I like Oscar night

Oscar night now always reminds me of Oscar Night 2000, when I gave birth to Jacob. I don't remember much of the awards - actually the only thing I remember was seeing a very preggo Annette Benning and thinking "She looks waaaayyyy more pregnant than me! Why isn't she suffering now like I am!"

Now this is my kinda junk mail! Free money

I got a nice piece of junk mail yesterday that included a free $1 bill. I'm no marketing genius but I think sending free money to people in order to try to get more money is pretty stupid. I figure I already give a lot to charities when I shop and donate at my non-profit thrifts. So I think this dollar is destined to be spent in one of them. (The Warning sticker on the envelope is warning people (postal workers?) that it's illegal to knowingly interfere with the delivery of mail.)

Puffy from There's Something About Mary - .25

My favorite buy of the week was a Puffy dog from the movie There's Something About Mary. Paid .25 for him. Makes me think back to the first time I saw this movie in 1998. My husband and I were on a cruise and we made a stop in Cancun for a day. Since we had just spent a week in Cancun in 1997, we decided to spend a portion of the day at the movies. It was in English with Spanish subtitles. We even got a promo package of There's Something About Mary hair gel.

Pics of party last week at Raven's Stadium

My husband's work had a party last week at the M&T Stadium in Baltimore. Yummy buffet dinner, lots of door prizes - we won a $200 Ipod Nano!!!! - and music by a 22 piece band. I highly recommend them the next time you need a 22 piece band for your function, visit them on the web at Mood Swings I even got dragged on the dance floor once. I uploaded the video to my Myspace page (click on videos there) and you can hear my scream.

Another Wednesday, another snowday (but no snow)

Well it rained yesterday so schools were closed 2 hours early. And they are closed today due to icy roads. Probably just in the northern part of the county - there's puddles in my driveway here in the southern part of the county.

All I can say is there better be school tomorrow!! The kids are off on Friday and Monday for teacher in-service day and President's Day. And the thing is, when schools are closed, Smile is closed. Not going to Smile on a Wednesday throws me off for the rest of the week! And since there was another snow day last Wedneday, I am really not liking this trend.

I did manage to get to VV yesterday and bought a pair of funky red ostrich clogs made by Dansko. They definitely caught my eye and the price was right.

Going to make some cake mix cookies with Jacob today for Valentine's Day. (Take a dry cake mix, mix in an egg and some oil, form into cookies and bake).

Also have to start doing some body maintenance for an upcoming semi-formal party that I'm going to on Friday night. Today my plan is to hide my greys. I was going to have a manicure tomorrow, but right now my nails are so short, its probaby not worth it. I can do my nails myself.

Rachael Ray - Before she hit it big

Well I am still looking thru pictures that I've taken over the last year or two and came across this one. (By the same token, I'm also trying to catch up in my magazine reading....currently reading the October 2005 issue of People and reading how Jennifer Aniston has a hot new romance with Vince Vaughn and Nick Lachey is quoted as saying "everything's perfect" (regarding his wife Jessica Simpson).

So anyways, this book cover is kind of interesting if you're a Rachael Ray fan. I am, I love hearing her mention her upbringing in upstate NY on her tv show since it's only about "10 exits" away from where I grew up. She was on a local tv cooking show with this local tv news anchor. Egads! No wardrobe stylist and she's not even using a Rachael Ray knife! My mom bought the cookbook for a .25 at a garage sale (and no, she doesn't want to sell it). And its even autographed.

Yardsale season still over a month or two away

so no yardsales for me today. I did go to Smile this week and buy a few goodies, like a bottle of Victoria Secret Very Sexy for Her perfume and lotion at $1 each. At VV, I bought Jacob some Super Nintendo games at .50 each.

In going thru my old pictures - I found this one I took several months ago. It's a typical Wednesday morning at Smile - a line of people gather waiting for the doors to open. (Smile is closed Sun-Tuesday so people know that Wednesday is the best day for the best selection - although they continuously put out new stuff).

Have I mentioned lately that I love Staples?!?

Well I do. In today's mail I got a $8.60 rewards gift card from them as my quarterly reward. I'm a member of their rewards program so for every purchase I make, I get a % back (I think it was like 2%) every quarter. But in today's mail they said my Reward percentage has been upgraded to 5%.

Since I'm sorta running low on empty inkjet cartridges, I just bought 150 empty cartridges on ebay (free shipping). I paid .60 per cartridge so that will each turn into a $3 Staples coupon when I recycle them. So for every $9 I spend at Staples, its really like I spent $1.80. Plus I will be getting 5% back. Then if I really want to double dip, I can charge all my Staples purchases on my Discover card for their cash back bonus. (We pay off our credit cards every month so I don't need to be concerned with paying interest etc).

Massive snowfall in Maryland causes schools to be closed today.

We got a whopping .25" of snow (if that!) overnight so of course schools were closed today. No, I am not kidding. Bunch of namby pamby wimps who run the schools here. They say "oh we do it for the safety of the kids...their safety is #1". It's the same school system who sent my child home the first day of pre-k with a loop of yarn around his neck with a name tag. Heck, if I had worn something similar during my years of working at the nuke plant, I would have been written up for wearing a safety hazard.

Photo isn't the best, I should have put a ruler next to it.

Boy, am I really on the ball!

For the past 1.5 years, I had kinda been wondering why no one has signed my guestbook on the main page of my website http://www.yardsalequeen.com. Every so often I'd check it and see that the last entry was from November 2005. I thought about taking it down since maybe it made the website look "dated" or something. Or perhaps that signing guestbooks are so 90's and just something that no one ever does anymore.

So after I updated the website the other day, I decided to do a "test" of my guestbook and sign it for the hell of it. Afterwards I see a notice "guestbook entry will be added once approved by the webmaster". Doh! LOL! I must have changed it to make it so I had to approve all entries because it was getting so much spam and I totally forgot that I did that!

So I logged in to the guestbook account and see hundreds of entries waiting for my approval. LOL! Most are still spam though for prescription drugs and it will take a long time to sift thru page after page of the bad entries. But so far I have I managed to find several legitimate entries among the spam.

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Here's a pic of a male red bellied woodpecker that was at my suet feeder today. Why they are called red bellied, I don't know.

Tempest Video Game is fixed

We have a full sized Tempest video game that we bought in the early 90's (before ebay) and for the past 5 years it hasn't worked. My husband knows about electronics (I figure if he can explain in detail every aspect of how a nuclear power plant works, he should be able to fix an old video game). And ta-da, he did. Another situation of: why didn't we fix this years ago.

No yardsales yesterday.

I love Staples!

I am a Staples shopping addict because of the $3 coupons you get when turning in HP, Dell and Lexmark cartridges for recycling. I buy the empty cartridges on ebay and then take them to Staples for recycling. Sometimes I find the cartridges at thrifts super cheap (I bought one earlier this week at a thrift store for .25 which I turned in for a $3 coupon). Today I found these Crayola marker kits on clearance for $2 each, so I bought 3 and used two $3 coupons for a grand total of $0.

JC Penney shopping (yes, I shopped retail!!)

My husband had the day off so we spent several hours shopping and having lunch. The other day I printed out a 15% coupon to use at JC Penneys from taking a survey at http://www.jcpsurvey.com (you enter in the data from a previous receipt). I "splurged" and bought myself this cute Rolfs wallet. Original price was $36, on clearance for $16.99, then 50% off that, and then additional 15% off. Price came out to be $7.22 plus tax.

Yippee - after suffering for over 30 years - going to fix the furniture!

I wish I knew these things existed 30 years ago!! When I was in the 3rd grade, my parents bought me a nice bedroom set (twin bed, a chest of drawers and big long dresser with mirror) that I used forever (and still is in great shape). Except the sliders on several of the drawers are broken. When I was a kid, I overstuffed the drawers and broke a little plastic piece that the drawers would slide on. But of course I still continued to use the furniture but had to be careful when pulling out the drawers since they would not stay open on their own.

I mention it to my husband today how it would be nice if he installed some new sliders or something in the furniture so it wouldn't be a pain for Jacob to open the drawers. I figured it would be impossible to find the exact plastic part from decades ago but my husband was sure that "drawer technology" hasn't changed much over the years. And voila! Right at Lowes and at less than $2 a package are the little plastic dohickys that we need. If only I had looked for them 30 years ago! Anyhow, I am so excited about finding these!

Happy February

Happy February. My son did his schedule for the month - I thought it was cute.

Well I'm biting the bullet and not going to Smile today. I have so much stuff to do at home. Plus, it's snowing a little and no use going out and getting my car dirty unless I really have to. I hate getting all that water on the floor of the garage from melting chunks of snow stuck to the car.

I have to get our health care account for 2006 straightened out. I swear it's driving me nuts. I hate it. I am so glad we are not going to use it again this year, not worth the hassle at all. In 2006 thru my husband's employer we used http://www.wageworks.com you put in a certain amount of money (your choice of how much) and the benefit of that is that you're issued a debit card to use in stores for over the counter medicines and doctor co-pays. Well the real benefit is that you don't pay taxes on that money, as long as its going toward your health. Ugghh so last year they changed it and now you have to submit receipts for everything you used the card for. Otherwise you will have to pay THEM back even though its YOUR money! What a frickin headache. So not worth the hassle. Well on the plus side, I am getting pretty good at using the fax feature of my scanner/printer since I have to fax them all these forms and receipts and then do it again when they tell me I'm using the wrong form.

Shit Man was fixed today

Yesterday the kids didn't have school so I thought it would be fun to take Jacob to Annapolis for the day and go to the Chuck E. Cheese. I also wanted to check out a Children's Museum that is there. I saw from the museum's website that they had a special for January: if you brought in 3 empty baby food jars per person, you'd get free admission (normally $3 a person). So since baby food was .49 a jar, I spent approximately $3 on babyfood instead of paying $6 for admission. Annapolis, overall, is a pretty upscale town. The parking lots are full of Lexus's and BMW's. So I was expecting the children's museum to be something special. I was not impressed. It looked like a gutted rambler house that they filled with plastic germy yardsale toys. They did have some other things but I doubt we'll be going back.

I was hugely disappointed that the Annapolis kids also had the day off from school - and I think the majority were at Chuck E. Cheese. It was a zoo. Jacob didn't even want to stay - way too many people.

So since we definitely didn't fill up the afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese, we went to "our" museum in Solomons. Coming home around 5pm I passed this Antiques store sign and got a laugh (I'm easily amused). I passed it this morning and it was still the Shit man, but by this afternoon shit man had been fixed.

Went out to lunch with a friend today - ate at one of those Japanese places where they cook your meal right in front of you.

Let's play.....NUCLEAR WAR!

Bought this game at VV the other day, looks like a fun little game for the family called Nuclear War. On the side of the box it's described as a comic cataclysmic card game of global destruction. And described as a game for all ages, so I'm thinking ages 3+. Paid .50 for it.

Shaving Brush Collection

I thought I would share a pic of one of my collections - this is my shaving brush collection. I look for them when I'm yardsaling but I'm not fanatical about buying them. I don't look for them in high priced antique stores or buy them on ebay. Just look for ones priced cheap at yardsales. They are lined up above the lighting fixture in my bathroom. I guess my fascination with shaving brushes started early - here I am with Dad getting my first shave. The brush that is second from the left belonged to my grandfather.

No Yardsales today (too cold)

No yardsales today - well there was one moving sale advertised but I didn't go. I figured all the vultures would be out early. Well I don't know about the vultures, but I know the hawks were definitely out - I took a picture of one in my backyard today. He/she was checking out the birds at my birdfeeders.

I have several birdfeeders in my backyard. I usually buy the "deer corn" for the squirrels in big 20 lb bags. That reminds me of a funny story - I was doing an interview last year for a newspaper and the interviewer asked me what I bought the last time I went "real" shopping at an actual shopping mall. I had to think a bit and then I told her - 20 lb bags of corn at a Dick's Sporting Goods. How sad is that! haha.

I also buy 50 lb bags of sunflower seeds from a hardware store and I make suet for the woodpeckers. Here's a recipe that I use:

Mix together using your hands the following(it's messy!)

4 cups cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 cup peanut butter (chunky or regular)
1 cup Crisco shortening (or generic)

Shape into patties and put into a suet feeder. Refrigerate leftovers.

If you don't have a suet feeder - you can use a plastic net (like the kind that is usually on a frozen turkey). Then just put the suet patties in that and tie it closed and hang (if you have squirrels in your area, they will get to it in about 2 seconds flat). Othewise you can also smear the suet right into the bark crevices of your trees. Or wait and buy a suet feeder at a yardsale for .50 and then make the suet.

Liquor store with a drive-thru window

I think I finally got the hang of my new computer, as far as organizing and adjusting photos. Here's a pic I took sometime in 2006, I had forgotten where it was stored. It's a nearby liquor store that has a drive-thru window for convenience. I wonder why that bright idea hasn't caught on in other parts of the country...