Friday's Fave Five #413

Welcome everyone.  Friday is our time to look for the blessings which touched our lives in the past week and share 5 of them.  Sometimes it's super easy to see them and sometimes we need to reach deep within as they are not quite so obvious for varied reasons.  But that is when establishing this discipline comes into play.  Please join us.

1.  Free Books!   We had taken a bunch stuff to Thrift Village that we were no longer using and in exchange they gave us coupons for 3 free books.  Now that's a reward if I do say so myself.  The only thing was I could only use 1 coupon per day.  Good thing they are only about 6 blocks away.  But mostly, do you know how hard that was?!  It was torture.  When looking the first day I found all 3 that I wanted.  Now I had a dilemma.  Which one to take for sure and which 2 to risk not being there the next couple of days.  I ended up with 2 Kate Morton books (The Secret Keeper and The Distant Hours) and also The Other Story by Tatiana De Rosnay.  All hard cover and all in excellent condition.  Score!!  I hope they are good.

2.  Unexpected treat of a lunch out.  Since Christmas day we have had a ton of snow since Christmas Eve.  Hubby has been driving to my mom's, sometimes several times a week to shovel for her as the guy she usually has do it hurt his back.  In appreciation she took us all out for a Chinese food lunch after church.  It was a nice surprise.  The food was excellent and is a favorite of hubby's so he was pretty happy.

3.  Massage.  Very grateful for my massage therapist this week.  Last Friday while shoveling I felt muscle seize in my lower back.  Ouch!  A few back pills later and taking it really easy on the weekend and lots of stretches later, I couldn't wait to get to my appointment that I already had.  She really worked hard on it and it feels good as new now.

4.  New Recipe.  I noticed in the grocery store that they had butternut squash, cubed and frozen.  I've been wanting to try more squashes, so I nabbed a bag then got on Pinterest to look for  recipes.  Found this one, tweaked it a bit by adding a couple of cubed potatoes in the last 20 minutes and then adding a bit of cornstarch slurry to thicken it just a bit.  It was delicious.  Yum.  And using the bag of frozen squash was so easy.  Just threw it in in the last five minutes.

5.  Fresh squeezed orange juice.  Nothing compares.  Yum!  And especially goes down good when kids are bringing all sorts of coughs and colds to dayhome with them.

What have been your favorite blessings from the past week?