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| I bought an orchid plant as a gift to some friends, this upcoming weekend. We get to enjoy it's beauty in our house, until Sunday. |
Groceries
I am low on brown rice, vegetable oil and vinegar. Plus I will need dairy milk and almond milk for the month. I'm still hoping to find a good deal on avocados. I will pick up more bananas from Trader Joe's. Cash & Carry has 3-lb blocks of frozen spinach on sale this week, and I'd like to pick up a couple. Otherwise, I think there is nothing else that we really need. But I will stock-up on deals as I find them. And I will buy $2 of treat items from Dollar Tree, like chips and crackers. I am making some almond cookies as a gift, this week. So I will need whole almonds. I will pick those up on Senior Discount day at Fred Meyer.
Household
We are still needing low wattage lightbulbs. It's embarrassing, but the 5-light kitchen fixture has 2 burnt out bulbs. I'll be making a trip to Home Depot in the next week or so, and will pick up light bulbs, then.
Flats for starting seeds indoors. I am down to one flat for indoor seed-starting. The rest of the flats developed cracks over the past few years, thus leak badly (fine for outdoors, not fine for indoors). I will also pick those up at Home Depot, very soon. The seed-starting flats are more likely to motivate me to get to Home Depot than the lightbulb issue.
I make a run to Dollar Tree just once per month, now. I found I was needlessly spending too much by stopping in, on a whenever-basis. So, at Dollar Tree this month, I'll pick up q-tips and cotton make-up removal squares, for one daughter's theater class -- Stage Make-up (yes, she is in class putting on and taking off make-up!). I can also use those q-tips in cleaning the ridges of the refrigerator/freezer gasket. Toothpicks (for cleaning the tiny gap between the stove and counter top), liquid dish detergent (for hand-washing dishes), shampoo for daughters, toothbrushes (Dollar Tree sometimes has containers of 6 toothbrushes, they're soft and wear out in a month, but that's how often we like to replace them), and I'm still looking for a cheap squeegee for window washing. I'll check Dollar Tree and Home Depot.
Yard and Garden
I need some more soil for an area where I will put some of my potted daffodil bulbs. This bed has sunk over the years and we want to bring the level up. We'll also pick up the work on the walkway from the driveway to the back yard (on the side of the house). We've been slowly adding a walkway with pavers. I think this year, we could complete the work. And February is a good month to begin. I can fit about 18 pavers in the trunk, each time I go to Home Depot. This Saturday will be the first HD trip for this new year, if I can rouse one of my kids to come with me.
Also, last week I killed 4 mosquitos in the house! Those of you with snow still on the ground may find that hard to believe. This could prove to be a bad year for us with mosquitos. We have a seasonal creek (AKA a drainage ditch), a small pond and a large pond (AKA "the swamp") on the property. We try to stay on top of the mosquitos with treatment (BT -- it's a safe alternative, for humans that is, to traditional insect killers). I'll pick up some more dunks for the pond and pellets for the stream this month, and get a jump start on the mosquitos for the year.
I am very relieved to not "need" very much, right now. We have some large expenses coming up with work that needs doing on our house. We've been slowly replacing the 40-year old windows throughout our house, with more energy efficient ones. This time, it's the living room windows. We've been putting off replacing this room's windows as they could be among the most expensive window replacement in our home. While we have the money saved, I still hate to see the balances in our accounts drop so much after having some work done. On the up side, new windows will not only be more energy efficient, but they will look beautiful, too. The current ones are double-paned, but the seal has been broken for years, and moisture has leaked between the sheets of glass.
If you will -- keep me in thoughts and prayers, today. I have my follow-up to the follow-up this morning.
