Amazon goodies August 15, 2020

 I'm going to do my best to make a list of freebies and other things on Amazon that I like on a daily basis again. Just links for you to check out. Yes, they are affiliate links. Click and buy anything, and I make a tiny bit of money to help support me and the zoo crew.

I've recently rediscovered the fun of a good romance novel. Rom-coms are a favorite right now, though I still like my historical romances. As always, links open in a new window. These are three of my favorite romance authors:

Lucy Score

Nadia Lee

and my favorite of all time,

Johanna Lindsey

For those who like murder mysteries with some recipes thrown in, may I recommend Joanne Fluke and her Hannah Swenson mysteries? All of the recipes mentioned in her books are given, and all are delightfully fun to do and generally pretty easy to make.

And now for the homesteady-type books - food, crafts, and so forth! Remember, these are all Kindle books, free at the time of posting. They may not be free when you get to them. I'm not the author so I have no control over that. All I am doing is posting them for you to look at and decide if you want them or not.

Cauliflower Rice Recipes

Crochet Christmas Ornaments

Casserole Cookbook

Homesteading Food (Box Set)

Cake Cookbook

Superfoods Beans Recipes

Copycat Recipes

American Chinese Cuisine

Hash Brown Recipes

Vegetarian Recipes

35 Chicken Breast Recipes

Everyday Vegetarian Family Cookbook

Rose Gardening how to grow roses

Grow Roses Easily

Slow Cooker Comfort Foods

Complete Dehydrator Cookbook

EVERYTHING CHOCOLATE COOKBOOK

Hydroponics

Fermentation for Beginners

50 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HOMESTEADING

Hearty, Healthy & Delicious Mexican Recipes

Easy To Knit Slippers

Mediterranean Cooking

The Frugal Life

DOWNSIZE to FREEDOM

Hydroponics (box set)

FLOWERS

There is a light at the end of the tunnel

And it's getting brighter every day. With only nine weeks to go before Quentin can rehire, he found a possible job around here hauling logs. It pays decent, on a per-log basis, so that will be good for him if he can get into it. We shall see. Work for me goes on (and on and on sometimes it seems), but I'm working on getting a better-paying position, so that's a wait and see thing, too.

On the other hand, things are kicking along now that the weather's cooled off a teeny bit, by about twenty degrees! More stuff's getting cut down, burned, buried, or whatever needs doing. So you can bet that there's a lot of clearing up getting done, and we're happy about that. Any little thing that gets done is a blessing, whether we stay here and buy this place or end up eventually buying some other place nearby. It's all to the good, and the more we can clean this place up, the happier I feel about everything.

I do need to get some extra moolah together once hubby's back to work and do some stuff for myself, whether I plant in containers next year or not. One of the things I really want to do is based on the fact that I love, love, love tomatoes. They are my favorite veggie of all time. I can snack on them raw (so can hubby, for that matter, we go through them like crazy), good on sammiches, soups, stews, homemade sauces and ketchups and other condiments ... so much you can do with them. One of my favorite places to get tomato seeds is WinterSown.org and their free with SASE tomato seed offer. The link takes you to the offer page. LOTS of varieties! I need to get some SASEs together and start sending for seeds, lol. And I need to get others ordered that I wanted to order this year and couldn't because of one very small income. We scrape by, but it's tough. Hence why we need so much to get other income avenues going much better, easier once we have two incomes and can afford to get internet at home. With that, I can do so much more than I do now, including revamp my Etsy store and get it going again. Yeah, I know, I've got loads of ways to MAKE money, it's a matter of getting it all going, and it's pretty much impossible to run an online business when you are only able to get online once a week. Grrr-some. But getting so much closer to not being a problem any longer.

Other blessings - our health and the kitties health is all good. Usually, either Quentin or myself comes down with a summer cold when the weather changes so rapidly. So far, so good. No sniffles at all. Guess working in a cold environment is helping me avoid it this year. Cold, but not overwhelmingly cold, like at Butterball, where it was freezing all the time. At Tyson's, I'm actually reasonably warmish most of the time, as long as I dress for the cold in layers of shirts. How hubby actually manages to deal with the cold in sleeveless tees under his smock is beyond me, when he's there. People think I'm joking when I say he's my personal furnace, but I ain't.

Back home today, he's busy burning trash after having cleared out the fridge. I told him that since he's responsible for all the leftovers IN the fridge, HE can clean it out this time. I'm not into his science experiments that get buried in the back. Gee, I wonder why he texted me that some of that stuff was pretty rank? Hee hee hee. Being a redneck, I swear his favorite word is WHOOSH from lighting off the trash pile. He certainly does light enough stuff off to make mini infernos on a regular basis. Of course, considering how much garbage is lying around the place, it does give him plenty of fun time burning things, so I can't gripe about his "hobby" of trash burning, right?

The layette for Bobbi and Eric's baby is coming along. My idea of knitting the sleeves into the body as I went didn't work out like I wanted, so I had to tink back a bit and while the body is in one piece, I'm going to have to make the whole sleeves separate and work them in when I do the neckband, then do the seaming (have I mentioned how much I HATE seaming????) once I get all the knitting done. Then there's just the hat, booties, diaper cover and blanket. The blanket is going to be cotton, too, just not the denim colored cotton I'm using for the rest of the set. I have lots of colors of scraps laying around in good-sized balls, including a whole lot of cream. So I'm doing knitted squares in a free pattern called Baby Feet. I'll be doing the borders in cream, and the middle in different colors of cotton. Once they're done, they'll have to be seamed together (ugh) to make the whole blanket, but the border of the squares will make the border for the blanket, so there's no need to go round the thing and add a border. I think it will look cute, and the cotton I've got in colors is all different colors, not just baby colors. There's green (three shades, I think), brown, dark and light purple, yellow, and I dunno what else. But lots of colors for a very cute baby blanket. The good thing is, with this being a unisex set, if they take good care of it, once little Elizabeth Marie outgrows it, they can put it away for the next baby to come along. Though if the set gets used all to heck, that's good, too. NOTHING a crafter likes better than seeing things they've made be put to use.

My socks are coming along a bit at a time, as is the feather and fan afghan, though they're kind of back-burnered whilst I work on the layette, so the baby has it before she outgrows it. Not like we don't have a bunch of afghans around anyhow, and I have enough socks to get by, but a baby needs STUFF.

So with all that said, here's a photo of our recently emerging fall color on the place. Enjoy! The photo is taken outdoors, just outside the bedroom off the kitchen, where that old tool shed used to be.

I also have to write a note of complaint to Wally World. I opened a newly-purchased package of swiss cheese slices yesterday when I made dinner (swiss burgers, stuffing and green beans) and found THIS on the cheese in the packaging!

Yes, folks, that is a piece of plastic wrapper of some kind ON the cheese as I pulled it out of the wrapper. Hubby was all for just pulling it off and tossing it, but I reminded him that this has to do with Quality Control, and with the industry that supports us, which is food processing, right now, QA is what we are all about, and I was pretty sure Wally World wouldn't be too happy to know that one of their packages had a problem. So it's off to write them a note pretty quickly. And now, for the obligatory (gigglesnort) list of this week's free books for the Kindle. Once I get the internet at the house again, there's going to be a lot of things going on, many of which are still in planning stages. I'm so glad I made a business plan for all this stuff, so I have a day-to-day list of what I have to get done to make things work.




Okay, there's way more I'd like to add, but I have a ton of other things I have on deck for today while online, and they have GOT to get done. See you next week, folks!

A nice break in the weather and Happy Labor Day, USA

Finally, we're getting a bit of a break. It's been so hot and muggy that it's been difficult to get outside for more than a few minutes at a time to do anything, so what's been getting done has been bits and pieces. A lot of small trash has been getting burnt (bless you, Quentin, my darling hubster!), some small trees have been getting cut down and trimmed up for future firewood, and a few small repairs got done around the house. Two in particular I'm glad are done.

One, we kept wondering why the heck the front door stuck, despite all the things Quentin did to fix it. Turns out that the wall right there between the doorframe and the interior wall between the living room and kitchen wasn't even attached to the flipping floor!!!! He fixed that with screwing some 2x4 to the base of the wall indoors and out to support the wall. No more squeaky hinges, no more sticking door. It's nice to shut the door and have it shut like it's supposed to now. And two, the floor in the kitchen doorway was pretty soft, and we were worried that one of these days, somebody'd step on it and go right through. He took a 3/4" pine board, cut it to short lengths for crossing over the joists, and while we now have to step up a tad to get over it and into the kitchen, it's a lot better than having to worry about stepping through the floor. We did notice that soft spot's pretty bad when Quentin got done, as the floor there actually gaps about 3/8 of an inch in the middle below the board. If we buy this place, the floors are going to have to be completely ripped up and redone with new boards. Period. If we don't, we'll just fix what we have to fix to keep from going through the floors.

The place we like is still for sale, though honestly, things are not going well for us financially right now in that department. We know it will be a long haul to get where we want to be, especially with not having internet at home, so I have to work hard at getting anything done right now. It's tough, but in the next few months, things will get much better for us. Quentin's only got about 11 weeks left until he can apply for rehire, and we're pretty sure that he'll get back in. That means I only have to do all the blasted overtime for about 12 more weeks (because it takes them a week to get the application printed off, call him for the tour/interview/medical, and tell him when he starts orientation again), and then I'll have more time to do the things I want to do. Like needlework and clearing things up around here, and writing and reading and cooking. Soooo many things I don't have time for right now that I'll be able to do again soon. We are both looking forward to good things coming soon.

Tomorrow, Monday, is Labor Day here in the USA, to honor our working-class people. A lot of folks make jokes about it being the day for pregnant women to go into labor, but it is for honoring our laborers. I'm going to have a rough time of it, with knowing I'd normally be at work and instead getting a paid holiday off!

I am getting some knitting done, though. I started a layette set last night during our date night for our neighbors Eric and Bobbi. Bobbi finally had the baby this past week, a darling little girl they named Elizabeth Marie. I'm making the set in a 100% cotton yarn, colourway is "stonewashed denim," which Quentin thinks is looking sweet. It's supposed to be a raglan sweater but I loathe doing seams and am well-known in my family for knitting up things as one piece so I don't have to do the things. Buttons are enough of a pain, and I hate trying to match up decreases and hope they come out right. If I knit the thing as one piece, I don't have to worry about sides and back not matching in length or whatever. And by doing the sleeves in the round rather than flat, not only do I avoid having to seam the things under the arm and into the body of the sweater, I can avoid doing much of ball-winding for them by knitting them to the underarm and then working across the body and sleeves as I go. Work one sleeve to the underarm, add it in, work up the other sleeve the same, add it in, and then just do my decreases per the pattern. It sounds a bit wonky, but it works out really well and also avoids the bulk of having seams in the sweater when it's done. I'm making it about six months size, so that when the whole set is done (sweater, bonnet, booties, and blanket), it will be plenty big enough for little Elizabeth to fit in and still have a bit of growing room. It's an heirloom baby gift, and I do enjoy sharing my stuff with people like this. It's such a joy to see their faces when they open the package and see what's inside.

Sadly, I don't think any of those peach seeds I planted this spring will ever sprout. I'm about to give up on them, as I have had nothing out of them all summer. Not a single sprout. I think I did something wrong, but I'm not sure what. Either that, or I got a bunch of bum seeds out of things, lol. It does happen!!!! So next year is another chance to give it a whirl. And who knows, sometime next spring, they might sprout anyhow.

Cleanup around here has included picking up a ton (it seems) of soda cans that just got tossed on the ground by the previous tenant. Good night but there are a lot of them! I need to find me a grabber thing to pick them and other small items up, because all that bending over hurts my back, and after Friday, it's sore enough. You know it's going to be a bad day at work when you walk in and your boss says, "X-ray two is broken!" and that's where you work. It took four people working our butts off all day to do a job that two people normally can handle. It made for a miserable day, really, and then I stayed over for another four hours for my overtime that I have to pull for three more months (why does twelve weeks sound so much shorter???), though in a different area, thank goodness. And tomorrow, I have off for the holiday, with pay, yay me. I'm looking forward to getting a LOT of writing done, and am finally halfway through Genesis. At this rate, I might get it done by October, haha!

And now it's time for me to dump my email to read when I get home and list a bunch of books and find a bootie pattern I like that will go with the sweater. Sadly, the pattern for the sweater doesn't include a bonnet or booties, so I need to find something that I can adapt a bit to include the mock cable pattern the sweater has going up the front next to the buttonband and up the sleeves. Till next time, it's book time for y'all! (Speaking of books, the Bountiful Farm Cookbook has made it to #30 on the top 100 Free in Cookbooks, yay!) Remember, the freebie books may not be free when you get to them, but when I grabbed them myself, they were. Have fun till next week!

FREE KINDLE BOOK FOR THIS WEEK




That's all I have time to share this week. There are obviously a TON more that I simply do not have time to list right now with only getting online once a week. (You wouldn't BELIEVE how long it takes to put this post together every week with the links, lol.) Have fun, and don't forget to like the farm on Facebook - I tend to share other things on there that I don't put in here!

Busy, busy, busy!

Crappy week at work, every day it seemed like something broke. Thank goodness I'm not a lead so I don't have to worry about things like that, just doing my job as best as I can. That isn't difficult, as I managed to get into a job that's fairly easy and hard to mess up. The overtime has to continue for a few more weeks, but it's coming down a day at a time. Before I know it, the week's over, and so is a few more days of overtime that I don't have to pull. Yay! In other good news, this upcoming week, one of our littler bills will finally be paid off, and I can be proud of us. Despite one paycheck and that stupid garnishment, we're still managing to get by and have the truck down to $705 left to pay off. We're blessed that the guy we're buying it from is willing to work with us and take good-faith payments every week towards the payoff, rather than getting mad about it, gracefully waiting until hubby's back to work and getting paid so we can make bigger payments on it and get it paid off.

The only problem I have now with overtime is the nimrod they hired to replace the old night lead on my regular section. The new one is a decent guy, and was a lead in a different spot. However, he has yet to learn to read the work orders before starting the shift, so he knows if he needs extra help or not. Hate to tell him, but that section ALWAYS needs extra help. However, he pulled the old, "Well, the supervisor told me I shouldn't need more than eight people, so I guess I don't need you," on Friday night. I got overtime by asking one of the supervisors, and he put me elsewhere, glad to have the help. At  my ten-minute personal break time, I chatted for a minute with the backup lead over there, and she told me she was doing the work of three people because of this moron, and wasn't too happy about it. But what choice do you have when your new "boss" is a blithering idiot, more concerned with carving things in stone than in actually getting things accomplished? Not a lot, really, but as long as I can get my overtime for a bit longer, I'll be happy.

The nights I don't stay over at work for overtime, I come home, grab a fast supper, and get my butt out with Quentin to get things done. He's doing a lot of trash-burning and brush-burning. The stuff we can't burn for whatever reason, we're piling up near the edge of the easement, so that when the power company comes through and brush hogs and such in the easement again, they'll bury it for us when the doze all the stuff they trim off to the side of the easement. Heehee. Why work harder than you have to with something like that?

Lots of small trees and scrub brush are getting cut down. That's a lot of the brush-burning right there. The scrub and all the trimmings are going up in smoke, because we don't want them sitting around and gathering critters like snakes and skunks in them. Some of the wildlife isn't bad to live around, just annoying, but when you get things that can hurt you or stink you up involved, it gets a bit crazy trying to avoid getting sprayed. We found that out when Q left the last bit of brush piled up for a mere three days. He scared a young skunk out of the pile when he started to haul it to the burn pit, and nearly got sprayed!

And I'm officially a published author, lol. The Bountiful Farm Cookbook, full of nearly forty family favorite recipes, is up and running on Amazon! I'm pretty proud of myself for this, and it's only $1.99. AND!!! Next weekend, for three days, Friday the 31st through Sunday the 2nd, it's free! So if you're looking for a good recipe from me, feel free to grab the book next weekend!

I will say that I'll be glad when things pick up and we can do a lot more financially and get a place we're buying. Renting is great, we love our place, but we want to own, and it makes it hard to do anything when we have to ask to do a darn thing in the way of fixing things. We want to get stuff done, but we have to ask, wait days for replies sometimes, and then hope the answer's favorable. It bites, and we're a bit tired of that, so if not beforehand, once hubby's back to work, we're paying off all our bills that we're snowballing out of debt on, getting a nice downpayment together and going from there to get a place we like and can own. Neither of us likes the idea of a mortgage, with the economy the way it is, but we like the idea of continuing to rent with all the pitfalls we're having handed to us lately even less.

Speaking of free books, it's time for this week's free book mess, so have fun. I have to get these posted and get my butt back home. Chicken lo mein tonight for dinner and more trees to get cut down. FUN!!!!!!

FREE KINDLE BOOK FOR THIS WEEK

Sorry they are mostly cookbooks again - it seems that's about all I can find most of the time, lol. But at least nobody's gonna go hungry!! (I should note that for personal reading anymore, I'm enjoying the teen/young adult books a lot more than adult novels. The YA books at least move the plot along, whereas the adult stuff is pretty boring!)

At least it stopped raining

Because now it's fall weather qute a bit early. Brrr! But good for sleeping, so comfortable and easy to get to sleep and stay there all night long. The cats are enjoying it a lot, curling up on window shelves Quentin long since installed for them and snoozing away the day. He's so ready to go back to work, he's literally counting the days until he's able to apply for rehire. I'm ready for it, too. Not that I don't love him and time with him to death, but there's times I'd like to have some time and space to myself. (I do get a bit tired of all his car shows ALL the time, lol.)

We have gotten a lot done lately, mostly him. A lot of trash got burned now that the burn ban's off due to nearly a month of rain. The ground's pretty saturated, things are wet and staying that way, so no burn bans, thus all the crap that's built up for a month can get torched. There's been a bunch of trees cut down to clear the view around the place, including a few yesterday. We had to stop a lot sooner on that than expected, because Quentin unintentionally stood on a nest of ground bees iand tore it to heck, stirring them up bad. He's allergic to bee stings (thankfully no stings from them), but it meant we had to quit until they settled down, and by then, it was getting dark. What we did get down got trimmed right off and left as full logs, rather than cutting to stove length. We'll let it season that way, so that if we do find a place and move, then it will be a lot easier to move the big logs rather than a bunch of stove length logs, though those will go with us, too. The more we've got trimmed back, the better the place looks, and the more firewood we'll have to take along for the ride if/when the time comes.

The mountain road's a complete mess. I'm surprised I can get the car through, as bad as some of the gullies the rain washed out of the road are. You literally have to roll through them slowly, unless you want to bust a tire. It's pretty rough and not a lot of fun at the bottom right now. Thankfully, there are ditches next to the road on the rest of it that make the runoff head downhill without carving craters in the road. I love our place here even though it's just a rental, but I'll be glad when we can buy a place and move. I know it seems like all I do is gripe lately, and I honestly don't try to. I think it's just I'm tired from all the overtime I have to pull to make ends meet, I'm tired of not getting things done around the place that I want to do, and I'm tired of being tired. A few more weeks (12 1/2 and counting) till Quentin can rehire, then a few more weeks after that before he is back to work and getting paychecks, and things will start to look up. I've already warned everybody that once he's getting a paycheck again, I won't do more overtime, period.

I will, however, keep writing, and keep up my needlework and doing thins around the house. Speaking of those, my knitting's gotten a whole sock finished finally, barring weaving in the ends. Date night every Saturday is now mandatory for us, as a choice to help keep our marriage more stable and give some sanity to our crazy life. And I do my best to make sure that I put things aside for a bit before I head to bed, and those little bits add up fast when you are working on something that doesn't require a lot of pattern reading. Sock heels to toes are easy to work without much thinking, so I got the heel flap done, the heel turned, the gusset worked, the foot done and the toe done, all over Saturday while doing laundry and then that night while having movie time with hubby. Warning, do not get Redline, Vehicle 19, or The Tower. They all sound good, but they're not that great. Redline was the best of the three, with John Billingsley (Doctor Phlox on Star Trek: Enterprise) being the bad guy; though the ending was not too smart, because you don't know if the people get rescued or not. Vehicle 19 started out good, quickly morphed into sheer boredom, and ended up boring, with another "what happened to end this?" ending. Cliffhangers are good for serials, books, and tv shows. NOT good for a movie, which to me means it has a definite beginning, middle and ending. The Tower was the worst. We didn't even watch a full ten minutes of it, especially after we realized it was "The Towering Inferno" in Korean, with English subtitles, set it Korea. (Or maybe it was Hong Kong, I couldn't figure that part out.) We both like TTI, but if we want to see it, we'll watch the original version in English, not some mashed-up gobbledegook version with subtitles. So movie night for movies was a total bust on the rentals. We did splurge on Super Storm for $10 from Wally World, and truthfully, we got it because we like disaster movies (in ENGLISH, please! We don't speak-a da other languages so gooder!), and it sounded good. It was well worth the $10 because the plot made sense (though I still laugh over the plot device of Jupiter's Great Red Spot disappearing entirely) of a sort, and made the night worthwhile. That, along with finishing a sock, was fun.

As for writing, sometime Monday, my first book will be available on Amazon for the Kindle. The Bountiful Farm Cookbook got published to my bookshelf there today and it looks good in the previews. I'm debating putting it up for print editions as well, but I'd have to make it run around $5 for that and I'm dithering on it. The Kindle version will only be $1.99 paid, though I did opt it in for the KDP Select program and I'll be doing a freebie promo on it in a couple of weeks, around Labor Day weekend. Mainly because I'm only online once a week, and I can't set it up for a promo until it's published. That takes about 12 hours, so it'll be midnight tonight before it's in publication officially, and next weekend before I'm online again to set it up for a promo weekend. Thus, two weeks before I give away (hopefully) LOTS of copies.

And I'm sitting here grabbing freebie books by the ton again because a - I can, and b - a friend is stopping by here at McQuack's to say hi and give me something Quentin and I have been wanting to get (and keep forgetting when we have a bit extra to order it). A can crusher for all his soda cans. We need the thing, he's getting a bit tired of stomping down all the ones he empties, plus all the ones we keep finding laying around outside. Easier to bring a five-gallon bucket of the things in from outdoors if they're laying around and run them through a crusher in a couple of minutes than to have to wait till he remembers to get outside and stomp them down.

So with that, it's time for this week's free Kindle books mess. Have fun. I'm off to get some lunch (my once a week garbage food indulgence) and read while my new books download. Hugs, all! Till next weekend!

FREE KINDLE BOOKS FOR THE WEEK




Ok, it's nearly four p.m. here and I need to hit Wally World for dinner supplies (ran out of spaghetti sauce, gotta buy a jar, though I much prefer my homemade, I'm too pooped to mess with it), and get myself home. I'll work on more books next week!