The Hovel is the new name that I gave to the little house in the back of my parent’s property in Dime Box. It is always confusing because they say they are working on the house, but you never know which one. So, Mom and Dad had be space plan how to rebuild that little building, and this is what we all finally decided on encase anyone else is interested.

This is about or 4th of July, it is pretty late, sorry I have no real excuse, no kids, just work. Anyway, below you can see our hosts the Amaros. This is before their baby as you can see, but they were still awesome enough to host everyone.

We all met at their house, and were going to have a big meal with everyone providing something.

This of course was a great time to take pictures of family. We did family pictures with everyone,and here you can see Tanya and I.

All of the family pictures turned out great, except for Grant and mine…. 🙁 I managed to blink in every single one, and I normally don’t have that issue, so this is the best one from those.

As you can see, Simon was also here at this get together, and we needed up with a great picture with him.

Here you can see some of the yummy goodness of our feast.

The Crofts provided meat that was tasty.

The cranberry fluff that I made since it was a great excuse to make it,but finding cranberries when it isn’t close to thanksgiving can be hard.

The the Warsnick Fielder bars, that I posted the recipe for earlier which were very tasty.

So all in all we had a great time with Family and friends, and I hope your time on the 4th was great too!!

Grant and I have been trying to sell some stuff on Craigslist lately because it is just cluttering our apartment. We don’t need them, and so we try to sell them. We have definitely found some of the dumbest Craigslist people around. First they call and want to see it, you wait for hours, and then they either never show, or they later tell you they already found what they needed. But in the end, Craigslist is awesome when people are just curtious. One of the things we have been trying to sell was our couch.

We finally managed to sell it for 100 which is awesome because it makes our apartment feel so much more open, and this was awesome when I was 15 and bought it. Now that I am older the low back isn’t quite as comfortable as I would have liked another reason we decided to part with it. Supposedly it went to a school library in a school here in Austin which sounds awesome and would be a perfect couch for that. Grant wonders if this was just a scheme of the buyer to get a better price,but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

We then upgraded from the couch to this chair and ottoman which we also bought on craiglist.

We got this pair  for 140 instead of 400… we really wanted the leather pads. Well, we wanted it with white leather,but they only have an off white that always looks dirty so this is the compromise. Other than this we finally got organizational tools for our desks. We love our desks since they are just a top piece with two drop downs on either side,but that means no storage. So, once again Craigslist pulled through and we got these for 50 for the pair which was a steal since they are steel no pun intended.

Also, if you have never been on the website http://austin.kashless.org/free it is worth your time. It is full of people just giving stuff away. We saw a posting today for a while leather modern couch that someone had put on their curb. We went to go get it,but someone else had beat us there which can happen,but I still can’t wrap my head around just throwing something like that out when you could sell it,but people give away a lot of stuff so they don’t have to mess with it, so give it a try if your interested, oh, and they have them in other states too.

It has been a little while since I have posted. Grant and I have both been working at Alpha Granite, and Grant has even been working almost full time which has been a huge blessing. We are wanting very much to pay off our loans so any extra cash we can get will definitely help.

As many of you know, I have been reading the blog www.hip2save.com a lot, and I get a lot of my great deals off of her website. A few of the things that she puts on there are just sweepstakes or things to enter. I do them for poops and giggles,but I never expect to win anything. But low and behold I won something!!!

Actually, I won two!

Johnson and Johnson has some awesome giveaways where the first 10,000 to enter win, etc. So I always enter just because you never know.

This was the larger of the two; I had never gotten anything like this so it was a cool treat, especially since I won’t have to buy ziplock bags for a while now.

After there first win, a few weeks later I got this one in the mail, a little bit smaller,but I will take anything free and be completely satisfied.

Again, very few Ziplocs will be bought for a while.

Yep them are some firetrucks!