All Hallow's Eve

Just want to say Happy Halloween to everyone! Halloween really is one of my favorite holidays, although for some reason I don't go all out for it. I think once I have a family it will be more fun to celebrate it, but for now, I'm just going to start getting decorations together each year so here's to add to my holiday decor, along with my pumpkins I already posted! These decorative blocks are so easy to make, yet so fun to decorate! I'm working on one for Thanksgiving so you'll be seeing that shortly!
I want to know what you all did to celebrate the wonderful holiday :) So leave a comment with your favorite goody you made, your favorite decor, or what your costume was! Post it on your blog so I can see what fun you had! Ok, cheesy, but I love to see what everyone else does to celebrate!
* Trick-Or-Treat *

My Emergency Essentials Scoop

We've been instructed from General Authorities to have a food storage for quite some time now. Clay and I have been trying, but obviously being college students, newly married, etc. it's harder to stock up on. I love that I've been getting started with couponing so I can stock up on items, but this analyzer was nice to see what we've actually got. According to it, if I did it right, we have about 31 days worth of food storage. I don't know if that calculated in other canned food, water, peanut butter, and such so hopefully not so then we'll have more! Our goal which we're slow at getting to, is at least getting together a 72 hour kit. I think we'll do that for Christmas though :0

TacomaLand

Now that the rainy season has begun, I'm glad Clay and I took advantage of the fun things to do outside in Tacoma. We went to the zoo which was fun, although they didn't have that many cool animals like giraffes, etc. We did see a bunch of ocean animals - sea otters, walruses, sharks, and eels. We got up close to a polar bear swimming and man, are those things huge! Anyway, it was just a fun, relaxing afternoon at the zoo :)



Another Saturday Clay decided he wanted to build a work bench for his tools and such. He got to take some junk wood home from work and so we went to Home Depot to get the rest of the stuff. Well, I've been in a crafty mood lately wanting to build those decorative blocks so we got me a power sander! Yeah, my first "tool"! Ha Ha We spent the whole afternoon and evening building that work bench and can I say that I think it rocks?! I love that my husband is great with construction, a handy man, and can build a lot of things! It was a fun day working with power tools again seeing how I hadn't done much since 8th grade Shop class ;)

We also got the chance to go to the Glass Museum on Free Museum day! (I wouldn't have gone there without it being free:). It was cool watching them blow the glass and constantly keep it heated. It sure does take a long time to create just a part of a piece so kudos to the artists :) There's this bridge that takes you over the freeway and the walls are surrounded with glass pieces and some of them are just out of this world, like how did they ever manage to shape that thing! After the museum, we went and ate at BJ's Brewery. I don't know where the closest one in Idaho is or if there is one, but can I just say that it is now one of my favorite restaurants! YUM!



Anywho, well I will have other posts about our time in Tacoma so far so that I don't have a million pictures here on this one post. Until next time...

FREEBIES-4-ME

I love getting things for free or dirt cheap! I'm sure most of you are like this as well and if you aren't...well then I don't know what to say about that. If you check out my blog, you'll notice that I have linked a bunch of bargain blogs to mine and I check them occasionally to see what hot deals are out. I have tried to get into couponing, but I don't get the newspaper and fail to buy the Sunday one to get all the great doubler coupons and such. Plus, there's really not much that I can stock up on with just Clay and me. So I shall share with you some of my other favorite freebie things!

*SwagBucks* I learned about this from another blog and have fallen in love with it. Basically, you "install" their toolbar to search from and for certain things that you normally search for on the internet you can get swagbucks. These can add up pretty fast and in return you can get prizes for free in their swag store. For me, I like to stock up on Amazon gift cards that are 45 swagbucks for a $5 gift card. What a great way to get things for free and possibly start your Christmas shopping! Right now, whether you have an Amazon gift card or not, I just scored a Good Housekeeping 1 year subscription for $4.00, but I got it free because of my gift card! If you want that, at the checkout, enter the code: OCTMAG50 to take it down to $3.99. You can check out this blog where they also talk about it: Thrifty Northwest Mom. To start out with swagbucks, click on my banner of swagbucks on my blog and you'll start out with 3 swagbucks at least. They can add up pretty fast so why not?!

*Redbox* Now I hope all of you have heard of Redbox. I think it's the best invention for renting movies and I don't remember the last time I rented from Hollywood or wherever-surprised they're still even up and running. We haven't had to pay for a redbox movie for who knows how long. I didn't know these codes even existed, but I have found so many codes to get the movie free that I will share with you. Please bear with me as I list them. A LOT of them I don't know work anymore (they have a code for the first Monday of the month so that might be some of these and not work anymore) but I found them on other websites and just wrote them down so I could try them out when renting. What's awesome is that you can use the same code but on different debit/credit cards and we have more than one bank so we can get 2 free rentals from the same code!
FREEDVD
2GIGITYS
2HORSES4ME
GXGGZHM
WALGREENS (obviously only works at walgreens and the next one too)
DVDATWAG
BREAKROOM
SHPNSVE2
KRJX6M3
X6Z256Z
REDBOX
DVDONME
DT5W3JQ
9HB6MP22
33TX3M6
FLAGIT
MILLER
MEMORIAL
RBM14V
MLKING
LOUZOO
HIGHLIFE
The list goes on so try those out and get free movie dates for the rest of the year! Anyway, if you have any others or other deals, let me know!

New Addition...

I've got some catching up to do on here....About 3 weeks ago Clay and I decided that it was time to get me a car so I can get out of the house and start substituting. Well, at first we were just looking on craigslist for kind of clunkers just to get around town, but when it came down to it, we decided it was better to just get a nice, reliable car because our car is kind of kicking out on us every now and then and we want to trade it some time maybe before it loses value. So our friends (Nicole and Nathan:) had bought their Honda Accord from this private auction dealer down in Utah and we wanted to get an Accord as well. So Clay had been e-mailing this guy for a while and he showed us this great one for pretty cheap. So it came down to the wire-do we want to get a loan on this car even though it's not completely what we wanted? We decided at the last minute that we weren't going to get it. Well a couple days later this guy e-mailed back and told us about this other car coming in that was going to go to the auction if we didn't want it. We had 2 days to decide and to make the story short, we loved everything about it and it had more than the other Accord and was even cheaper! Clay was to fly down to Utah the next day to pick it up but decided that I shouldn't stay home all weekend so we both got last minute flight tickets and flew to Salt Lake to buy a car! Everything was so last minute with getting the loan and everything but it all worked out. So we got to the airport, the guy picked us up in our car and weirdly enough, we signed all the paperwork in front of the airport and it was now ours! Woo Hoo! So we drove it to Rexburg and stayed the night there.
This is the picture at the dealership.

Saturday was just a relaxing day meeting up with friends and Clay worked on his mom's flower garden area. Thanks Sam so much for the great time together! And Mindy, your belly is adorable and I'm excited you're having a girl! (Wish I had pictures with you girls!) Nicole, it was so great getting together with you and Nathan and going to dinner!
Thanks for letting me steal this picture too :)

And for those of you that I didn't see......you're in trouble next time I see you. Ha ha Just kidding. It was definitely a last minute trip! We left early Sunday morning and drove all the way back home through Coeur d' Alene (so beautiful! Nicole, we'll spend next summer there with you guys! ha ha).
Good, quick weekend!

HaLlOwEeN --diy-- PuMpKiNs

I found this project on My Frugal Lifestyle and thought it was so darn cute. Now my end product doesn't do justice of what hers looks like,
but here's what you need:



Rolls of Toilet Paper
Fabric Glue
Brown paper bags
Green felt
Green pipe cleaners
Material of your choice that's around 18"x22"

Just wrap up the toilet paper with the material, roll up a paper sack and stuff it in the toilet paper hole part. Cut out a leaf with the green felt and use the pipe cleaners for cute swirlies. Ok, so I'm bad at describing, but here's the end product that you can just look at and do it yourself and probably better :)

Love it.

My Oh-So-Famous Flower Cookies

Now don't these look so DANG YUMMY?!?!?! Oh, trust me, they taste just as good as they look ;) I first found the recipe WAY back in the day when I would read American Girl magazines! There's more to the whole look, such as adding popsicle sticks and green ribbon to look like a stem, but here's the magical recipe if you'd like to try out for yourself! I decided to make these for a couple of families in our ward so hopefully they'll like them and don't hate sugar!

Cookies:
1 Yellow Cake Mix
2 Eggs
1/3 C. Oil

Extras:
Large Marshmallows
Food coloring
Miniature candy bars
Frosting

Preheat at 350 degrees
Mix all ingredients for cookies
Roll each mini candy bar in cookie batter and place on cookie sheet
Cook for 10-12 minutes
Let cool and in the meantime separate frosting into two different containers
-One container with about 3/4 of the frosting and color it GREEN
-The other 1/4 of frosting color it YELLOW
Snip marshmallows with scissors into 4 pieces

When cookies are cooled:
Frost the cookies with the GREEN frosting
Place 5 pieces of marshmallow snips to look like a Daisy flower :)
Frost all cookies and place marshmallows on top
Lastly, drop a tear of the YELLOW frosting in the middle of the petals!

Back to the beginning when I mentioned about the popsicle sticks...you can push them into the candy bar and wrap the cookie batter around the candy bar and once you have them all decorated, add the GREEN ribbon on the stick to look like a real stem! Feel free to make your own edible flower arrangement!

YOU'RE DONE!!!
So, go ahead and EAT 'EM!