It's happened.

The unimaginable has happened. My house is clean, well, the parts of my house I spend time in are clean. I won't mention my cold storage, workshop or shed. But, my house is clean! That means the bedrooms, bathrooms, my office, kitchen, and living rooms are clean. This calls for a celebration! We're gonna Barbeque.

post

so I suppose I should post again one of these days. For now, suffice it to say it's been a very busy, exhausting few months. Sushi graduated, I promoted to Director with Pampered Chef, I went to new Director training in Chicago, and all the rest of the normal busyness. I am also working on stepping up my business by quite a lot, I want a lot more bookings now that Sushi is home every night. Time to make my business take off so we can reach our financial goals. I'll try to put together a real post here soon, inbetween all the madness.

Yesterday. . . .

Sushi summed up yesterday perfectly. He came home and called me and said "so, it looks like it was an interesting day around the house?!" lol. Yep, it was. He came home to all the laundry clean but piled up in the baskets not folded, the shelf in our storage room knocked over on the floor and everything scattered around it, a hamster cage outside because the hamster was dead, and the house smelling like smoke.
I was at a show when he called so this conversation happened when I was driving to pick up the children from my parents house.
Here is how my day went. I was trying a new kind of show yesterday so I spent all day preparing for it. When I got up yesterday morning I went to our storage room and found the shelf on the floor and everything scattered. ???? yep, don't know what happened there or when it happened. I just hope the shelf is not ruined. However, my day was full so we just carefully stepped around it. The laundry? yep, my family is lucky it got washed, the goal today? fold the laundry and pick up the shelf. The hamster? Well, it died sometime within the last day or so. Not sure, it's cookie's hamster and I check on it occasionally but the responsibility falls mostly on the boy. Oh, but cookie was sooo upset. He weeped, he wailed, he told me he doesn't want any more hamsters because they die too fast and he really loved that hamster. :( Part of why we have animals is so we can learn about death, I know it sounds morbid, but, it's really part of why my children have pets. The other parts? Responsibility, and happiness, pets bring happiness.
Lastly, about the smoke smell. This is a story I need to write down because it is both tragic for the microwave and funny. :) Yesterday as I was working on preparing for the show Tank ran downstairs excitedly exclaiming "I did it! I did it!" He ran from person to person telling them this. To which we all smiled and said "Oh! good job!" lol, we should have checked to see what he did. Not too long after that I needed to go upstairs for something. I walked upstairs and smelled smoke. Shocked, I looked around for the culprit. I looked over at the microwave and saw. . . . a very black plate of nachos, with thirty five more minutes to go! I hurridly stopped the microwave and opened all doors and windows. When I tried to take the plate out of the microwave only the outside half came out and the middle stayed in the center. He had melted the plate! I grabbed my handy nylon scraper and scraped off the melted middle plate. It was so hot it melted my nylon pan scraper! Yipes! Well, tank was not thrilled that I was throwing out his nachos so I had to explain that they were yucky and made him a new plate of nachos. But I am a little shocked! The two year old made himself a plate of nachos and put them in the microwave. He just knows if you push buttons and start it will cook your food. Stinker! I also told him he needs to ask for help next time he wants nachos. I am so glad that we only paid 10 bucks for that microwave! If it was a new $200 one I would have been sick. Our experience with this (after Anna's similar experience, only with a muffin, a black, smoking muffin) is that the microwave is not long for this world. This kind of thing seems to kill the microwave for good.
So, there ya go. What a day!

Director!!!!

Woot woot! I did it! I am now a director with The Pampered Chef! Yeah! I have been working so hard on this for the last year! I just submitted the last sales needed to get me to where I needed to be. I was amazed at how my friends and family stepped in to help me. At the beginning of today I was 238.02 away from the $5000 I needed for my team sales. Perhaps it was tacky but I put out a plea on facebook and what an amazing response I got! I met and exceeded the goal and now I am a director! This will help our family out so much, AND I can finally check off something on my new years resolution list!

Manna

What a day today has been. It's been a roller coaster. I started off the day feeling overwhelmed, my house is soo dirty and we were having dinner guests tonight. I knew I needed to clean like crazy to be ready for them so I canceled my time at the gym. I started cleaning, and getting food ready to cook when I got a phone call. Our dinner guests had to cancel because their son had a fever. bummer. So, I lost all motivation to clean the house. whoops! We have had a rough month, earlier this month Sushi looked like he got two paychecks. I told him to check with his work and tell them they messed up. Turns out he gets a length of service bonus. We got told by his work that the extra paycheck was legit. So, we splurged a bit. Bear in mind, we NEVER would have spent the money had we known what would happen next. The next day our account was majorly overdrawn with 400 worth of stuff still left to go through. Turns out, there was a bank error, the contact at Sushi's work was too lazy to actually call payroll and just guessed that the "extra" paycheck was actually legit when it in fact wasn't. I was/am a little upset because we did all the "right" things and we still got screwed. So, I had to call my bank, stop payment on my mortgage, and transfer money from savings to checking to cover the crazy amount of stuff that was still going to be going through our account. As a consequence of this our mortgage was paid late this month. Because we didn't have the extra to cover all the extra crap. we have been extra squeaky tight this month because of this. Oh sure, we did our taxes and we are expecting a refund but it's not here yet. Today our manna arrived. The kids and I picked up the mail and in it there was a manila envelope. Cookie asked if he could open it, I told him sure, whatever. He opened it and said "Wow! Mom, there are $100 bills in here!" In shock I said what? let me see that. Sure enough, in a plain manila padded envelope with no return address, no post stamp and our address and a message printed on a printer was $1000. I have no idea who sent it to us, I have no way of knowing or finding out. All I know is that I feel incredibly blessed. That is a huge amount of money in my world. I'm shocked, I started crying like a baby. For those of you who know me you know I've very stoic and I hardly ever cry. For the rest of the afternoon whenever I thought about this I would start crying. This is literally something that will allow us to be able to pay our mortgage in April. I wish I knew who to thank. However, whoever did this probably also knows I'm very proud and even though we so badly needed this money I never would have accepted this had they written me a check or put their name on it, I would have said it was too much and too generous. So, I am thanking our angel in the only way I know how, I'm telling everyone how blessed we are in the hopes that whoever did this will know how incredibly grateful we are. Thank you so so so much, you have no idea what an answer to prayers this is. I literally feel as though we have been given manna from heaven. The windows of heaven were opened for us today.

Homemade dishwasher detergent

I'm trying something new today, in an effort to save some money I'm trying to make homemade dishwasher detergent. I go through one of those huge cascade boxes in about a month and a half, two if I'm lucky. So, I'm trying something new. I got the recipe at this website http://diynatural.com/simple-effective-jabs-homemade-dishwasher-detergent-rinse-agent/ and I'm gonna go mix it up right now. I'll let you know how it works, it took me about 14.00 to buy the ingredients for this and that will make multiple batches.
Also, an update on the microwave, went to our local classifieds and found a used one for $20 that is here in a town about 10 minutes south of us. I'm gonna go check it out tonight. I know, it only took me one day. What can I say, I'm sick of teaching the old dogs new tricks. :)



UPDATE- got the microwave for $10, can't beat that, it's hilarious, the kids are so happy to have one again they keep finding uses for it. lol.

RIP Microwave

well, dangit, the microwave died yesterday. My diffuser died saturday, so many of the things we own are limping along. Sigh. Maybe we'll be blessed with a "new" microwave from someone who takes pity on us. We are broke, not a little broke, completely and totally broke. sigh. I know time will fix all things. And we need to focus on what is important, not on things. But, it is a little discouraging to see so much that needs to be fixed and not be able to do anything about it. But, on the bright side my wonderful brother, Elder S is going into the MTC (Missionary Training Center) this afternoon and from there to the Columbus Ohio mission. I know he is going to be a phenomenal missionary. Most the time you get these boys who have lived squeaky clean lives who go on missions (don't get me wrong, that is a wonderful thing and definitely preferable to the alternative, but, most of us are not squeaky clean). Elder S has experienced the power of the atonement and has chosen to turn his life around. And I'm very, very proud of him. He is such an amazing person and he will be an amazing missionary.