My husband has been “Mr. Fix It” this weekend.  He’s scaring me!  I like it!

First, he put the stereo speakers on the front porch and hooked them all up and hooked up all kinds of stuff around the TV.  Our TV isn’t old and it’s pretty big but anything over about 12″ is too big in my opinion.  But, the sound is horrible.  If I had to guess, I’d say that once upon a time when we lived in MO and Chad was home and we were not, something might have been turned up just a little too loud and a speaker was ruined.  Of course, I never suggested that possibility to Vince though I’m guessing he thought the same thing and never suggested it to me.  But he hooked the TV up to the inside stereo speakers and now we can have TV playing in too many rooms or it can just come through the speakers in the living room . . which is still too many rooms if you ask me.  But at least we don’t have to buy a new TV and we don’t have to listen to those horrible speakers in the one we have.

My sewing room has been finished for what . . 6 or 7 months?  The knobs were never put on the cabinets and drawers.  Today, Vince did that!

And best of all . .

When we moved into this house 9 months ago, one of the drawers had the bottom mashed out of it in the back.  I could put a few light things in there but couldn’t put much in and whatever I did put in, sometimes it ended up sliding down into the second drawer as I was pulling the top drawer out.

It has been glued and will be put back in my kitchen this evening.

As a reward for working so hard, he gets dinner!  Seriously . . his favorite dinner!  Meatballs, spaghetti sauce, linguini noodles, salad and bread.  My least favorite dinner.  Our almost every Sunday dinner.

I hope he appreciate that I make this for him . . even though I don’t like it at all!

According to Wikipedia, compulsive hoarding is a pattern of behavior that is characterized by the excessive acquisition of and inability or unwillingness to discard large quantities of objects that would seemingly qualify as useless or without value.  If you look at the symptoms of compulsive hoarding, we aren’t hoarders but we do stock up on things we know we’ll use.  I suppose no hoarder has ever admitted to being a hoarder though.

Most everything that we use every day, I try to keep at least a year’s supply on hand.  I only buy extras when things are on sale so I’m always “shopping” out of my own pantry and then when things are on sale again, I replenish my supply.  Not everyone has the room or the desire to do this but to me, it makes sense.  When you think that saving 50¢ per can on vegetables and using probably 5 cans per week . . that’s $2.50/week in savings or $130 per year.  I’m guessing that by doing this with the things we use so much (toilet paper, paper towels, sugar, canned goods, dish soap, bath soap, shampoo, etc.), we save several thousand dollars per year and it’s so nice to want to make a recipe and know that unless it calls for something really unusual, I have it in my pantry.

This week at Kroger, they have some kind of deal where the large Gatorades on sale for 67¢.  Do you know how much Gatorade Vince drinks when he’s out working in this heat?  A lot! Do you know how many bottles we have in our pantry?  Enough!

But our best find this week was charcoal.

Kroger has the same charcoal for $6.99 for 16.6 pounds which is a decent price.  That comes to about 42¢ per pound.  But, Home Depot had a two pack – 20 pounds each bag for $9.97 and that comes to about 25¢ per pound.  We use at least two twenty pound bags per month so that’s about 24 bags per year.

We had stocked up the last time they had it on sale for this price — maybe around July 4.

There were 12 bags left so when Vince was at Home Depot Friday, he bought more.

That brings our total to 26 bags, which should be about a year’s worth.  But, then when we had to go back to Home Depot on Sunday,  Vince decided to get a few more bags.

What great timing!  He tossed a box of trash bags in just as I was taking a picture!  Eight more double bags of charcoal brings our total in stock to 34 – 20 pound bags.  That’s 680 pounds of charcoal and at a savings of at least 17¢ per pound, we’ll save roughly $115 over the next year.  Sounds like not a whole lot but it truly adds up.  And, it’s nice to know that no matter when we decide to fire up the grill, we have charcoal and don’t need to go to the store to get it.

We won’t need to buy charcoal til we find it on sale again next summer.

We have a gas grill too but we much prefer using the charcoal grill.