In The Refiner's Fire

Pink Tobacco Flowers - non-smokable.  They made a beautiful border this year in my garden. I'm convinced firmly that life just is busy at this stage, and that is okay.  I don't always enjoy it though, especially when John has seven-zillion things happening all at once and we don't spend as much time as a family as we'd all like.  It appears we're going to have a week or two of relative quiet (as much as we can during Advent).  Here's hoping! I've been working hard at stretching our money and cleaning out the house, as well as keeping up with all the daily things.  Here are some of the frugal things we've done the last two weeks: * Made homemade pizza, bread sticks, biscuits, waffles, applesauce spice cake, roasted chickpeas, chicken noodle soup, meatball soup, oatmeal muffins, banana-blueberry smoothies, and pancakes at home. * Mended a necklace by replacing a broken jump ring. * Borrowed a keyboard from work (I was able to sign it out for a...

A fairy house that our daughter and a friend built. It has been a crazy couple of weeks.  John has a synod meeting for a couple of days, we celebrated Reformation Day with the Confirmation of 8 young people at our church, there were two events at our children's school and we've been trying to get Christmas gifts started and the fall cleaning done around the house.  Whew! I have been trying to take a minimum amount of work home in the evenings and on the weekend for the last two weeks and it's been going okay. That still needs some tweaking but I'm pleased with it so far.  We are doing some big time planning for 2018. Hopefully, I can share that with you when we're through - I'm pretty excited by it! Here are some things we've done that may count as frugal in the last week: *Made coffee cake, calzones, bread sticks, and French bread. * Returned books from the library and picked up some new books and a movie, stopped by later and picked up an item on...