Lazy Days

I have been being lazy or busy a great deal of the time lately and so have not found the time or energy to post. Over the weekend I helped Shane in the yard. We cleaned up most of the leaves that have fallen so far and took them to the dump and pulled out some icky shrubs, which will be taken with the next load of leaves. Shane also finished clearing out the iris bed, so that can be planted this coming weekend. While he worked on that, I cleaned the house up, something that I have a tendency to let slide. I can almost always think of something better to do and I seldom have the willpower to get the cleaning done first when I get home and am tired. I also got some cooking and baking done over the weekend. Saturday I make a big pot of cabbage rolls (which fed us all weekend) and Sunday I baked a couple of apple pies. This was my first completely homemade pie. Don't yell at me, but I have never made my own crust. I always heard it was hard and complicated, so I just bought pie crust at the store. I decided to try it out and they came out pretty good. Shane, my pie lover, said the only thing he would change is to make them a little thicker next time. I can probably do that. I also learned to cut the apples a little thicker. I could not remember the way my mother would do it, and the book said to slice them thin, so I did. A little too thin...it was more of an applesauce pie once they cooked down. Oh well, still tasty.

Other than that I have been practicing my knitting and watching too much internet tv. My scarf is now about 17 inches long and I am all caught up on House, Bones, and Kitchen Nightmares, as well as a couple of other shows on Hulu. We actually spent an entire evening this week watching a bunch of episodes of Reba that they had loaded recently. So lazy :)

I have also been improving my mind, though. I am almost finished reading The Complete Tightwad Gazette. It has a lot of great tips and ideas in it. I am going to discuss using some of them with Shane and see what he thinks about trying to save some money around the house. The biggest things I want to do are to really do a good job in our garden next year and get a lot of canning done and to make up a price book for grocery shopping. I have read about this in several places and it seems like a great way to save a lot on groceries with only a bit of work at the start. I think I will start when I do my shopping this weekend and get some prices down.

For now, I need to back to work. We are in the slow time of the year right now in the agricutural business and there are often giant chunks of free time. I am working on a couple of projects for my boss, but other than that, he doesn't mind if I read, knit, or surf on the computer. So nice!