A collection of tiny blog posts

Good Monday morning to ya!

(Well. It’s Monday morning as I type this. I have no idea when you will read it.)

I’ve got a post full of random things for you today. It’s like a collection of tiny blog posts. 😉

The bookshelf is in Sonia’s room

Mr. FG and I carried it up there on Saturday, which was quite a task because of the size.

This is a seriously tall bookshelf; here’s 5’8″ me next to it for comparison.

There was chalk paint all over the shelf hardware and my goodness, that was a bear to get off.

I tried a couple of different methods and eventually landed on a soak in boiling water followed by lots of elbow grease with an SOS pad.

In the future, I will most definitely think twice before taking on a furniture item that’s been chalk-painted.

I don’t regret doing this bookshelf, but chalk paint would definitely give me pause in the future.

Anyway, I’ll do a before, during, and after post once the paint is hard enough for Sonia to load up the shelves with stuff.

(The wait is because we are trying really hard to follow the instructions and patiently wait five days for the paint to fully cure, especially because books are notorious for sticking to painted shelves. Hopefully our patience will pay off!)

Isn’t this egg beautiful?

Zoe had to do an osmosis lab for biology, and the last step was soaking the now-shell-less egg in a food coloring solution.

I thought the end result was really beautiful.

So, the virus. Whoa.

Things have seriously changed in such a short time; it feels a little like whiplash.

We’d been doing pretty well in my area for quite a few months and now poof! Some of our metrics are as bad as they were at the beginning of the pandemic.

Sigh.

I was telling Mr. FG this morning that hey, at least there’s not a whole lot of formal stuff in our lives that can get re-cancelled.

• He was already working from home.
• The girls already had online college classes
• We were already doing church online
• I always work online (!)

We were already wearing masks when out and about, and we have not been eating in restaurants.

So, the uptick is discouraging, but the tightened restrictions will be less of an adjustment than they were the first time around.

The main thing I’m hoping for on a personal level is that Lisey will still be able to keep working at Valvoline.

They wear masks, there’s a lot of air circulation because of the garage doors, and customers stay in their cars, so I think it’s a relatively safe job to keep going to and I am hopeful she’ll still get to work.

And on a worldwide level, of course I am hoping for a swift end to the pandemic with as few lives lost as possible.

A food waste course is coming (tomorrow, actually)

Several years ago, I did a poll asking what Frugal Girl readers would like a focused course on, and food waste was the top answer.

I’ve been a little slow to execute (!), but tomorrow, I’m opening up the first round of a four-week email course on food waste.

(I’m doing an email course because I know how easy it is to forget about courses that are delivered all at once.)

Since this is the first time I’ve done this and there are bound to be snafus, I’m offering it at a lower price point tomorrow, and then it’ll be a slightly higher price point in January.

The first round of participants can be my beta testers and help me make it better by offering feedback.

Anyway. More info coming on that tomorrow!

Wire closet shelving is a hot item (?)

Mr. FG and I redid Zoe’s closet shelving so that she has a wood shelf and an actual bar to hang her clothes on.

I listed the closet shelving on a local free group, thinking it was worth a try vs. throwing the old shelving away, and I got a whole bunch of responses.

I love that the internet makes it so easy to connect my uneeded stuff with people!

It is almost always worth it to take a few minutes to try to give things away. It is so, so true that one man’s trash is another’s treasure.

I accidentally got a LOT of coffee

Lisey and I like the Starbucks mocha grounds, and I usually get a box delivered every six months or so.

Well, somehow my Subscribe and Save got messed up and I got a double order.

Which means we have an awful lot of coffee right now.

Luckily, Lisey and I aren’t coffee snobs, so when we open a package six months from now, we will not be all, “Hmm, this tastes slightly stale.”

Being an easy-to-please coffee drinker is coming in handy right about now.

And hey, no matter what happens with supply chains, we know we will not run out of coffee!

Normally I just sort of abruptly end these posts of randomness, but let’s do something more fun today:

Tell me a few random things about your current life in the comments.