My Thrifty Retirement - Week 6

 

Six weeks in and my weeks feel like they are flying by.  My week began by celebrating Mother's Day with my beautiful daughters.  We enjoyed a great meal together, made Friendship bread and did a lot of girl talk.  I was a very special day.  I followed that up with dinner out with my girlfriends Wednesday night and more girl talk.  I love when we can get together and visit while enjoying a glass of wine and a great meal.

 

All neat & tidy, ready for more creative work

I spent most of my week dodging our crazy weather, we actually had a snowstorm Monday morning, and puttering around my house.  I've decided I love to putter.  I spent some good quality time in my craft room making a couple of gifts and then did some cleaning and reorganizing in there.  I don't know how long it will stay this way as I'm a pretty messy crafter, but for now I'll enjoy how neat and tidy it is.

 

Thursday morning I went grocery shopping and dropped off a full glass bin of recycling while I was at it.  I picked up a pound of butter ($2 with a digital coupon), chicken breasts on sale for 99¢ a pound and a couple of packages of lunchmeat on markdown 50% OFF.  I used my last bit on a gift card to reduce the cost of my final bill too.

 

I organized all of my office supplies in the TV cabinet

I did some more decluttering throughout the house and used a container I already had on hand in the garage to reorganized my office supplies.  I had the girls go through our school supply bin and pick out what they wanted and we are donating the rest to a neighborhood grade school.

 

The second drawer keeps paper, labels, envelopes, folders & notebooks

Meals were super thrifty and super easy last week.  I went through the kitchen freezer and pulled an assortment of leftover items to reheat and prepare for super simple meals.  I made a half batch of blueberry muffins for Mother's Day morning using up the last of a bag of blueberries I had.  I made a minestrone soup with cooked stew meat and pasta I'd squirreled away in the freezer and a can of seasoned diced tomatoes.  I served it with corn muffins, also from the freezer.  Leftover crack chicken and rice from the prior week was enough for two meals.

 

I packaged these four large chicken breasts up for the garage chest freezer
I've started writing the price on the packages now to keep track of how much it costs to prepare a meal

I made a small pizza with a dough ball from the freezer, a piece of leftover chicken breast my daughter had from a work lunch, some pesto and a bit of grated mozzarella cheese.  Leftover taco meat from the freezer was used to make taco salads and I took a container of black bean burgers out of the freezer as well as whole wheat hamburger buns to make another meal.  We enjoyed fresh salads all week too.  Now that I've used up all of those leftover items I actually have a bare spot in the freezer and I'll need to get cooking too.

 

We are quite pleased with how well this detergent has been working

I made homemade foaming hand soap solution to refill the kitchen dispenser and one in the downstairs bathroom.  I made a new batch of our new recipe for laundry detergent and filled up my one gallon Mason jar with it.  The last batch I made lasted for eight months and we really do like using it.  It gets our laundry very clean and doesn't cost much (about $3 per batch at today's prices) or take much time (5 minutes) at all to prepare.  I do add some Purex scent beads to mine which adds a little bit to the overall cost ($1 per batch), but it isn't necessary, just my personal preference.

 

Every time I get up from my chair Jack steals my seat

I hope you all had a wonderful week last week and are off to a great start this week.  Let me know how it went.