Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The Frugalest Strawberries Ever!

Two nights ago, at about 9:45pm, my husband and I were in the kitchen, just about ready to head to bed. Suddenly, our doorbell rings. Very odd. My husband goes to the door and there stands our elderly neighbor with a box of fresh strawberries!

Our neighbor's name is Dot and she's a real sweetheart. She explains that her daughter is visiting from out of state and they went strawberry picking that day. They picked more strawberries than they could handle, so they dropped the extras off with us! So thoughtful!

The coolest part of the story is that I was just telling my husband last weekend that I wanted to go strawberry picking so I could freeze some fresh strawberries. I thought it might be cheaper than buying frozen bagged strawberries at the store. Instead, free strawberries showed up at our doorstep :)

Here's a picture of the strawberries I froze:


I re-used two frozen strawberry bags I had kept in the freezer after using them up. They are crammed full, with the extras going into a Ziploc bag.

This is what I make with my frozen strawberries:


Yummy!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Part Time Has Begun!

I am in the middle of my first week of working part time! A young woman who has done some temp work in my company was interested in the position and she started on Monday! She will be working Mondays and Tuesdays and I'll be working Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I am really excited!

I am going to be training with her a little bit this month. My boss doesn't want to have to pay either of us overtime, so I went in for one hour on Monday and one hour yesterday. Then, she went home an hour early on Monday and I'll go home an hour early on Friday to make up for it. Not ideal, but we're working with it.

I can already tell that I am not going to have any problems filling up my two days off. I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished this week. I think my biggest challenge is going to be to not waste too much time on the Internet :)

Financially, I should be getting a lump sum payout of my unused vacation time in with my next paycheck. I plan to use that to top off our emergency fund, which will then be at our goal amount! Anything left over will probably be split between the car fund and the home improvement fund.

I'm a little nervous about the large decrease in my paycheck. We've never relied on it for living expenses (it's all gone into savings funds), but I've become really accustomed to growing our savings accounts fairly quickly. We have a lot to save yet before we'll be ready to replace our old vehicles, and that's going to go a lot more slowly now. I know I just need to have faith, though, because I'm really sure that this is where God wants me.

I'm looking forward to a productive summer!