Wednesday, March 13, 2024

10 Things for Seniors

As we age, physical tasks can become more difficult.  These are some of the products hubby and I use to "combat" aging...

  1. The pill boxes above.  Hubby takes a boatload of pills each day and there is no way we would be able to remember if he took his pills each day without these containers.  In fact, it is kind of a common thing that elderly people will overdose themselves if they just take their pills right out of their prescription bottles because they can't remember if/when they last took their pills.  Better to be safe than sorry.
  2. A bidet.  We love our bidets.  Although it took hubby more than a year to come around to even trying it, now he is a die-hard fan.  For elderly people who have a hard time twisting around to wipe, a bidet cleans the entire undercarriage, no twisting required.
  3. A step stool.  Although these days I don't even want hubby on a low step stool, it is better than the alternative of climbing on the counter to reach a high shelf.
  4. A very long shoehorn.  Hubby has a hard time bending over these days so a short shoehorn isn't much help.  He found a super long shoehorn at Ikea and now doesn't even have to bend over to put on his shoes.
  5. A "grabber".  We use a grabber like this that the SIL left at our house and it really is a better alternative to reach lightweight items on high shelves or pick up things off the floor for hubby who has a hard time bending over or reaching higher shelves.
  6. The SIL also left an extendable hook like this that she bought when she couldn't reach into our top-loading washing machine to take out the clothes.  I've used it a few times when something drops behind the washer or stove and we didn't have the strength to pull the appliance out to reach the item.
  7. A back-up camera.  Most new cars come with back-up cameras these days and it is a God-send to older, crunchier people who cannot twist to look behind them when they back out of parking spaces.  Fortunately, even if you have an old car, you can buy these cameras to put on old cars and they are pretty inexpensive.
  8. A step-in shower.  This is the next home improvement project we will do at our house.  Our bathrooms only have tub-shower combinations and every time hubby goes to take a shower I worry that he will trip getting into or out of the shower which would be a disaster. 
  9. Which leads us to grab bars.  We haven't installed these yet, but they are definitely a good idea to help people get on/off the toilet and in/out of the bathtub.  A bonus--many fire departments provide these for free!
  10. Hearing aids.  Hubby is pretty much deaf without his hearing aids but a nice thing about today's hearing aids compared to the hearing aids from years ago is that they have bluetooth connectivity which means his hearing aids connect directly to the TV (nice because now we don't have to crank up the TV to deafening--to me-levels when we both watch TV) as well as to his cell phone so he can hear calls coming in/listen to music.etc.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Feeding a Crowd

I was talking to my neighbor today and she said "you sure had a lot of people at your house a couple weeks ago--how did you feed them all?"  She probably thought we spent a fortune feeding so many people based on grocery store prices these days but we used a lot of tricks we learned in the past when we hosted large parties or fed large groups of people on the cheap (years ago at my non profit we fed lots of families with a super bare-bones budget but everyone always went away full!).  Here's how we did it...
  • I made ALOT of snacks.  Brownies, cookies, cakes, caramel popcorn...these are easy ways to create a lot of food for cheap.  If you buy a dozen brownies at the store it costs a shocking amount of money but a box mix makes a couple dozen brownies for a couple dollars.
  • We bought $5 chickens from Sam's Club and this was the main course for one of the days.  
  • Speaking of Sam's Club, we also bought 5 dozen eggs, six heads of romaine lettuce, two pounds of sliced cheese, and two pounds of sliced turkey for sandwiches.  Also we bought several cases of bottled water which everyone drank or took with them when they went to the tourist areas (this is cheaper than buying water in the high-priced stores near the tourist areas).
  • I made a big salad each day to go with the main meal, basically romaine lettuce with some tomatoes and cucumbers from the 99 Cent Store.
  • I made a huge batch of pancakes one day (a giant bag of pancake mix at Sam's Club costs less than $10 and literally makes hundreds of pancakes).  Leftovers were wrapped up and put in the fridge and then disappeared overnight.
  • We bought lots of loss leader snacks at our local grocery store over the past few months and saved them for the kids to eat when they were hungry.  At the store we bought boxes of granola bars for 99 cents on sale, boxes of cereal for the same price, bananas (always cheap), and bags of potato/corn chips for $1.50 each (we usually have to buy three bags at a time to get the sale price but rarely eat these so they go in the snack box for parties).
  • We made lots of Filipino dishes which uses a base of rice or noodles then hubby makes a simple stew of chicken/pork/beef (bought at 99 cents a pound then kept in the freezer until we have a large meal to make).  We also made fried rice, stir-fried noodles, etc which uses a cheap base and lots of finely sliced vegetables and meat (way cheaper than giving each person a slab of steak!).
  • We had bought racks of pork ribs for $97 cents a pound and again, put them in the freezer until hubby made three racks of baked ribs for the main course one night.
  • We encouraged the kids to make sandwiches to take with them instead of paying Strip prices when they got hungry while out and about (bread was bought at the 99 Cent Store for $1.50 a loaf, cheese and sliced turkey was bought at Sam's Club).
  • A few jars of spaghetti sauce, a couple of cans of canned tomatoes and some spices made a lot of pasta sauce.  Add in some frozen meatballs we made a while back and a few $1 packages of spaghetti noodles, plus a salad, and a loaf of bread heated up in the oven and we had a complete meal for everyone for less than $20.
  • I cooked so many eggs!  Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs...everyone ate eggs for breakfast.
  • Sides included frozen vegetables like bags of corn (99 cents a pound), mashed potatoes ($1.50 for a 5 pound bag of potatoes on sale), fresh green beans that were on sale, etc.
  • We stocked up on soda when it was on sale over the past several months so there was plenty of that for everyone who didn't want water.
  • A few other tried-and-true ways to feed a crowd that we didn't get to this time: chili is super easy to make, as is cornbread, and feeds a lot of people for cheap as does a big chicken Caesar salad and bread for a light lunch.  A taco/burrito bar is also a good way to stretch a lot of food for a little money.  Baked potatoes with chili is another good meal for a crowd.
Overall, besides the one day we took everyone to the Chinese buffet for lunch, we cooked A LOT of food.  However this was much cheaper than taking more than a dozen people out to eat for every meal and really didn't take a lot of time make (washing the dishes was another story though...).

Friday, March 8, 2024

5 More Things

In no particular order...

  1. This is the possibly pregnant cat in question.  I don't know much about cats but she is huge compared to a few months ago!
  2. Be sure to set your clocks forward tomorrow night before you go to bed.
  3. I think we have gone full Orwell now...this girl was charged and found guilty for calling a biological male a male.  "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."  eeekkk
  4. Apparently, the middle class is heading towards extinction.  After looking at grocery prices this week, and checking hotel prices for a small-sized city where my walking group is holding an event this weekend ($170 for a Holiday Inn???????), I'm thinking there will be the few rich people and the many, many poor people in the not too distant future :(
  5. Here are a bunch of places you can file your taxes for free.
Have a wonderful weekend!

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

10 Random Things

It's been a while since I posted!  Nothing particularly exciting has been happening but here are several interesting things...

  1. The trees in the picture are blessedly still.  We had quite the windstorm this past weekend which left dirt and dust everywhere (thankfully we didn't lose power!).
  2. One of the cats is definitely pregnant.  She used to be sleek and svelte, now she has the dimensions of a mailbox.  Kitten pictures to follow sometime soon...
  3. I saw this story on the national news so I hurried over to the recorder's website for our county and signed up for recording notification alerts so this won't happen to us.
  4. To celebrate Leap Day on February 29th, hubby and I got a buy one, get one free sandwich at Firehouse Subs (we qualified because I had a first name that started with a LEA or P).  If one of us would have been born on leap day, we would have been able to jump of the Stratosphere for free (not!).
  5. Speaking of free, here is where kids can sign up to bowl for free this summer at participating bowling centers.
  6. I saw this post about making a 'minimally viable budget' which sounds like a good idea.  When I get a bit of free time I will definitely do this.
  7. Here are some 'street smart safety tips'.
  8. Apparently Princess Kate is missing.  At least according to the conspiracy theorists.  Has anyone else noticed that their news feeds/YouTube feeds/Facebook feeds, instead of showing a wide range of topics, now only shows drama/depressing/conspiracy/triggering posts?  It seems weirdly manipulative, IMHO.  In other cases, the news is just weird.
  9. Work is getting busy as we head towards the end of the fiscal year.  When I asked my boss how I was doing work-wise, he said "great, I hope you will work for us forever!".  Nice vote of confidence there (although "forever" might only be as long as his chairmanship term lasts...so there's that).
  10. Finally, I was watching "driving through" videos on YouTube which are basically dashcam footage of people driving through various cities and town.  When I watched videos of the towns I grew up in, they were completely unrecognizable.  I guess you never can go home again...


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

We Survived!

Hubby and I survived the birthday "surprise" in which more than a dozen kids and grandkids descended on Vegas for hubby's belated birthday celebration.  Among the highlights...

  • Five people missed their flights to get here, three due to weather and two because they showed up at the airport ten minutes before their flight was scheduled to leave(!).  Three were able to reschedule and two missed the entire weekend due to weather delays.
  • Hubby and I cooked a ton of food for everyone which saved a lot of money over paying for everyone to eat out three meals a day.  We did take the whole group out once for a very reasonably priced buffet which everyone enjoyed.  I washed a metric crap-ton of dishes!
  • It was wonderful getting four of the five kids and several grandkids together so they could all bond.  They haven't all been together as a group for years!
  • It was a bonus that we live in a tourist destination so everyone was entertained by just heading out to see what was happening in the tourist areas (Las Vegas Strip, Fremont Experience, Hoover Dam, etc).  The younger people were out every night, the older people were happy to get to bed at a reasonable hour after a full day of being out and about.
  • Hubby and I ARE NOT used to being on our feet for 12-15 hours a day!  We were beat at the end of each day (hubby is 75 so he was probably way more tired than I was!).
  • It was interesting to hear a range of social and political opinions--from way left liberal to way right conservative and everything in between.  Fortunately political discussions were few and far between.  Among the popular topics of discussion were gardening, menopause (me and his daughters who are all close in age), financial planning for all of our later years, kids these days (speaking of the grandkids), previous reunions, etc.
  • I was really impressed with one grandson who is 19, very intelligent and really well spoken at such a young age.  His girlfriend was equally interesting to talk to and had perfect manners.  My faith in today's youth has been restored!
  • It was interesting to see all of the kids who hadn't been together in years pick up like they had all been together last week, not more than a decade ago.
  • We saved a lot of money by not only cooking meals but by baking a copious amount of desserts and by buying a huge box of different kinds of snacks that the kids could have which kept them from spending money at the store or fast food places.
  • Overall everyone had a great time and we are looking forward to doing our next reunion on a cruise ship!

Saturday, February 10, 2024

10 Things from This Week



It's been pretty quiet around here this week...
  1. We had several days of rain (thankfully a lot less than southern California) and the cats were wet (they don't like being wet) but they still showed up every day (sometimes multiple times a day) to be fed.
  2. The kids and grandkids are excited to come to the reunion/hubby's birthday party in Las Vegas.  We are getting ready for everyone, stocking up on food/soda/etc so we can feed everyone, and generally looking forward to the festivities.  We've had a big family reunion about once a decade for the last 40 years (once in the Philippines, once in Connecticut, once on a cruise ship, and this one coming up in Vegas) but the more people who are added to the family over the years, the harder it is to get everyone's schedules to work out to allow everyone to plan for the same days off.  Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to attend but it should be a big group anyway.
  3. Hubby's cousin took us to a nice lobster/seafood/sushi buffet for his birthday.  It was good, and by Vegas standards, fairly inexpensive at about $45 per person (the buffets with lobster on The Strip are closer to $100 per person!).  

  4. The Super Bowl is coming up tomorrow so we will, of course, be parked in front of our TV to watch it.  Although the game is in my city, paying $6000 to $10,000 per ticket is absurd!
  5. I saw a lot of people complaining on social media about their natural gas bill going up this past month around Las Vegas.  I got our gas bill yesterday and I feel like complaining too--it has more than doubled since the same time period last year (and basically the same amount of gas used!).
  6. Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to put President Biden on TV for a live press conference???  Our presidential choices this year are awful!
  7. Hubby seems eeked out about how much money I make now from my job (he keeps asking how much I am spending to bring everyone here for his birthday, saying he should be the provider, etc).  Since we have always had separate accounts he didn't realize that I made the same amount of money several years ago when I was working.  I asked his if he thought the big house payments, new cars, and travel several times a year in the past was just funded out of thin air.  He had to think about that for a minute.  He said he is worried about what will happen to me financially if he dies before me (he is 20 years older than me).  I guess for both of our sakes, I need to take things like my investments/retirement fund/sources of income/etc more seriously and plan better for my/our future.  
  8. I'm a bit concerned about the Europe cruise we have scheduled in the fall.  And stories like this, plus other things like this related to my work are not helping!
  9. On another travel note, something I have never heard of before even though I used to regularly attend Quaker meeting is this option instead of hotels.
  10. Finally, here is a cool infographic on National Park passes.