Month: August 2026

Been A Minute

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Home StuffLeave a comment

Truth be told, I haven’t been on here in 2 weeks for 2 reasons. One is that during the day I’m watching the Lindsay Clancy trial. I actually can’t sit still and just watch it so I put on my headphones and actually get a lot done. I think it must be the stress. I’m not going to write a long list of how and why I would vote as a juror, but you know I do not like the color pink but yet here I was last Thursday.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a pink shirt so I found this huge one where Hannah works. I used the little rubber band trick to try and make it look a little less like a tent. Donny said it looked like I have a giant belly button. He ain’t really wrong. LOL

Reason number 2 is that Donny and I have been watch the series Silo on Apple TV in the evenings. It’s so good and we’re sad that we have caught up and now have to wait until Fridays to watch an episode. We have 2 left before we have to wait until next year for the last season. What a bummer.

Number 3 is that I let Penelope use my laptop to watch a listen to chickens on YouTube. I put up a pen in the living room so that she has a space that’s hers and not just a box and random puppy pads. I don’t know what we are going to do with her. She still cannot walk and just kind of scoots around. It’s not a great life for a chicken but she does seem to enjoy YouTube.

Our garden is on it’s last legs except for the pumpkin and watermelon vines. I’ve been dead heading all of the sunflowers, zinnias and marigolds to harvest their seeds for next year.

So far I have these 3 bowls full and today I have a cereal bowl full of the seeds.

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I am going to have a lot of flowers next year. The white zinnias that came up later are still going strong.

I had a gorgeous basil plant growing in the big garden. Something happened and it fell over and for the life of my I couldn’t get it to stand up again. I dug up as much of the roots as I could and replanted it into a pot. It went into shock for several days, but now it’s looking good.

Hannah and I went to her work on her day off. If you don’t know she works at this really good thrift store that is only 3 minutes from our house. She also got a job at one of the big haunted houses here and it super excited about doing that. She really loves her job and even when we were there on her day off regular customers just stopped her to chit chat. I did find 3 items that I purchased.

Anything with a sun and I’m in. Moons too. This one is slate and hangs by a leather strap.

I thought this amber jar was so cute and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

I also can’t pass up a handmade mug. This one is from Hill Country Pottery.

Can we just talk about the heat for a moment? Our electric bill is 489. We live in a 1008 square foot house. What in the world is going on. Well, it could be that we have the original 1961 windows and I like a lot of sunlight so I raise the blinds and open the curtains. We also had the air set to 73. Not a good combination. Being that I am extremely frugal we now have our thermostat set at 78. I have pulled down all of the blinds and closed the curtains. So basically I live in a cave because I will only turn on a lamp when it’s necessary. Honestly I thought I would be sweating like a pig but other than the windows the house has good insulation and it’s not bad. When I’m in the kitchen cooking I do use this handy dandy device.

It’s getting used to not having all of the natural light. Yesterday I did all of the laundry and folded it in my dark, only lit by a lamp, room. It was actually pretty cozy.

I also have one of the mini swamp coolers in our room.

Since it’s hot as hades (108 this weekend and that’s not the feels like) I’ve been doing crafts. I painted the faded out frog I got from the estate sale.

And I used 66 toilet paper rolls (some were actually paper towel rolls) to make some flowers. I still have to paint them. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow during the trial.

And can I get a big HALLELUJAH? Olivia, Jackson’s girlfriend, took the bear!!!!!!!

They started back to college today so I want to wish them a very productive semester. Not the bear.

Paint It, Find It, Fix It

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Frugal LifeLeave a comment

Remember when I painted the back of my bookshelves to match the curtains? Well, every time I looked at it, it didn’t look gold it looked like a sad beige, which will never be in my home.

It was just so one dimensional and sad looking. I mixed up some paint. It’s the yellow that I had with brown that I also had.

After I finished this paint job it was still looking too one dimensional. I decided to try wiping stain over it but apparently I had used all of my stain. I found some burnt umber acrylic paint and added water to it to thin it out quite a bit. I just used a sponge brush to wipe it on and then immediately wipe it off. I wanted to give it a “it was used in a cigar smoking room” effect.

This is exactly what I envisioned.

Now it makes me happy when I see it.

I have been missing a 4×4 piece of wood on the corner of the front flower bed for a while. I don’t know what happened to it. Donny might have taken it to use for something but I really don’t know. I have to drive by this empty lot on the corner of the street that leads to the entrance of our neighborhood and the loop every day. I saw a piece of a 4×4 just laying near the curb. One evening when Donny was driving I told him to pull over so I could grab it. He didn’t know what I was talking about so he had to do a u-turn. He pulled into the middle turning lane and I jumped out. He was yelling “hurry hurry a car is coming”. I had on flip flops and was doing my best not to get run over.

It’s a pretty busy intersection but I got it safely.

It fits and it didn’t cost a thing.

Our saucer swing broke. The middle circle came out so it was just the outer fabric circle left. We couldn’t use it because you would just fall through if you tried. I didn’t want to buy a whole new swing this late in the summer so I decided to redneck fix it. I bought 4 rolls of Duck brand tape and got to work.

Does it look exceptionally appealing? No it does not. Did it actually work? 100% it did. It cost less than $12, much much cheaper than a new swing. I’m most likely going to change out the swing next year anyway so this was a quick inexpensive fix. Don’t sleep on the powers of Duck tape.

I have been looking for a table for Hannah’s room to go where the 6ft tall teddy bear resides. I hit up 2 estate sales because on the website both looked like they had something that might work. They didn’t but I did find some candles and a goofy frog for cheap.

When I get some free time I’m going to repaint him. He’s a bit faded.

Last, but not least, it rained on Saturday and a little tiny bit on Sunday.

The temperature dropped when the storm blew in. It rained for several hours and thank goodness the neighbors know I’m a little strange because I danced in that rain. Our grass is getting brown and we needed this so badly. I do love summer so much, but when it nears the end of August I’m ready for some respite from the heat and am looking forward to Autumn.

Garden Update

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

On Thursday I was feeling marginally better thanks to Donny giving me two wonderful back massages. I’m thinking it’s my psoas muscle so I’m just going to have to wait it out and try not to overdo it which if you read this you will know this is extremely hard for me.

On this morning Donny found several chickens in the already damaged pumpkin patch. They were all happily taking dust baths and no plants survived. We headed to Jake’s Feed Store to pick up more pumpkin seeds. I am right at the tail end of them being ready for Halloween, but I’m just going to take that chance.

I zip tied the little fence together to make it stronger and then we put up the hard chicken wire and regular chicken wire and zip tied that to the fence. I replanted seeds, gave them a good water and crossed my fingers that the chickens couldn’t get in.

Because I was already sweaty and gross I decided to go ahead and think out our side garden that had gotten overgrown. Our sunflowers had to be staked up along with several tomato plants and zinnias. As always there was morning glories that had to be taken care of.

It’s always sad when the summer garden is coming to an end.

Even though the tomato and cucumber plants are looking worn out we are still getting produce from them. I found this cucumber hiding in the mess.

We aren’t doing a winter garden so I decided to plant more pumpkin seeds on one side of the enclosed garden just to be able to see something growing.

Watermelons are still going strong. They take up so much space, but we have 4 in the purple bed that are still going strong. We had 5, but Donny was checking one and it fell off the vine.

The two baby pool also have watermelon growing. Donny found one hanging on the fence that needed an immediate sling. I found an old run pad and zip tied it to the fence and our metal rooster.

We’ll see if this will even work. The hot Texas sun may burn up a lot of my plants, but watermelons love it.

We’ve had a lot of luck with our sunflowers this year so I also planted some more seeds just to see if they will grow. These are the last blooms of the ones that we grew earlier.

We also cannot forget about our pollinators. They need water also. I had gotten the flower bird bath and over the summer it had gotten rust spots. I spray painted it, washed the stones and put a plastic planter water catcher in it.

Rough Few Days

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Home lifeLeave a comment

These past few days have been ROUGH. On Tuesday I did something to the right side of my body. Everything was seized up. It was so bad by Wednesday that after Donny got home, at 5 on Wednesdays, I got on our Chi swing machine to see if I could loosen anything up and was in bed by 5:45. I woke up at midnight and went to just lay down on the couch with our tens machine on. I also think that I’m having phantom gallbladder symptoms again because I haven’t been taking my ox bile daily like I know I should.

I swear by this stuff. I’m feeling a bit better today, but the hip and shoulder blade and where my gallbladder used to be is still giving me fits.

When we woke up Thursday morning we found out that we had ants. They were all over the kitchen sink and the countertop next to the sink. We haven’t had a problem with ants since we have lived here. We cleared everything off of the counters and got to work.

After a quick Google search I found this product is safe to use around pets and is non toxic. I honestly think it’s just lemongrass and geranium essential oils. It killed them all off though so that’s a win. Because I don’t want them to come back and so far they haven’t, I mixed in some essential oil with my castile cleaning spray.

I need to move it into one of my amber glass bottles since I added the oils.

The worst thing that happened was to one of my pumpkin patches in the backyard. This is what it looked like on Wednesday.

While we were handling the ant problem, Donny looked out the window and said, “there are chickens in you patch”. I ran outside and one of the brown chickens was having a field day scratching up all of the shoots. I tried to save as many as I could but they were so damaged. I was devastated.

I put screens over the top to see if it will deter her. We’ll see.

On a different note, I found the best watermelon I’ve had all season at Aldi.

I prefer seeded ones but they are hard to find and when you do find them they are so expensive. This one will do just fine.

House chicken has a friend. She likes watching this cat wave its arm. She also likes watching TV and at night I put on the Roku Zen Life channel because she also likes music.

And one last random bit. We only have one this year, but it’s a cutie. Very shy and never raises it’s tail. Its tail is different and looks more like a cat’s tail.