Bountiful Baskets Saturday

Our town started working with a food co-op last spring. The organization is called Bountiful Baskets and they have pick up sites in many states and are constantly opening more and more sites. It's a really great deal! Only $15 for a regular basket and you get roughly 50% fruit and 50% veggies. There are always extras you can add on too or bulk items such as oranges, apples, tomatoes, loaves of bread, extra veggie/ fruit packs etc. Every two weeks you place your order on Monday or Tuesday you pick it up the following Saturday. This past Saturday was our pick up day. My friend Bonnie and I always go and volunteer our time. When the truck comes - usually a semi truck - the volunteers help unload the truck, check the shipment to make sure we got everything we were supposed to, pass out the fruits and veggies to the baskets (we use laundry baskets that were purchased for the site), and help people check in and find their numbered basket and get them the extras that they ordered. When you volunteer you get to choose an extra large item, or two extra small items. Here are a few pictures of what we got this time.

As you can see from the pictures you get a lot of bang for your buck! The produce is almost always better quality than we can get at the grocery store - a lot fresher and a lot more flavorful. For veggies this time we got 7 roma tomatoes, 8-9 Jerusalem Artichokes, a small bundle of spinach, two heads of romaine lettuce, 4 English Cucumbers, and 4 yellow squash.


For fruits this time we got 5 bananas, 6 oranges, 10 apples, a small container of blackberries, 4 mangoes, and 2 large lemons. Sometimes it's hard to believe that we got ALL of this for only $15!

Happy New Year!

Well I guess it's about time that I actually start writing on this blog. After all we have been married almost 6 months now! Please excuse the look of it. I was trying to do some more creative things with it but they weren't working and were just plain frustrating me and so I decided to just leave it for now.

Here you will find little snippets from our daily lives. Most of them probably won't be very exciting and I'm sure not going to make any promises that there will be posts on a regular basis but check back every now and then and see how we're doing.

Usually Sunday is my day that I spend at least 4-6 hours in my classroom preparing for the coming week - making lesson plans, copies, organizing, cleaning/ picking up etc. Today, however, was a day that was spent relaxing. We still have tomorrow off of school for Christmas break so I decided that school work could wait until tomorrow. About the only thing that did get accomplished today was that Tess got a bath. Tess has been having some skin issues - lots of itching (no it's not fleas!) and some dry scaley patches on her belly. We are trying to switch her from one kind of food to another to see if that helps thinking that it might be an allergic reaction to chicken. Also the dry weather we have here doesn't help either. Have you every tried to bathe a 70ish pound dog? It isn't as easy as it may seem. First there is the problem of getting a dog that big wet. If we had a hand held shower sprayer that worked right it might help the situation, but we don't. So I did the best that I could and so far (knock on wood) she is a little less itchy - but then again she has had a pretty lazy day also doing not much other than sleeping.

Bentley is doing well also. He got a hair cut right before Christmas and it's super short so he's been wearing lots of sweaters and little doggy shirts to stay warm. He also likes to cuddle under the blankets when we're curled up on the couch. In fact as I type this I have Bentley curled up on the couch to my left and Tess curled up on the couch to my right.

Here is a picture of the puppies looking out the window at Santa when he came around on the fire truck right before Christmas.