First week

My husband is on some weird diet, and I am trying to lose weight. I officially started on the 4th, while he started a bit earlier than that. I choose the 4th to make sure that a.) I got to enjoy the New Year's Eve party and then eat whatever I wanted afterward to recover from it, and b.) starting on the 4th I had a few days to myself, and these things are always easier for me without other people around trying to get me to eat things other than what I have picked out. When my husband is around, he offers me food from his diet, and since his diet isn't really about weight-loss, it isn't always a good idea.

Anyway, I'm going to say that the first week was a success. I've had no regular sodas or other regular sugary drinks. I've had no cookies. I don't think I've had any chocolate, or if I had it was one square of dark chocolate, but I think the last time I even did that was before the 4th. I've not gone to any restaurants or eaten any fast food. I try to write down everything that I eat or drink, and then I write how many calories I think I've consumed. I think most days I'm just right around 1200, which is what I wanted. And I think that I've had three servings of lowfat dairy everyday, with one of the servings always being a cup of no sugar added yogurt.

And I think that I've lost a few pounds, though I doubt that I've lost as many as it seemed this morning. I think that it's just hard to read regular bathroom scales (unless they are digital, which mine is not), and there might be some other factors at work, like maybe weighing first thing in the morning is not accurate, or maybe I was wearing too much clothing during the first weigh-in but not enough now. But I'm not trying to do anything silly, only two pounds or so a week, and maybe even a steady one pound per week would be okay for a bit. So I think that I've at least done that much, and I can be happy about that.

One thing that I did not get done this week was the whole eight glasses of water per day thing. I'll try to work that in later.

The other thing that did not get accomplished this week was a neat and tidy frig. I had imagined the thing being half-empty, with about thirty things in containers just waiting for me to eat, and a few other things waiting for me to cook, and then a gallon of skim milk and the diet drinks and the V-8 and a few bottles of things like mustard and ketchup. Well, even after the cleaning, there's still a lot of bottles of stuff, some of which we are using right now, and some of it we expect to be using soon, and just other things that we like that we don't want to throw out cause we'll need them eventually.

And that's just my side of the frig. I tried to divide the frig into stuff I'd mostly be using on one side and stuff that he'd mostly be using on the other. But now it's a total mess again, and we squeeze in things wherever they will fit.

And then there are all these vegetables, which I hope will get eaten, but some of them won't. We haven't actually thrown out that much yet (a couple of pears and some watercress and chives), but that's mostly because I ate a few of his things when he was away, and then when he got back I just started pulling out stuff and asking him what he intended to do with it, and then he'd cook something.

Of course, cooking something usually meant that we needed yet something else from the store, so as soon as I get rid of something it is usually replaced with something else. But that did keep most of the cauliflower from being wasted, and yesterday we ate the zucchini and the eggplant. Still, I think that today or tomorrow I'll be trying to rearrange the whole thing again.

I remembered it being much easier before. But of course, last time I had the place to myself for most of three months.

Trying to eat what is good for me

Someone I know is going to try going on a diet. He's ordered two weeks of frozen dinners, and if he eats nothing but these dinners and some snacks that are included, he'll lose weight. I wonder how long this is going to last.

About a week ago I had the place to myself and tried to do the dollar a day thing for a bit. I usually am able to do this and have both yogurt and a small cola every day. This time a few prices went up, and I had to skip the yogurt. Not that I've been eating the yogurt for a while now anyway.

But I must start eating right, and I would like to stop spending so much money, and I would like to lose weight. The one time I did lose weight (safely), I ate a lot of spaghetti with a lot of veggies. And I ate yogurt. And I ate popcorn and drank V-8.

I've been reading a blog by someone who is trying to eat on a dollar a day for a year. She's a vegetarian. Her plan is to buy a lot of basic stuff and then after she has the rice and flour and such she would spend a certain amount every week or two on fruits and vegetables. Since she's a vegetarian (and almost vegan), she doesn't have much else to buy that needs to be bought fresh and kept refrigerated. Sometimes she might add some tofu and soymilk. Everything else is kept in the pantry and possibly bought in bulk.

I am not a vegetarian. Last week I tried writing down what I thought that I should be eating (plus a few sort of splurges that I tend to eat when I am not feeling great). I didn't write down the cost of veggies, cause those prices tend to change with the seasons, so I'd never really know what that would cost until the week of purchase. Still, there is almost always something I like on sale, so I didn't think that should add too much.

I was disappointed that after I added everything up I didn't have much that could be kept in the pantry except for spaghetti, and that what I wrote down added up to more than sixty a month. That is with the new low price store that just opened. I'm surprised how much I take for granted that they didn't have. They have a great price on milk, but they don't have 1%, so if I buy the milk there I will have to mix skim and 2%. And they have a great price on eggs, but I didn't see anything like Eggbeaters. They had sodas, but no diet cola. No sugar free pudding mix. Other things were good deals, but not really great deals. My plan for one-stop shopping isn't going to work here.

Okay, so with the what I think I'm supposed to eat plan (which is not vegetarian but has one vegetarian meal everyday), I'm spending sixty dollars a month plus veggies (the thing that I'm supposed to eat the most of), and I forgot to add popcorn and V-8 (another thing that they don't seem to have at the new store), and this is before I go to the added expense of buying any special diet stuff or substituting stuff like Eggbeaters for eggs.

I think that I'm going to try this on Monday, for about a week (except that I'm going to see about getting free breakfast at Subway on Tuesday). We've already had junk food this week, and I don't think that we need more. But we'll see how it goes.

Sorry I have not posted

I have started a couple of posts, but then not finished them.

I have had the place to myself for a few days. I debated on going, but then decided that I could get a certain thing done better by myself, even if I did not get anything else accomplished.

You wouldn't think this would be something I would want to do by myself, but there just doesn't seem to be room for me and the junk and other people, so other people are out.

I told him that there would be a surprise for him when he got back. I didn't tell him I would be moving furniture, but that did kind of commit me to do something impressive while he was away.

It would have been better to clear away some space in the backroom first, and I did sort of try that for a bit, but I gave up on that about halfway through. Friday I needed to deal with the bedroom, thinking that I would get halfway and need the halfway point to be Friday night when I went to sleep. But I got to that point earlier than I thought, and managed to get the furniture moved Friday night.

Of course then most of Saturday was spent in bed watching TV. But I have moved furniture from one wall to the opposite wall, and also removed everything from another bookcase so that I could clean behind it and spray for bugs. And I threw away a lot of stuff. Now all I have to do is move three more pieces of furniture, clean under the other side of the bed, and throw away more stuff.

Okay, not even done with one room. But this is a big deal, that I was able to move the furniture by myself (should have just done the one piece and left the other, as the other piece had to be lifted instead of just dragged to the new spot, but I managed), and that half the room is the way it is supposed to be, and the other half should be easier (no furniture needs to be lifted, and most of the actual trash is gone).

I am about out of certain cleaning supplies, so I can tell myself I took a break because of that and get right back on it Monday.

So my husband came home to his surprise and said that is just how he would have moved things, if he weren't so lazy.

Anyway, after all the complaining about not having enough work, this week stuff has been added from another division so that he has six things scheduled. He is starting to whine a bit about stuff that might happen at the other division, but I am thinking that a total switch might be best. It might have most of the advantages of having a new job, without the stuff like losing our health insurance.

Today we will probably go out (though I'm not sure where), and then after lunch we will go to my brother's and watch Riverworld. While they are hoping that it is better than the last one, I had never read the book and thought the last one was okay. Anyway, it is a two-parter, which usually means that they have put more work into it than the usual SyFy movies. We will see.

Well, I did manage to do one thing yesterday. I made yogurt, which if I did it right should be ready to use just about when I finish writing this. I didn't do any special measuring or take temperature readings or anything. No fuss. I just decided to accept that everything done last time was correct and try doing it without the thermometer. If I'm going to do this on a regular basis, that is the way it will have to be. If I have to spend all day checking on it then it becomes a serious chore and I'll make excuses for not doing it. This way I'll have no excuse.

Also, after today, I plan to eat what I am supposed to for the rest of the week and compare that to the dollar a day thing. So we'll see how that goes.

Now back to the usual stuff, like whining about cleaning and such.

The first day of asparagus

There was asparagus in the back yard today. Not just tons of it, but I cut six stalks of it. I have enough that I will either eat it with pasta tomorrow for lunch, or maybe I'll eat it later today.

I mostly write this as a note to myself, so I'll know what day it was, so I'll know what day to expect it next year.

I didn't like asparagus until rather late in life. I must have been nearly thirty. I only like it if I cook it. Everyone else overcooks it or makes stuff with canned or frozen. I don't like any of that. Anyway, I decided to plant lots of asparagus where I used to live. And then when it was growing enough to eat it, I had to move away.

Maybe now I'll have to move away from here too.

I think it would be nice if there were all different kinds of asparagus, different flavors, different growing times, different colors. It would be nice if there were chili pepper flavored stalks that just grew out of the ground without having to plant it every year. Or tomato flavor. Or squash flavor.

I like my garden, but I don't like the work. Asparagus is a lot of work, but once it is done, it's done, and you can just enjoy it for ten years or more. Except for fruit trees and rhubarb, I can't think of much else that works that way.

The cabbage soup diet

I am writing this just after lunch on Tuesday. Before that, I had not eaten any meat since lunch on Saturday.

I guess that everyone has seen the magazine headlines for odd diets that promise to shed so many pounds or so many inches. Some of them sound good, some of them sound awful, and I guess that I just don't believe what most of them say anyway. The cabbage soup diet is supposed to help you lose up to ten pounds if you do it for a week.

The diets all say "up to" some amount. Losing zero pounds would be included in the "up to" ten pounds, right? So that would probably be what I would get for my efforts. Zero weight loss. Or maybe like two pounds of weight loss that I would put back on the next week.

And cabbage soup just sounded awful anyway.

A while back, my husband made some cabbage soup. Not a diet cabbage soup, just a soup that happened to have cabbage in it. It was pretty good. I thought maybe I had misjudged cabbage.

I was thinking that I should start eating better. Well, I am always thinking that, and never doing it. My husband was going out of town for a few days. It is easier to eat better when he isn't here. And, if I were ever going to try one of these stupid sounding diets, that would probably be easier to do when he isn't here.

So, I had pretty much decided to do this silly cabbage diet for a week, just to see what would happen. Ten pounds of weight loss sounded unreasonable. Maybe would it be five pounds. Five pounds would be worth the effort, right?

And then my husband's trip out of town got cancelled, but I decided to do some of it anyway. Maybe starting Sunday. Saturday we had lunch at Whataburger, and I had a fish sandwich. Fish isn't bad for you, but the ton of mostly mayonnaise sauce probably isn't too good for you.

Saturday night I went out with friends, and somehow we ended up at a Greek place instead of the restaurant we had agreed on earlier. It was more expensive than places I normally go to. I spent thirteen dollars on a vegetarian plate. It wasn't quite the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was the cheapest thing that I didn't have to pay extra for a side of hummus, and I like hummus. I had some fun talking to my friends, and I took half of the food home with me. It was good, just maybe not thirteen dollars plus tax and tip good.

Okay, now it is Sunday, and I'm supposed to start this diet, and I make some soup. Only then I remember that I have these leftovers from the Greek restaurant, and I have to eat them for lunch or the food will go to waste. And I'm not going to waste food that cost me thirteen dollars plus tax and tip. Besides, I like hummus. So the diet could not officially start on Sunday, so I also ate a couple of cookies and some nuts, but mostly I ate leftovers and a bowl of soup.

Okay, so then it was Monday, and I'm officially going to try this diet, sort of. I made this soup. I'm surprised that there's all this other stuff in the soup and only half a head of cabbage. I am missing a few things that were supposed to be in the soup, like a bell pepper and mushrooms and I didn't quite have enough tomatoes. And I didn't have Lipton's onion soup mix, so I substituted a ramen noodle seasoning packet. Close enough, right? The idea is to eat a soup that has no meat or added fat and just has a lot of veggies. I did that.

Well, even with only half a head of cabbage and all of this other stuff in the soup, the soup mainly tastes like cabbage. And it is nothing like the soup my husband made. For one thing, my husband's soup had potatoes and lots of this fancy bacon stuff. This soup doesn't have either of those. And when my husband made the soup, he didn't add the cabbage until right before serving. So I should have made the rest of the soup and then just added the cabbage right before reheating, but I forgot, so the first bowl of soup had nice fresh crisp cabbage, and all of the rest had regular mushy cabbage that I don't care for.

On the cabbage soup diet, you make this soup, and you eat as much soup as you want, and then you eat this other stuff, depending on what day it is. So on the first day, you eat soup and you drink water, and you eat all the fruit you want except you can't have any bananas. Okay, so on Monday I ate some of the soup and some pineapple and an apple. By Monday night I really hate the soup, even though I've only had about three bowls of it.

I am thinking that the point of the cabbage soup diet isn't really about however much you might lose that week, but how much you would appreciate other foods after you get done eating this awful soup. You would be just so happy to eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli and fat-free salads and anything else you're supposed to eat as long as it isn't this cabbage soup.

I think that I am there already. I don't need to torture myself for the rest of the week. Boring skinless chicken breasts and broccoli sound really good.

Still, I spent money on this stupid idea, and I'm not going to waste the food. I'm going to eat the rest of this soup. I didn't make that much of it, and what I did make I have eaten half of it. I will eat the rest and try to make something better tasting with the rest of the veggies. I will try to eat the rest of the cabbage too, maybe if I remember not to overcook it.

The second day of the diet you are supposed to drink plenty of water, eat as much soup as you want, and eat as much veggies as you want but not have any fruit. And as far as veggies go you are supposed to stay away from beans and peas and corn. Avocados aren't mentioned, but I'm assuming that you stay away from them during the whole diet.

I remember that a friend mentioned getting a free sandwich from Jack-In-The-Box on Thursday. Maybe I can do this diet thing until Thursday.

I look on the computer and find out that the free sandwich thing is today, Tuesday, not Thursday. Happy to have an excuse, I go to lunch with my husband and get a free sandwich after buying a giant soda. I wonder how many calories were in the sandwich? I think that I drank about two hundred calories of soda, and then I put the rest in a bottle and into the fridge for later. Drinking the whole soda was probably close to eight hundred calories. I don't need it. Not today.

Okay, diet experiment over. Bad idea. I will force myself to eat the last of the soup later today, and tomorrow I might think about eating only veggies tomorrow. But then after that I'm going to eat a nice sensible low fat chicken. And I've already bought the chicken, so there's no way that I'm not going to eat it.

What smells like beer?

Before I get too much into the boring details, let me say that I mostly had a good weekend.

And if you were planning to eat your spaghetti dinner while watching the latest episode of Being Human, alter your plans a little bit.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to make some cookies. I don't think that I have made any cookies from scratch since I have lived here, but I thought that it might be a good idea after I found this recipe online, and I remembered that I would have three things coming up that would require me to bring food.

So I took the new mixer out of the box and I went and spent five bucks on a new cookie sheet (cause it had been so long since I made any cookies I couldn't find the old ones) and I got together the ingredients that I already had and went out and bought what was missing. The new cookie recipe was not that great, but now that I had this new cookie sheet and all the ingredients for making cookies, I decided to try making an old recipe except to substitute whole wheat flour. That wasn't great either, so I went and bought some regular flour and tried again.

The cookies weren't bad, just not like I remembered. They are sort of tall and fluffy. I don't know what I did wrong. Also, I don't taste the baking soda. Chocolate chip cookies have baking soda, and I am quite sure that I put in the baking soda, but I can't taste it. Does baking soda get old or go flat or something?

Again, the cookies aren't bad, and in fact I am starting to like them, though I sort of doubt that anyone else will. I just can't figure out why they are different. Anyway, I took some of the whole wheat ones to the annual meeting, cause I had to take something, and most of them did not get eaten, which is okay cause that left more for me. I took the regular flour ones to the party, and again not many were eaten, so again I have leftover cookies for me, which I am not complaining about. But I think that I will give up on making the cookies for anyone other than me, and I will figure out something else to take to the last thing, and in fact there is no reason that I have to take anything to that at all if I don't want to. But I'm thinking that I will just purchase some candy instead.

All day Friday and Saturday, I had been very careful to read any emails from the group, in case it had something to do with the party that I would need to know about. Not that there was much, just people asking other people if they were going, and what are you bringing, and once in a while what are you wearing, etc.... And there was this new guy that hasn't been to a regular meeting yet, though he's already officially a member of a club, just that most of us hadn't met him yet and didn't know who he was. And he was asking about the party, and no one else answered him, and I didn't quite know what to tell him. But I thought that somebody had to say something. It wasn't an official club function, just that someone had invited pretty much everyone in the club. If he had joined a few weeks earlier, he would have officially been invited already. I didn't think that it would be a problem if he came, but I really couldn't invite someone I didn't know, and I thought that he should talk to the couple giving the party, though by that time it was too late. He already knew where the party was, so I told him the time and a little more info, hoping that someone else would chime in and say whether he was or was not officially invited, but again no one else said anything.

So after all this wondering what I should take to the party and what I should wear to the party, I have bought a black blouse and this sort of black thing that is not really a shawl and yet another black dress, and then I decided that it was too cold to wear any of that and just gave up and decided to wear what I wore last year. Except that I couldn't find what I wore last year. So I ended up wearing some really dark blue stuff and black boots and this black thing that used to be part of a Masonic costume.

I was getting ready to leave early, cause I hate driving in the dark, when I realized that I forgot to charge my phone. So I wait a little while to put some life into the phone, and then I head out, and as I am just nearly there I realize that with moving things from one bag to another and getting my keys sorted out and everything that I have somehow not transferred my wallet and do not have my driver's license or any money or a debit card or anything. Not that I expect to need any money or anything, but it would be very upsetting if something happened and I needed to show my driver's license. I didn't expect that would happen, and I was nearly there anyway, so I kept going, and nothing bad happened. But it was still very annoying.

So I got there at about the same time as a couple of friends, and we were all about twenty minutes later than we had intended, but we were still the first there from our group, and the parking lot was mostly empty. And I have been to this place several times before, but I am always surprised by the layout when I get there. There is this sign that says something like "Lake Ahead", and literally, the lake is right there after the sign. Not that the parking lot I'm looking for is ahead, but the lake is ahead. By the time I read this sign I have already missed where I meant to go, and I have to turn around and go back a little bit.

So we go in and see all empty tables, as everyone who is already there is in the back helping our hostess. So we are relieved that we are not late.

More people come in and bring food, and I am surprised how many of them are not wearing black. A few more of my friends show up, and some of us sit down and eat. And then this guy comes in by himself, and I think that's probably our new guy, and then I restrain myself from blurting out something like "Are you the new guy?" and he looks around a bit and goes to the back of the room. So maybe he isn't our new guy. But a bit after that someone brings him over and says something like these are some of the people in your group. And then there is a discussion between the four guys about steampunk stuff, and then the new guy and the other guy wander off to meet other people.

I get up to get some more food, and I'm wondering what smells like beer?

Probably beer.

I don't drink alcohol, but I do like several things that are made with alcohol, mainly beer bread and beer chili and beer cheese soup. But there was none of that, just beer.

So there was a lot of talking to people I don't really know and whose names I can't even remember. And I talked to the new guy some more. And I talked to M.

This is not M my friend the Klingon, this is the other one, and I see him once in a while, and I have finally decided that it isn't weird and running into him a couple times a year is not a problem. So that's what I thought, so I kept talking to him. I was wrong.

I had a few items of clothing that I decided I needed to part with, though I would rather give them to someone I knew would appreciate them and make costumes from them, so I brought them to the party. I gave a t-shirt to my host, who thought it was such a cool picture that it didn't bother him that it was started to tear. And I looked around the room for women who might fit into the dresses, and I asked a few if they were interested, and they said no. And then I noticed a certain person I did not want to have any of my things, so I did not make an announcement like I had planned. But then another friend arrived, and she said that she wanted the whole bag, so that worked out. I'm glad I thought of it instead of just dumping the stuff at Goodwill with the rest of the clothes I got rid of.

I talked to the new guy some more, and it is always nice when someone attractive is paying attention to you. He made suggestions, and though he said upfront that it would not be a date, I'm afraid that he didn't really mean that so I declined. It seems like the guys that I have known for a while who suggest something that is "not a date" really mean that and totally get that it is not a date and is not going to lead to anything resembling a date, but guys that I have just met are thinking that the "not a date" will either somehow become a date or at least end with me agreeing to a date later. So no more "not a date" type things with anybody I don't already know. I will be happy enough to talk to you when we just happen to be at the same place at the same time, which is probably going to happen a couple of times later in the month anyway.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, M has reached a whole other level of stupid. And it is hard to believe that anyone is really that stupid, so he must just enjoy making other people uncomfortable. I am thinking that if I have anymore trouble from him, I will start a new blog totally devoted to answering the question, is M really that stupid?

The party ended a bit after that, and I waited for certain people to get their things together so that I could walk out with them and not be around either M or the new guy, even though the new guy was being totally nice.

I managed to drive home without anybody finding out that I didn't have my license in my purse.

Sunday we ate at Taco Bell, after my husband saw a commercial for something he wanted but they hadn't had for a while. And then there was the Superbowl, which he watched, and I watched commercials in between Googling stuff.

Yesterday we went to various thrift stores, but I didn't buy much, and it got cold and rained and we came home earlier than we might have and watched Caprica and Being Human.

And then we got some bad news about this job he was applying for. He had read somewhere what the pay was, but then he couldn't find where he had read that, so he sent another email. And we can only hope that they misunderstood the question. Surely no one gets paid that little. We were only thinking about the job because he read that it was a lot of money, and we wanted some clarification on if that was the most you could make or if that was an average or what. And on top of that you had to provide your own transportation to the interview, which was out of the state and would require either plane tickets and cab fare, or would require driving a lot and get a couple of motel rooms. And then you had to provide some of your equipment and buy somewhat of a uniform, plus nicer clothing was sometimes required.

Anyway, that is the end of that. We would have serious problems with paying to get to the interview even if we thought it would mean a good paying job. There is no reason to even waste the time if it is really such a low paying job. It was about half or less of what we have read about similar jobs, and even those do not seem to pay enough. So that was disappointing, but at least that particular discussion is over.

A few things in no particular order

A friend sent me a link about a job, and I can't get it to work. I will try again later, but maybe it isn't worth the effort, as I missed four or five questions on what seemed to be an easy practice test. I'm getting old. I'm slipping.

We have finally figured out the whole unemployment thing. The thing about the unemployment is that you have to file all the time, even when you worked and don't need it, even when you didn't apply for a job and won't get it, even if you turned down work and won't get it, even when all this is going to do is waste time and make people at the unemployment office do more work that is totally unnecessary, and that way you are still in the system on the week that you don't work and need the money, and they send you your money in a reasonable amount of time and such.

So that is what we are doing. Unfortunately, now that we have figured all of that out, we are told that we only have ten thousand dollars left, and the way things are going that isn't going to last us very long.

My husband seems to be making an effort to be especially nice to me, if you can call it that after more than three years of him still not having done one thing that he was supposed to do for us to be roommates, much less actually be back together like nothing had happened. On my part I was having one of those moments when I think that I might as well try to enjoy myself with the way things are, as they will probably not change in the near future. He worked two days last week and two days the week before, and then he is not likely to work at all for the next two weeks, and then we don't know what is going to happen after that. So of course what we tend to do when he has all this time off is go to restaurants and go to movies and go shopping. Well, we are short on money, though not as short as we would be now that we have figured out the whole unemployment thing. We have not been going out to nice restaurants, just now and then going to Arby's and such, cause we have coupons. And we haven't done that much shopping, but we have bought a few things. While I feel some guilt over that, I can't really say that I feel bad about seeing a few movies, as we have a couple of inexpensive theaters. But there are still days when we stay home and do absolutely nothing, and it tends to get on my nerves spending all that time together doing nothing, sort of getting in each others way.

Not that the day I had to myself went any better. I had planned to spend it knitting, and something went wrong, and I don't know if I can fix it. And he was really trying to be nice to me after that, but there is just nothing to be done about it. I will just have to put the thing away for a while, and maybe after some time has past I will see a solution and not get so upset when I look at it. I instead spent the day watching videos, but I did not feel much better. The next day when he was trying to be nice to me, I did make an attempt to just forget about everything that is stressing me out and just enjoy the day, which I did, for a while. And then the next day I noticed something, and that made me think that something is going to go wrong, and that he knew about it and intended for something to wrong, or at least that he was okay with it. But even if nothing goes wrong, that is what I think of him now, that he is very selfish and this attempt at being nice is just to hide the fact that something else is going to go wrong and that he is responsible.

Christmas Eve dinner was finally rescheduled for yesterday. I ate a half dozen oysters and have no need to see anymore oysters for a while. They were really big oysters too. I'm not really complaining, the food was good, and it was good to see everyone and it was good for mom to have a break, as grandma did not get better like we thought from her most recent hospital stay.

Saturday was fun, though not what I had imagined. We did trivia as planned, but just regular trivia, not sci fi stuff like usual. So I did not win, even after having put together a really great team. And we were playing Family Feud, and the answers are based on what people think is the answer, even if that in fact is not the answer. So we were trying to "steal" points from the other team, and we just don't have any good ideas. The question involved things that turn from green to yellow, and all the good answers have been taken, and all I can think of is pears. My friend thinks maybe the answer is yellow squash, except that I and another friend have gardens, and we know that yellow squash starts out yellow, or maybe even white, and is never green to begin with. So we go with pear, cause no one else can think of anything, and the answer was squash. And then there was a question involving things associated with Texas, and the answers to this question obviously did not come from Texas, and no one was getting those right. And then there was a question about haunted houses, and I was thinking theatrical production, and I guess that the people taking the survey were thinking real house that no one lives in anymore. So we got all of that wrong too. But it was still fun, and I didn't need a silly plague anyway.

I have really had it with all the junk. This helps somewhat when we are shopping, as I have several times put things back, cause I'm thinking that I don't need it right away and I don't want it enough to find someplace to put it, and if something happened and I had to move away, would I want to pack this? Probably not. So I have stopped myself from buying a few things, but I still don't manage to get rid of much.

I know all the experts say that if you don't use something for a year (especially things that you have had in box that hasn't even been opened for a year), you should get rid of it. And I know that makes sense on some levels, but on other levels it just doesn't work for me. Like I have many craft things that I don't use for a year, but that doesn't mean that I should throw away tools or supplies that are still good (or even still new in the package). And seasonal things stay in boxes most of the year, should I throw them away cause I was too busy to put everything out this year? Throw out the stuff that I didn't put out cause it looks too old or I just don't like it anymore, sure, but just because I didn't use a particular decoration this year doesn't mean that I won't want them next year. And I haven't done any baking in forever, but I just have a feeling that in the future I will want to, maybe because of the financial situation, and then I either wouldn't be able to do anything or else I would have to go and buy all new stuff, which would be hard to do because of the financial situation.

And then like all people who have either been on a diet and gained it all back (or people who keep thinking that they will diet but don't), there are all these clothes to think about. And even if I haven't worn them in a year, it still doesn't seem to be a good idea to throw them out. If my weight changes by ten pounds either way, if I didn't keep the clothes, I would have to go out and buy clothes (clothes that might not even fit for very long), or else I would have to stay in the house all the time naked.

So I guess I would rather live with all the junk than live in fear that I'm going to be stuck in the house naked without bakeware and holiday decorations.

The other thing that I have a lot of that I don't really do much with anymore is books. For the last three or four years I have done little reading. My eyesight isn't what it was, and most of the time I just don't have the attention span necessary to enjoy reading a book. But reading has been such a big part of my life, and I keep thinking that someday I will feel better and want to read again. And it also seems silly to get rid of the one thing that is somewhat organized and I actually have a place for. I have many bookshelves, and the books that I've had for a long time have places on the bookshelves and I know where they are and I can find them when I want them. And then there are some additional books that I'm not quite sure where to put, cause they don't quite go with the books that are already on the shelves. And then there are really new books that I didn't put anywhere, cause I was reading them (or at least I meant to), and they are just here and there. So there is the dilemma about the books that on the one hand I shouldn't get rid of them because if I really put some effort into it that is the one thing that I could get organized and every book would have its place, and on the other hand books are the one thing that I could easily get rid of and there is a place to take them where I wouldn't feel that they had just been tossed out. I could even get some money for them, though not enough for that to be the deciding point. Still, I think today I will make another attempt to cull some of the cookbooks. There are two boxes of them that I meant to look through, and it may have even been a year since I last looked at them.

And while I am trying not to spend money and buy things that I will just have to put away somewhere, I am thinking of buying yet another black dress. I was invited to a party, and it is less than a month away, and since I just now learned of it I haven't been planning what to wear. Ideally, it would be something goth, and while I have plenty of black I don't think that just being black makes it look goth, and of course a lot of my things just don't fit at the moment. So I am looking through my things trying to find something that looks goth, or something that I can add to something to make it look goth. I don't think that my best black dress looks goth, but if I add enough stuff to it then maybe it does, except that I wore all of that to a party this time last year that was for the same people, and I'd rather not wear the same thing two years in a row. Though they do not have the same reason for the party as last year, they are thinking of just having a theme party as an annual event. So this may require a whole series of black dresses and gloves and hair ornaments and such.

I thought that there was more, but now I can't remember what.

We are expecting snow today

I wouldn't believe them, except that it snowed on Christmas Eve. Yesterday was a fine day, though we found out it was a bit cool to spend much time in the park after we did not bring our coats. But today it is supposed to start snowing at about lunch time. We must remember to go out and buy a few things first, like lottery tickets.

My husband has bought about five or ten pounds of this gourmet Italian bacon stuff. While I would have no problem eating about five or ten pounds of regular bacon, given enough time, I think that I'm already getting a bit tired of this stuff. It is really good for some stuff, but it isn't what I am used to, so I guess that I would rather not have it for breakfast. Anyway, we will go to the grocery store and buy a few things so we can eat this fancy bacon the way it is supposed to be prepared.

I did not find the matching yarn yesterday, so I will put the current scarf aside and start on a completely new one. I have three skeins of soft white yarn, and if I run out I will keep the label so that I can buy more matching yarn. After all of this practice, I should end up with a really nice scarf, though at this rate the pilot will get his Christmas present for Valentine's Day, which would totally be the wrong message.

Speaking of Valentine's Day, that is when the club usually has a fundraising auction, so it is about time that I start looking around to decide if I am going to put anything into it.

I had better get dressed now if I plan to go anywhere before the storm.

Sorry, I've been busy, sort of

It has been pointed out to me that I haven't blogged in a while, and if I don't blog and I don't write long emails to individual people, how are my few remaining readers supposed to know if I'm okay?

So, I'm okay. Or, at least, I'm as close to what now passes for okay as I tend to be.

My husband had steady work for a bit, but this week he doesn't work until Friday. And he will soon be laid off for about a month if things go as last year. So that isn't good. We are trying to do pleasant things with his almost week off. We had one last nice dinner out at Campo Verde, where I tried to figure out how I might copy something. And anyway, you have to go to the place at least once during November or December, when they put up extra Christmas stuff in addition to the thousands of Christmas lights that they have up all year.

Until further notice, we have to stop going out, and he doesn't do much cooking himself, and he needs more calories than soup and such that I like to make. The one thing that he does like to do is make pizza, so we spent seventy dollars on groceries, some of that being a turkey, and some of that being cheese and stuff for pizza.

Some of that was also potato chips and such that he probably doesn't need, but I never can really convince him that potato chips are not a necessity. On my part, the variety pack of Tang wasn't a necessity either. But most of the other stuff wasn't an unreasonable splurge, and we did get some things that we really like and maybe that will keep us from missing restaurants too much. And we did remember to get stuff like soap too. Except for veggies and milk and eggs, we shouldn't have to buy much for a while.

For the person I confused by saying that I would be spending Thanksgiving with G, I meant Uncle G, so I hope that clears that up. Uncle G's second wife is an angel, though I still can't quite wrap my head around the idea that Uncle G actually got a divorce. We just don't do that, except in the most extreme circumstances, and I just can't picture that of Aunt S. Not that I was best buddies with Aunt S, but it still seems strange that she was Aunt S for all of those decades, and then a few years ago they signed some papers, and then Aunt S was just S, and then a year or so later I got a new aunt. Weird.

So I expect Thanksgiving to be nice, as we have in the past spent Christmas with Uncle G and the new aunt, and she is very friendly in addition to being a good cook. Since Dad died Thanksgiving has not been too great, and half of the time my sister is with her in-laws and it just isn't that great at all. So this year it is actually something to look forward to. And it is next week, I think.

And then comes Christmas, and despite all of my plans last year, I am not ready. In fact, I do not even remember what all of those plans were. I knew that I probably would not have money for Christmas presents (though I had no idea it would be this bad), and I knew that if I wanted to do gift exchanges with as many people as last year that I would have to plan ahead and mostly give things that I had made for them, and that I wouldn't have the time unless I made them well in advance.

So I went out and bought all these supplies. And I remember buying the supplies, and I even remember where I stored most of them. But I just don't remember what I planned to do with them.

So of course I did not make any of the Christmas presents ahead of time. I am currently working on a scarf which I had planned to give to Miss Allergies, but I have only just a couple of days ago taken it off of the machine, and there is still a lot of work to be done by hand, in addition to the normal four hours it takes to finish up a scarf. And, I have made some mistakes and I must find some way of covering that up as I have no way of actually fixing it. I also had something planned for the pilot, but I am waiting on some supplies to come in the mail. There is something that I usually get for another friend, whether or not she decides to get me anything, except that I usually get it in the summer when it is on sale and put it away, but I didn't have the money to do that this year. So I don't really have anything for her, and she has pretty much announced that she plans to give most of us baked goods.

Now, if you remember watching The Big Bang Theory last Christmas (click here to see Sheldon's Greatest Christmas minisode on YouTube), you might recall Sheldon's description of traditional Saturnalia gift giving. "The essence of the custom is that I now have purchase for you a gift of commensurate value and representing the same level of perceived friendship as that represented by the gift you have given me."

So I am not sure what would be of commensurate value to baked goods. I would think that the thing I usually get her would work, if I had the money to go and buy it, which at this point I probably don't. Giving her baked goods in return doesn't seem like a good idea, as her house would already have plenty of baked goods (the broken cookies and other leftovers of stuff she makes for other people), and I'm not that good of a cook anyway. Anyway, I have been warned not to give her a scarf or anything that I might make for the others, as she likes to keep her house clutter free, which she does by throwing things out on a regular basis. Ideally she likes more practical stuff like soap, which she can use and enjoy and then it is gone. So I might make her some soap. Or, if they turn out good, I might make her some sweet potato chips. But then I would like to give her more than the one thing, just in case she really dislikes sweet potato chips.

At this point I don't think the sweet potato chips are going to work anyway. The regular potato chips were a disaster, and I have given up on them. Next I will try tortilla chips.

As for the rest of my Christmas gift list, I still have no clue about J. For R I was thinking about a scarf similar to the one I am making for Miss Allergies, except that it is taking too long, and R wants to limit the gift giving to about ten dollars. So the idea of giving her that particular scarf is out. I have something small for the last person in that group, and he will either be giving cards or "stocking stuffers", and while my gift for him won't fit in anyone's stocking, I did spend less than five dollars so I think it will work with the general idea.

And then there is my family, and I don't have a clue what to get for any of them, and we haven't yet discussed plans. I don't have the money for what I usually get my mom and my sister. I really don't have much money for anything. And I don't think any of them want a scarf. If they want scarves, I hope someone will tell me, but other than that I hope that they decide to go with something small, or maybe an exchange of baked goods.

Maybe I can get someone a fruit basket.

What else have I been doing?

Tuesday last week we heard that you could get a free Whataburger buy dressing from head to toe in orange. I wasn't sure about the head to toe part, but I have plenty of orange Halloween shirts. So I wore one with a mostly orange skirt and an orange headband. My husband wore one of the shirts and an orange hat. We hoped that would be enough. When we got there the place was crowded, as it turns out they were giving out the free burgers to almost anyone wearing any orange, and there were plenty of people with just orange shirts. We spent another five dollars on drinks and such with our free burgers, and it was a bit of fun.

Today or tomorrow I have to go to Irving, so we will probably see 9 at the dollar theater. Then I will be out of money again.

Free cereal and missing time

I used to do the whole coupon thing, where you cut out a bunch of coupons and wait for things to go on sale, and then you get some stuff for free or almost free. At the checkout you pay twenty bucks for stuff that originally would have cost a hundred dollars, so you saved eighty dollars. Not really, cause I would never pay a hundred dollars for that stuff, but I liked the way it sounds.

At some point I decided to quit doing that and try to eat better. The saving money thing and the eating better thing don't always work together. Like, if you are at the pizza buffet, once you've already paid to get in, you might as well get your money's worth and eat lots of pizza, but eating a lot of pizza isn't good for you. Or, you might be trying to eat lean stuff like turkey, but eating hamburgers is cheaper. Or, you might get a good deal on after-holiday candy, but it would be better for you to eat fruit instead.

So I got out of the habit of clipping coupons, so that the coupons wouldn't influence my decision making at the grocery store. And it worked for a time, and I lost about twenty pounds. I have put them back on now, but I didn't get back into the coupon thing. I still use them once in a while, but I don't spend a lot of time doing it, and I'm not as organized anymore.

Once I found a display of Christmas Crunch. That's like Captain Crunch, except that it is green and red. It was about a week after Christmas, and they had a big end cap display of the stuff, and it was on clearance for $0.99. I had a dollar off coupon and another coupon for $0.75. So I got one box for free, and the other one for $0.25. I bought some other stuff and took my stuff to the car. The Christmas Crunch said it had a surprise inside, so I opened the box right there in the car to see what it was. Inside the box, but not inside the bag, was some gum and some candy and a dollar off coupon.

Great. So I got the dollar coupon out of the other box, and I went back inside the store and got two more free boxes of cereal. And then I took those to the car, opened those boxes, took out the coupons, and went back inside the store for two more free boxes of cereal.

After several trips back inside the store, I had collected one box of cereal that for $0.25 and fifteen boxes that were free. And then I was told that I couldn't have anymore cereal, and if that was all that I wanted could I please just leave the store.

So that was odd, cause it was a week after Christmas, and the stuff was on clearance. Clearance. That's means that they are trying to get rid of the stuff. So I don't know what the problem was, but I left anyway.

I do the remember back when then once in a while and buy kids cereal, but mainly I just eat it when we're at a motel. Until a while back when there was the Kellogg's Star Trek promotion, and I bought a lot of their cereal, and most of it was stuff like Corn Pops.

We ran out of Corn Pops. We're not quite out of cereal, but most of the sugary stuff is gone.

I saw in one of my grocery adds that Captain Crunch and some other cereal was on sale for five boxes for eight dollars. And, there was a three dollar off coupon if you bought five boxes of cereal, making the cereal a dollar each. Cool. I'll go get some.

I wasn't going to buy all kid cereal. There was some stuff that's better for you that I like, and it was on sale too. But I did have to have at least a couple of boxes of Captain Crunch.

Also, I had these rain checks for cheap chicken. A ten pound bag of leg quarters was $3.90, so I got two of them. And then I got eggs, which unfortunately were not on sale, but we still needed some eggs anyway, and they were like a dollar fifty. And then I got five boxes of cereal, some of which is good for you, but two boxes were kid cereal. And I was going to buy this stuff, get forty dollars cash back, and immediately go back home and do some work. I must have gone to the store at about ten in the morning. It took longer than I though because they are doing work in the store, and some of the stuff is moved around at took longer to find than usual. But still, I don't think I was there that long.

At the checkout I'm talking to the cashier and having a pleasant enough time, and the cashier mentions that some of the cereal rang up at forty cents. And then the coupon still worked. So this stuff that I thought I had spent fifteen something on only cost ten something. I was pretty happy about that.

I got so distracted that I forgot to get my forty dollars, and I had been charged for it on the receipt. I was still in the parking lot. I went back in to get my forty dollars. The cashier looked at my receipt and gave me my forty dollars. I thought it was going to be a big hassle and we would have to call a manager and have him count the register and all that, but no, she just apologized and gave me my money.

Since I was still there, I thought I might as well get some more of that cereal, and I had another coupon. So I got one box of the Captain Crunch and four boxes of the other stuff, and it came to $3.20, and then with the coupon I only had to pay twenty cents.

Now I am debating on how greedy I should be, and if I should go back and try to get more cereal. I have a feeling that not all of the cereal will be marked down like that, probably just boxes with a certain date, and they might not have anymore anyway. Still, with the money problems we are having, I think I might as well try. If they have more I could get ten more boxes of cereal for forty cents.

Anyway, I went home and had to deal with twenty pounds of chicken. I hadn't planned on doing it right away, but the chicken is usually frozen and needs a few days to thaw out. This stuff wasn't frozen, and I knew if I didn't deal with right then I would forget and the stuff would spoil. So I cut up the whole thing and separated the legs from the thighs and then cooked half of the chicken and picked the meat off of the bones, and put the other half of the chicken in plastic bags.
And then it was four o'clock.

How is it four o'clock? All I had done since nine that morning was watch Fringe and Bones and maybe one episode of Stargate, go to the grocery store, and deal with this chicken.

Does it really take all day to do that? Especially since most of that TV watching was done while I was waiting for the chicken to cook or to cool down so I could put it away.

So while I had a good day and got a lot done and saved money and all of that, I didn't get anything done that I had originally planned to do. I washed a few dishes (which I then had to wash again after dealing with the chicken), and sorted through maybe two boxes of books, and that was all. I didn't run any other errands or anything. After four I talked to a friend for a bit, but after that it was time to fix dinner, and then the day was pretty much over. I watched Smallville and Glee, and then fell asleep while attempting to watch some British thing.

Anyway, that means that I will have to get a few more things done today before I go hang out with my friends. I should go to the bookstore and go somewhere to get a phone card. And before I do any of that I'll have to do some laundry.

Not that any of that is a problem, just in my mind I pictured doing most of that yesterday, and I can't quite figure out why I didn't have time to do it. Just one minute it was time for lunch, and then I was doing some more work, and then it was four o'clock.

Now that I think about it, I didn't even have a bath.

That's okay. I'll have a bath now.

Maybe I will make more videos

Today I am cleaning the dining room area, somewhat, as later today or tomorrow I will attempt to film another video. At least, I will if I find that dress I was going to wear, or if I find something else to wear. Anyway, I am partially redecorating the area with Halloween stuff, though I'm just moving stuff from the other room. I still haven't unpacked the other Halloween stuff from the boxes.

And then there's another video that I might work on. In fact there are several that I might work on, but not today. I believe that the contest is limited to five videos. The problem is narrowing it down to five, and which five, and once I've decided to film something should I spend the money to really film my idea.

For instance, David has this idea of feeding a hundred people with $20.09, but he hasn't quite figured out how to do it. I'm pretty sure I could make a hundred meals with that amount of money, though they would be very something very small and basic like soup. But it would be a very boring video if I'm just standing there saying that I know how to do it, without filming any cooking or anyone eating. But I don't really want to make a hundred meals next week. Maybe I could make ten meals for two dollars, and if you wanted to make ten times that amount it would add up to a hundred meals for $20.09.

But then, that is David's idea, and everyone knows that it is David's idea. I'm not sure that I should take his idea, even if he doesn't know how to make it work and I probably do.

In fact, I didn't even want to do the coupon thing cause David was already doing food. I used to do the coupon thing, but I mostly stopped doing it several years ago when I was trying to lose weight.

I know, now that you have seen my video, you don't believe that I was trying to lose weight very hard. Still, I was at some point, and I decided to stop eating so much packaged foods and start eating more fresh vegetables, and there aren't that many coupons for fresh vegetables, and it just wasn't worth the effort anymore.

I could do a travel thing, but again, if I didn't actually travel anywhere, that would be a rather boring video. Anyplace that I can actually get to for that amount of money is someplace that I've already been to and don't really need to go to again this week.

Maybe I'll only make three videos. That's probably a lot for someone who never made a video before last week.

I half want to do a video on things you can eat besides quinoa.

Yesterday, I went to look at one of the blogs written by one of David's readers. She doesn't write much, she just takes a lot of pictures. She had a picture of a garden bed she wanted to start. She currently has it right up against the fence. I tried to warn her that she should move it away from the fence, at least enough that she can walk all the way around her garden, but I couldn't get the comment thing to work.

Maybe David can warn her.

Yesterday, I got a comment from a new reader. And then he deleted the comment. That was odd, since he didn't write anything bad. Whatever.

And, yesterday, I got a look at the new CW show The Vampire Diaries. I didn't know that it was on, so I missed about the first five minutes or so. It looks to be a lot like Twilight.

I miss David's blog. Not that David's blog has gone anywhere, just that he isn't doing much with it right now. He's finished his first challenge, and he's come up with ideas for other challenges, but now he's wondering if he should actually do any of them. He has doubts about being able to feed a hundred people for $20.09. And he's back to school now, and he's busy with other things. There's not much time left for blogging anyway.

I keep telling myself that I shouldn't spend so much time blogging, and compared to what I used to do, I have really cut back. But I found a blog that I liked to read, and it's writer has gone back to his real life, and I miss reading it. It was a bit of fun.

Like this video thing. Next week it will be over, and I will again be waiting for things to get back to normal, which they never will. But I will be back to the same old stuff, without the distraction of the videos.

Same old stuff.

Dumb comments from someone else's blog

I've been reading a blog where someone tries to eat just a dollar a day. This is maybe the fifth such blog I have read, plus I tried to do it myself for a couple of weeks. I think that they are interesting.

Well, they get the occasional dumb comment. People don't like that they are pretending to be poor. Not that they were actually pretending to be poor. If they were even close to pretending to be poor they wouldn't go to the movies or do any social things which require money, they wouldn't drive their cars anywhere that they didn't have to be, etc.... These people weren't doing that, they were just setting limits on the amount of money they spent on food. They weren't pretending to be poor or making fun of the poor.

People who leave these negative comments need to get a life. But those people are usually in the minority.

And then there are a lot of us who try to give advice. And some of the comments were really bad advice.

So there are people who stop by and tell him to eat more vegetables or eat whole grains and such. And I have no problem with that. Vegetables are good for you, and whole grains are good for you. But it seems like some of these people were trying to get him to be a vegetarian. Again, I have no problem with someone being vegetarian, and that food choice is better for you than what most of us make. But this wasn't the good for you challenge, this was the dollar a day challenge. So maybe the good for you stuff might go a bit over budget.

The one that I really thought was dumb was the one who thought quinoa was the way to go. And so I pointed out that quinoa wasn't cheap, and at nearly four dollars a pound this was something to stay away from if you only have a dollar a day to spend.

Someone else replied that compared to other grains, quinoa was a cheap source of protein.

First off, the point isn't to get a cheap source of protein compared to other grains, the point was to get inexpensive food. Why get quinoa if it is a cheap source of protein compared to other grains, when compared to other foods it doesn't add up. A cup of cooked quinoa would have eight grams of protein (I could swear it was nine grams, but I just looked it up and it is eight grams), while an egg would be about six grams. But the cup of quinoa would cost more than an egg, so a better comparison would be two or three eggs which would be twelve or eighteen grams of protein for less money. Or chicken might be a better deal. When I got the chicken leg quarters ten pound bag on sale for $3.90, it says that it contains 30 servings at 17 grams of protein per serving. I think that is a little misleading, as this serving is a certain amount of chicken and not a whole piece of chicken. If you cut the leg quarters in half, you have 22 pieces of chicken, not 30, so you have to cook the chicken before you could divide it into servings. Still, even if it were 22 servings at 17 grams of protein per serving, that is $3.90/22 = about eighteen cents per serving. So you would get a lot more protein from half a leg quarter than from a cup of quinoa, and it wouldn't cost as much. From a pound of grain you get about eight cups cooked servings, so that serving of quinoa would cost you about fifty cents. You could have almost three pieces of chicken for that.

Quinoa is the in thing right now, so it is expensive. It does have a bit more protein than most other grains, but you could buy so much more other things for the money. Even if you wanted to stick with grains, you could buy a pound of rice for about a dollar and some other kind of grain for about a dollar, get about five or six grams of protein from a serving of each of them, and still have saved almost two dollars from buying two pounds of other grain instead of one pound of quinoa.

So if a person really had to get by on a dollar a day, even if he wanted to avoid meat, why would he spend his money on quinoa? Let us say that quinoa is $3.59 cents a pound (last time it was either that or $3.79, so I'm going to say $3.59 just because it is easier math to follow), and that a person only has seven dollars to spend for the week and he spends it all on quinoa. He'll get almost two pounds of grain, which will make about sixteen cups when cooked (hopefully a little more but probably not much), and if he eats a cup per meal he will probably have to skip breakfast most days and will get between sixteen and twenty-four grams of protein per day. And he won't have anything else to eat, just the grain.

With the same seven dollars, and still avoiding meat, a person could buy a pound of rice, a pound of some other grain, a dozen eggs, a pound of lentils, a pound of some other kind of beans, and an onion and a few peppers. And depending on exactly what he does buy and where and if he gets things on sale, he might have enough left over for some seeds to make sprouts from, some popcorn, and maybe even a few more vegetables.

And that's if you are trying to avoid meat, which was not part of the challenge. Otherwise you could skip either some of the grain or some of the beans and maybe get some cheap sausage or hotdogs, maybe a pound of hamburger if it is on sale, or maybe some chicken if it is on sale. And don't forget to look for those marked down packages of meat that are about to go out of date.

I thought that it was very odd that someone actually tried to make a case that quinoa was a good deal if you don't have a lot of money to spend on groceries.

But that wasn't even the dumbest comment on the blog. The dumbest comment was somebody trying to say how wonderful the blogger was by comparing him to Christopher McCandless.

Christopher McCandless???

McCandless is a guy who just sort of walked away from his regular life to wander around the country, do odd jobs, and hitchhiked to Alaska. When he got to Alaska, he didn't do anything normal like rent a room or get a job, he just headed out into the woods, didn't tell anyone where he would be, and lived in an abandoned bus for a couple of months. Then it was cold, and he ran out of rice, and he couldn't cross the river to get back. He wasn't able to hunt or fish much, and what he did kill he wasted, cause he didn't know how to preserve meat. He died, probably from accidentally eating the wrong wild plants, and not being able to get medical help.

If McCandless wasn't mental ill, he was at least very stupid.

And what does any of that have to do with trying to live on a smaller grocery bill? The commenter seemed to think that McCandless was some sort of hero. I would think a comparison with someone who wandered out into the wild without adequate planning would be an insult. And it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. The guy blogging about eating on a dollar a day didn't drop out of school or quit his job or dump his family and friends or any of that. He just spent less money on food for a few weeks.

It was just a little experiment.

McCandless???

600th post: a few recipes and thoughts on not having as much money for food as I might like

This will not be the big splash of the 100th post about dinner with William Shatner, or the 300th post about homewrecking sluts, or even the 500th post about whether or not killing one's enemy with a Bat'leth is a good idea. Compared to other posts with the double zero numbers, this will be no big deal at all. After giving it a little bit of thought, I've decided to write about eating food when you don't have much money. We will see what comes of it.

I've been thinking about this a bit anyway, with what has been going on recently. And now I'm thinking of it some more, after finding someone else doing the dollar a day blog thing. And then last week we watched a movie about some old ladies who lived with a zillion cats and a lot of garbage.

You know, when Arlo Guthrie writes a song about people who never take out the garbage, it is funny. When real life people do it, not so much.

Anyway, a while back I found this blog of people who were trying to only spend a dollar a day on food. And I thought that I would try that. I didn't get through a month like they did. To do the dollar a day thing as an experiment, you have to plan ahead. You can't have any social commitments during the experiment that would cause you to spend more than a dollar. So I couldn't do a whole month, because of the social commitments I had already made, and then some other things came up that I didn't want to miss because of silly experiment. For me, it was just an experiment, and I did not have a charity or a goal or anything to go with the experiment. When the experiment started interfering with my social life too much, that was the end of the experiment.

When you are doing the dollar a day thing out of necessity and not as an experiment, you don't have to plan ahead the same way. You just can't make any social commitments that require spending money, so you really don't have to plan around them, because you won't be going to them anyway (unless maybe a friend just can't bear to go without you and pays for you to go). There are no dinner and a movie nights with friends, there no holiday parties which require you to bring special food, and there are no stops at Starbucks, etc.... You became that person that everyone used to like, but no one has really seen for a while.

I haven't been doing the dollar a day thing recently. I'm not doing that because I'm so low on cash that I'm just eating whatever happens to already be in the house, regardless of how much I paid for it whenever I thought it was a good idea to buy it. Not that I've stopped stopped buying groceries entirely, I still have to buy milk and eggs and bread and maybe potatoes and noodles, but the rest of it I am trying to make from the odd things that I bought and maybe put in the pantry and forgot about.

I'm about to try a few odd things. Like I'm eating Pasta Roni and similar things that I should have thrown away last year but didn't get around to. Some of it still tastes good. Some of it doesn't. Then I have the odd thing like Chicken Helper, but I don't have any chicken to go with it. Would it be just awful with sausage instead, or maybe Spam?

Could I have Spam, Spam, Spam, Chicken Helper, and Spam?

Or it might be more like rice, rice, rice, Spam, and rice.

In one of my garden beds I have turnip greens. I hate turnip greens. But I needed something that would grow fast, so that I had what looked like a garden bed instead of a mound of dirt. (The neighbors would complain if it was just a mound of dirt.) So I planted a lot of stuff, and I ate some of it, and most of the rest of it has since died, except for the turnips. My husband likes turnip greens, so we had some last week. I thought maybe they wouldn't be as bad as I remembered.

Nope. I still don't like turnip greens. But my husband likes them, so there is free food for him in the backyard.

As for the rest of the garden, I didn't get as much out of that as I hoped. I got plenty of asparagus earlier, but asparagus is only once a year, and for this year it is long past. I got several tomatoes before the plants fell over (which was entirely my fault for not having them properly staked in time), and I currently have yellow squash number seven and eight waiting for me in the fridge. It seems to me that eight squash are not that much from two healthy plants, but the bees don't seem to like me this year. The eggplant remains fruitless, and the pumpkin plants died. I got some peppers earlier, but they aren't doing as well as I would have liked. Maybe they will do better after it cools down in the fall.

The rest of the garden is either an herb or an ornamental plant, or something like a sweet potato vine that is decorative now and might actually produce something to eat later in the year. So I have this big garden, but I'm not getting much to eat from it now.

It occurs to me now that maybe I should have applied for food stamps two months ago. I suppose that I still could, but I keep thinking that things are about to get better, and that there wouldn't be any point in trying to get the food stamps. There's probably a form to fill out, and then they get back to you, and by that time you are working again and told that you don't get anything, sort of like the unemployment thing.

I'm still really ticked about the unemployment thing.

Back to the subject of food. I think that I will post a few cheap food recipes.

Okay, the first one is not really a recipe, just sort of a reminder. Eat popcorn. Get an air popper (or maybe get one of those things that lets you use regular popcorn in the microwave) and make popcorn. Then spray it with some butter flavored non-stick cooking spray (such as Pam) and then sprinkle salt. Well, I am not supposed to have salt, I'm supposed to have chili powder or Parmesan cheese or something, but I usually have the salt anyway. Or, if you would rather have something sweet and aren't worried about sugar or calories, you might try sprinkling a bit of cinnamon sugar. Anyway, regular popcorn is cheap, and if you don't load it with butter and salt and such, it is even good for you.

The second recipe is for my attempt at making the black bean soup from Campo Verde restaurant in Arlington. First, you sort and rinse one pound of dry black beans, and then put them in a large bowl and soak them in water overnight. Next, you pour off the water and put the beans in a crockpot (mine is about six quarts and has the automatic switch to warm feature). Now you cover the beans with water, so that there is about an inch or two of water over the beans. Set the cook time to high for four hours. Then you slice and quarter about half a pound of smoked sausage (and I now use the $1.09 Value smoked sausage from Kroger's) and add that to the beans. About halfway through the cooking time, add a diced onion and between four and eight sliced jalapeno peppers. (Note: if you add the peppers and onions earlier in the process, they tend to lose their zing, and if you add them much later in the process it might be hotter than you like.) And about five minutes before the soup is done, add half a bunch (or even a whole bunch) of chopped cilantro. This should make about about twelve cups and cost about $0.25 per cup (depending on what kind of sausage you use, where you buy your onions and peppers and cilantro, and whether or not the ingredients were on sale).

The third recipe is a similar soup. Replace the black beans with pinto beans, but cover with at least two cups LESS water. Add the sliced and quartered sausage (or, for even less money, add less sausage and a couple tablespoons of bacon grease). At the midway point when you add the chopped onions and sliced peppers, also add two 8 ounce cans of tomato sauce, and about a tablespoon each of powdered cumin and chili powder. Skip the cilantro.

The fourth recipe is macaroni and cheese (just the kind made from a box of pasta and powdered cheese mix, either the store brand or whatever is on sale) mixed with a drained 6 ounce can of tuna, and about a cup of diced tomatoes and jalapenos (or leftover salsa). This is even cheaper if you can get the tomatoes and jalapenos out of your garden, but you might need to cook them a little bit before adding them to the macaroni. Leftover chicken can be substituted for the tuna.

The fifth recipe is for almost a gallon of yogurt. You put almost a gallon of milk (not skim milk, but I have used 2% and 1%) in the crockpot and set it for high for four hours. If your crockpot has the automatic switch to warm feature, you don't have to do anything else for about twelve hours. Then you check to see that the temperature has gone down to about 110 to 120 degrees. Don't let it cool much more than that, but higher temperatures would kill the yogurt culture. Then stir in a small container (like 6 or 8 ounces) of plain yogurt (or sometimes vanilla will work if you can't find the kind you want in plain). Make sure that whatever yogurt you use has live cultures. The first time you will have to buy some from a store, and after that you just put a cup of yogurt aside for the next time. Then you leave the milk and yogurt mixture in the crockpot, set on warm, and come back and check it in another twelve hours or so. It should all be yogurt then. All the books tell you to sterilize everything with boiling water before you make yogurt, but I have only just done regular dish washing, and so far I haven't had any problems.

The sixth recipe isn't really a recipe either, just a reminder to think about making your own sprouts. Making your own is so much cheaper, and it only takes about a week, or maybe less, depending on what you are trying to sprout. Mostly, you are going to go to Whole Foods and health food stores for your sprouting seeds, but not always. Mung beans, for example, are usually a better price at the Asian market (if you have one). You measure the seeds out with spoons, and a week later you have several cups of fresh and cheap vegetables to put in your stir fries and salads and sandwiches.

Okay, so that's the end of my 600th post. Tomorrow I will go back to pulling out my hair and complaining about stuff in general.

We actually went to the movie yesterday

Yes, we spent about fourteen of the hundred dollars we have left going to a movie and eating dinner. What were we thinking?

Let me back up a bit.

About a week ago, my husband asks me if I want to go out of town with him for a few days. He says he is scheduled to work in Amarillo. (Sorry to have been unclear about that earlier, but I don't like blogging about where we are going. I like blogging about where we have been once we get back, but I know that there are weirdos out there, so it doesn't seem like a good idea to tell the whole world where and when I will be. Maybe that will land me right in the weirdo's backyard, and he will make plans to meet me. See?) Anyway, I haven't been to Amarillo in a long time, and I don't think that I have been there as a destination since I was very young. We have been there a couple of times on our way to New Mexico, Arizona, or California and have stopped there to eat lunch or something, but I don't think that we have ever stayed the night there. So that would have been interesting, and I was sorry that we didn't have time or money to go there a few extra days to look at stuff.

But as it turns out he was not scheduled to work in Amarillo, he was scheduled to work in Abilene. He claims that is what he told me, but I know that isn't what he said. We have this joke about Abilene, and if he had said Abilene I would have immediately started with the jokes. I am quite sure that he did not say Abilene.

Anyway, Abilene is not as far away, and probably not as interesting either. On the other hand, it would not be this long drive, and there weren't as many things to do, so maybe there would have been less temptation to spend money. And as it turns out Abilene has some cheap things to do and even a free museum, so going to Abilene might turn out to be a good thing.

So I was starting to look forward to going to Abilene, until I realized that we probably wouldn't have enough money left to make the trip. We thought that we would have two hundred dollars, and it turns out that we had about half of that, which probably wouldn't be enough for gas and the minimum two nights at a motel. So he called to say that he couldn't work out of town unless they could advance him some money, which he already knew that they wouldn't. His boss said that the Abilene schedule looked light, and could he work it if it was cut back to just one day? It is hardly worth the effort of all that driving and all that work for just one day, but yes, he could work just one day. We waited for them to call back and say either which one day it was, or that they were leaving it two days and got someone else to do it.

While all of this is going on, he needs new equipment and yet another computer doesn't work. They will have to send him another one and more equipment.

So now the entire idea of going out of town has been scrapped, and they have found him something to do in Dallas. This particular job probably became available because there is little money to be made and no one else wants the job. But fine, he'll take it, as long as he doesn't need going out of town expense money and he doesn't have to work on Saturday, he'll do it.

He kind of forgets that he has stuff to do on Friday too, and now he has to work Friday.

But, the schedule is done. He works Tuesday through Friday in Dallas. End of story. If they can get him a working computer and some other equipment today.

So, yesterday morning, he asks if I want to go see Julie & Julia.

Now, at this point I should yell at him. What are you thinking? But then I see what he is thinking. He's thinking that we now have a hundred dollars that we took out of the bank, and we don't have to spend it on going out of town Wednesday and Thursday. If we really want to, we can spend seven dollars going to see a movie.

Fine. I remind him that he should cut the grass first, which he does. So I'm looking to see where we might watch this movie he wants to see. And the movie isn't at our cheap theater, and to get the next cheapest price we have to go to a ten thirty showing, which we aren't going to be ready for. So I suggest waiting til Monday, but then I find a place not far away that has a one o'clock show that costs just under five dollars. So we do that.

The movie was okay. Not just wonderful, but okay. My husband has read the book and looked at the blog. The movie is half about Julia Child fifty years ago, and half about the blogger who made all five hundred and something recipes in 2002. So the movie isn't really based on the book Julie& Julia, but half based on that and half based on Julia Child's own book. My husband didn't like that, while I haven't read either book and was maybe more interested in the Julia Child parts.

Maybe I should blog my way through a cookbook. But it should probably be a diet cookbook. Or the way things are now, a budget cookbook.

Anyway, so after the movie, when he usually waits for me outside on a bench, we weren't at our regular theater and there was no bench. And I couldn't find him. And I guess that he was waiting out in the car, except that I couldn't remember where we had parked, and unlike our cheap theater, this place had a parking lot full of cars. So I am just wandering around this big parking lot, looking for my husband. And I don't find him, and I go back inside. It's hot. I go back out and find him.

I am too hot and tired to get into it. And so much for my resolve to not spend money on anything, especially dumb stuff like sodas. It is hot, and I don't even have any water in the car. And we need to buy gas anyway, so we decide to get sodas when we get gas. Only we nearly hit someone at the first place trying to get to the only empty pump. We go to a second place and circle around, but leave there too. Why the long lines? Is it some holiday I've forgotten about?

The third place is totally empty, and I am suspicious. Maybe the pumps don't work? But they do, and we get some gas. I go in to pay and to get sodas. The sodas are almost one fifty. Maybe I don't want sodas for that much. Maybe that is why the other two places were crowded, cause they had cheap sodas or Slurpee's. The sodas are going to cost three dollars. For four dollars we could go to Burger King and get dinner off of the dollar menu.

We don't find a Burger King, but we do see a McDonald's. We eat there instead.

Okay, no more spending money til Saturday.

Except for lotto tickets. I will lose my mind if I don't buy the damned lotto tickets.

I spend the rest of the day watching the X-files, and cooking beans in the crockpot while doing a dance around the dirty laundry on the kitchen floor. The laundry has piled up, and we ran out of soap. I've gone to the dollar store and now have soap, but I haven't quite decided it is time to try the soap yet. I'll probably do that today, or maybe tomorrow.

So that was all that we did this weekend, except that I have tried to get a little work done in the garden in the morning before it gets too hot. It is time to start on the wildflower bed, cause I will need that to be finished next month, even if it is too hot to do a good job of it. And then I will finish the pathway between the wildflower bed and the bulb bed. Unfortunately, the fire ants have decided to work in the same area. I will have to find out where they are coming from and kill them.

So I am off to dig in the dirt.

This really is going to be a long week.

The power went out

Not for very long. The power just sort of blinks off once in a while, mostly during storms. Yesterday it blinked off without a storm. No big deal.

Except that the clock goes off, and the answering machine goes off. Now, I think that you are supposed to put back-up batteries in the clock and the answering machine, only I keep forgetting to do that. So I have to reset the clock, and the answering machine never has a clue what the date and time actually is. So according to the answering machine my brother left me a message at 2am on Tuesday when it was actually about 6:30 pm on Friday. Stuff like that.

And the VCR goes off, which isn't too bad unless I was actually in the process of recording something, which at about lunch time yesterday I was not. I barely even had to fix the clock. And with these new converter boxes on the TV, I have to turn on four remotes instead of just two to get the TV back on. Sometimes the converter boxes have to have the channels reset, but this did not appear to be a problem at lunch time yesterday. Maybe that has to do with the length of time that the power is out, and it was only thirty seconds, so I don't think anything happened to the boxes, or at least if there are any channels missing I hadn't noticed them.

Another thing that happens when the power blinks off is that the crockpot (which is usually still plugged in even when it is turned off) then has a blinking light to tell you that it is now off and that if you were using it (which most of the time I am not) you need to turn it back on and such. So if the power goes off, the crockpot will have a little blinking red light, which might go unnoticed for days if I wasn't actually cooking something in it at the time the power went off.

Except that yesterday at about lunch time, I was actually using the crockpot. I was heating milk to make yogurt. Making yogurt is not brain surgery, except that you have to heat the milk to a certain temperature without scalding it, and then bring it back down to a certain temperature before adding yogurt to it, and then you have to keep it warm at a certain temperature for about twelve hours while the milk actually turns into yogurt. So while it isn't hard work, and you can do something else like watch TV or even sleep during different parts of the process, you do have to keep going over to check the temperature of the milk.

Anyway, you can make yogurt in a crockpot and have little worry about scalding the milk, though heating the milk in the crockpot does take time. And now that I have the crockpot with the digital readout that automatically switches from high heat or low heat to warm after a certain amount of time. So I was going to attempt to make yogurt with a much longer process, but it requires a lot less going to check it's temperature.

So that is what I was doing at about lunch time yesterday, when the power went off and turned off my crockpot. Now, I did remember that I was using the crockpot so that I went to turn it back on. Except that I wasn't sure how long the crockpot had been on, so I wasn't quite sure how much longer I should leave it on high temperature, so I guessed about an hour. So that seemed to be about right, and after checking the temperature a couple of times I turned it down to warm and went back to what I was doing and didn't check the temperature again until after seven.

So that should have been everything put right that wasn't right (except for the time and date on the answering machine, which is never right), and after about an hour or so from the time when the power blinked off I thought everything was okay. And I went back to alternating cleaning with watching stuff on Hulu. And it was rather warm, which is to be expected when it is about a hundred degrees outside, even if you are not actually outside yourself. But it seemed more so than usual, as I have a window unit air conditioner in this room, and another one in my bedroom, and those two cool this end of the house. I have a third unit which would cool most of the rest of the house except that it isn't working at the moment and I don't have the money to have it fixed. So it is usually noticeably cooler in this end of the house than in the front of the house, except that yesterday after lunch it was noticeably cooler in this room and not so much anywhere else.

At a bit before seven I went in the bedroom to set up the VCR for something, and that was when I noticed that the air conditioner was off. That particular air conditioner has a digital readout, while the other two have knobs, and so the air conditioner in this room came right back on after the power blinked off without me doing anything, and the air conditioner in the bedroom with the digital readout went off and stayed off until someone noticed to turn it back on. Only it had been like seven hours without me noticing to turn it back on.

Okay.

So, there is the odd occurrence of the power blinking off just now and then, which is a bit more often in the summer, because it is Texas and everyone is using their air conditioners. But maybe it tends to be a bit more often here, maybe because my house and the neighborhood itself is about seventy years old, and maybe it wasn't built so good to begin with. But of course the time when the power really blinks off often is during thunderstorms, and we had one of those last night. Not that there was a great downpour of rain, just enough to make a bit of noise and get everything a bit wet. And then power blinked off a few times, just for thirty seconds or so, which is just enough time to turn off everything with a digital readout.

The first of these happened at about one in the morning, after I had been asleep for just a couple of hours. And I guess that the noise was enough to wake me up and notice the blinking clock and that the air conditioner had gone off. So I got out of bed and turned the air conditioner back on. I did not bother putting the correct time on the clock as I did not want to go to find out what the actual time was, and I would rather just get back to bed as soon as possible.

Remember that I was making yogurt?

Okay, during the part of the process that requires the milk mixture to be kept warm for about twelve hours, I am usually sleeping while the crockpot is set on warm. Except that when the power blinks off like that the crockpot is actually switched to off, not warm. So right after I get back into bed I remember this and walk to the front of the house to turn the crockpot back on and switch it to warm.

The power blinked off at least a couple of times after that, and twice it made enough noise for me to notice and get out of bed to turn on the air conditioner and walk to the front of the house to switch the crockpot back to warm.

So I did not get much sleep last night, but the last time I did get almost four hours, so I guess that was enough at one time so that I do not feel just awful this morning. But it was still rather annoying.