In The Refiner's Fire

I'm woefully behind on posting homemade gifts, though I'm still hoping to hit 52 by the end of the year - one gift for each week.  I'm hoping to get caught up on posting in general once summer session ends here very, very soon! (I may just be a wee bit excited about summer session ending.  I have a great group of students but, man, it's been intense!).  The school year for the children ended the first week in June and we needed gifts for their primary teachers, two women and one man.  All have a green thumb so I borrowed an idea that I saw many variations of on Pinterest and ended up with a very inexpensive gift that will hopefully be helpful.  I'm not entirely sure this counts as a "homemade" gift but it worked anyway and cost very little. Gift #15: Herb Plants and Garden Gloves   About two weeks before school let out for the summer, my Dad came home from the local hardware store with a whole stack of garden gloves - some for us an...

    Hard to believe it's the end of June already.  I feel like summer hasn't really started yet and here it's almost July!    We're eating a lot of salads this week - lettuce from the garden and lettuce, spinach, kale and Swiss chard from the CSA mean lots of greens to use up.  I'm totally fine with that! They're delicious!  We still working on emptying the upstairs freezer - it's taking a lot longer than we had anticipated and I think we're going to have to step up the game if we want to have the deep freeze fixed before we have all the produce in.    So, with all of that, here's what we're eating this week:    Sunday, June 26:     Breakfast: Smoothies     Lunch: Homemade Pizza and Breadsticks     Snack: Popcorn     Dinner: Baked Salmon, Rice, Strawberries and Blueberries    Monday, June 27:     Breakfast:...

One of the many things that I love about summer is that it's quite easy to lower the grocery budget thanks to our CSA and what we have growing in our garden.  I love the taste of the fresh produce and I love that we can cut back at the store and put that money elsewhere.  Right now we're setting some money aside to do a big stock up right before John is done with Residency at the end of August.   If John isn't already in place in a Call by then, our income will drop dramatically and having a very full pantry and freezers will be a huge blessing.  We're working on a list to figure out what would be the best things to stock up on and I'll be keeping you posted as to how all of that is going as we approach that point. He's had several interviews so we're hopeful that we won't need to stock up, but we'd rather be prepared than caught short. Anyway, back to this week's shopping and our CSA. Here's our CSA box this week:   Clockwise fro...

One last photo from my Dad - I promise I'll load some new ones this weekend! Man, I'm having a hard time understanding that it's really mid-June and that Father's Day is this weekend.  The children made John presents at camp this week so we'll be giving him those and my Dad mailed four pairs of trousers that didn't fit anymore but are in really nice condition so I shamelessly wrapped those up and will give them to John for the holiday.  Since he asked for new trousers for his gift, that was perfect.  My Dad lost a lot of weight a few years ago when he was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and bought these trousers then.  They don't fit him anymore (my Dad is a large man - tall, broad and strong even at 84 years old) but they will fit my husband now (John is the same height as my Dad but not quite as broad).  I did buy John a nice, card to go with all that. We're very busy with summer session for me, summer camp for the children, and John's ...

    I'm a bit slow in uploading my photos from my iPod - I really don't want to mess with cables and all that jazz right now, so you get another version of the flowers you've already seen!   This month is just speeding by.  It's hard to believe that we're this far in already.     Here's an update on my June 2016 Goals so far this month:    1.  Keep up with all the work needed for teaching my summer class.  This is a LOT of work and I need to be really intentional about it or I'll fall really behind.  This has taken up most of my time but I haven't fallen behind at all yet! YAY! 2. Attend at least 15 Jazzercise classes this month.  I need to push myself a bit.  This one has been a colossal failure so far.  I have only attended 4 classes so far this month - my shingles pain has been really making things difficult so far this month. 3. Learn 18 new Jazzercise routines.  I got behind in Ma...

Did I show you these already?  They're edible "Golden Snitches", inspired by Harry Potter. Our children wanted them on their cupcakes for their school class, so I bought a bag of gold-colored gum balls at the craft store and then made colored candy/chocolate hearts to use as wings for the "Snitches".  I thought I had white or cream-colored chocolate but I the closest I had was yellow-colored white-chocolate candy melts.  Missy made the hearts using a mold we already owned and both children were absolutely thrilled with the result!  Their classmates thought it was cool that they could eat everything and the teachers appreciated that only the cake wrappers ended up in the trash, rather than a pile of plastic rings or other junk.    We went to Sam's Club this last weekend and did some stocking up.  Our CSA started last week and we have a few things popping up in the garden so we felt a big stock up and very little other shopp...

Well, I *think* we're officially into summer here.  We're consistently warm - upper 70'sF - mid 80'sF - and the rain is mingled with brilliant sunshine.   My garden is flourishing with the rain - we've had SO much rain that everything is going gangbusters.  We have several peppers coming and the strawberries have lots of flowers.  We've had fresh flowers on the kitchen table for a couple of weeks now and it's just making me so very happy. These last weeks have been so very busy - house guests, end of school activities, start of summer session at the University, garden planting and weeding, graduation parties, church activities, Memorial Day, and all the other things that come in May.  Things will slow down a bit here in June now and I'm looking forward to dinners on the patio and time spent in the garden.  Here's what we've done this last week that were at least marginally frugal: * Used hotel points to stay at a hotel when attending a f...

Our beautiful clematis - taken by my Dad on his Smartphone!  We have three in our yard in varying shades of purple. Totally random day for this post but I decided since I didn't keep you posted very well on my goals for May and it's now June, I'd just start with June since today is still at the beginning of June! Here's the goals I have for June: 1.  Keep up with all the work needed for teaching my summer class.  This is a LOT of work and I need to be really intentional about it or I'll fall really behind. 2. Attend at least 15 Jazzercise classes this month.  I need to push myself a bit. 3. Learn 18 new Jazzercise routines.  I got behind in May so now I need to catch up! 4. Weed at least one area of the gardens each week.  My Mom and I did a super job of cleaning these out initially in the spring so it *should* just be maintenance.  With the rain we've been having, it might be harder than that. We'll see.  5. Pick any produce ...