Bloggers United Federation

Sonya Ann has started a small consortium of bloggers. *yikes I wrote bloogers but fixed it!*

Anyway, we are a group of assorted bloggers banding together to support each other's blogs.
As SA our fearless leader said it, "It is really about building a solid network for all of us, driving more people to each other's blogs and hopefully, earning more. "

I urge you to join with us if you have a blog.
Just let me or Sonya Ann know, either by leaving a comment on one of our blogs or by emailing us directly, and we'll "hook you up".

All you have to do is simply to promise to go to other member's blogs and to link to each other every so often to get your readers to become other BUF's members' readers.
This isn't limited to a certain genre of blog, a certain country, age or sex.....except no x-rated blogs though you can say PORN every now and then. ;-)

Heck, maybe some day we'll have a convention or something......or I'll show up on your doorstep......ok, maybe that's too creepy, huh? ;-)

I've made a separate page containing the List of the Bloggers United Federation Members which is the tab titled "Bloggers United Federation" (duh!)at the top of this blog.  Each member is a hyperlink so you can just click on their name and go to their blog.
Leave them some comments, let them know who sent you there and just show them some love, ok?

I have also included(most were already there anyway)the BUF Members' blogs on my blog roll.  Each BUF member has an asterisk next to their listing there, to denote their membership.


So come on, what are you waiting for?!
Join us.

Sluggy

Ancestral Connections Are Everywhere!

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered 2 years ago that my bloggy friend Sonya Ann and I are related.  We are 9th cousins.
She and I are descended from Captain Samuel Snead(my 10th Great Grandfather, her 9th Great Grandfather).
He was our first Snead to immigrate to American. Samuel came to the Virginia Colony with his wife, Alice Gallimore Snead and their son, William, in 1635.

Our most recent shared ancestor is Samuel Sneed's grandson, John Sneed, who married Alice Tinsley.
From there our ancestor's branch off, Sonya's line being the son William Sneed of New Kent, Virginia and mine, the son Samuel Sneed of Hanover, Virginia.  Back then, name spellings were quite fluid, Snyd or Snead one time, Sneed the next time.  Over the years the spelling of the name got standardized in her line to SNEED, my line to SNEAD, but it's the same family line.

One of the famous cousins we share--Golfer Sam Sneed.  My 6th cousin 3x removed.

Anyway, who would have thunk it, that I'd find a long lost cousin in blogland?

So imagine my surprise when I had my last giveaway and the winner, chosen at random, had the same last name as the maiden name of one of my 3rd Great Grandmothers!

I emailed her if she knew anything about her family history and after some back and forth we discovered that we share an ancestor in Abraham Stapp II who married Dorothy Moss 1678.  Abraham was 2nd generation of that family born in America. We are 8th cousins 2x removed(I am straight 8th cousins with her grandfather).

One of the famous people we almost share, Scott Stapp of the grunge band Creed.  He took his stepfather's surname so genetically we aren't cousins.

But we do share this guy.....

Kentucky legend & frontiersman Moses Stepp.  That's his grave in Martin County, KY.


I find this happening every time I turn around.  I find ancestral connections to people I meet in my life.

More recently I was talking to another blogger buddy, Jay, and he said he was related to Roy Rogers(Roy's real name was Leonard Franklin Slye).

 Well I went to look up Roy's parents and Leonard's mother was named Mattie Womack.  Gee, I have a line of Womacks in my family lines. I traced Roy's maternal side Womack line back a bit and wouldn't you know, it flows back to Prince Edward County, Virginia, where my Womack's were too.
I feel confident that once I do some more digging I'll find the actual link to Roy Rogers maternal line of Womacks to mine.
So far on the paternal side of Sly family I haven't done enough research to connect Jay but he says it is there.
So while Jay and I aren't cousins we are both probably each related to Roy Rogers, Jay through the paternal line and me through the maternal line, so we are from allied families.

It sure is a small, small ancestral world we live in.




Have you done any genealogy research that led you back to famous or infamous people in your family tree?

Sluggy
 

I'm Skeptical

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this blog......HERE.

This Mavis Butterfield person seems like a kindred spirit....even if she seems to be an Uber gardener.
She use to coupon heavily and went into that extreme couponing mode when it was hot a few years back just like me, and her food spending was under $100 a month for 2 years.   We both stopped doing the heavy couponing for free stuff thing as we saw that most of the things you got for free using coupons were NOT good for you.  Mavis' food spending shot up a little bit but still stayed under $185 a month overall in 2013 and 2014.

Now she has challenged herself in 2015 to only spend $100 a month on food for her family of 4.
Oh, and she is only grocery shopping at Costco for the year.
Yeah.

Ok, so before everyone gets all depressed and disheartened that they can't feed a family of 4 for a year on $1,200, let's talk about this.
I applaud her for doing this but really, she isn't only spending $100 a month for food.
She is going into this challenge with a whole kitchen/pantry full of things bought before the challenge started.
Condiments, spices, staples like sugar, flour, etc.
Plus she seems to have a lot of preserved food starting off too(she's mentioned a ton of frozen blueberries about 5 times in what I've read so far...lol).
Plus she is using gift cards gifted to her and getting free Zaycon credit for meats when people sign up through her referral link.
And she is doing bartering with neighbors to get a bit of variety into her rotation so no money changing hands.

She is not even 4 months into the year and almost up to $500 in spending but feels her monthly totals will be going down once she can start harvesting from her garden so yah, that should give her lower totals OOP.
But is she adding in all the costs associated with growing that food?  Seeds, tools, added water use for her home, the costs to preserve the foods she grows......they all add up, don't they?

As for Costco.......we don't have one here and I've only been in one once(this past January).  It seems to me similar to those other warehouse places like Sam's Club and BJ's.
Isn't the running joke you can't get out of a warehouse store without spending at Least $100 a trip? lolz

I don't know.
The large packages of stuff is fine for things you eat often but what about dishes you only need a small amount of something for?
She batch cooks and freezes dishes too which is fine if you have ample freezer space.

Back in 2010 I grew just shy of 94 lbs. of food that year.  It will be interesting to see if she meets her goal of growing TWO THOUSAND POUNDS of food this year. 

I'm going to continue to follow along with this scheme and see how it pans out.
Hey, I am game for anything that brings down my food bill without making us eat a less healthy and/or less varied diet.....aren't you?  ;-)


And now I am off into an online suckhole looking at articles/blogs on feeding your family on $100 a month......


Sluggy




 

This Week on the Dining Table

The "Finding New Things to Clear Out" Edition.....

Just when you think you have everything cleared out you find something else to get rid of.
Last weekend after hauling the daughter's stuff down to the living room I opened the door to the basement and spied a basket hanging on the wall of the stairwell.  It use to hold dog supplies.  No dogs anymore so I will post this lot on the local Freecycle board.  I also have a metal dog crate, a dog house and an outdoor chain link metal dog run/kennel to rehome.
And then there are the pol stairs behind the run/kennel out back.
Sigh.
So much to get rid of.......

 

Anyway, onward to the meal planning!

 

Here's what was planned last week.......

1.  Spaghetti and meatballs, salad
2.  Ham and bean soup

3.  Fish, potato salad, whatever veggies I can dig out of the freezer
4.  Kielbasa on rolls, grilled onions, Brussels sprouts

5.  Chicken and Confetti pepper fajitas

6.  Leftovers
7.  Maybe get Take-out or BLTs(if I can find some nice tomatoes this week)

And this is what actually happened--

1.  Spaghetti and meatballs, salad
2.  Ham and bean soup(I had broccoli cheese soup)

3.  Fish, potato salad, Brussels sprouts
4.  Kielbasa on rolls, grilled onions(hubs ate leftover pot. salad too, I had some salad)

5.  Chicken and Confetti pepper fajitas

6.  Leftovers
7.  Take-out Chinese

Everything went as planned, more or less.

Last week I made 2 trip to the food stores and spent $37.69 OOP on $69.66 worth of reg. retail groceries. 

I had 0 transactions at Rite-Aid last week.
And that one won't be changing for some time to come. lolz

$209.76 spent of my $300 April food budget, leaving us $90.24 for the last 10 days of the month. 

Leftovers going into this week are--1 slice of quiche, corn, mac and cheese, 2 soups, spaghetti and meatballs and fajitas filling.
 

Here is the plan for this week.........

1.  Hamburgers on rolls, Corn on cob
2.  Leftovers

3.  Meatloaf, Squash & Onions, Macaroni Salad
4.  Ravioli, Salad

5.  Salmon, Macaroni Salad leftovers, Sugar Snap Peas/Corn

6.  Lena's Lemon Chicken w/Zuchinni, rice
7.  Leftovers

2 nights of leftovers and 5 nights of new dishes. 

 

What I need to buy for this menu......squashes, ground beef, coc. (In reality we went to Maine Source on Sunday and bought these already but since meal plan runs Sunday to Saturday this spending goes on this coming week's week.)  I plan on spending about $40 this week(with the ground beef being the bulk of that spending).

 

What is getting fixed and served at your house this week?    

Was last week's plan successful, did you go off plan or did you not even plan what was going to be eaten that week?

Any great deals on food at your stores this week?

Sluggy

Weekend Accomplishments

It was gloriously WARM yesterday(it hit 77F degrees here!)and sunny on Saturday so hubs and I headed outside to work on an outdoor project we didn't get to last year.

This is the side of our house.  It's the westerly side and doesn't get much sun most days right next to the house.
We cleared it out last year(pulled up lots of tree and bush starts)and dug up a big ugly bush to the right of this photo.
The shrubs flanking the tree trunk are Forsythia.  The one on the left is too close to the house and just a spindly mess so we ended up pulling that one up too.

We found what looked like a buried GI Joe in there too but it was just his arm stuck in the ground.
Oh, the things you find years after your children grow up.......

So we got the area raked out of sticks and leaves, leveled the dirt abit and got the edging set and pounded into the ground.  Next comes landscaping barrier and then pretty white stones.  Once the tree leafs out this area is very shaded.  I plan on getting that bench this year to place into the bed and I'll hang my wind chimes in that little tree.  It will become a nice cool place to sit outside when the weather gets hot.  There may be a bird bath in the future near here, out in the side yard too.
Now we need to arrange for the delivery of stones.

This is what this area looked like last Summer.
It's impossible to get grass to grow over here so this stone bed will be a nice compromise....plus it will be less area to mow for hubs.

I also started cleaning up/uncovering the back garden bed on Saturday while hubs was doing the "down on your knees" stuff....

Lots of dead leaves.  It's still too early to plant here but I hope to get at least a part of the bed ready to sow some lettuce seeds soon.

Some onion sets that wintered over in this barrel planter are growing already too.
I need to get proactive this year with the garden.
Maybe I'll keep track of how much I grow this year like I did back in 2010!

We've got the leveled and round place in the backyard now where our above ground pool use to be.
It gets a lot of sun so would be perfect for growing stuff here.
Maybe I'll scrap all the sand off of there and turn it into a garden bed?
Or since it has electricity running back there, maybe I should put in a pond or put a fountain out there?

I don't know about a pond though.....it's a lot of work to maintain and real estate professionals will tell you that putting in too much outdoor/yard stuff will keep some people from buying your house(when we go to sell in 3 years).  People are turned off usually by landscaping and "stuff" in that vein since it all needs maintenance.  People don't want to spend their days working on their yards.  They want simple, nice looking and easy to maintain from what I've been reading.  There seems little sense to us to put in time/money into the yard that won't make it more saleable in 3 years.

What do y'all think we should do with this piece of the backyard?

We still need to clean up the front flower bed, get more plants to put in there and then re-mulch.  It's too early to plant yet but we can clean it up, probably next weekend.  By the time I can see again(after my cataract surgery)College Boy will be home and I can buy plants and have him help me get them put in before we go off on our road trip to Louisiana.

Today we are off to drop a load at Salvation Army, mostly made up of our daughter's cast-offs, and then to Maine Source for some produce and meat.

What are you up to today?

Sluggy