$30 In Kroger Grocery Savings!

##### KROGER GIFT CARD WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT #####

After taking out comments with no email address and duplicate entries, the random number generator has selected DEANNA as the winner of this Kroger Gift Card!

Congratulations to DEANNA and to all who stopped by to leave a comment, with a special note of thanks to My BlogSpark for offering this to my readers!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~Original Giveaway Post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I participate with a group called "My BlogSpark" that will occasionally offer me items to give away to readers here or to pass along savings coupons, etc.

Well, I have a great one for you guys this week -

How would you like to win a $30 Kroger Gift Card? I received one this week and will be sharing with you later how far I managed to make my $30 gift card go at my local Kroger store. General Mills and PepsiCo are sponsoring the giveaway of these gift cards to readers across the country.

From August 16th to September 2nd, Kroger is having a Mega Savings Event. You can visit http://www.thekrogerco.com to see the stores that are participating in this event.

Here's how the event works:

When you buy 10 participating brands and use your shopper card at checkout, you instantly save $5.00. And there is no limit on the number of rewards per transaction. You can look for the double yellow tags in the store.

So that's effectively an instant $0.50 saving on each of the ten things you purchase. Here are some of the brands offering the savings: Aquafina, Betty Crocker, Cascadian Farms, Cheerios, Cheetos, Chex Mix, Dole Juices and Juice Drinks, Fritos, Fiber One, Gatorade, Green Giant, Hamburger Helper, Lipton Tea, Nature Valley, Pepsi, Pillsbury, Progresso, Quaker, Sobe, Totino's, Tropicana, Yoplait and many more.

Here's what you need to do to win a $30 Kroger Gift Card:

1. Leave a comment here and tell me how you try to stretch your grocery dollar these days. Do you buy in bulk? Do you shop daily? weekly? monthly? Do you batch cook and freeze? What works for your family, especially now that school is getting underway?

2. Make sure I have a valid email address so I can notify you if you win.

3. Winners will be announced Friday evening , August 21st (after I get children to bed!) so we can get your card out to you in time for you to use it during this Mega Sales Event.

That's it - tell your friends!

Getting Fall Ready

Things have been busy the past few weeks at our humble abode. Canning has been a major activity and there's still quite a bit more to do.

We've gotten all of our homeschool plans made; books and supplies have been purchased and are being organized for our start of school at the end of this month.

Hubby got a last minute call last week from the Army Reserves and he headed out on Friday to spend the next 50 days at Ft. Jackson, SC - they had a shortage of instructors and gave him a call to come help out.

I've been working some on my newly acquired HAM Radio skills - with much success locally on our 2 meter mobile unit. I'm anxious to try my skills though on the HF bands - I have a radio that a friend is letting us borrow, but so far my antenna hasn't quite been up to par. I can hear very well on the 40M band, but apparently no one can hear me. So, that's on my list of things to get to sometime in the next several days.

Cows are doing well and babies are growing nicely. We've been very blessed this year with ample rain and some unusually cool temperatures this July, which has kept our pasture grasses going full-steam. A nice change from the droughts of the past 2 years.

Bees are also going full steam ahead - we managed an incredible feat of splitting our one main hive from last fall into 4 new hives this spring - now we have a total of 5 and they all seem to be doing well. Not much honey to extract this year due to the splits, but wow, if they all make it through the winter we should have tons of honey next year!

Well, that's a quick update on our goings on - how is your summer winding down?

Preparedness From a Woman's Perspective

Last Saturday American Prepper, WVSanta (WV), Matt (KY) and Bob (SC) were interviewed on James Stevens' Family Preparedness Guide radio show on Blog Talk Radio. They did a great job explaining the ins and outs of prepping and why we do it. It was a great show guys!!! If you missed the show, you can still download it here.

This Saturday (08 August 2009) James is having the ladies on his show to discuss the Prepper Networks and prepping from a female point of view! It is going to make for a very interesting discussion!

Please tune in at 2:00pm/EST and listen to Phelan (Fay-lynn) (Kansas Preppers Network), Ernie (Indiana Preppers Network), Kymber (Canadian Preppers Network) and me (Tennessee Preppers Network)! You can listen to the show live and call in with your questions (347-326-9604), or you can download the show later using this link.

Please be there to support us! And remember - we love questions so bring them along!!!

If you are interested in learning more about Family Preparedness, what preparedness means, what a prepper is, or all of those things, OR if you know someone that you would like to introduce to the topic of preparedness in general, this is the radio show for you, so please join us!

Hope to hear you on the radio!