Five Things I've Recently Learned

In no particular order...

1. I have been baking forever.  Like since I was 5, when I got my first Easy Bake Oven.  Fast forward to now and how come I have only recently (in the last month or so) learned how to use baking parchment???  I saw some baking parchment at the dollar store and thought I would give it a try and now we use it literally every time we stick a pan in the oven!  I make a sticky Filipino dessert cake and it is always really hard to get out of the pan so I used the parchment and--wa la--the thing came out so easily and I hardly even needed to clean the pan.  Needless to say, while I am late to the baking parchment paper party, I now swear by the stuff!
2. If you are looking for a temporary job, the US census is now hiring for the 2020 census.  Click here for more info.
3. You might want to look through any old toys you have at your house (unfortunately I am a minimalist and get rid of stuff immediately if we are no longer using it).  This guy just sold an old video game for $100,150!
4. We were walking through Costco today (I love their oatmeal--$8 for a giant bag of oats!) and we noticed so many things that are part of a smart home.  From your TV to your refrigerator to your Ring doorbell to a weather thermometer to lights to your thermostat--so many things are connected via wifi to make your home "smart"!  And now it looks like the big tech companies like Amazon and Google want to control your whole home...yikes!  While we do have our TV connected to wifi (for access to Netflix and Amazon movies) that will be the extent of it I think.  It kind of creeps us out that everything can be hacked and controlled by people we don't even know...eeekkk.
5. Here's an article about doing a "no buy" year and I realized that since the end of last year, we have hardly bought anything except food.  This became apparent when hubby recently received his pension check and was able to put half of it in savings.  He uses a cash-back credit card to buy stuff (groceries, Goodwill, any other shopping we do) then pays it off each month when he gets his pension check.  He was really surprised when he went to transfer the money to pay the credit card and found we had spent less than half what we usually spend in a month; the rest went right into savings!