Victory!

     It's the little things, am-I-right? I love celebrating little things that make me happy, or accomplished, or even just random silliness, which really should be a 'label' here on the blog because I post so often about it. 
     For today, this week really, I'm yelling "Wooty Woot Woot!" over the fact that I've gone through the last 15 months of emails lingering in my inbox. All read, all saved for some reason, just sitting there, annoying me every time I opened my email app. So, I decided it was TIME to tackle it head on. I started by updating my files options, adding a few new folders for new email types, and consolidating a few that probably should have always been combined. Then I went through and deleted like crazy, to the tune of several hundred emails. Then I started sorting into folders, trying to wade through a month at a time. Along the way, I unsubscribed to nearly 20 newsletters that I've been getting for quite some time but are either no longer applicable to our life, or I just signed up for them to enter a contest or some such. This time last week, I was getting between 50 and 75 emails every day. Today, just 13, and a few more of those will drop off in the coming week as some newsletters take up to 15 days to delete you from their email lists. So, by this time next week, I should only be getting a dozen or less emails a day, all pertinent to our lives, and I'll have waded through the rest of the backlog from 2012-2016. 
     Please feel free to join me in my email quest, or some other small task you've been putting off for too long, and then post a comment about it, so we can all congratulate each other. 

Let's do this!

Good Intentions and all that...

I intended to wax eloquent about our week here at The Man Crew House, but the morning slipped right through my fingers so now I'll leave you with this instead...

Happy Friday, Friends! May you be looking so forward to your weekend that you simply must express it through interpretive dance. 

God Bless ya! 

Pantry Challenge Update: Feb 2019

Phew! We made it! We ate our way through the January Pantry Challenge and we didn't starve, nor did we resort to eating canned cranberry sauce mixed with limp celery and outdated cake mix for dinner. *grins* Here were some of our goals for the month:


~Pantry Challenge month goals:

1. Reduce our grocery bill by half of our usual $800-$850 by only purchasing produce and meat.
2. Eat at home every night once our guests leave. 
3. Pack lunches every day for work (DT and I)
4. Bake all our bread  

Well, 3 out of 4 isn't bad. I didn't bake bread but a handful of times in January but we smashed all of our other goals. We ate at home all month long, with Community Group Night and Sister-Girl Nights being the only exception, and those were planned in advance. DT and I ate packed lunches at work all month long. And we even came in UNDER budget! I did some fancy math and by my best counts, I plated up 520 servings during the month of January, between the 6 and then 5 people that lived here, The BIGS eating out some nights, and bringing friends over some evenings. I spent $383.79 for the entire month, and that included things like laundry detergent, toilet paper, and pet foods as well as our meals. If I divide the money spent by the servings made, our amount spent for each serving was just under $.74. That's a number I can live with for sure.
AND...If I subtract the pet food and other non-food items, the cost per serving drops to a mere $.61! I'm a Pantry Challenge winner for sure. We ate homemade pizza together every week, we made enough food for people to pack lunches all month long, and while every meal wasn't our favorite, we all went to bed every night with a full tummy and lighter pantry shelves. I cleaned out the new fridge and freezer while my friend Laura was in town, we ate a good chunk of the things in the deep freeze and the pantry is looking much lighter and tidier between the Pantry Challenge and the 3 hours I spent cleaning, decluttering, and organizing it at the end of the month.
I kept an account of some of our Pantry Challenge fun on Instagram, using the hashtags #FeedingTeenagers, #PantryChallenge, and #TheManCrewHouse.



 It should be mentioned that a friend gifted us a large turkey this month and we enjoyed nearly an entire week of turkey themed meals, and another friend and I ended up at a grocery store while we were out running errands together and she sent me home with a few bags of groceries, helping us keep our numbers really low this month.


If you've never tried a Pantry Challenge, I encourage you to try one. Use up what you have, make a few new meals, be creative (the Internet is FULL of creative uses for odds and ends groceries) purchase as little as possible while still serving up nutritious meals. I tried to only purchase meat and produce this year. I normally only buy fresh produce, but a few shorter Pantry Challenges earlier in the Autumn had depleted my meat stash in the freezer, necessitating the purchase of some to get through the month. Feeding these guys requires meat. LOL!