Category Archives: Home & Garden

ConAgra, Publix and Home Depot

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While standing at the customer service desk in Publix I noticed a little pad of coupons on the counter and pulled one off. This coupon turns out to be a pretty cool deal from ConAgra Foods, Publix and Home Depot.

The deal is that you buy $20 worth of ConAgra brand foods from Publix and send in the coupon with the Publix receipt for those groceries and they send you back a Home Depot gift card worth $25. Now, you do the math. Spend $20 plus a stamp and get back $25. That’s a sweet deal and not that hard to do. ConAgra makes a lot of big brands that everyone recognizes and uses, like:

  • Hunts (ketchup, spaghetti sauce, etc.)
  • Libby (hash, canned corned beef, etc.)
  • Chef Boyardee
  • Peter Pan Peanut Butter
  • Van Camps (pork and beans, weenie beanies, etc.)
  • Slim Jim
  • Reddi Whip
  • Crunch ‘n Munch
  • Gulden’s Mustard

and probably a few more that I forgot to list. But come on – how hard is it to spend $20 on any of the above groceries?

I don’t know where you are supposed to get these coupons from, but I found mine at the customer service desk – so if you want to take advantage of this you should head out to Publix ASAP because it expires June 29.

Summer Storms

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Heard on the news this morning that the midwest has had even more severe weather. It seems like Kansas especially has been hit by tornadoes this year and now a lot of the midwest states are having flooding, too. Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma are all having a hard time this year.

When I decided to move here, the mild weather was one of the main attractions. Tennessee has all four seasons yet all four are relatively mild. The worst weather we have in the summer is the threat of severe thunderstorms with hail and high winds, and sometimes the threat of a tornado. In the winter we have the threat of an occasional snow storm or ice, but they usually only last a day or two and the past several years have been very mild with almost no snow at all.

With all the bad weather hitting the midwest, I’m glad that I chose Tennessee when I moved, instead of Illinois or Missouri. I’ll just go to those states for vacations and hang my hat here in Tennessee for most of the year.

Survival Books

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While shopping today – my goodness we spent a lot of time and money in the stores today! – I found two new books that cover survival topics and my paranoid self decided I should buy them and read up on the subject.

The first book is called, “Survival Wisdom and Know-How,” which is everything you need to know to survive in the wilderness.

The second book is called, “Country Wisdom and Know-How,” which is everything you need to know to live off the land.

Both books are about 500 pages of no nonsense information on vital subjects. I can’t wait to have an hour outside on the porch swing to read through one and see how much I don’t know about the basics of survival without our modern conveniences.

Brazil

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I have some great stories about Brazil from people I know who used to live there or have gone there on vacation. I was even invited to tour the Brazalian embassy in Washington DC, as the legal administrator to Brazil’s Ambassador was married to a co-worker and we all became good friends while we lived in the DC area.

She would show us pictures of her very very very large family in Brazil and their house on a huge plantation. They were considered well off as they owned several hundred acres of prime farmland, yet they did not have indoor plumbing in the house and they did not have a telephone on the property – and this was a recent as 1990. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to travel to the nearest town – about 200 miles away – and stand in line to use the onepay  phone mounted on a pole in the center of town.

With the advent of cell phones and satellites, they do have both phones and TV in the house now, but they still have many primitive limitations and I find it amazing that with today’s technology so many people still live with the challenge of basics like getting clean water and protecting your children from attacks by wild animals like crocodiles and panthers.

Garden’s Bounty

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What a thrill to pick fresh vegetables from my container garden this year. I haven’t had a garden for 4 years, so I was determined to do a little of it this year somehow – and containers proved the answer.

There are so many trees around my house that there is no place to put a traditional garden and have it get enough sunlight. So I bought some large pots and put in two tomato plants, 7 green pepper plants and 1 jalenpeno plant. Then I strategically placed each pot in a place that would get sun and rain.

They are doing marvelously and we are picking from them daily now. Time to stock up on bacon so we can have our BLTs!