Every year, except for a very few, we have gone to Cracker Barrel for our Thanksgiving meal. There’s no stress of cooking, no clean up and seeing all of the Christmas decorations in the country store, just puts us in the holiday mood.

This year we went online and put our name on the wait list so we only had about a 30 minute wait once we arrived. Perfect amount of time to browse around.

No one orders traditional Thanksgiving food. I don’t because I dislike turkey in all forms so I get my yearly chicken fried steak. Hannah loves their chicken and dumplings and the guys got the grandma’s sampler breakfast.

I don’t think you have to necessarily eat the turkey and all the trimmings as long as you’re with the people you love, that’s Thanksgiving right there.

P.S.

We loaded up on candy on the way out and this is one of my favorites. Brings back childhood memories

I had a surprise phone call from an old friend from high school this past weekend. He’s the kind of friend that is one of the nicest people you will ever meet and can make me laugh so hard my stomach hurts. He is a caregiver for his ailing mom, so has had to be quarantined for months.

We talked about how the situation in the world right now could really bring a person down and how negative people can suck you into their vortex, because let’s face it, misery loves company. It’s hard right now, but we both agreed that finding the silver linings in each day and concentrate on those blessing big or small can change your whole outlook on life. Even if you’ve had a rotten no good very bad day, finding even one small glimmer of good can turn it around, even just a little bit.

So I was thinking about that and there have been some really good things happening when I think about it.

School, for my kids, is weird this year. Mask wearing and social distancing has become the norm. They were quarantined for 2 weeks when Donny and I came down with covid, but we are finally almost back to normal.

Hannah had homecoming. Just the football game, no dance, but we made the most of it.

I turned this into this

Hannah is in color guard and not only do they have to apply elaborate makeup they use this magic curl sucker machine that creates the perfect curl. I searched Google for reviews and knew I wanted the babyliss one, but was not thrilled with shelling out almost 100 bucks for one. I ran into TJ Maxx and found the exact one I had been looking at for $39.99.

We can always be thankful for Friday night lights. The weather cooperated and it truly felt like Autumn! I’m proud to say our team is still undefeated and pirate stadium has the best popcorn.

Gotta show support. How cute is this shirt?

Not only have we been shuttling back and forth to flag practice, Hannah has had theatre practice. Although we thoroughly enjoyed the play I am grateful it’s over so Hannah can slow down a bit.

My silver lining from yesterday is this.

I LOVE coming here. It smells like Mexico. That is not an insult. I grew up in Corpus Christi and spent so much time across the border that when I walk into the store it brings back such happy memories. And of course, this makes me happy too:

These, plus a few more ingredients turedn into a dinner I’d been craving.

Seriously one of my very favorite meals

I can’t forget to mention the pumpkin we’re growing. It finally has some orange. I think by next Halloween we’ll have a mighty good pumpkin. I’m all seriousness, it should be ready for Christmas. 😀

I hope everyone can find their silver linings no matter how small or silly they might seem to other people.

A few days ago I was looking on offerup for a desk chair. Jack broke the one he was using. We replaced it with the only extra chair we had, which was a living room chair. He broke that too. He likes to lean back and it snapped one of the legs off.

I didn’t find a desk chair, but I did find this awesome cabinet. It had only been listed for 5 minutes. I messaged the seller and told her we could be there in a few minutes. That’s one of the perks of living in a small town, you can pretty much go from one side to the other in about 10 minutes.

We have little to no storage in our home and we can’t have anything too big because there is just no room. I thought I would repaint it and it would go in our bedroom, but the colors are perfect in our living room.

I was able to move the candles out of the tv stand and actually put the electronics back in the drawers.

Now it’s decked out for Halloween.

We did end up finding a desk chair for Jack. Not the $300 one he was looking at. We bought it at Wal-Mart and like my friend Cindy always said, “don’t buy the cheapest or the most expensive. Just get the one in the middle and it will work out just fine”. That’s exactly what we did and it has.

Well, we signed the lease last night. Although we haven’t gotten the moving van yet, we started taking what we could over in Felix our Flex.

The hardest thing about this move is not the downsizing, it’s that every donation place is still closed. We can’t even have a garage sale. I’m sure we’ll figure it out, but in the meantime, this is what our day looked like.

A lot of the kitchen stuff.

The kitchen is small but functional.

There is a small dining area that just barely fits our dining room table.

It’s just shoved up against the wall right now so we can move stuff in.

There is carpet in the living room and bedrooms. Not my favorite thing, but it’s clean and in good shape and we’ll make the best of it.

When I start to get overwhelmed, I just keep in mind the reasons we are doing this. We are going to be saving a lot of money each month. We love this neighborhood because it is so family friendly. We are going to be able to slow our life down. If those aren’t the best reasons ever, I don’t know what is. ❤

We took a break from packing today since it was Jack’s 13th birthday. It really bites to have a milestone birthday when your in quarantine, but we made the best out of it.

He doesn’t really like sweets, so he asked for a chicken nugget “cake” with lots if sweet and sour sauce.

He also got a newer and better phone. The one he had he’s had for 3 years and just recently locked himself out of it. We just got back from a 2 mile walk playing Pokemon Go. Whatever it takes to get him out of the house. For being quarantined, it was a fun birthday.

We’re going to sign the lease on the new house tonight. 3 more sleeps in this house then it’s go time!

One week from today we are moving. Thankfully it’s only 3 miles from where we live now, but the kicker is, the new house is half the size of the one we live in now. That means that we are going to have to purge 50% of our stuff. Yikes!

We have lived in our present house for 2 years. We made a decision as a family to find a place that was much cheaper so we could save money and pay off some debt. When we started looking there were only a little more than a dozen houses for rent and only a very few in the kids school district.

We had driven by the new one and thought that there was no way we could downsize this much, but the more we discussed it, the more it made sense. Saving $600 a month in rent, not to mention the savings in utilities, pretty much sealed the deal.

Is it scary? Yes. Is it exciting? Yes. It’s going to allow us to slow down. Spend time on things that matter. Live more intentionally.

I can’t wait to be settled in and see how this goes. Now to just get everything packed up. Wish us luck

I have a confession to make. Cast iron pots and pans intimidate me. I bought one a couple of years ago to try what was suppose to be the best way to cook a steak in the world. Well, I smoked my whole house up and burned the outside, leaving the inside still mooing. I never used it again and it just sat there rusting away. Well now I’m trying a new recipe and it calls for a cast iron skillet. Okay, gotta get back on the horse.

When I cleaned out the garage I found that skillet and my husband’s grandmother’s cast iron lidded chicken fryer. They were not pretty. They were just covered in nasty rusty yuckiness. I didn’t know what to do. I had tried to clean my skillet once by some weird way where you put it in a garbage bag with cleaners. Did not work. At. All.

I was willing to give it one more shot. I found this pin on pinterest.

https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/survival/2013/2493846.html

Okay, first of all, I need to let you know that it’s easy, but has some drawbacks. You just scrub up your pots with a brush to get as much rust off as you can.

Then you put them on the lowest rack in your oven upside down. Now for the drawback. You use the self clean mode and just let those suckers cook. It will smell. Like your house is on fire. It also takes a little over 4 hours.

Next just let them cool for about an hour because they will be VERY hot. Now you wash them off again with a metal brush or scrubber. Make sure you get in all the crevices.

After you scrub all the rust off, you grease it down really good. I used vegetable shortening. Put them back in the oven upside down. Put one rack on the very bottom and line it with foil. I would make a lip all the way around with the foil because the grease dripped off and now I have a grease stain in my previously clean oven.

Bake in a 350 oven for an hour. Let cool for about an hour then pull them out and grease the insides one more time.

That’s it. I was floored, shocked, knock me over with a feather surprised by how they turned out.

Y’all, look at this skillet!!!!! It looks brand spanking new!

Like I said before, this was my husband’s grandmother’s. She will be 101 this year. We googled the brand. It’s Griswold and they ceased production in the mid 1950’s. This skillet is probably about 60 years old!!! It looks like we just bought it. I couldn’t be more pleased.

So, if you have cast iron that you don’t know what to do with because it’s a rusty mess, you have got to try this method. Seriously.

I’m also giving a shout out to The Carbonaro Effect. I watched it this morning and it had me laughing so hard. Nothing better than a really good magician with a sense of humor.

Stacy