Snowball Fights Anyone?

What a grey day we had in Pennsyltucky yesterday.
First off here was my view in the morning....

I was trapped in a hospital waiting on specialists to come poke and prod me.  Mostly I just answered questions about my sleep.  They feel I need a BiPAP machine at night so a new sleep study has been ordered.  Oh goody!  I get to try to sleep in a strange bed in a hospital with cameras watching me and all kinds of electrodes and gizmos hooked up to me next week.
Can.
Not.
Wait.
8-P

Then in the afternoon, here was my view......

Sitting in the car in the parking lot of the grocery store, waiting for my daughter.  I was out of turkey for my new tradition of a turkey sandwich daily for lunch.
Rain was a bad thing since my Hubs replaced my windshield wipers but they aren't working correctly.  They move alright but they just don't REmove any water from the windshield.  I think he pushed down on the center of the wiper arms when he attached them, so that the curve of the glass is not lining up with the curve of the blades, so they just flap back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.....

Here was my view from my back door in the early evening.
About 7pm, the skies opened up and it started hailing......

And it hailed some more......

And more......

And by the time it ended 5 minutes later, the deck looked like it was time for snowball hailball fights.....

Here's a shot from our front door after some had melted......

And here over by our shed.  Where the grass is dead it looks like white flowering ground cover plants.....

Now actual snow in May is not unheard of here but hail at any time of the year is a rarity.

Sluggy

 

APRIL 2013 Budget Results....Food & Toiletries Spending

 

Here are my FOOD BUDGET spending totals for APRIL 2013.

I have posted April's totals on the right side bar under Total Grocery Savings for 2013 and updated the Yearly Totals.
I am listing subtotals for each store I purchased from in April.  If you aren't interested in that much detail, just skip to the bottom for the Totals Summary.

My spending includes Food, Toiletries/HBA, Pet Supplies, Cleaning Products, Paper Goods & tax where applicable. We are a family of 5(4 at home this month)& 2 dogs. No kids under 17.
******************

MAINE SOURCE(restaurant supply)

OOP  $123.12

Value  $204.13

Savings   39.69%

SHURSAVE STORES(small local independent affiliated stores)
OOP  $243.20

Qs/Ads  $86.00

Value  $329.20

Savings  26.12%

WEIS MARKETS

OOP  $69.17

Qs/Ads  $10.25

Value  $79.42

Savings  12.91%

I am no longer adding my rebates received into my food budget directly. I will use them on food on occasion and will note that when used.  I will keep track of rebates/gift cards/certs received here as before however.

REBATE CHECKS RECEIVED IN April.....$0.00

GIFT CARDS and CERTIFICATES....$0

TOTAL Value of Cash/Store Checks/Gift Card Rebates Received...$0.00

COUPONS and FREEBIES

Zero

*********************
My best 3 Store Savings Totals were Maine Source at 39.69%, the Shursave affiliate market at 26.12% and Weis Market at 12.91%.  l only shopped at 3 different stores this past month. 8-)

TOTAL Out of Pocket........$435.49

TOTAL Coupons & Store Sales Savings...$177.26

TOTAL Value of Items Purchased............$612.75

TOTAL Savings of...................................29%

This closes out the April food/toiletries spending.

THOUGHTS & COMMENTS for this month.....

I went into April with $400 budgeted for food/toiletries for the month.  Overshot the budget by $35.49.  Not bad considering I didn't do any of the shopping the first half of April.

Exactly 1 ManQ was used in April.  I did NO Rite-Aid shopping in last month either.

Looking ahead to May---We'll stick to our $400 food budget again this month.  With the sudden changes I need to make to my diet this month I am not sure how this will affect our food budget.  I suspect we will need to spend more on food. May will see even more changes in our food spending.

 

And here is the run down of my Food & Toiletries Spending for 2013 so far--

2013 Total Saved $1109.98

2013 Yearly Total Value of Items  $2527.45

2013 Yearly Total Spent $1426.47

2013 Yearly Savings Total of 43.56%

How much did you spend on food in April?
 

Sluggy

Retiring on the High Seas

Hubs and I are in the pre-retirement phase of life.
We are still undecided about where we will be moving to once he retires from his job.
The only thing for sure is that we WILL be moving from here.

We go back and forth on where to go, what size house to buy, etc.
But I think I have found our retirement abode on Craigslist.

Check it out!
HERE

What do y'all think?

Sluggy

My Sexy Medical Test

Well I had my CAT scan last Tuesday.  It went well.  Too bad they don't take you early if you show up early though, since Hubs drove me and he arrives EARLY everywhere he goes.
Drives me nuts sometimes......

I have a touch of claustrophobia but I didn't feel any anxiety when they slid me into that machine.
Piece.
Of.
Cake.

They snapped pictures and then were going to inject a contrast and afterwards take some more pictures.
The contrast agent gets into your system via an IV line.
IVs.
These are always much fun with me, finding an acceptable vein near the skin surface of my arm and keeping an IV needle in it for any length of time.
I have "Houdini" veins.....now you see them, now you don't.
Also, I get really bad black and blue marks from IVs that take forever to disappear.
Here's my arm just this morning, a week after having this latest IV needle inserted.....

Back to the story......The technician who prepped me found a vein quickly and accessed it.
But after the first set of photos, when they injected the contrast, the needle came loose and the sticky liquid instead of shooting through my veins, shot into my ear, in my hair and all over the pillow.
What a mess!
Afraid to move I was frantically waving my fingers on my other hand trying to get someone in the control room's attention.
When they realized something wasn't right and came to fix the problem(ram the needle around in my arm looking for the vein again), it took about 20 more minutes before the IV was ready to function properly.

The technicians had said that when they inject the contrast you'll feel a warmth in your chest and you may get warm because of the iodine in the solution.
Well, of course I am weird, you all know that, so after I got that warmth in the chest sensation, my nether regions started tingling and heated up like nobody's business.
It was better than any "adult warming gel" for "her enjoyment" advertised on tv.
I know this is TMI and many of you are x-ing out of this page about now but I must say I rather enjoyed this part of the program and I am looking forward to any and all CAT scans in my future.
And my advise is, that if you ever have a CAT scan insist on one with contrast. ;-)

So the doc was checking for Pulmonary Embolisms(aka blood clots in the lungs) to rule them out.
Thankfully that was all clear.  Although it's been a month since I went to the hospital in crisis and I'm pretty sure if I had had a PE, it would have broken loose and killed me loooong before I had this test.

The images did come back showing a nodule on one of my lungs.  It is very small.  Now these can be either cancerous or not, so there is concern depending on what your risk level is.  I am not low risk and I'm not high risk for one of these to grow into something bad.  Because of being exposed to secondhand smoke from my SAHM as a child and having asthma, I have a moderate risk of this thing growing and changing.  So the plan is to keep an eye on it and have another scan in 6 months.

Oh goody!
Can't wait.....and I am serious.
The next time though I'll insist the technicians buy me dinner first.   ;-)

Sluggy

My Son, The Musician

We always liked when our children became interested in playing a musical instrument.
My background is in the "Arts", so I was always keen to find out when one of them showed an interest in something cultah'd.  

We found that the oldest son was a natural stage actor and singer from the age of 5.  It's hard to ignore when at the school wide chorus concert he was in at that time, when you overhear many parents in the audience asking their companions, "Who is that child?  He is amazing!"
And no, I was not imagining it. ;-)
He dabbled in the arts but by high school decided it wasn't for him.  His "acting" ability will stand him in good stead though as he pursues his goal of being a high school or college level History teacher.

The middle child, the Daughter, well, she was gifted in math and science, with nary an artistic bone in her little body.  She did take up the trumpet in middle school but I think that was more as a social thing to fit in.  She also sang in the school's chorus and performed in the musicals.  Though she was no prodigy, she did discover an affinity for the guitar as a pre-teen.  She taught herself to play it and when she continued to show interest we did pay for lessons.  She performed(or played back up for singers)at high school events but she hasn't decided to pursue music as a vocation.  It's a hobby she enjoys and the urge comes and goes.

When it came time for the youngest son to decide if he wanted to join the elementary school band class, he was MORE than ready!  I guess seeing his older siblings both learn and play the trumpet(plus his sister played the guitar and was teaching herself the keyboard), he wanted to do that(play music) too.  He never gave any indication as a little guy that he was artistic and we figured he'd try it and lose interest like so many kids do once they realize the work involved in learning and mastering an instrument.
But then, he told us that the hand-me-down trumpets, from his siblings, he would get to learn on were not to his liking.
HE wanted to play......the flute!
He was drawn to the flute from day one.  So I went on eBay and found a really good quality used instrument for cheap money so when he lost interest after a couple of years, I wouldn't feel bad about spending the money on it, and I might be able to resell it to boot. ;-)

His siblings tried to dissuade him from playing "that girly instrument".  They knew he's be teased for not playing the drums, the sax or one of those other loud brass instruments.  Despite their advice and influences, he decided on the flute.

And instead of losing interest after a year or two, he stuck with it.  He moved up to the middle school band and then was invited to join the high school marching band while still in middle school.  Once he was actually in high school, music became his life as a student.....well that and French class.  A day without a lesson or a music class or a musical after school activity was a day without sunshine for him.

At this point we decided to upgrade his instrument to a better quality one.  He was taking lessons through the school but the time came that private lessons were needed to get him to the next level.
He stumbled upon a wonderful flute teacher.  The local music store had an arrangement with instrument teachers and she was working with them.  Youngest got assigned to her for lessons and the two just clicked.  After a few months, the teacher went out on her own and youngest son decided to follow her instead of change teachers at the music store.  Then his 1/2 hour lesson expanded into 45 minutes.  He is pushing us now to pay for hour long ones.

This is all just a very long way to introduce this video(albeit a questionable quality video as it was taken with Daughter's phone) of #2 Son playing at the student recital for his flute and piano teacher, which was this past Friday evening.  It was his very first public performance as a soloist.

Youngest has been taking "serious" lessons for about a year now.  Though in the music world, he is considered a "late bloomer", he has made great strides in his technique. He has decided to go to college for music(if he gets accepted into a program)and work in some capacity of the music industry/business as his vocation.

Without further adieu, here is Noah performing "Sicilienne" by Gabriel Fauré

Sluggy