Queen of the Jumble

This is possibly the best pasta salad I’ve ever had, definitely the best I’ve ever made!! Vegetable rainbow bow ties, 4 medium tomatoes, 1 large cucumber, olives, grilled artichoke hearts from the jar, pepper rings, green onion, good seasons Italian dressing mix, and grated romano :-D

More salad creations…southwest salad with romaine, bell pepper, black beans, corn, green chiles, and bbq sauce.  Also, a greek salad (my fav) with romaine, cucumber, red onion, olives, artichoke hearts, feta, and lemon juice

Tried something a little different this week…after chopping all of the veggies and whatnot I placed them all in those fresh saver bags.  You know, the ones that say they keep your fruits and veggies from spoiling for weeks and weeks? Yeah so I wrapped everything up and stored them in my little shelving unit.  Today was my baja inspired salad with romaine, spanish brown rice, pico de gallo, mango, and lime!  Also, this is what I look like when I chop onions, real purdy I know ;-D

My friend tipped me off the other day that Target had these cube organizers on sale so I picked one up.  Only $40!  I already had these bins ready to go from the dollar tree because I was originally planning on building the furniture myself with the hubby but when I heard that price, I was like, “cha-ching!” ;-P  So yeah the whole thing was assembled that same day (thanks to a hammer, a screwdriver, and a little man-power aka my husband.) 

Ever wonder what an allergic reaction can look like?  Well, here it is! WOW, my son woke up the other day looking like this.  He was oblivious.  Jumped up and was ready to start the day like it was no big thing but I’m pretty sure I had the look of complete terror on my face.  If I ever wanted to know what Quasimodo is supposed to look like, I’d bet my son’s face was a close comparison.  So like any parent that finds their child in the morning with a swollen face and eyes, I went into freak out/get it done mode and called my husband in order to let him know that he was to drive home immediately and we were going to the ER.  My son could not be more happy-go-lucky at the hospital, perfectly satisfied to just walk around the waiting room and read the letters on the various signs.  It was all peaches until they shoved a cotton swab into his throat and a needle in his arm to collect samples….that didn’t fly too well with him, lol, but immediately after all of the trauma and horror of bodily fluid collection, he conked out and stayed that way for a couple of hours.  After ruling out mono and strep, the doctor pretty much concluded he had an allergic reaction to something that we absolutely cannot figure out.  Will most likely remain a mystery forever but the experience taught me that hospitals are awesome, nurses are awesome, lab technicians are awesome, and doctors are awesome.  The list of awesome people actually goes further than that but those are just a few.  Because of all of this medical awesomeness I went from slight panic to sitting comfortably in my home while I gradually watched the medication take my sons swelling down.  Gotta love how fortunate we are to have access to all of these things and to people who know their shit ;-D

So yeah I’m a couponer :-/….Don’t judge me cuz I’m awesome lol but seriously I’ve been couponing for a little over a year now and I gotta say it’s pretty legit.  It all started when the hubby was watching “extreme couponing” (of course) and was like, “hey babe, you should totally do that, you’d be amazing at it.” to which I replied, “well obviously i’d be amazing at it but no, those people are freaks.”  After some thought though I decided, wtf, why not just try it out?  So I did and at first it was way too time consuming and difficult to keep up with so I modified my strategy and now I have a picture perfect method.  My original “stock pile” as couponers call it was ginormous.  Too ginormous actually so I started bringing all of it to a church that a lot of my good friends go to.  They put up a sign, “Jenni’s 99cent Store” lol and people would take what they need, putting a dollar in a little jar to help cover my costs so I could buy more shiz.  Sooooo then I had no stock pile because I enjoyed giving my stuff away so much that it was all gone and then I got kinda tied up with the holiday season so couponing got put on the back burner.  A few weeks ago I started up again, this is my pile thus far, not bad ;-D  Anyways I’ll share my weekly method real quick in case anyone is interested in trying couponing out:

So typically on Friday or Saturday I go to this website: http://www.couponmom.com/.  I very occasionally go for the grocery store deals because what’s cheap or free is stuff I don’t really eat.  I always check out the drugstore deals and more specifically I look at CVS, Walgreens, and Target.  I’ve just found these places work best for me and have what I like to use.  I look at Coupon Mom’s lists, isolate all of the deals that come out to $1 or less, then print out the list.  I then go back to the list online and see if I need to print out any coupons because sometimes the deals require a printed coupon, this is especially true of target deals.  I then flip through all of my coupon booklets from previous weeks to find the coupons I need for this week’s sale.  I clip all of the newspaper and printed coupons.  Sunday morning, when the new paper comes, I also pull out any coupons I need for the sales and clip them.  Now I usually try to tackle the coupon run that Sunday because this is the first day of all of the drugstore sales.  If you wait too long, many sale items are already cleaned off the shelves from other couponers, like me haha, so it’s best to get in there quick and get what’s on your list. 

For CVS you’ll need a CVS card.  Deals that give CVS rewards pretty much always have limits so you may only be able to purchase one or two of the same item to get the rewards back.  Rewards are like store credit and can be used for future purchases.  I’ve found they typically expire about a month from when they’re printed. 

Walgreens is a little different.  They do not have a customer card but instead offer rewards per transaction.  This means that you can get reward money back as many times as you want but if you have 20 coupons, you’re going to have to do 20 separate transactions.  Also, if you get reward money back (which is actually a manufacturer’s coupon) from a particular sale item, you cannot use that same coupon towards that same item in a separate transaction.  This means if the schick razor was on sale for $5.99 and you received a $5 rewards print out, you cannot use that $5 reward on another schick razor that is on sale for $5.99 that same week, even if it’s in another transaction.  If they repeat the same exact sale the next week, you can use the rewards cash because the new week resets all of the sales.  UPDATE:  Important to mention, can’t believe I forgot!  Because rewards print outs are equal to manufacturer coupons, they require 1 item per reward coupon during checkout.  This means that if you are in the checkout line with 5 items, 5 coupons for each item, and 3 rewards print outs your number of coupons technically outnumbers your number of items because TECHNICALLY you have 8 coupons.  This means you need to grab 3 extra knick-knacks like little 33 cent caramels or 25 cent pencils.  Sometimes you can find these little cheapy items around the store.  If you don’t have one item per coupon/reward, you will not be able to use the reward so this is very important!  Rewards usually expire about two weeks from when they’re printed.  Hopefully this makes sense!  I had to learn all of this the hard way so it’s good to pass along the information!

Now Target is awesome because they accept a target coupon as well as a manufacturer’s coupon.  Many target coupons can be printed off of their website here: http://coupons.target.com/.  Some also come in the mail and some can be found in the newspaper with all of the other ads and coupons.  Target is easy because you don’t have to bother with rewards.  Sometimes they will have sales where if you buy a certain item you receive a free $5 gift card which is awesome because it’s not complicated at all.  It’s $5, it doesn’t expire, and it can be used towards any item for any purchase. 

So there’s the low down.  Couponing can be very intimidating at first.  I was so confused when I started but now I’ve got a sort of rhythm and system down that works really well for me.  If you’re wondering where to start, sign up for a newspaper like Orange County Register or LA Times.  I personally receive the LA Times and was able to get a deal where it only costs me $10 a year for the Sunday paper only service.  I subscribe to 3 copies so every sunday I get 3 copies of every coupon.  It’s good to have at least have two copies since many deals are “buy 2 for $5” and whatnot.  Good luck couponing! :-D

Another light, late night rice cake idea! Bomb-diggity, easy midnight pizza ;-D

My garden!  A few months ago my hubby helped me put this together.  I did a ton of research to try to figure out the best way to do this so once I came up with a solid plan, we went out and got the supplies.  2 kiddie pools, gravel, soil, and strips of fabric.  We layered the gravel inside of the first pool and drilled drainage holes around the sides.  Then we drilled holes throughout the bottom of the second pool, threading strips of fabric through each hole and knotting them securely.  We dumped all of the soil into the top kiddie pool and planted all of my little sproutlings that I had already been growing for a few weeks using my little self watering seedling starter, (here is exactly what I used, got it at target: http://www.burpee.com/seed-starting/grow-kits/xl-ultimate-growing-system-prod002628.html?catId=2211.)  The idea of the kiddie pool garden is to fill the bottom pool with water and as the strips of fabric wick up water into the soil in the top pool, water gets distributed evenly amongst the plants.  This way you don’t have to water them everyday.  At first though, my plants started dying so my hubby dug down to the bottom to try to figure out why.  He realized that it was just getting soupy and yucky at the bottom of the soil so we removed all of the fabric strips.  This seemed to help a lot but then a couple of weeks later they started looking unhealthy again so we tried placing an umbrella over the garden to protect it from the sun.  Once again, we managed to save the plants, it seemed they were getting scorched in the heat.  A couple of weeks after that they started turning yellow which I suspected may be from over watering so we laid off of that for a while and now they are thriving more than ever.  Strange adventure it is to raise plants!! Much more trial and error than I originally thought but it’s been fun and I still can’t wait to finally harvest all of my fresh and organic zucchinis, tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers!  For now at least I have my yummy basil.  Looks like I’ll have to start prepping already for which winter plants to try out! :-D

I’ve been looking for weeks now for something practical for the hubby and I to store our phones, keys, wallets, and sunglasses!  I always see these hanging shower caddy thingamajigs (we also have one in our own shower) and I’ve thought, “wow, those look like they could be useful for other things besides holding shampoo bottles and body wash,” but for some reason my brain could not put these two ideas together.  Well, I’m excited to announce tonight that these two ideas not only met but they made love and had a baby and now my new shower caddy hangs on my front door, solving my phone/keys/wallet/sunglasses problem for all eternity.  THE END. :-D

Is it late?  Are you craving something nummy num nums??  BEHOLD!!! Something nummy yet light yet healthy yet satisfying:::: plain rice cake, natural peanut butter, fruit preserves, brilliance.

Don’t know if ya’ll know this, cuz I sure didn’t until about a week ago but microfiber apparently works amazingly at dusting and cleaning shiz!  So, at the dollar tree (cuz everything is at the dollar tree), I found a microfiber mitt in the auto section and another microfiber towel in the cleaning section.  This mitt is LEGIIITTTT….the people were right, the people whose websites came up on my google results when I googled “How to Dust” were right when they said, “MICROFIBER RULES THE CLEANING WOOORRLLDDD!!!!!!”  Cuz you know what? Microfiber rules my cleaning world now and I wouldn’t have it any other way at this point so, yeah get yo self one or two…in fact, get yo self microfiber in mitt-form because who doesn’t like to have their cleaning tools attached to their body with a thin piece of elastic??