YESSS! Being an Electricity Hitler Pays off BIG TIME! :D

I am PUMPED!  Remember how last month, my electricity bill was $195 (the highest it's ever been), and I decided to become an Electricity Hitler as an experiment to see if my wacky energy-saving ideas would help lower my next-month's electric bill?  Well, who's crazy now, because all of my weird efforts TOTALLY WORKED!  I got my electric bill today, and it's down to $142!  That's a savings of $53!!!  SIG HEIL!

To recap, all I did was the following:

• Keeping the thermostat on 66 (we have an electric heat pump), and using our gas logs along with the heat pump during the day, so the heat pump doesn't have to work as hard.
• Keeping the doors shut to rooms we're not using at the time.
• Closing all the window blinds in the house when the sun goes down in the evening, and opening the blinds back up again when the sun comes up in the morning.
• Keeping all lights in the house off, unless they're absolutely needed.
• Keeping everything unplugged that is possible (within reason), until needed, and then unplugging again after use.  Even if the item you have plugged in isn't turned on, it still uses energy.
• Turn off and open the dishwasher when it is just going into its drying cycle, and let the dishes air-dry.  This saves electricity, and adds warmth and moisture into the dry, wintertime air in the house.
• After using the oven, leave its door open to allow the heat to come into the room, instead of being wasted.
• Not using the clothes dryer very much; hanging up our laundry on the clothesline instead (luckily, our clothesline is under our covered porch, so we don't have to worry about the rain).  We also have one of those wooden drying racks that we use inside the house, too.
• Washing the clothes in Cold water instead of Warm or Hot.

So now that I've saved all that money, maybe now I can afford to buy myself a new pair of socks!  :/

(Please note that these socks will NOT go into the trash can, however; I will put them to good use as cleaning rags).

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

So I'm ecstatic that I saved a lot of money on my electric bill.  But with every success comes failures (and if you're me, you usually have nothing BUT failures).  So I finally got around to trying out the recipe for liquid hand soap that i saw in a Kindle book.  But since I didn't have a big enough container to hold it all, I halved the recipe.  I finely grated 1 1/2 bars of soap, added 3 cups of water, put it all in a pot, and cooked it on the stove until it was all dissolved, just like the recipe said to do.  And then i poured the concoction into a small plastic coffee can, to allow it to cool and set up for a couple of days before pouring into the pump liquid hand soap dispenser, again, just like the recipe said to do.

Great, right?

DING-DONG, YOU'RE WRONG.

EPIC FAILURE.  Now I'm stuck with a giant, cylindrical brick of soap, and I have no idea how to get it out of the coffee can.  (It's OK, you can laugh).  GEEZ!!!  What a disaster!

Well, ya win some, ya lose some.  :/

LOL!

Happy Valentine's Day WTH?!?

Well, Lilly's class had their Valentine's Day party "special snack" today, which was evidently the equivalent of an entire 5-pound bag of sugar, judging on how much more hyper and ill-behaved than usual Lilly is this afternoon.  :/

When I picked Lilly up at the bus stop a little while ago, she came totin' her little paper bag full of valentines from her classmates.  On our way back to the house, she pulled them all out and showed them to me one by one.  Then, towards the end of the pile, she whipped out this, and my jaw dropped:

Yep, that's right.  A medical blood specimen vial.  With a little rolled-up scrap of paper inside of it that says "Happy Valentine's Day":

The vial also contained a little bit of unidentifiable white powder, which Lilly spilled most of at school.

WHAT?!?!?

SKETCHIEST VALENTINE EVER!

On a different, non-valentine note, Jamie emptied a dumpster today at a place where a mama goat just had 2 cute little babies mere moments before he got there, and he took this video of them.  CUTE!  :D

DANGER! DANGER! No, Wait...False Alarm...!

I picked Lilly up at the school bus stop a little while ago.  When she hopped into the car, she was very serious and seemed worried.  I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that she had found something dangerous on the bus, and that she had it in her coat pocket.  So naturally, I was alarmed, and immediately thought it must be a syringe or some kind of drugs.  I told her not to worry; that I would NOT be mad, and to just show me what it was.  So when she nervously whipped a pair of nail clippers out of her coat pocket, I was instantly relieved, and horse-laughed.  She was still apprehensive, however, and swung the hinged portion aside to reveal the attached nail file.  She had thought that it was a knife!!!  So I horse-laughed again and assured her that it was OK.  Sheesh!  XD

Lilly with the 'switchblade'...LOL!

No Mo' Sno'

Well, the vast majority of the snow is now melted and gone, and aside from school being on (yet another) 2-hour delay again this morning, things are back to normal.

The last hurrah with the snow yesterday was Jamie and Lilly's angry snowman:

There's a story behind the angry snowman.  We make all of our snowmen angry.  The reason why is that several years ago, we made a snowman, and as it melted, its sweet little happy face just naturally transformed to at first being just slightly skeptical, and then it became a little ticked off, and then it got angry, before finally settling at downright pissed.  And so, we commemorate that amusing event in all of our subsequent snowmen.

The last I saw of yesterday's angry snowman, the dogs had eaten its entire head completely off.

I must say, I'm feeling a lot like the angry snowman myself. I absolutely HATE winter with every fiber of my being.  I HATE the cold weather, I HATE being cold, I HATE not being able to go outside without freezing to death, I HATE the house being cold, I HATE having to warm up the car before going anywhere, I HATE having to wear 57 layers of clothes and still freezing to death...basically, I HATE it ALL.

Can you tell I have cabin fever?

I was so happy to see that Punxsutawney Phil determined that Spring would come early this year.  But then my hopes were dashed when I learned that General Beauregard Lee (who is closer in proximity to me than Phil is) predicted that there would be 6 more weeks of winter.

HURRY UP, SPRING AND SUMMER.

HURRY THE %^*% UP.  >:{

WOAH, IT'S SNOWIN'!

WOW!  It's our first snow of the winter!  We don't usually have too awful many snows.  I kind of secretly like it when it snows on the weekend, and it's supposed to all be melted and gone by Monday morning so life can get back to normal.  It's great to just sit around the house, still in your jammies, turn on the gas logs, and watch the snowflakes go falling down.

Now that I think about it, gosh, I believe it's been about a little over 2 years ago when we had our last decent snow.  Last time it snowed, Lilly was ornery and refused to go outside.  But this year, she was super-excited about it, and rip-roarin' to go:

Here's a video of the sledding experience.  Jamie filmed it, and he has a habit of letting the camera run way too long.  But if you stick with it (at about 4 minutes in), you will get to see Lilly accidentally jumping the sled over a log!  :O

The dogs are having a great time in the snow, too!

Here's another way-too-long, Jamie-made video of the dogs playing in the snow, if you care to partake:

And here are some more pictures that Jamie took of the snowy scenes around the house:

It started snowing at 11:30 this morning, and it's now about 6:30 in the evening, and it's STILL snowing.  As of right now, I think there's anywhere from 3 to 5 inches of snow on the ground.

When Lilly and Jamie finally came back in the house for the last time for the evening, Lilly angrily flung her gloves in the floor, because she was mad that she had to stop having fun in the snow to come in.  Ironically, this is how one of her gloves just so happened to land:

Well played, glove.  Well played.  Captured Lilly's sentiments exactly.

LOL!

Maddie Will Danse 4 Sellery :D

I was cleaning out some leftovers from the fridge a while ago, when Jamie came home from work.  I handed him a bunch of old celery sticks and a bowl of rice and asked him to give them to the dogs. Here's the outcome:

I am certain that the hit tune "Maddie Will Danse 4 Sellery" is sure to hit multi-platinum, and the new dance craze "Doin' the Celery" will be sweeping the nation overnight.

LOL!