My life has been riveting this weekend.

Dinner on Friday with My Gazelle’s Mom, who is a lovely woman.

Dog walking, co-op shopping, and book reading on Saturday.

Today, I ran 10 miles and got the bubble guts at mile 5. It was a long walk/jog home.

In the midst of all of this crazy 4th of July partying, I embarked on a new project.

The Oatmeal Project.

My Gazelle loves him some oatmeal. But, he doesn’t like my standard version of oatmeal: plain, maybe some banana and cinnamon thrown in; but bland by his standards.

He prefers the processed, apple-cinnamon variety. It’s expensive.  It’s horrible for him. I love him too much to feed him that crap.  To remedy this situation, I picked up some props at the wild and crazy pre-Fourth of July party I went to on Friday.

Translate: the co-op that I’ve been wanting to check out for the past few months.

Quick oats, because my man doesn’t cook.  He boils, but he doesn’t cook.

Dried apples.

Dried peaches.

I purchased all of these items in bulk, and the total cost was $4.38.  Have I ever mentioned that I love a good bargain?

Here’s the whole crew: Sugar in the Raw, quick oats, dried apples & peaches, and cinnamon.  I also bought the cinnamon sticks in bulk and spun them in my VitaMix.  I love that friggen thing.

I also bought some of these, because I needed to put the oatmeal “packets” into some sort of container type thing, and I didn’t have enough Pyrex dishes.  I haven’t been buying plastic bags for many months, but I felt better about these since they were safer for the environment.

I chopped up the dried fruit.

It just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t taste it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.

Sidebar: As long as I’m at it, I’m going to let you know that I wasn’t going to post this picture of me in all of my makeup-less glory, but then I remembered Angela’s post about embracing our unmakeup-ed selves, and I said,

“screw it…I’m the same girl, just without makeup.”

Back to the story…

I split the oatmeal up into each bag in 1 cup portions, and then threw in the chopped peaches, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1 tablespoon of sugar in the raw.  I figured that if he wanted it sweeter, he could throw in some honey or agave.

I ended up with 10 bags of oatmeal–5 peach, and 5 apple.

This morning, the man tried the first one.  He approved.  He actually said that it was too much oatmeal, so I could’ve split it up into 12-15 bags.  For $4.38?  Seriously?

Bargain!

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