38/365

The nice thing about the rain is the beautiful snow that it brings to the local mountains. This lovely view greeted me from our front porch this morning, and I know tomorrow it will be even better as we are getting more rain overnight.


The bad thing about the rain is that hubby and I won't get to make our planned bike ride for this weekend. We were going to go ride 10 miles at the zoo, but it's either raining or in the 50's... and I'm a wuss. I don't do cold.

We spent much of the day folding laundry, pairing up socks (I had a whole laundry basket full of nothing but socks!), and taking hubby's car to the dealership and the tire place to get stuff right with it. A few weeks ago, someone had come up in our yard and kicked the front of hubby's car, kicking out both grates in the front bumper and knocking his entire fog-light assembly out. The initial quote from the dealer was over $200 to repair the damage, because it would involve removing the entire wheel well. Well, a $20 off coupon came in the mail this week, and when he took it in he told his service care manager that he was on a budget, and we ended up only paying $58 for the repair. They also replaced some sort of part that there had been a recall on - some sort of pulley or belt or something. Of course, then they quoted him for over $1300 to replace his tires (all 4). There was no way that was in our budget, so we took it to the local tire store that both of our Dad's patronized for many, many years and he got his two front tires replaced for under $200. We'll replace the others as money allows.

We wanted to take the children to Chuck E Cheese this weekend for Cecilia's birthday, but they are being very obstinate about getting their chores done so it looks like they will be missing out. Today I just wanted them to finish cleaning their room (they did most of it last night), finish the dishes, and pick up all of the toys and trash they had dumped on the kitchen floor... it all would have taken them less than an hour if they just did it. It's still not done. Tomorrow is their last chance. If they drag their feet and don't get it done, well, we'll be saving that much at least.

Tomorrow is grocery shopping day. I need to take stock of what I have in the freezer, what's on sale to stock up on, and check and see if there are any yummy sounding (frugal) recipes for me to try out this week. Got any suggestions?