My Tireless Retirement - Week 26 = 6 Months!!

 

Hello my friends!  I hope you are all doing well.  Anyone else amazed it is October already?  And!  That I have been retired for six months already?  That just blows my mind!

 

I bottled up my latest batch of home brew

Last week I worked on a project that has been on my list for quite some time.  It is worthy of a post of its own so watch for it coming up soon.  Here's a hint.  It was on my "bucket" list.  Along with that project I've also been exploring some vacation ideas for my first big retirement trip.  I can honestly say it can get quite overwhelming.  I have way too many options.  This is going to be a process, I can tell that already.  But I've got plenty of time to sort it all out and part of the fun is the planning.

 

I raided my scrap wood stash

Tuesday is typically my day to run my errands, mainly because it is also discount movie ticket day.  I didn't do any grocery shopping, but I did try to do some thrifting.  That was a complete bust.  I'm in search of some artwork for my upstairs guest bedroom as well as a pair of hiking pants.  The search continues.  I also went to the movies and saw Maverick.  OMG!  That was good.  I don't know why, but I wasn't expecting it to be so emotional.  It was definitely exciting as expected, got my heart rate right up there!  One thing that movie did do was cement the fact that we're getting old.  Man!  It happens so fast.

 

Wednesday I was back in project mode out in the garage and got that wrapped up.  I was chomping at the bit to get back out there, but I kindly waited until a respectable hour to make sure no one was sleeping before I started up my power tools.  I'm cool like that.  LOL

 

Friday I did some crafting making a wreath out of wood rounds I sliced up on my miter saw.  I used branches I had pruned off of our sycamore tree a couple years ago.  It was a fun project and something I'd always toyed with making.  I decided to hang it up in my craft/guest bedroom downstairs and I think it fits in nicely with the décor.  I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

 

I had a full gallon sized Ziploc bag of veggie scraps that I'd been squirreling away in the freezer along with a big pork bone I had saved so I put that into my largest slow cooker with some water, added a couple bay leaves and let that simmer along with a huge bone in chicken breast for four hours.  Then I strained it, took the chicken meat off the bone and chopped it up.  I put everything back in the pot and added a combination of frozen veggies, fresh chopped onion and some chopped up kale plus fresh minced garlic.  After another four hours it was soup!  Boy was it good.  The weather is just starting to change around here and a nice brothy soup and a grilled cheese sandwich makes for a perfect meal.

 

It made a lot of soup so I put a quart and a half in the refrigerator to enjoy and the rest went into freezer containers for later adding several more meals to my others I've made recently.  It will be very nice to have hot homemade soup anytime I want, especially as the weather cools.

 

I also made huge meatloaf in my slow cooker using a pound of lean ground turkey (79¢) and a pound of ground pork ($2.49) I got on markdown and items I already had in my pantry.  It was delicious!  I find doing my meatloaves in the slow cooker makes them come out juicier and this one did not disappoint.  I put a couple meatloaf dinners into containers for the freezer to eat later and the rest in the refrigerator for a couple more meals during the week.  I find I'm averaging about two cooked meals per week right now to keep me fed for an entire week.  That's pretty good I'd say.

 

Homemade "TV dinners" or the freezer

I closed my Etsy shop last week.  They've updated to a new financial platform for payments called Plaid (click and read the last line of the article) and as part of that change I am required to give them the login and password I use to access my bank account online.  Apparently it is the only way for them to sync my bank account with my Etsy account.  I can't believe they operate like this.  My own family doesn’t even have that information.  I think it is the dumbest thing ever and in good conscience I couldn't do it.  Way too risky.  I'll just have to figure out another way to sell my stuff.

 

If you've made it this far, good for you.  I have a surprise.  I'm going to do a giveaway, my first one on this blog, in celebration of my sixth month of retirement.  I am giving away a set of my handcrafted Christmas cards as well as a set of the all occasion cards I make.  All you have to do for your chance to win is leave me a comment.  I'll announce the winner next Monday.