Later this week I have to do some serious grocery shopping, my cabinets, fridge and freezer are really looking bad! So I hopped online earlier to see what’s on sale at my local grocery stores. I was able to grab a few AMAZING deals last weekend at a store I normally don’t shop at, so I made sure to head over and check their sales ad for this week. All I can say is WOW, am I ever glad I did that! They’re having a HUGE sale this week on tons of the stock up type items that I need the most! By huge sale I mean that they are offering OODLES of items 10 for $10 and you get an 11th item free. The really cool thing is that you can mix or match the items, so you don’t have to buy 10 of a certain item if you really don’t need 10 of them!

So I went through their sales ad, as well as the sales ads of the other stores I like to grocery shop at and made myself a list! I about choked when my printer finished printing it out and I seen that I had almost 5 pages of stuff that I wanted to pick up…LOL! I doubt I’ll be able to get all of the items I want, but at least I know where I’m going to be able to get the items I want and need the most at the best possible price!

Today we’ve managed to catch a couple of the Fast and Furious movies and tonight I’ve been chilling out with my daughter watching Titanic, one of my all time favorite movies! I used to have Titanic on DVD, but sometime over the past few years I’ve apparently lost it, so it’s nice to watch it tonight with very minimal commercial interruptions!

I’m happy to report also that my daughter is much happier with her “new to me” computer now that we’ve been able to give it a little extra computer memory late this afternoon to help it run a little faster! It’s not that it wasn’t running well before that, it’s just that it was a little laggier than it needed to be in order to run some of the games and programs she uses.

I haven’t received any more phone calls today from family members, and right now I need it to stay that way! Most of the sickness I felt earlier has passed and I was actually able to keep the few bites of mashed potatoes that I ate at dinner time down, which is a HUGE plus!

Anyway, I need to get back to the movie and my daughter, she’s getting a bit impatient with me…LOL! This is one of her favorite movies too!

My children are a little more than 2 years apart in age, and one of the things that made my life the easiest when they were small was a good stroller! One of the worst things about strollers, even 13 years ago, was the fact that they were heavy and awkward! On top of that, if you wanted to take it anywhere that didn’t offer paved walks or smooth floors, you played heck trying to push it!

Parents these days have the benefit of advanced technology as well as the experiences from parents like me to thank for things like the Bugaboo stroller. These are, without a doubt, one of the most awesome strollers I have ever came across and I wish like heck they had these when my kids were little! Not only are they nice to look at, they are also light weight, compact, very well built and offer parents the ability to not only use them in places that offer paved paths and finished floors, they can easily be used in areas with rough terrain like paths and grassy areas!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that strollers had advanced from what they were when I was a small child to where they were when my own children were small, but a Bugaboo stroller would have been nice to have had VS the strollers that were available when my children were small!

It’s been two weeks since we buried my nephew. His death and funeral provided four of the most gut wrenching, stress filled days I have experienced in a very long time. But thanks to the support of my wonderful husband and children as well as several online friends, I made it through those days. Then with the success of finding a job this past Wednesday, it finally felt like some of the drama and stress that was going on in my life was about to subside.

You know, the affects that stress have on your body are amazing! I swear stress is better than even the best fat burner when it comes to weight loss! It prevents you from being able to eat, and it causes migraines that induce nausea and vomiting, at least it does in me! This is exactly where I’ve been since around 10 PM last night, thanks to a family member.

I’m being accused of losing/misplacing the memory card from my late nephew’s digital camera. I brought the camera home 2 weeks ago when I was making his video. I took the card out of his camera, put it in my computer, copied the pictures off the card that his family wanted used, put the card back into his camera and put the camera back into it’s bag. I am 100% certain that this is what I did because I told my husband as I was putting the card back into the camera that the last thing his family would want right now would be for me to lose or damage the memory card. I had the top of my desk 100% cleaned and organized while I was working on his video so that nothing would get damaged or lost.

I’m the first person to admit to and fix what I’ve done wrong and correct my mistakes when I can. Keeping his memory card serves me absolutely no purpose or benefit. I know what I did and exactly how I did it, I also know what I didn’t do. I can’t fix this and it’s ultimately going to cost me my entire family and what pisses me off is that I didn’t do anything wrong! So, I’m throwing my hands up in the air and giving up. At this point in time I’m not sure I’ll ever do anything for anyone again because it causes nothing but stress and grief!

We’ve been told that because our house is directly in one of the flight paths of the nearby airport, that’s the biggest reason why the cell phone signal in the area is as poor as it is! And it’s actually been suggested to us more than once that we look into a cell signal booster for our home and our vehicles. I think what amazes me the most is the fact that it’s nearly impossible to pull in a reliable signal on my cell phone in my yard, but if I go less than half a mile down the road I’ve got a full signal.

It stinks that I moved into a “dead zone” area for cell phone service, but hopefully some day I can pick up a good booster and change that! In the mean time, if you call my cell phone, don’t be surprised if it goes straight to voicemail

Trick or Treat

Witches, ghosts, and goblins.
Stealing down the street,
Knock on every door way,
Trick or treat!

When your door is opened,
This is what you meet,
Scary creatures shouting,
Trick or treat!

I remember all of us kids up there on the stage in our masks made from construction paper singing this song, the melody of it is still in my head almost like it was just yesterday that I sang the song…LOL! Remember how it used to be cool to cut a couple of holes in a white sheet for your eyes and go trick or treating as a ghost? And my all time FAVORITE costume, the one I wore most often as a kid, was when I’d borrow a pair of pants and flannel shirt from my grandfather. Then my mom or grandmother would cut holes and sew patches on them in various places. We’d take a handkerchief and fill it full of paper then tie the ends of it around a stick. I’d put the altered clothes on and tie a piece of twine through the belt loops so use like a belt, mom would take black shoe polish and rub it lightly into my face and I’d proclaim I was the BEST hobo ever! LOL

Last night I had to stop at the store on my way home from my orientation to pick up break and milk. It never ceases to amaze me how intricately designed Halloween costumes are these days! They had every type of Halloween costume you could imagine for sale in the store! Long gone are the days of simplicity, replaced with what seems almost like a competition judged by cost rather than the imagination! Yes, I do realize that some kids and parents still do use their imagination and make their own costumes, but judging by the amount of empty space on the costume racks when we’re still four weeks away from Halloween, I’d have to say the people that do are getting fewer and farther between those that don’t!

Yes, I have had some fairly traumatic things happen in my life, but I’ve also had many more wonderful things happen as well! I grew up on a farm, in the country, with a very wonderful family! Life was always very busy! If we weren’t in the fields planting, fertilizing or harvesting crops, we had livestock to take care of! During the times that those things were taken care of and I didn’t have anything to do, were the times that I had the most fun.

Growing up like I did was a completely amazing experience! I learned the lesson about how good it feels to do hard work and I learned that it’s the simple things in life that bring you the most happiness! Things like laying on a blanket in the yard on a summers day listening to CKLW and trying to figure out exactly what animal that cloud in the sky looked like. Or swinging so fast and high on a tire swing that you swore you were going to crash into a huge tree limb!

Eventually I replaced CKLW with WIOT and when my parents started becoming grandparents they replaced that old tire swing with one of those really nice wooden swing sets because it would be safer for their grandchildren. But my point is that it’s those simple things that I remember the most about my childhood, and it’s those memories that mean the most to me! Life was so different back then compared to what it is now.

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon backing soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, melted
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons vanilla
2 eggs
1/2 package milk chocolate chips

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Line cookie sheet(s) with parchment paper or grease thoroughly.
2. Mix/sift flour, baking soda and salt and set aside.
3. In a medium sized bowl cream together butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. Beat in vanilla and eggs until creamy. Mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda and salt) until well blended. Stir in milk chocolate chips by hand with a wooden spoon.
4. Drop cookie dough onto prepared cookie sheet(s) by tablespoon, making sure they are about 3 inches apart.
5. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes or until the edges get a golden color. Remove from oven, allowing them to cool on cookie sheet(s) for a few minutes before moving them to wire racks or table to cool completely.

This batch makes approximately 4 dozen cookies if you make them on the smaller side, less if you make them larger, so if you want to make a large batch I would suggest mixing up a double batch of the ingredients. I’ve never really cared for Chocolate Chip Cookies, but I LOVE these ones! They remind me quite a bit of the soft version of Chips Ahoy cookies that you can buy in the stores!

Ingredients
3 cups sugar
2 cups Crisco oil
4 eggs
2 teaspoons baking soda (dissolve in liquid ingredients)
6 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups buttermilk (I’ve used both the fresh and the powdered, both work fine!)
6 cups flour
3 teaspoons vanilla
Colored sprinkle sugar

The MOST important things about this recipe are A). It makes a HUGE amount of batter, so you may want to cut it in half and B). dissolving the baking soda into the liquid ingredients HAS to be done or the cookies don’t turn out correctly! I’ve also found that it’s best to have at least 2 cookie sheets when baking these, but more than 2 is even better! Also, if you don’t have a stand mixer, it’s VERY helpful if you havea
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (232 Degrees C) and line cookie sheet(s), or grease thoroughly.
2. In a LARGE mixing bowl sift together the flour, sugar and baking powder and set aside.
3. In another large mixing bowl mix oil, eggs, vanilla, buttermilk and baking soda.
4. Slowly pour sifted dry ingredients into liquid ingredients mixing continuously until thoroughly mixed. It is a very “runny” mixture, with almost a paste consistency.
Baking Directions
This is where things get REALLY REALLY busy, I have made these many, many times and the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you start baking these, you absolutely cannot walk away!
Drop dough by tablespoon onto lined or greased cookie sheets, sprinkle with colored sugar if desired and bake in the oven for 6 minutes.

That six minutes they are baking gives you just enough time to get the next sheet ready to put into the oven when you take one out. The “method” that I’ve found that works well goes like this. A). Prepare first sheet and put into the oven B). Prepare next sheet to go into oven C). Pull sheet out of oven when the timer goes off, remove from sheet and place on table or counter (I usually cover a small folding table with aluminum foil or waxed paper to put the cookies on when I remove them from the cookie sheet) D). Put next cookie sheet into oven.

These cookies are VERY light and almost fluffy. I have found that I don’t like how they taste when they are frosted, so that’s why I sprinkle the tops of them with colored sugar before baking. I change the color of the sugar according to what season I’m baking them in or for the occasion I am baking them for (i.e. red and green sprinkle sugar for Christmas, pastel colored sprinkle sugar for Easter, etc.) They also freeze VERY VERY well, so I rarely cut the recipe in half, I just freeze part of them after I bake them. It’s probably one of the most time consuming cookies I have ever baked because of the fact that you cannot walk away from them, but I’ve found that they are well worth the time and they’ve become a family favorite! My other family members have come to expect a big plate of these every year for Christmas, almost to the point that I’ve thought about telling them they need to find out if there is a drug rehab program for cookie addicts…LOL!

So, there you have it, my two MUST HAVE cookie recipes! Let me know if you try them out and if you like them! HAPPY BAKING!!!!!

The past two weeks have been extremely stressful! It was two weeks ago yesterday that my nephew passed away suddenly, two weeks ago today I spent the day with family, trying to do what I could to help out. The day after that I spent the entire day putting together the tribute video for my nephew, and ran into problems in the end stages because the program I was used to using didn’t publish DVD’s and I was totally unfamiliar with the program I ended up using, which really made me freak out!

Then there was the day that everything blew up with my family over the video, which ended up with me spending the visitation day and the day of the funeral with the vast majority of my family pissed off at me and completely avoiding me, leaving me feel completely abandoned by them.

Since then, there has been some fairly major financial stresses, my kids freaking out over really dumb things, two weeks with little to no communication with family members, a dog totally destroying a sofa, finding out that we lost our health insurance because of letters that were mailed to us that we NEVER received, and then there is the fact that I spent three days kind of stressing out over going on the first job interview I’ve been on in over 5 years.

I know that stress can mess with your mind and your health. But can it also make you completely forget something you normally do on a regular basis? I recently joined a forum and would visit it several times a day. Out of the middle of nowhere, I completely forgot about giong there and haven’t went to it in quite a few days. My brain feels like it’s complete mush right now, I’m feeling so tired all the time lately, yet when I go to bed, I can’t get my brain to shut down, so I lie there flipping channels on the TV for a while before I can finally fall asleep.

What I’m wondering is, do I need to be worried about this to the point that I should see a doctor? To me it just seems like something that will eventually pass, but the fact that I completely forgot about something I did on a daily basis kind of bothers me. I don’t have health insurance right now, so going to the doctor today, or even this week, is not at all possible! I don’t know what to do honestly. I think if I just try to chill out, it will eventually pass. And it’s not like I’m not used stress, because it’s been a part of my life for a long time. So, what do you think?

What I like most about the job that I’m interviewing for today is the fact that it’s a job doing something I LOVE doing! What is is for, you ask? I’m interviewing for a position as a baker. Can you say YUMMY?? LOL And it’s in a place that I LOVE LOVE LOVE to eat at as well, double bonus!!!

I’ve gotten my clothes for the interview ironed and laid out, about the only thing left to do is use my most current acne treatment, grab a shower and get ready. But it’s a little less than 3 hours until the interview, so it’s too early to start getting ready yet. I know I should start early though because I’m going to make an attempt to do something with my hair to make it look decent. It’s at one of those REALLY fugly growing out stages and there’s not much that can be done with it without putting some major effort into it, which totally is not me….LOL! But I’m totally sick of having short hair again, so it’s growing out again even if it means I have to do fuss with it daily!

But OMG, I’m a freaking nervous wreck! Honestly, the last job interview I went on was over 5 years ago! The most recent job I held that wasn’t working from home was one that was offered to me by a neighbor, so there was no interviewing for that job…LOL! But he moved shop at the end of the year and no longer needed me since he was going to run the office part of it from his home. But we’re in a financial position right now where one of us needed to find a job yesterday! So I’ve been filling out applications and sending my resume out to as many places as I can find to apply online.

Speaking of finances, I’d like to point out my new page here on the site. I know that the economy is the pits for EVERYONE right now, that I’m not alone with what I’m going through financially, but I’m in a bit of a “pickle” right now, so I’m reaching out to you all for help. My new page is title Donations and yes, that’s exactly what it’s about. The biggest reason I’m filling out applications and sending out resumes online is simply because I’m about as broke as you can be. If I do manage to get this job today I’m then left trying to figure out how I’ll get enough gas to keep me going back and forth to work. Besides that I have the fees for my site(s) coming due. I’m sorry to ask, but if you could help me out a bit, I’d really appreciate it!