Shop Hop Saturday 2/19/11

Hopping along again this week with Ruthi, and abitosunshine.   Click the button at the end of my post to hop along and/or support other shop owners online.

 As you know, we are buying a house.  I have, for now put away all of my crafts--other than a small rug I am attempting to crochet for either in front of the front door or in front of the kitchen sink.  We are working on closing the house early, so hopefully we can get settled in and I can get more crafts done before the monster garage sale.

In the meantime, I did list 4 new items in my etsy store this week, and I do have 4 more to list next week as well.  So, I will still have new things to list in this blog post next week as well.

Here are my new listings:

Dish Scrubbies Set of 4 in Cream Color

 

Toothbrush Rug Multi Colored 

 

 

Hot Pad/Coaster Set in Peach 

 

 

Hot Pad/Coaster Set in Light Coral 

 

 

 

Drugstore Bootstrap Challenge Week 3

Week 2 of the Drugstore Bootstrap Challenge put on by Frugal Follies. You can find her challenge information here.

Here are the rules that I set for myself:
Here are the "rules" I am trying to follow:
1. I can spend no more than $10 out of pocket the whole month.
2. Sales tax does not count in the $10 total.
3. I can start with the $5 in register rewards that I have on hand.
4. I can use any coupons that I can, and they also do not count in the total, as the total is just out of pocket.

If you recall, I was already up to $6.73 of the $10 out of pocket for the month challenge.  I blew that with one week left, but oh well, it's been fun.

This week I bought:

1-Renuzit Fabric Freshner Spray--these are on sale buy 1 for $2.99, get 1 free.  There was only 1 left on the shelf so the manager let me have it for half price--I used $1 coupon making it just .49

1- Reach Total Care Dental Floss--on sale for $2.99, used $1 coupon, got back $2 in RR's.

1-Skintimate Shave Gel--on sale for $2.49, used $1 coupon, got back $1 in RR's.

1-Lysol No Touch Hand Soap Dispenser--$11.99, used $3 coupon and got back $7 in RR's.

2-Tuf paper towels--on sale .49 each with Walgreen's coupons (these were my fillers to be able to use my 2 RR's from the previous week)

I had a total of $14 in coupon savings.

In total before taxes, and after coupons came to $6.94 out of pocket.   This isn't bad at all really, especially since I took home a total of $10 in RR's to use next time.

This brings my total for the month so far, out of pocket, to  $13.67.   Do you think I can maybe just not spend more than $15 OOP instead of $10 with next weeks shopping included?

The Lysol hand soap, paper towels, floss, Renuzit, and Skintimate are all packed in a box to move to our new house.


Steve went with me to Walgreen's as we had just been to the realtor's office down the street signing more papers on the house.  He found them to have laptop caddy trays marked half price.  He knew we each needed one for at our new home.  $12.49 each, or a total of $40.48 with tax for 3 of them.  They are staying in their boxes until we move.  I think they will be very cool to have and use with our laptops and work even better than the tv trays we currently move all over the house with us.


Have a great day, and happy coupon shopping!

Winner Announcement--Yoplait Smoothie Giveaway

Thanks to everyone who entered my giveaway.  Be on the looking out for the next one!

I used random.org to choose the winner.  Winner will have 48 hours to contact me or another winner will be chosen.

The winner is:

Comment #40 is from: 

Pegasus72 said... 40

Posted on my facebook Congrats Pam!  I will be contacting you.

Thinking on Thursday - Pondering with a Purpose 2/17/11

Brenda Youngerman has just started a new blog hop on her blog.  Since I am always pondering, I thought I would join in, although I am not a writer.

Each week she will give a prompt.  This week's prompt is word association and we are to choose 3 words from her list to write about.

Click her button at the bottom of my post to join in, or just hop around to see what others are writing.

I am choosing these 3 words:  expectation, struggle and ability.

This is all about me....my expectations, struggles, and feeling that I do have the ability to make a living online. 
I first got online in 1996.  I had been doing refund conventions for a few years.  I was hearing all these gals that came to my conventions rave about the internet and how you could go to the company websites and requests coupons.  At that time, my life was all about coupons and refunds.

When we got the internet at home my first search was for Kellogg's.  Somehow my search ended me up, not at Kellogg's, but at a website where you did trivia to earn points to redeem for prizes.  I don't remember the name of the website now, but when I realized you could do this type of thing online, the rest is history.

Back in the day, it was fairly easy to earn online, both money and gift cards.  I even did several programs in the names of several family members.  Unfortunately, that's changed.

Here is where my expectations came in.  My first goal was to take my family on a vacation to Florida.  Circumstances changed before I saved up enough for the motel, food, etc.  Here is a part of my life that not many know about.  My daughter we 3 years old at the time, and her father molested her.  He's been in prison now for 11 years, and has 9 more years to serve (on good time).  There went my trip to Florida with the kids.

Now for the struggle......oh no!  I had to re-think our entire lives.  How was I going to continue to raise my children?    The Lord works in mysterious way, as they say, and he really does.  I had final paychecks from her father from his work.  I ended up winning a dishwasher that I was able to sell for $250, and he had been getting savings bonds from work that I was able to cash in.  These things kept us going.  I had my same job as a lunch aide, but I started spending a lot more time online earning!

I joined a website called piepoints (to which I still belong).  There I found that I was able to become a sponsor.  I put together a little website with some crafts for sale.  I only started out with about 5 different things for sale.   This eventually grew.  I am still a sponsor today with the site.  Being a sponsor means that some of my crafts I offer in trade for points from members.  Being a sponsor means that my URL's are always in the traffic exchange etc.  Piepoints has recently been taken over by some of the members, and I am anxious to see what they do with it.  (I'm getting off base here, see why I'm not a writer?)

Anyway...I know that I do have the ability to earn a living online.  The definition of that living for me is the ability to earn enough to buy the groceries for the house, put gas in my own car, and take us out to eat on occasion.  I do not think that my expectations are too high. It's been a struggle, and is still a struggle, but I'm enjoying it all the same. :)

P.S.  I did end up taking my children on that trip to Florida.  It wasn't the way I wanted, but we found an online friend that we stayed with while we were there, and he took us to some of the sights.  We drove my mom's old rickety station wagon (which used 15 quarts of oil each way) (It was a 33 hour drive each way).    I had sold the motel gift cards I had earned, but had kept the fast food ones, so we used those for most of our eating on the trip.  We had a great time, and now we can all say we've been to Florida.

Squidoo Hopping 2/17/11

Welcome to the second week of my Squidoo Blog Hop.

A big thank you to those of you who joined us last week.  I hope to see it continue to grow as we support each other.

I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and I even learned a few things.  I read in Louanne's blog post about out links.  I learned that by having outlinks within our lenses, and people clicking on those, it helps the lens rank.  This has me knowing that I need to get back in to a lot of my lenses and see what I can add.

I have a lot to learn about the different modules that are available and just what they do.

I would love to know how to put in a module where others can subscribe by email to my lenses.  Sandy Spider has this, so I get notice in my email when she builds or updates one of her lenses.  She tried to explain to me where she went to find out about putting one in, but it was above my head.

I think I am going to continue this week with sharing lenses that are on the bottom of my list as far as lensrank.  This gives them a boost up.

Last week I shared Our Unschooling Journey- 4---This week it's Our Unschooling Journey 3 that sits at the bottom of my list on lensrank.   This was part 3 of our attempt to unschool.  These lenses are great memories for me.  I love looking back at them and the photos I shared of Jasmine doing various things.

The second one up from the bottom in lensrank is Homeschoolbuy, however, my auctions there are in a mess and won't be fixed until after we move into our new house...and probably not until after I do the monster garage sale and I'm putting any books I don't sell there back on the shelf.  So, I'm going to skip that one.

Next is Naruto.   This is a lens that I built dedicated to my youngest daughter (who is now 14).  I did some updating to this lens today, adding another amazon module and flickr photos.  I did part 1 of the characters making the characters names in bold.  Left the rest for another day.  Enjoy!


Speaking of a boost up....I am a squidoo angel in the books category.  If you have reviews or other book related lenses, I would love to take a look at them.  If you would like, please share the URL in the comments section.






 

WIP Wednesday 2/16/11

Welcome to WIP, hosted by Every Day Crochet.  Click the button at the bottom of my post to play along and see what others are up to.

I still have quite a list of what I wanted to get done in crafts before the monster garage sale March 19.  I'm afraid that packing and moving is going to have to put a halt to that!!  Basically, the house can close any day now, which is great and I would love to see it closed and us able to start moving some things over there even if we don't start staying there right away.

I'm still sitting here crocheting dish scrubbies.  I have a lot of white netting.  I think past today and what I can make around my other activities is what is going to end up being in the jar for the sale.
Here is what I have so far:

I ripped out lines on the strip quilt I am working on and this photo was of me in the process of re-sewing.  It looks a lot better.  I am in hopes today yet to get the middle of the quilt sewn on.  I've not decided exactly on the back as I only have 2 sheets to choose from and both are flowery.  I'm also thinking of making the binding.  In other words, once the middle is sewn on, it's being boxed up and won't be worked on again until we are settled in the new house.

I have the back and edging pinned on the table runner.  It's just a matter now of sewing around it.  That won't take long, but I'm kind of anal, and working on the strip quilt until I run out of the thread that is already on and in my machine.

Other WIP's include 2 books I am reading for review......and the mess of organizing and packing for the move.

Giveaways Linky Tuesday

Mailbox Monday 2/14/2011

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Welcome to Mailbox Monday.  We've been busy attempting to sort through some things for the move, and taking another look at the house and all.  I'm really late posting this week.  Click the button at the end of my post to join in the fun.

Lots of magazines again:
2 issues of People
Sports Illustrated
2 issues of Time (usually comes on Saturdays so they got behind)
Good Housekeeping
Bloomsburg Businessweek

Other mail:
Gerber Graduate coupons
A hand written thank you note from LaFamos for doing a review on the Kat McGivern CD.....I thought this was so cool...hand written, thanking me for such a great review of the album and how they look forward to working with me again...and it's also hand signed by everyone in their office!
3 other pieces of hausernet mail
Nexxus Pro-Mend samples and $3 coupon
Lanacane Anti-Chafing gel sample and $1 coupon
Covergirl natureluxe silk foundation samples and 2-$1 coupons
$11.68 check from clixsense
$18.96 commission check from Jerky Direct

In my email:
$25 paypal from sidetick
$1.71 total paypal from Yahoo! Contributor Network
Here is something that came in my email back on Dec. 21 that I had no idea had come.....a $75 virtual Visa card.  I was expecting a card in the mail and hadn't ever gotten one, so emailed them asking when I could expect it.  They emailed me right back about it coming in my email and then I found it.  I used it to pay for a 3 month weekend subscription to the newspaper and for my space at the monster garage sale......this was from doing a project with 20/20 Research.