For You - Dr. DiMagno

I promised my doctor last month that I'd get back on the Wii and lose weight. Remember her, in the picture to the left? Well I told myself I'd begin after the girls went back home and we quit having all those favorite meals and dinners out. August 1st was the date.... I tried but couldn't force myself to pull out the mat, the board, the controls, adjust the TV settings etc. etc., so the first morning I did 15 minutes of floor exercises instead and again the same routine on the 2nd & 3rd day of August. Cut me some slack, I'm no spring chicken. But yesterday I prevailed, I'm back on the Wii Fit Program.

The Wii is kind of intimidating, it keeps track of everything and there's no holding back on the comments. I was greeted with Hi Dorsey, it's been 111 days since I last saw you. And to make matters worse there is no where to type in excuses. I'll be honest I gained 5 lbs since I was last on the Wii. Remember the vacation in Maine eating lobster...vacation to Asheboro eating Meghan's gourmet cooking...feasting on all Ashley's favorite meals while she was here from Mexico. I guess I should feel fortunate that it wasn't 10 lbs.

Yesterday I focused on Yoga & ended with dance steps for a cardio finish. The male instructor I chose yelled at me once, that's a first. He said "Your muscles won't train themselves you know." I guess I wasn't putting enough effort into it. And listen to this...I accidentally hit the retry button and didn't feel like doing that particular pose again, so I went and got a drink instead and finished just the very end of the exercise and the instructor gave me a big fat ZERO. He said "I know you took a break during this exercise". Good Grief! I can't get away with anything, even with a TV Yoga trainer.

I'll keep you posted on my Wii adventures and tell you all about the pounds just melting off me.

I'ts ALL about being FRUGAL these days

What did I do today to save money?

1) I made a mini apple cobbler with 3 apples that have been on my counter for weeks. I added flax, extra cinnamon & walnuts to make it more healthy. Yummy!

2) I organized my cans & jars to make sure what we purchased first is eaten first, so there is no waste.

3) I brought meat out of my freezer in the garage (dated Feb/April/May) into the smaller one in the house so it is eaten this week. Oops! How did that February one stay hidden from me?

4) I started a price book for getting groceries at the best price possible for stockpiling. I will be recording..Date...Price...Amount..Price per/unit, so I will know how low it actually goes and when a sale is really a sale.

5) I checked my email for new Internet printable coupons put out this week.

6) I cut coupons out of my new ALL YOU magazine. Check it out! I purchased it when there was a super cheap deal through Amazon.com. This magazine is known for having the most coupons every month out of all the magazines on the market. Great tips on being frugal too.

All of this before 10:00 am. I love my days off.

Catalina What's a Catalina?

It's been a while since I've post anything on groceries, coupons, huge savings.. well you get the picture.

Yesterday I saved BIG! And NO coupons were used. What? No coupons? Dorsey has lost her mind. Wait a minute how'd she do that? Lose her mind? No, silly how did she save BIG without using coupons?

Here's how. Catalinas are printed out of a machine at the checkout station. Meijer started something new in the month of July; depending on how much you spend the Catalina machine gives you a print out of Meijer Cash. I received two $10 Catalinas, one $8 and one $2 for a total of $30 in Meijer Cash. What I earned in July could not be used until August, and further more you had to purchase General Merchandise or Clothing....what a bummer - no groceries. I also had a Catalina for a savings of $5 when you buy a $25 gift card from Meijer, which I then used to pay the bill.





This waffle maker was $35.99. I had $30 in Meijer Cash. OK, now it's $5.99. I had saved $5.00 on the gift card. Now it's .99 + .84 tax = $1.83. As you can see by my receipt it says $1.50 in coupons. Well it was really another catalina, but who's complaining, I got this waffle maker for .33 Cents!!!



Plus I saved $11.89 for shopping in store sales. That Dorsey is one savy shopper!

The Little Bed - Part Two

If you missed The Little Bed - Part One, click here.

Please forgive me for forgetting to post regarding Sydney in the bed. As Sydney would say to me "Say..Oh! Grief! Gramie." Oh Good Grief! My memory is failing me so often these days. I'm going on a health kick and maybe the new diet & exercise will help my memory too. We can always hope, can't we?

Here they are:



Sydney between the Smurf sheets. When I adapted them to fit the Little Bed for Audra I never dreamed one day I'd have grand kids using it. Life is just full of surprises and this one is a very pleasant surprise. Love those BIG brown eyes. I'm thinking there's another big brown eyed girl in my near future. What do you think?



Meghan & Sydney saying their Good Night - I Love Yous.

It's definetly a GIRL!

Ashley is back in Mexico and she went for another Dr's visit. This ultrasound was very conclusive. It is a GIRL! So Daniela will be her name. Gramie was right again.

Check out this site, How Many of Me? I was attempting to look up how popular the name Daniela is, but then decided to see how unpopular mine is and that lead to famous Doris's and that lead to this website. There are 8 people in the U.S. with my name. To do a comparison I'll give you a couple examples. I tried Natalie Jones, and there are 760 of them in the U.S. Then I tried Robert Weber. To my amazement that name brought up 1,934.

There is only one person in the U.S. with Daniela's first and last name. My grandson will be named Griffin and there are 3 people in the U.S. with his first and last name. It was fun to play around on this website. Check out your family names.

Using the Social Security popular names website, Daniela ranked 122 on the list in 2008. Griffin ranked 242. My other grandkids, Michael ranked 2nd, Ava 5th and Sydney 49th, these were all for 2008. The name Doris has not placed in the top 1000 in the past 9 years.

Produce from my raised bed garden

While my grand daughter Sydney was visiting she had the honor of picking grandma's first tomato and second pepper for the gardening season.



Ashley wanted zucchini bread while she was home, but the zucchini weren't cooperating. I bought bacon for BLT's and italian sausage for a scumptious zucchini stir fry. I'll post the recipe when I make it latter this week.




At least we've salvaged something out of this terribly wet gardening season, thanks to the great raised bed my hubby put in. I do believe we'll add a couple more next year.

Next comes Ashley pushing the Baby Carriage

When we discussed the menu for the shower, Ashley declared that she'd like a watermelon fruit basket. Good Grief, I thought, that's something I've never done before. So I went on the Internet and looked up how to carve a watermelon into a fruit basket. I found other amazing sculptures, including a baby carriage, which totally fit our party theme. I told everyone we were going to attempt to carve the watermelon and I'd blog the results, be it good or bad.



So I began with help from Meghan and Ashley. I began by drawing the cut line on the melon. Oops! I drew past the bonnet section of the carriage and it was permanent marker. Meghan came to the rescue with the bright idea of trying a Mr. Eraser sponge to erase it and guess what? It worked pretty good. Then when I cut the top off to make the basic shape of the carriage, the second glitch occurred.... the watermelon split about an inch past the cut line. Ugh! Well at least it was on the same side as the marker boo-boo, we determined that would be the side facing the back.



Meghan cut the handle. We ended up trimming it a little thinner than it was in this photo, but you get the basic idea.



Here's our finished baby carriage. The hardest part of the whole sculpture was the wheels. The centers of the oranges just don't hold anything. I had to cut a mini square of watermelon rind to put in the center of the orange. It was a little frustrating, but we were able to get them attached and they stayed on well.



Filled with fruit and on display. The wheels were suppose to have strawberries as hub caps, but we used the watermelon rind circles instead, because we forgot to save some out when we cut the fruit for the salad.