Saturday

We had our first hard frost of the winter last night. Yeoldfurt said there was a fairly thick layer of ice on the horse's water trough this morning. We still had four little bell peppers growing out in the garden. I meant to bring them in when I got home last night ...better to pick them early than to loose them to the frost. But I forgot. So I picked them this morning. The plants themselves were curled over and the peppers felt soft from the frost damage, but they still smelled good so I chopped a couple of them up in Yeoldfurt's breakfast eggs this mornings. Waste not, want not.

I made two loaves of bread this morning and have another batch in the breadmachine. The second batch is new recipe that called for a little powdered ranch dressing in with the flour. I season a lot of things with powdered ranch so I always have some on hand. It will be good with our homemade chicken soup tonight. We've decided to do a soup night twice a week to cut down on the meat budget. I have always considered myself to be frugal. But we've trimmed so much off of the budget these last few months and looking for way to trim more that I think I just didn't know what frugal was before now.

I have a couple of Series EE savings bonds that my grandmother gave me back in the 90's. I looked up their value online a little while ago and they would cover one mortgage payment with a little left over. So I'm going to cash them after the first of the year too. My grandmother always believed that a government savings bond was one of the safest investments you could make. In her day, that was true. But I don't trust TODAY's government at all so I might as well cash them while they are still worth something. Of course, Uncle Sam will expect me to pay tax on the interest earned on these bonds so I won't cash them until January so I won't have to worry about paying the taxes until the following year. Surely things will be better for us by then.

My sister and her son are coming up late tomorrow night to retrieve my sister's furniture that she has stored with us. They won't be able to get here until 10:00pm so they will spend the night and load up Monday morning. I will have to leave for work early, so I won't get to visit very much. But at least I will get to see them. My sister and I are very close and she moved in with us a year ago to try to find a job up here. It had been three years since her husband passed away and she was looking for a fresh start. But after six months here and no job, she went back to Alvin and found a job almost right away. That was in late May and it's taken her these past six months to finally get an apartment of her own. I know she's happy to be having her own place again. Once all of her things are out of the storage shed, we can reorganize it and set up the 'pantry' for our stores like we want. Yeoldfurt is already contemplating what kind of shelving he wants to build.

Since they won't be here until late, I still have all day tomorrow to do my chores and have everything tidy when they get here. I'm glad I put up the Christmas decorations today. At least things will look cheery.