The LC on the DL

I have been living at the hospital lately with a sick little one. Nothing much else going on in life as everything else is currently on hold.

It was a very good week. I hit the new GoodWill store in town in search of something to use as a hayrack for the cavies and found a shelving unit for the little one’s room to replace the changing table that she has seriously outgrown but we were using for storage. It’s one of those heavy duty plastic things like Little Tikes makes. She loves it since it is pink and purple and looks like a doll house.

I also got a StepTwo adjustable basketball goal. Yes, they were total impulse buys but check it out, I got them both for under $8!! The shelves were $4.98 and with a wipe down they are as good as new. The basketball goal was only $1.98 (retails for around $30) and has lots of use left in it. Score!

Wal-Mart deals (still good):

Johnsons & Johnsons Little Buddies soaps are $.94 each. With two $1/1 from last Sunday’s paper and two of these printables for $2/2 I managed to score 6 soaps for free and earn an overage of $.24!

Live Active cereal is $2.98 and with this printable for $3/1 I got a box for free and earned an overage of $.02.

Zantac 150 Cool Mint 8 pack is $3.98 and with this printable for $5/1 I got it free and earned an overage of $1.02!

Aquafresh Advanced is $2.23 and with printables from here and here for $2/1 I got two tubes for a total of $.46!

Kashi Cereal is on rollback for under $2 per box of selected varieties. Using this printable after registering at the Kashi website you get a box for free with an overage.

How do overages work? The cashier certainly won’t give you cash back however, it does lower the cost of your other items that you don’t have coupons for or that you aren’t getting for free. Overages rock.

CVS deals (last week’s sale):

Mother’s Day shopping at CVS netted me one 12oz box of Russell Stover’s chocolates and one 12 oz. box of Whitman’s samplers for $1.99 each. Both were on sale for $3.99 per box and I had $2/1 coupons from the paper. I saved $13 on the chocolates! Just don’t tell my mom ;).

Bed, Bath, & Beyond still has their clearance sale going. They have a big section with up to 75% off the lowest marked clearance price. I got three of the kids new quilts (originally marked almost $100 each) for $9 each.

As you know I haven’t been posting much to any of my blogs or the podcast. I have refocused most of my time and energy back where it belongs, to my family. Should time free up again, I hope to spend more time blogging, until then it is time well spent with my children, my husband, and taking care of my home.

We have many projects that are taking up a lot of our time but they have been great family projects. First up is our vegetable garden, while it is small we hope to get enough produce out of it to save some on our grocery bill this season. The kids all picked vegetables they are in charge of and have been diligent in caring for it. Also to their delight we planted some marigolds and sunflowers.

Several weeks ago we constructed a guinea pig home and cat proofed it. We adopted three male guinea pigs that are about a year and a few months old and that have lived together in a 1′x2′ cage most of their lives. They were surrendered to a rescue shelter and were not used to being handled (the noted reason for surrendering was because the children wouldn’t clean the cage). They are doing smashingly and already are used to their meal schedule and come to our voices. The little one we named Scooby Doo now curls up on my chest and will nap. They have some a long way from the shy and squirmy little guys they were and the children, my husband, and I just love them to pieces.

I have to take a sideline here and rant for a minute. Children should not be the sole responsible party for a pet. Children cannot BE responsible for pets and giving a child a pet does not teach them responsibility. I have seen numerous parents agree to let children have a small pet on the condition that they will take care of it and if they fail the pet will be “gotten rid of”. One, this teaches children that parents allow a child to ignore a pet and live in terrible and inhumane conditions (since the parent won’t step in) and two, that if they don’t want the pet all they have to do is to stop taking care of it and the parents will get rid of it. This is a very tragic and common occurrence and parents who think they are teaching their children lessons of responsibility usually don’t realize they are teaching irresponsibility instead. Adults should be in charge of the pet with children assisting parents. Remember, the best way to teach your children is by example. (end rant)

I have been sewing and crocheting quite a bit and trying to get rid of a lot of surplus fabric I have by turning it into rompers and dresses for the littlest girl. My oldest daughter learned to sew recently and has been working on some of her own projects as well. We have even made some cozies for the guinea pigs.

Coupons and shopping trip deals have been taking up several hours every weekend but the money we are saving is worth every penny. It costs enough to feed and care for a family of six as it is and the way grocery and incidental costs are going up it is costing more than ever. Every week we spend time as a family clipping coupons from the Sunday paper, I then organize them and check out the weekly ads. I have found several websites to be invaluable resources in planning my weekly shopping:

Money Saving Mom - (Walgreens, CVS, Wal-Mart deals as well as a few other good deals)

BeCentsAble - Grocery Gatherings include weekly ads and the coupons that go with them allowing you to either get items free or for pennies on the dollar. They note the best deals for items on sale or with coupons at a long list of stores so you don’t have to spend quite so much time keeping track of them on your own when planning your shopping trips.

Those are the two big ones I check. There are many other blogs I am keeping up with and I will share those with you later. I will have a post from my great deals this week to share with you the kinds of things these sites have helped me to accomplish (for example, I got $20 worth of stuff absolutely free yesterday at Wal-Mart). It takes some work, but a penny saved is double that which is earned!

My primary job is to be a great mom and wife and to care for my family and home. While technology is a great passion of mine, it cannot consume my time. I do love teaching people about technology and being an open source evangelist but there are only so many hours in the day and once I have spent 40 hours a week or more away from home my family suffers when I spend another 40 ignoring them at home. I am more than happy to answer questions, share what I know, and link to things I think are truly exceptional, but I don’t have time to be a news outlet. ;)  I am keeping up with as much as I can but can’t afford to miss out on my family. Thanks for understanding that.

Boy did I strike gold yesterday! Although it was the dreaded tax day and one thing went wrong after another, a friend of mine called and said she had an extra ticket for the My Chemical Romance concert that night and did I want to go. Of

course, I felt really guilty about accepting since I had a ton of crap to do and was having such a terrible day, but her husband pretty much talked me into it. It didn’t take much really because I do like MCR.

I haven’t been to a concert since Megadeth (with the Misfits opening) in ‘99. Oh boy things have changed and I have certainly gotten older but I eventually really got into the music and started dancing and jumping and singing along. It was great fun and a much needed release. I love any opportunity where I can dance like no one is watching and sing my heart out like no one is listening.

Today I still managed to get up on time for work but my ears are still ringing. I took some pictures with my phone and since it doesn’t zoom I had to modify them in iPhoto after the fact. They aren’t the best since we chose to head up to the top balcony but it was a good location for watching the show even if the pictures are blah.

Moral of the story: great concert, great opening acts (Drive By and Billy Talent), and I really need to do this more often!

Between the soaring gas prices and the rising costs of necessities we are really feeling the crunch of the economy at home. While it would be awesome if the blogs and podcast would finally start pulling in some extra cash, they really haven’t done it yet. My family made a lot of sacrifices over the last year while I spent every waking moment on the computer writing, podcasting, and researching content and the time has come where I can’t expect them to continue to miss me 80 hours a week not to mention I am missing them most of all. Online has to take a backseat to my family since giving up my day job is not an option. My family is more important than any other blog or social networking event is so hopefully everyone understands why it seems I have gone dark for awhile.

Besides the new challenges facing the average family in the US right now, the real wake up call was that 10 years and a better income later, I had less money now than I did in the past in a single income family. We were doing something wrong and we had to do something to fix it or we will never survive the current economy crisis. We are going back to our roots and doing what we used to to save money and make our hard earned money go as far as possible. We also realized we don’t spend enough quality time together so we made a plan and agreed to start implementing change. We put our plans in motion a few weeks ago and things are looking up.

One of the easiest changes I can make is to alter my work schedule to cut down daycare costs so I can be home when school gets out. This starts this week and I will be getting up before the sun comes up to start my commute to work every day and I will be home more with the kids and be around to take care of my home.I have gotten some great tips from online blogs and groups in addition to just common sense back to basics living for overcoming the rising costs of living. We will survive stronger, happier, and healthier than ever and I will share more of our money saving tips that include our garden, made from scratch recipes, sewing/crochet/knitting, and smart shopping methods. My free time has moved completely over to household productivity/management time but blogging won’t cease completely; posts will be less frequent, but they won’t be absent.

We had a busy weekend what with the Easter bunny visit and all. I did last minute shopping at the ever handy Wal-mart and discovered every other mother in town waited til after 10pm to grab their last minute items. Wal-mart was a madhouse! Favorite item the kids received in their baskets? Parachute eggs! They are a little bit bigger than normal and have a parachute that is a bit bigger than a dinner plate attached to them. Inside is a gummy paratrooper. One ended up stuck in a tree but over all good times were had.

My oldest daughter organized a family talent show and movie night Saturday. She served Triscuit cracker pizzas and cola floats but my youngest son provided pretty much all the talent. She worked really hard on the family event and put up decorations, fliers, and had the three year old taking tickets.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on getting NixNews.com ready for release and tweaking out a new theme for linuxchic.net. I know I probably re-theme linuxchic.net more than I should, but while the orange madness seemed like a good idea a few months ago, it was starting to seriously burn my eyeballs. Hopefully you will find the new theme more attractive and easier to navigate. If you feel the urge, stop by NixNews.com and check it out. Feel free to let me know of any bugs, suggestions, or just random opinions you may have of it.

Image from Amigurumi Kingdom on Flickr

Where have I been this week? Not much on Twitter, no podcast last week, and hardly any posts. My deepest apologies. I had some minor surgery Monday which resulted in 13 stitches (six on the inside, 7 on the outside) on the side of my face almost right up against my ear. While I thought it wouldn’t be too bad, the pain went on for days. You don’t realize how much that skin gets tugged and pulled until you are all sewn up and try to eat, talk, laugh, cough, and sneeze. Holy moly! Tonight I am feeling much improved as compared to the beginning of the week and am starting to feel almost normal. Tomorrow the stitches come out and hopefully I will be able to put on my headphones and get a podcast out as well as a bunch of new posts.

As for my frantic schedule I found this awesome spreadsheet to keep my blog posting focused and on schedule and have started tweaking it out for my own sites and get everything on track.

To sum it all up, I have had little energy or enthusiasm to do much of anything. Lack of sleep contributed too because every time I rolled over in my sleep I would end up on my stitches which would promptly wake me back up.

I did get some other things done though. I finished a crochet baby blanket for some friends of mine who’s little one arrived about a month sooner than planned. She is a little doll baby and healthy. =) Crochet and sewing has always been a good outlet for me when I am stressed or not feeling well as it takes my mind off everything except what I am working on.

The kids are planning a garden and a worm farm and the nice weather this weekend really made them want to get started. Unfortunately the 70s we had today have now plunged to 46 degrees (F) with some rain and the threat of floods and a winter weather advisory. Snow is expected tomorrow - boo!!

We also checked out the new Bass Pro Shop this weekend. That place was amazing! They have a big climbing wall that kids were scrambling up, a restaurant, and outdoor gear I didn’t even know existed. They have a large tank of fish from the lakes and rivers of Missouri and a 100lb catfish! The kids loved it! We checked out fishing gear and boats and left full of spring fever. I can’t wait to get out to the lake and fish.

Well, enough for now, domestic duties are calling and winter is screaming at the door. I am going to go curl up under a blanket and relax a bit.

I need to make the best of the time I have. I don’t think I am using my time in the most efficient manner possible.

I am running three major blogs and one of them has a podcast. That in itself isn’t too bad as two are on technology and one isn’t really, but still, the amount of information I have to keep up with to write posts and produce worthwhile content is quite large.

I keep up with tech because I am a geek and I enjoy tech. The Alternageek podcast topics vary widely so I can pick and chose from just about anything tech related. The downside is that it is so varied I have to keep up with A LOT of sources. I also have to try new hardware and software because we like to teach people how to do things. Preparing for the podcast is very time intensive.

Linuxchic.net is mostly linux related but I tend to include a helping of social networking stuff too. Some of the stuff from the podcast site overlaps with linuxchic.net but so does my audience and who wants to hear about that stuff twice. blog(a)gory is a blog to help people improve their blogging as well as link to blogging news. Unfortunately that is the site that falls by the wayside more often than not and I have been doing good to get a post out once every two weeks due to a lack of time to keep up with tips on writing. Producing content for blog(a)gory is the hardest one of all but writing is my hobby so I would love to dedicate more time to it.

On top of all that I have thousands of emails a week, thousands of feed posts in Google Reader every day, I have to keep up with comments, Twitter, and they sysadmining of the websites. I would like to think the sites admin themselves but I still have to keep the server patched, make sure backups are running, make sure links work, make sure logs are rotating, make sure the stats systems that read the logs are working, make sure the servers stay secure, and then I have the marketing and promotion pieces of the sites.  They cost money just to keep running and even though I have been running linuxchic.net as a blog for almost 2 years and alternageek.com for 9 months, they still don’t even pay for the hosting, much less the work.

Oh, and don’t forget I have a fulltime job as a sysadmin where I support over 200 servers and those servers come before any of that other stuff. My most important job of all is the 4 kids I brought into this world and I sure can’t let them down. I wear a lot of hats and if I could afford to outsource some of the stuff and hire a marketing and finance dude/gal or a personal assistant I would definitely do it.

Sometimes, it can be a little overwhelming, but not too often. My biggest complaint is that I don’t have time to dedicate to producing more worthwhile content. I need to better manage the prep and research time so that I spend less time catching up and more time writing and podcasting.  I could narrow down the feeds but then I am reducing the number of sources where I get my information and in doing so may not get to see every aspect of a story or news item and if I can’t report to my audience the most well rounded view possible then I am cheating them.

If you have any tips on managing content, resources, and time I would love to hear them. Likewise, if I find a better solution to my manic multitasking I will share that with you as well.

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