Why I Oughta...

This tray was one of Nat's finds this past trip to the Great Lakes Antique Mall.  She picked it up, looked at the price, then did some comparison shopping on Etsy and said it was a deal. So...it is now ours!  It went away for the year, but will be a nice surprise next season when we pull our stuff out.  It fits the criteria for me (made in Japan) and for her (has a pretty cute set of Santas on it), so it is a winner. Check out the back below here for the mark and Japan stamp:

Back in November, I posted a photo of the foursome of figures that we picked up from the 50th Anniversary Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer set at Menards . Part of the deal was that when you buy all four, you get 4 different codes you have to enter on the distributor's website and you unlock the code to get a free mail-in Bumble.  We did that back in November and right before Christmas, this guy showed up in the mail. The four we bought at the store all came with little batteries in them, but this guy requires AAA batteries to be put in.  Because he arrived so late, he didn't get much attention this year, but I packed him away with the other four, so he'll be in heavy rotation with the girls next season, I'm thinking.

I've been on an oatmeal kick in 2015.  Eating it at home.  Even eating it out at restaurants.  The stuff is billed as being great for your health and cholesterol.  So...I'm giving it a shot and I've kind of figured out a way to make it taste good (brown sugar, bananas, vanilla almond milk). So, Nat came home with this box of Quinoa and Oatmeal combined.  It takes a bit longer than normal steel cut oatmeal (20 min for this vs. <10 min for the normal stuff), but it was pretty good.  I don't know if it filled me up any more than normal, but I'm willing to give it even more tries.

These guys above are called Vinylmation s.  They're a collectible series of things that Disney sells both in the stores and at the parks that you buy 'blind'.  You buy one from a series, but you aren't sure which one you'll get. And...they're HUGE in parts of the web.  There are literally thousands of 'blind box' unboxing videos of these things on YouTube .  We now have three of them.  The two on the ends are from Toy Story and the guy in the middle is from Sleeping Beauty (I think). They aren't cheap but people seem to be glomming on to these things in a big way.  So far, the Babe and the Bird, not to mention the Champ (the newest Parrillo!) are into these just yet.  They like the pins (more on that soon) and the Bird is all over Shopkins (which is basically the same thing but not Disney and cheaper), so as long as I don't cave when we go to the DStore, we'll be free and clear of these things.  But...that is a big 'as long as'

Just placing this photo here as a reminder to myself this fall when I try to drag all the Christmas stuff out of our crawlspace.  This year, I put away 10 tubs, the advent box, the nativity box and 2 other small boxes on the top right.   Now I'll have a reference photo to understand if I have everything out for the 2015 Christmas season. The reason for this is that this fall, I pulled out ALL of the tubs that had *some* Christmas stuff in them.  There was like 22 tubs total.  Lots of them were half filled with stuff and a bunch of them had things in the bottom of the tubs that we stopped using at Christmas (like old lights, plastic ornaments, old tree skirts, etc). This year, when re-packing our stuff up in January, I consolidated everything into these slightly smaller tubs.  (That was the other problem...last year, we were using lots of big tubs - you know the kind - the ones that you have to spread your arms really far apart to carry them).  These are easy to handle, can

I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa gift exchange this past Christmas season and was matched with a woman in western Massachussets who was a foodie/cook.  I bought her the Flavor Bible based on her profile. My Secret Santa had sent me a note before Christmas saying that my gift was delayed because it was on backorder.  I waited and waited and waited.  In fact, Reddit bugged me to mark my gift as 'not received' because I think they wanted to close down the exchange and re-match folks.  But...my Santa was persistent.  At first, I thought I was getting scammed.  That...this dude was just emailing me to cover his rear in the Reddit system but that I was going to get shut out.  But...what was in it for him?  He could have just used (as I did) a throw-away account and moved on. He emailed me a few times saying that things were on their way and then last week, he finally delivered a UPS tracking number.  So...he was legit.  My Secret Santa gift was on the way. When it

When we were up in Coloma, we stopped at Silver Beach Pizza down in St. Joseph and I was surprised by the construction. They're expanding to add 70 new seats to the restaurant which will be a big help.  Not sure it is enough based on how popular this place is, but it should make the line move faster at checkin. I'm guessing they're aiming to have this new addition open and running for Memorial Day to hit the crowd surge they get during the summer.  We'll have to go back to check it out on our next trip to see the progress.