My inlaws left early this morning for warmer weather AND THEY LEFT ME HERE TO FREEZE.

Every year they head cross country for warmer climates during the cold months. My father in law is on blood thinners and other things and in the cold weather his blood starts to freeze, it gets cold and sluggish and he is more at risk for a heart attack.

For teh first few years that i knew them, they loaded up the motor home and drove down to Arizona for three months, living out of the motor home, but the last few years they decided to forgo the motorhome insurance and small living space for a room rental. This years rental though, is quite small, its one room, the bed and mini kitchen are side by side.

My inlaws say that the size of the rental doesn’t really matter because they spend most of their time out of it, visiting friends, shopping and just enjoying the NOT -30 temperatures!

I just wish that one year they would take me with them! I hate the cold!!

On Boxing Day we went north to my dads house to celebrate Christmas. Everyone was there, both my siblings, as well as my step siblings, it was great!

Unfortunately, my baby niece has exema, a very bad case of it. They tried a prescription (Thank God for affordable health insurance) cream for it and it didn’t help at all. Right now my sister in law is re-washing EVERYTHING in a special soap to see if the lack of fragrance and dyes will help at all, and the baby has an appointment with a dermatologist to see if they can suggest anything.

I sure hope they can find something to help, she is a very uncomfortable baby!

In other Sad news…. My sister.

OMG, my sister (

Dad and My step mom had 105.00 sitting on a shelf – it was someones registration payment for archery – and she stole it. it was there when everyone went to bed, and gone when they all woke up. My step mother heard sister walking around – she has a distinctive walk, she uses a came and limps, so we know sister dear was up and around during the night.

It’s very sad. I mean. How could she think she wasn’t gonna get caught? Did she think no one would notice that amount of $$ missing? Really?

Sigh. What a dysfunctional family I have

An hour ago my kitchen was a war zone. Boxes, empty and full, papers, breakfast dishes and mittens littered the kitchen table. the counter was stuffed, not enough room to add a spoon to it. More dishes, more boxes, more everything, everywhere you looked.

It was a MESS. the sink was full of dishes waiting for the dishwasher and there was even a half eaten cookie on the floor.

Like I said. A Mess.

An hour ago, at least.

Then I prodded my child franchise into action. i had one boy running things to the proper room it belonged (Toys clothes and other assorted Christmas loot) Another of my sons was busy breaking own and stacking boxes to be taken out and my eldest was loading the dishwasher.

In less time than it has taken me to write up this post, my kitchen went from a disaster zone to clean again.

(Tomorrow I plan on washing the floors – oh my do they ever need it! )

This might be the best deal I have EVER gotten.

In a furnace you should replace your filter every month to three months – we have dogs so we take it out every month and vacuum it and replace it on the third month. We do the vacuuming becuase each filter costs us almost 25 dollars when you include tax.

We happened on the most amazing sale though, SIX brand new filters – OUR exact size of filter, for 21.00.

That’s a savings of  129.00!!

Besides the money aspect of the filters, is actually finding our size and type. Filters have weird numbers on them, like this one : ukf8001axx,* so you can’t just run out and pick one up, you have to go and write down the size and number and all that rot. It gets annoying. But hey! I’m not gonna worry about it, becuase I have FIVE brand new filters leaning against the wall in my furnace room, just waiting to be put to use!~

*thats actually a water filter number thingy, LOL

The other day I was trying to tell my husband about something I found online. I sat on Google trying different variations of searches in an effort to find it and was utterly unsuccessful. My husband suggested I try the computers history button, to see if it was there, and at first I was excited, then sad, when I found out it only showed the last 10 pages I visited. That was no help, as I had seen it early in the morning, after clicking through a free directory list, following a link from there and then even more random link clicking before coming upon the page I had found interesting!

So I was back on Google trying my searches again when the husband type dude says – did you get it fromt he history? I explained the ten search limit and resumed searching. he walked over, took control of my mouse and clicked the menu option of history that I had never paid attention to : Show all History.

Yeah. There is a button to show ALL your history, AND you can search it.

I am very upset that none of you have told me about this before. Seriously. This show all history button is gonan make life SO much more interesting!

And the website I was looking for? This one : Beautiful bugs. Check it out! It has super cool macros of bugs, and in particular, some super cool macros of bugs EYES!

Speaking of bathrooms, Guess what I did today!

I broke the bathroom faucet. I turned it on so I could wash my hands and it broke – in HALF. Half of the faucet stayed mounted as it should and the other half came off in my hand! WTF???!!!

Seeing as it is the faucet int eh main bathroom, it needs to be replaced ASAP – if it was the one in the master bath, that would be a different story as we use that bathroom for showering, and unless the other bathrooms are full, it;s toilet is never used!

But yeah, the last paycheck before Christmas and I will be spending a part of it on a faucet *GRR*

This time I am going all out though. I’m tired of buying the cheapest one on the shelf. Instead we are gonna invest in one of the Grohe faucets, they are built to last AND have a warranty!

I want to tile my kitchen backsplash. I’ve been wanting to do so for the past two years – maybe a bit more. The sad truth is that when you are living on a paycheck to paycheck budget, tiles are an expense I just cannot justify.

It’s sad, i know, considering that even without a sale to use, I’ve priced out tiles to be under 300, and that’s the entire length of my counters – two full walls, about two feet high. And yet, I cannot justify the cash (

Then I find things like this online and it brings to the forefront how badly I want to tile. Not that I want to do a tile mural or heat sensitive tiles, but come on! That is awesome!

Not that I could do anything like this to my bathroom – we have full wall mirrors in the bathroom, and it would look silly any place other than over the sink. its just that looking at such cool tile ideas remind me of how broke I am (