Summer Afternoons: Savings and Sweets

"Summer afternoon...
the two most beautiful words in the English language."
- Henry James

I love that quote. There is just something about summer afternoons, especially when they fall on Saturday and Sunday.

My weekend was pretty uneventful, but sometimes that makes for the best weekends. Yesterday Allison and I had the privilege of serving at The Well in Spring Hill. It's a wonderful ministry / food pantry in our community. It was a humbling experience, but everyone that came by was so wonderful. The hours flew by as we helped the sweet families load their grocery carts. I'm looking forward to going back and bringing Todd with me.

The rest of the weekend, like I said, was quite uneventful. I took long naps, long walks and tackled the mountain of laundry that was piled in our bedroom. Last week was so busy that our dirty clothes never even made it to the laundry room. I was so happy that we had nothing planned this weekend.

Todd and I did do a little experimenting with our own grocery shopping. Lately I've noticed more blogs and articles on how much money people are saving by being aggressive with coupons. We were curious to see if we could do the same and if coupon clipping was worth the time and effort. I will say this, it was pretty nice getting free olive oil, mouthwash and coffee creamer. We probably ended up saving about $20-$30 after it was all said and done. On the other hand, we had to go to three different stores (Target, Publix and Kroger) and I'll admit, the whole thing was a little exhausting. Maybe it's because I'm a rookie or maybe it's that I'm impatient, but it's not as easy as it looks. I'll give it another time or two to see how I really feel about it. :)

I typically try to bake or cook something on the weekends, but I was just a little too lazy this weekend. Instead of baking, we used the money we saved from our coupons to make a sweet summer treat. All you need is angel food cake, strawberries and whipped topping.

Doesn't that look good? I think I'll go make myself another bowl...