Happy Halloween

Since I have been sick on and off for pretty much the entire month I have spent a lot of time at home doing crafts. Unfortunately I can't share any of them because they are mostly Christmas presents except for these very cute Halloween jars that I finally finished! I got the idea from notsoidlehands.blogspot.com which is a craft site I really like- check it out for lots of fun ideas!

Magazines

Since I haven't been working since we moved to Texas I have had a lot of free time on my hands. I have been able to spend time during the day checking blogs and finding good deals! I had gotten a few subscriptions to magazines for free in the past years but lately I have been able to get a ton! Right now I am currently subscribed to O Magazine, Shape, American Baby, Parents Magazine, Glamour, Business Week, Woman's Day, Elle Decor, and Travel and Leisure (just to name a few- I know there are a few missing from this list) and I haven't paid anything for any of them! When I was telling my mom about a magazine she was excited and wanted some for herself so I thought maybe everyone would be interested to know how I found them all. Most of them are from a service called RewardsGold but I have found them through links from the coupon blogs that I read. Most of them are listed to the right of my blog in the "Coupons and Giveways" section. I recommend checking them out so you can get free magazines too!

Other products I have received free from these blogs range from free meals at restaurants (from special coupons), free computer fonts, free toiletries, free microfiber cloths, to free Glidden paint! Some of the blogs offer free fridays so they will list all the free items you can find online on Friday. The magazines go quick so you should just check in whenever you have a minute. Most of these blogs also offer information on how to save money in many other ways with coupons or sales listings. Some of them even offer giveaways that you can enter. I would recommend using an alternate email for anything you sign up for just in case they send out some spam with their free offers. I have just updated the list with the blogs that I find useful or particularly interesting. Good luck on finding fun free stuff!

Mom and Dad's Visit

A few weeks ago mom and dad graves came to visit! We had a ton of fun and visited lots of San Antonio locations. As you can tell they brought some nice pacific northwest weather with them which made it a lot easier to spend all day outside! Unfortunately the day we visited the temple was not a very good day for pictures because of the weather and the fact that all the water features are off because of the current water restrictions. We did get a lot of pictures at the Spanish Missions so take a look!

Nick at one of the Spanish Missions modeling the cactus and more pictures of us at the Missions

One pic of the natural bridge caverns. It was hard to take pictures inside so you will have to just go to the naturalbridgecaverns website to see more or visit yourself!

And of course no San Antonio trip is complete without Sea World!

We had so much fun showing them the city and have already thought of more places to take them next time they make it out here to Texas. Hopefully sooner than later!!

Organizing Projects

So we have been doing a few organizational fixes in our house and this weekend we spent pretty much the whole time sanding, priming, painting, sawing, and installing all of our new shelves and my new craft organizer. The pic above is Nick fixing the fan so it doesn't make any noise anymore!

Here is the gameroom closet with the extra shelf so I can now use the other side for my crafts!

Below you will see my new spice rack. We spent entirely too much time at the container store and bought a few fun organizers. Here you can see how the spice rack can be pulled out and down so I can actually see all the spices! Congrats to whoever thought of this idea. It has already proved useful!

Nick is hard at work creating the brace for my pegboard craft organizer!

Works all done! I have started to fill it up with my stuff and am very excited about how it turned out!

After all the hard work we decided to check out an Italian Gelato Cafe that we heard was pretty authentic tasting because the owners are from Italy. Nick always tests Gelato by how well they make his favorite flavor, Pistachio, and he said it was delicious! I had a "forest berries" (which is really just mixed berries but they translated it directly from Italian) milkshake and it was really good. I can't wait to go back to get a panini because they looked delicious. And in case you wanted to know the difference between Gelato and Ice Cream, Gelato is made with milk instead of cream so it has less fat!

Now that we have all the organizers up we just have to put away a few more things in preparation for Nick's parents to visit us! They are coming in two days and we are very excited to show them around San Antonio!!

Lowes Home Improvement Center

This is what Nick and I did today! This weekend we were busy but we finally managed to take some measurements to get organized. Here we have the makings of closet shelves, craft organizers and even a rake to clean up those pesky mesquite tree seeds. Wish us luck on completing all these projects this week! Nick is going to sand all the edges of the boards to match the shelves we already have and I am going to paint, paint and paint some more. Luckily we had a rebate check from Lowes for buying our washer and dryer there as well as a gift card! I am very excited because after all the cutting we ended up with a lot of end pieces that I now get to make crafts from. Maybe if I have enough time to be creative I will post some of them up for you.

Books are expensive....

So I have recently rekindled my relationship with the library. When I was younger I used to love library day at school and would always check out the maximum books allowed (which I think was three picture books or two chapter books). I would finish them as quickly as possible and then plan out the exact book I could chose for the next week. Often when I was done with my work early I would beg the teacher to let my friend and I go to the library during class to exchange books. Once I got to third grade we had set aside personal reading time and I was allowed to exchange a book whenever I got done! I must have read every single Roald Dahl book at least twice, all the box car children books that were out at the time, and unfortunately I read all those Goosebump books too.

Now as I got older it was less cool to go the library and get old used books so I decided to purchase the books instead. Although I have tried to save all my books they often get passed around through the family and I have found that when you are reading through a book in a week and then giving it away it really isn't worth the ten bucks. So I have recently got myself a library card. So far I have only had small reservations about the germs that must reside between the pages. I know they lysol the covers but you never know what is on the inside! It is nice to not worry about reading too fast to get my moneys worth and I love that I can go online and request the books I want to read. I get an email when they are ready and all I do is go pick them up. I don't even have to browse the library. It is a smaller library just five min away but they get my books from all over San Antonio. Since I have been reading at least three books every week it has saved me a lot of money just in the month that I have used it! I am a little sad that my book collection is not growing for our future personal library but oh well. I am having fun reading new books and old favorites all for the low low price of FREE!

San Antonio Temple