated up and gone bad.

And something is eating my tomatoes now.....not something bug-like, but something much larger.  It's not the rabbits since these tomatoes are a good 3 foot off the ground(think higher than the top rung of a tomato cage).  We've either got a deer in the yard at night or birds eating them.  There is a large population of bats around so I am thinking maybe some bats?
Whatever it is, it is not good.

Due to some creaky old age knee issues I have, I have not been able to bend over to weed the beds.  This is what happens to a garden when you can't convince anybody else in the family to weed anything....even for money......

And this is AFTER I tried pulling weeds yesterday and about became a lawn ornament due to not being able to get back up.
bleh.

And I must tell you that my "Left Brained Husband" has struck again.

He did the planting this Spring for me.
He even made a nice little diagram of "what got planted where" for me.
Wasn't that nice of him?

Here's that diagram....

The bottom bed notes that it was planted with "Greens, Greens, Tomatoes" on the back row and "Greens, Radishes, Tomatoes" on the front row.
I asked him what he meant by "Greens".
He had no clue.

Well fast forward 6 weeks and Radishes came up where noted.  Since the Tomatoes where put in as seedlings, I knew those were correct according to the diagram.  Greens must have meant salad greens since I had an empty Mesculun Mix seed packet, and that is what came up between the Radishes and the Tomatoes in the front, and again, over on the left in the front row.  So we had mystery plants in the other 2 "Greens" areas, since they were definitely not "Greens" at this point, beyond being Green in color.
Fast forward another few weeks and these appeared where "Greens" were planted....

Hubs had planted a type of melon(outside like a watermelon/round and inside like a cantaloupe) in the side bed, not the back bed where these were growing.  Silly me assumed these were those melons.

Then the melons changed....

Yes, they are Pie Pumpkins!lol
Well I now assume that these are Pie Pumpkins because I found an empty seed packet that held pie pumpkin seeds at one time.
And the way the vines are dying off this week, they should be ready to pick very soon.

Now over where he actually noted that he had planted pumpkins we have this....

Actual Pumpkins and a bumper crop of weeds.

I misspoke when I said all the pumpkin vines were dying off,  Evidently 2 vines didn't get that memo....

This vine and another one just to the right of the photo are taking over the deck.
I think the pumpkin vines are envious of the cucumber vines.
We have full blown plant gang activity in my yard.
Jets and Sharks.
Bloods and Crips.
They got nuthin' on Cukes and Gourds.

I'm just glad neither is armed with weaponry.



Sluggy

Stockpile Sale Addendum

I forgot to mention that on Saturday, that I piled all those cukes from my garden....remember these?....

I piled them into a box and I tried to give them away at the Stockpile Sale as a thank you for shopping with us gift-No Purchase Necessary!

I gave about 6 cukes away in that manner during the first couple of hours. 

Then I offered cukes to a couple and the man tried to take 1, to which the woman yelled at him to put that cuke back because her dad had some at home to give them. 
Well he retorted back that he wanted a couple because he planned on making pickles, so there!

I told him, "You go for it....I've been making pickles with them myself". 
So he took 2.

And then, as he was walking down the driveway to leave, he stopped and turned and came back to the box and said he'd take another if I didn't mind.
To which, I replied, "Take the whole box if you want!"
And he did.

And he paused at the bottom of the driveway after leaving, turned and waved the box in the air, yelled THANKS! again, and gave out a 'whoop' of joy.

I have never seen a man so excited about a cucumber!
And y'all with your minds in the gutter of that thought, just keep it to yourselves.....

Sluggy

Last Weekend & The Stockpile Sale

Last Weekend was the end of Hubs week off from work.
He decided he wanted to go to the monthly Chess Club Tournament held somewhere outside of Philly.
So he was gone all day on Saturday.

While he was gone, Daughter and I held another Stockpile Sale.  It was the same set up as the one I held in July...one day for 4 hours with big neon green signs saved from the last sale, posted on the roads leading up to our house.  Man, those signs just draw the regular yard salers in like flies on a garbage truck.lol

We opened the garage door about 15 minutes early this time and there were no early bird/dealers sitting waiting for us to open to pounce on all those copies of the Declaration of Independence for a quarter we were selling....don't they wish!
I put out some of the old/vintage/new in the box toys I had earmarked to send to Salvation Army that were still lying around the house as well as the toiletries.

It was slow at first but picked up by 9am and we had fairly steady business until almost noon.
With the slow start I didn't think we'd make near what we made in the July sale, but in the end, we finished up with $335.50.   That makes our total $682.50 for the year's sales.
And a good bit of what we sold was the old toys and collectibles.  I was shocked by how much of that went really!

Good sellers.....toothbrushes, mouth wash, shampoo, soap, cans of coffee, nail polish, diapers, Olay stuff, batteries, Lysol spray, deodorant, vitamins.  Anything I put into the crate marked "Everything 75¢".lol
Stuff that sat.....high end shampoos, men's razors, women's bladder pads.
This go round a wider range of items sold well, so there wasn't much that I didn't sell some quantity of.

We've been using our Garage Sale profits to purchase college needs for Daughter this week.  That was the deal I made with her--if she wanted me to buy some of this college stuff, she had to help me hold the sale and raise some cash.
The rest of the profits will go toward food buying and/or the extra gas we'll be using hauling kids and their stuff back to two different colleges later this month.

I'll be boxing up the toiletries that are leftover and deciding whether I have enough to do the flea market in September.  Just eyeballing what is left, it looks to be that I've sold about half of the extras I started with so it's worth the trip to hit the flea market and make a little more cash.  I just dread getting up at 4am to get there in time to get a spot to set up in.

Also, since the toys sold so well, I am pondering whether I should hold a Toy Sale the end of September before the weather turns bad.  I still have a LOT of toys in the storage unit and I'm thinking I can get people to buy for Christmas presents, as the end of September is close enough to the Holidays to get them spending on toys.  I'd prefer to do this in October, but the weather would be too awful by then.
Not having the Toiletries Stockpile will free up room for items in the garage as well as what I can put on the driveway.  I'm still indecisive on this idea though as it's a lot of work digging all the toys out in time and setting it up.  It's not like I don't have anything else to do with my time.lol

So the rest of Saturday was a couple of errands and a nap.
Hubs didn't do very well at his tournament unfortunately.  He usually wins them but not this time so he wasn't up for doing much that evening.

Sunday Hubs sat around and relaxed mostly.
Daughter got to drag my tired ass around stores for 3 hours, to start spending all that stockpile sale profit on college shopping.  Go me! 8-P
Though it rained most of the day, the sun came out long enough for us to take a dip in the pool later.

Today Daughter reneged on painting the powder room for me for pay.  She decided after sanding down one wall, she doesn't want to do the prep work(sanding, spackling, priming)on this massive 8'x4' room.
She only wants to slap paint on the walls.
So now the room won't get painted.
We'll have been in this house 11 years next week and this powder room is still the mess it was when we moved in.
Can you tell I am pissed?
I wonder if I return all the shit I've bought for her to go to college if she will find her passion for work again?

8 more days until she leaves.
And yes I AM marking them off on the calendar! ;-)

Sluggy