Boring Blog Box Giveaway Winner!

There were 43 valid entries for the latest Boring Box Giveaway.
I fed that number into the random number generator and out popped the number 16.
I went down the list of entries and The Winning Entry is.....

Frances  July 2, 2012 3:56 PM

Day 1 of my staycation. Well, we went a couple of towns over to a local farm to buy some produce.

FRANCES!

Congratulations Frances.

Please email me your mailing information so I can get this off to you.

And let me know if you want the kid's sunglasses are the reading "cheater" glasses.

Thanks to everyone for entering the Giveaway.  

I think I'm going to take some time off from doing anymore Giveaways for the rest of the summer.

I hope to resume once Fall gets here and I feel more energetic.

Sluggy

Triskaidekaphobia Friday at Rite-Aid

What makes Friday the 13th even better?
Why going to Rite-Aid and trying to cobble together a deal and laughing in the face of the bad luck gremlins, that's what!

And cobble is what I had to do since we didn't get any Revlon ManuQs lately and my store doesn't even carry the Zest Body Wash(which would have been free after +Ups and Q).  All the adults living here have an AdPerks account so I have access to 4 of each AdPerk Q.  This comes in handy at times and my store doesn't have a problem with me using multiples as long as each one is from a different account.

6 x Powerade drinks on sale .97¢=$5.82
2 x Reach dental floss on sale $3=$6.00
1 x U tampons on sale=$3.99
1 x Bic Big ass charcoal disc thing w/ 20% wellness disc.=$3.99
3 x Revlon scented nail polish 50% off($2.39)=$7.17
1 x Revlon clipper=$3.19
1 x Revlon tweezer 50% off($2.99)=$1.49
SubTotal.....$31.65

Coupons Used
3 x $1.50/2 Powerade/Dasani AdPerk Q=$4.50
2 x $2/1 Reach dental floss TearpadQ(from dentist office)=$4.00
1 x $1/1 U product ManuQ(Sunday inserts)=$1.00
1 x $1/1 U product AdPerkQ=$1.00
1 x $2/1 Bic disc Rite-Aid Q link sent to my email=$2.00
1 x $2/1 Bic disc Facebook ManuQ(its' a SS Q)=$2.00
3 x $2/1 Revlon nail polish AdPerk Q=$6.00
2 x $2/1 Revlon beauty tool AdPerk Q=$4.00
Coupon Total......$24.50

$31.65-$24.50=$7.15 + $.06 tax=$7.21

I had $7 in +Up Rewards to use up and I put the .21¢ left on my Rite-Aid gift card.
So ZERO out of pocket.

I received $7 in +Up Rewards back...($2 Reach, $1 U tampons, $4 for buying $10 or more in Revlon items).
And since the 2 beauty tools have a reg. retail price combined of $5 or more($5.18 to be exact), I can submit for a $4 SCRebate.

So I rolled my $7 in +Ups AND got paid $4 to buy this stuff.

The 'pons and floss are needs.
The beauty stuff is going into the Xmas stash for Daughter's stocking and the drinks are for the upcoming Bataan Death March Camp....er.....Marching Band Dehydration in the August Sun Camp.

I bought that Bic disc thing well, because with discount and Qs it was free!lol  No, really....we have a table top charcoal grill and if we ever go somewhere we can use it, now we don't have to lug a big bag of briquets with us.  If anyone has used this thing yet, give a shout out and tell us if it works, ok?


As of now, my Monthly Rite-Aid Stats for JULY are....

Out Of Pocket....$0.00 cash
Value of items bought....$65.52+$49.25=$114.77
Single Check Rebate due....$4.00

+Ups at beginning of month...$33+
+Ups used....$37+
+Ups received...$11+
+Ups currently...$7+ 


You've got one more day to work these deals at Rite-Aid.  New sales week coming up on Sunday.

Sluggy 

Channel Your Inner Hillbilly

Just a quickie for now.
Today's been busy and the humidity is kicking up again.....ack!

Here's a tune for your Friday to kick off the weekend.
I know it's no Stephen Colbert but....
I love this duo and I LOVE this song they do.
Their harmonies are off the wall....




And here's them doing this tune live for those who prefer the electricity of live performance over a glossy, over-produced music video.....



They only just started working together a couple of years ago. She was a Southern CA/LA-pop/rock gal and he was Southern bluegrass/old time country guy. But when they got together to write and perform their songs, it veered off into something more.

You may know them from working with Taylor Swift last year.  They were featured on that Hunger Games song she did.

Now crank your speakers up and channel your inner Hillbilly.....

Sluggy

I'm The Mother of A Bonafide Adult Today!

As of today, at 4:37 pm I have become the mother of a 21 year old adult.
Yes, my oldest child turns 21 today.

Here he is on New Years Eve when he was 18,  pretending his sparkling cider was 30 proof.  He's a real jokster, he is.  I wonder where he gets his most excellent sense of humor from?.....

I can only hope that the worst thing he'll do tonight is wear a lamp shade....lol
Actually, he has to wait until Saturday, his day off from his camp job, to tie one on, legally for the 1st time.

I don't have any funny/exciting birthing stories for this kid.   He came nine days early after 4.5 hours of actual "real" pushing labor(Ugh!) and he weighed the 7.5 lb. average amount for a boy baby.   He had a full head of hair and his head wasn't misshaped from the journey, which had all the L&M nurses ooing and ahing over him that he was so beautiful.  Luckily, he was too young to understand all that attention because if he had, he would have been impossible to live with the next 18 years. Yes, he has always had a high opinion of himself. lol

The only funny story I have is that my OB doctor kept telling me from 7 months onward at appointments that I should resign myself to having a C-section.
The doc would measure my belly at each appointment and at the rate it was growing, along with my weight gain, he said my baby was going to be ginormous.
Ok, maybe he didn't say ginormous....

The doctor, who was about 70 at the time... so you know he had birthed him a bucket load of babies.....he "knew" that this baby, if he went full term, was going to top out at OVER 10 lbs.   
10 lbs. easy he kept telling me!  So don't even go to Childbirth Class because you won't need it, he said.
With me being a person of small stature, there was no way in hell this behemoth baby was coming out the natural way was his esteemed opinion.

Well, turns out that the vast real estate that was my belly and uterus was NOT all baby!  I had an extremely large amount of amniotic fluid in there.  While most fetuses have a "kiddie pool" to swim around in, my son had himself an Olympic sized competition pool.  I know he did, because for 5 months I could feel him doing laps of the butterfly stroke.lol

My water broke at 2am on the 12th.  A pretty good sized gush it was, no dribbling and no confusion about it just being a prego lady pee leak.  It continued to break for 2 hours.  Every time I moved between my bed, the bathroom, the car,  the hospital wheelchair, hospital bed and again when they did an internal check, another "pocket" of water would be released and I left puddles of fluid.
I am an Aquarian so I guess it's only natural. ;-)

So the ginormous baby was not.  He was just the right size and fit nicely exiting the theater.


But how did he get from this......

To this.....making Christmas cookies this past Holiday for his steady Girlfriend.....

I tried to get him to learn to cook for YEARS but it took a girl he likes to get him motivated to finally try!


In less than 1 year he'll have graduated college and be officially on his own.
And in spite of having survived the trials of his parents, learning to parent on him first, he survived and thrived.

Another few years and I can kick it into Grandma Mode.......!

Happy 21st Birthday Matt!

Sluggy

Show Me Yours & I'll Show You Mine!

Sometimes I wonder about myself.
I think I am aware and "with it" but then things happen and I just shake my head at myself.

Like the other day when I was on someone's blog who is on my blogroll.....and I clicked on a link for someone on their blogroll and went to read a new-to-me blog.....and then I saw that this person had my blog on their blogroll.  And I was like, What?!?  How did I not know that?.....or who are they, do I know them?....it was a verbal head scratching of sorts.

And then I looked and this person evidently had become a follower at some point on my blog and put me in their blogroll but they never said anything about doing that to me nor had they ever left a comment on a post.
Because if they had I sure would have gone to their blog sooner and probably put them on my blogroll too.

I try to operate with some degree of neighborly etiquette out here in cyberspace.  I love to exchange links with other bloggers if I feel they are a good fit.  A "good fit" could be interpreted many ways......they are frugal, they are retired, they have teens, they talk about finances, they are funny, they practice the domestic skills, they live an interesting life, they are a woman of "a certain age", they are fun to read about, and so much more.

If you look at my blogroll, you'll see many voices.  All of them unique in their own way.

Likewise, I don't expect, but I feel it's neighborly for other bloggers that I have honored with inclusion in my blogroll to include me on their blogroll.  That's not to say that I won't put them on mine if they don't put me on theirs.  Some people are just more particular then I am as in "I have a XXX blog and I only link to other strickly XXX blogs", some people don't even HAVE blogrolls, some people are narcissistic and don't even consider/care that there are other writers out there,  and then there are the some people who are assholes.  Nobody who I read is an asshole.   ;-)

I have removed a few blogs over the years too.  I try not to do this but if  a blog is abandoned and not updated after half a year or so or if the blog changes drastically and goes in a direction I don't find palatable I will remove them.  IE-I removed a blog awhile back because they changed from personally written posts to writing advertising posts full of marketing hyperlinks to get them a higher score of some sort in advertising rankings.  Yah, they would start out talking about a subject and then veer off and become an advertisement for a law firm halfway across the country from where they are located.  Not cool.  There are ways of making a little cash off of your blog without turning the whole thing into a commercial.

All I am trying to say here is that if you have a blog, and you would like to exchange links with me and possibly grow your readership, EMAIL ME!  Also, if you have put me on your blogroll please let me know so I can reciprocate.

Sluggy