Here in our neck of the woods, the stores are looking a little sparse so I’ve been trying to grab what I can when I see it for our upcoming holiday meals… have you planned yours out yet? If not, I’ve got some easy recipes for you to use and some menus from previous years that may inspire you.
Our holiday meals here may not be quite as grand as they have been in the past but when everyone joins around the table we have more than enough!
We are trying our best to get back into some of our routines and traditions around here but it’s been tough going with one thing after another. I do plan to do a little something special for St. Nicholas Day and we hope to get our tree up then as well. I had thought about doing our Polar Express Party on St. Nicholas Day but it falls in the middle of the week so that wouldn’t work out well for anyone right now.
We won’t be doing anything really spectacular but I’m sure the kids will be excited anyway. I did manage to snag a couple of bags of chocolate coins a couple of weeks ago too so I’m hoping they won’t have melted by the time St. Nicholas Day gets here.
I just wanted to post this in case anyone else wanted to try to do something a little extra special… maybe you will have a chance to grab some things over the weekend to start a new family tradition. Maybe we can schedule a quick drive around town to look at Christmas lights or something as well.
We usually make Santa Pancakes and I think we did something a little different last year but I can’t remember what we did for sure as it was so crazy then.
Before you think that you couldn’t possibly pull anything like this off because something always goes wrong here’s another post about how our day really went on a previous St. Nicholas Day:
Y’all I’ve been so busy and haven’t had time to post but I had to quickly let everyone know about this little gadget that has saved us so many headaches and has probably saved the life of our washing machine on more than one occasion!
As you know we’ve had one issue after another with this house and I mentioned before about our well issues. We get A LOT of sediment in the water lines… I mean beaucoup amounts!!!
We use our Berkey to filter our drinking water and that works wonderfully but some of the appliances, mostly the washer, can’t cope with all the sediment. Our washer would constantly give us the ‘LO FLO’ error message. I knew that meant that I needed to clean/replace the filter in the washer hose.
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Last year, when I wasn’t able to be here very much I couldn’t predict when this would happen. Thankfully I found this in-line filter system which has saved us so much time and hassle.
When the error message pops up I can instantly check the filter without needing to pull the heavy washer out from the wall and wriggle behind it which is very awkward and painful.
Yuck, can you see all that sediment? All I had to do was to cut off the water supply, unscrew the filter, rinse it out, and then put it back on. Once I turned the water back on then the washer was ready to go again. I’m so glad that this catches all of that before it makes it to the washer because changing the washer hose filters takes me a lot longer to do.
It’s hard to see but the water is nice and clear in this picture and hopefully I won’t have to do this again until next year. There was a little bit of sediment back in there as soon as I turned the water on again.
I seriously hate to think what all this is doing to our other appliances like the hot water heater. When it gets bad I end up replacing the tank kits in the toilets and everything as well so we keep a couple of those on hand… this is not normal but apparently there is nothing we can do unless we had a ton of money to drill a new well and hope it didn’t have the same issues.
We probably need to look into buying a larger filter for the whole house so we don’t have to keep replacing shower heads, toilet kits, and the such but I just haven’t had a chance to research them yet.
Just this week we’ve had issues with our AC which was installed new but apparently was never registered by the company and therefore the warranty was never put into effect so that means we will most likely be out of pocket for the repairs. We never received the paperwork for anything as we didn’t sign off on the house being completed because it really wasn’t ever completed properly but that’s a story that may never have a happy ending.
We are currently under a tropical storm watch as we have a crazy storm headed our way. Sending major prayers to all of those down south of us that are still dealing with the devastation that Ian left behind!
Anyway we hope you are all having a great week and staying safe!
