Reorganizing

Hi all! I apologize for the delay in posting here. I've been busy trying to catch up on my family blog, and had to leave this one put aside for a bit longer. Never fear though, I have some good ideas and I hope to be reorganizing and implementing them on this blog, soon!

God bless!

Ongoing Challenge #4 Moey -- 30 Minutes in the Garden

One thing I am trying to accomplish with these Ongoing Challenges, is to make a habit out of doing *something.* Sometimes I let my expectations and dreams get too big for what I can reasonably expect from my time and energy in this stage of my life. So then, I feel defeated and don't even try. The garden is one area where I tend to do this. I have lots of wants and wishes for the garden, but nowhere near enough time to accomplish what I want to out there. But I thought it would be a good idea to see what can be accomplished in the time that I do have, maybe half-an-hour a day, and why not see what happens?

So this goes on my Ongoing Challenge list too -- 30 Minutes in the Garden, Daily.

In our vegetable garden, we currently are growing lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, yellow squash, cucumber, big tomatoes, roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, capsicum and hot peppers. Everything is doing fairly well at the moment although the tomatoes are suffering a little from the humidity and fungal growth -- which reminds me, today I saw toadstools growing in the squash plants, and now I am wondering if the squash will be safe to eat...hmmmm...the humidity is killer here!

Anyway, so I have been getting into the garden for my 30 minutes -- I try to do it early before it gets so darn hot! and I have been able to make some good observations (like the fact that we have squash vine borers again, and the lettuce has bolted) and do a couple of necessary things like pull up the bolted lettuce (saved a couple good ones for seed, though) and harvest the ripe vegies, and whatever.

Last week, when I had decided that I would do my utmost not to waste another bite of food, I went shopping in the pantry for potatoes -- had a little 5lb bag that had not been opened yet, but when I went to get out the potatoes, they were all wrinkly and starting to mold and sprout. There was only one good one in the batch. So, (uncharacteristically, and only because I had made it a challenge,) I cut up a couple of the ones least moldy and yet sprouty, and dug up a little patch to plant them in. My oldest son helped me plant the potato pieces, and so far there has been no sign of life.

So today I dug one up a little bit, and could see that it is sprouting some little leaves down there in the soil. Life!

I went and looked up what I should have done to plant potatoes (soak in salt water, plant in spring because they don't like hot weather, etc.) and it wasn't very encouraging...still, it didn't cost me anything but 20 minutes of cutting, digging and planting, and if I get a new batch of potatoes out of something I was going to throw away, I will be very happy. :-)

Ongoing Challenge #3 Moey -- Bed by Eleven, Up by Seven

Yeah, okay, I realize that to most people living in the "real world" -- who have to get up and be out the door by 7am and are dropping like flies well before 11pm, this sounds like some sort of holiday. Yeah, but. I'm not going to make excuses or anything, but I have never, ever, ever, ever been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person. I've been early-to-rise when I had to (school, work, taking kids to school, etc.) but even then: bedtime, I struggle with. I just seem to be constructed for third shift. LOL. And, I am nursing a baby, who I have to wake up to feed, or I lose my milk (already lost it, went to formula, baby got diaper rash, went back to nursing and trying to feed more often during the night.)

All that to say, that for me, the getting up is not the hard part -- the going to bed is the difficult bit. There is always the "one last thing" that needs done, or it is finally QUIET in the house (six kids, homeschooled, home all day every day, hello), or I am in the middle of a book or whatever. Whatever.

The thing is, I keep totally screwing up my plans with either being exhausted from not enough sleep, or not getting the stuff done that I need to, before I am buried under the stuff that I have to do when the kids are up and about. Today was a day like that. I got up early, but I was so tired, I just felt horrible, so I handed the baby over for some big-kid babysitting and went back to bed for a bit. We had planned to go to the library, but after my nap, by the time we got out the door, it was almost lunch time and nothing on my list had been done yet. So today, besides all the normal kid care, the only things on my list for today that got done, were: go to Aldi, and go to the library. BUMMER!

I had gardening to do, needed to clean out the fridge, cook up a few more aging items, clean the kitchen windows (trust me, this needs done), and other junk like that. But all my time was taken up just putting out fires all day long, and I was behind all day. I hate that!

So, I will be in bed by 11. Every night. I will get up by 7. Every morning. I will need some kind of motivation and help to do that. LOL.

I mentioned that I went to Aldi: I bought $16.89 worth of groceries: 10lbs flour, 5 gall milk, 4lbs bananas, 3lbs onions, hamburger buns, and a very nice cantaloupe. With only $25/wk to spend at the store (the rest coming from the pantry/freezer), that was a big chunk of change for not very much stuff. I will try to post the figuring I did to come up with those amounts, tomorrow; I just wanted to be sure to write down that I spent $$ and what I bought today.

Now I have 10 minutes before bed, and have a couple more things to do, so good night!

Humongous Challenge #1 -- Deb

Use what you have to create what you need/want

I am an habitual collector of potential. The theme of this challenge is something that has increasing gripped my interest lately, especially since I am very aware that we have way too much potential lying around here in the form of fabric, old pieces of furniture, tools, old clothing, yarn, craft stuff, dirt, seeds, containers, paint, frames, timber, food, old blankets, paper, toilet paper tubes, old towels, beads, feathers, energetic youngsters...you get the picture I guess. These are the kinds of things I can turn into a vibrant and fruitful garden, new and exciting toys and learning experiences for my children, gifts and thoughtful gestures for my friends and family, decorations and beautifications for my home, suitable and lovely clothing for those who need it, good and wholesome food to fill many hungry bellies, and perhaps even that most universal form of stored potential (and the one of which I'm not yet such a skillful collector)...

The ideal realisation of this challenge would be the conversion of all available resources stored in and around my home into useful and useable things, while not bringing new things into my home whenever it is possible to meet needs from within it. I suppose in order to reach this grand goal, I first need to know what I have, and what I need, so I will spend a little time figuring all of that out. It will likely be necessary for me to be very organised with this, or else I will lose my mind and any interest in this project. Thus I will need to categorise the dickens out of our resources and our needs and wants and make many, many, many lists. Therefore, step one = copious listmaking.

To be continued........

Daily List Challenge #1-- Moey

Holy guacamole. I am not really sure how to organize these posts but I don't have the time today to think about it, anyhow, so I am just going to jot down a few thoughts.

First of all: regarding eating for $1/person/day: I don't know that I am going to do a complete breakdown of each individual item that we eat daily. In the book, the authors did do that, which I think was fine for "accounting" purposes, but as a reader, it was a bit tmi. Reason being that, for the authors, it was a 30-day experiment to see if it could be done and at what cost. For me, it is an ongoing goal, not something written in stone.

Well, and over time, for example, peanut butter might cost me .06/tbsp from one jar but only .03/tbsp from another one I got on sale. Too much figuring for an ongoing project. So I think that the cost figuring for me will be a little more long-term: I'll keep track of what is spent every week, and how soon I run out of pantry items or budgeted money. When either the wallet or pantry is empty, then I can calculate from that how close we were to our goal.

Oh, I'll probably give rough estimates of what our daily meals are costing, but just not that level of detail. Cuz, I'm really doing this for a purpose, not as an experiment. I hope that makes sense.

On to the daily list challenge. I have two sets of challenges: Ongoing Challenges and Daily or Short-Term Challenges. I am not sure how I am going to set these up on the blog, but I will at least share my daily list for today. Some of the things on the daily list are actually items from the Ongoing Challenges.

*Diary (y)
Catch up ironing (y)
*Crochet dishcloths (working on it before bed!)
Sweep/mop kitchen and dining (y)
Plant new chocolate-mint starts (n - need to buy potting soil)
*Flute prac (y)
Skype Deb (y)
Call Doc (y)
Make Dentist appt (y)
Clean downstairs bathrooms(y, sort of, I did one)
Update Blog (y)
Library (n, won't have time)
*Garden -- water, clean out dying vines (n - raining),harvest (y), check potatoes (y)
Fold laundry (y)
Datebook update (y)
Find icecube storage buckets, start filling (y)
*Cook foods that are getting old (y - peanut butter, bread, small amt pepperoni, tomatoes, small amt grated cheese, onion, milk, mushrooms)
Dinner -- fish, salad, oven fries (n, made casserole from older ingredients, made salad and green beans w/peanut butter bars for dessert.)

That's it for now, gotta get started. I'll talk more about my list challenges later. I'll be really surprised and shocked if I get through this list today, but, well, it is all about the challenge. Better to do something than nothing, and having a plan helps.

*hope to blog more about these items later

UPDATE BEFORE BED: Well, there is my trivial but very full day. The list wasn't half of what I did, but it was the extra things I wanted to accomplish that I would not have, if I hadn't had the list. More tomorrow! :-)

Ongoing Challenge #1 Moey -- Eat Cheaper (but not poorer)

In the great stash of library books, is a little paperback called On a dollar a day : one couple's unlikely adventures in eating in America by Christopher Greenslate.

The premise of the first part of the book (the part I was interested in, and have read, LOL,) was that a billion people on the earth are overweight (hello, me) and 800,000,000 don't have enough to eat. The rest of the people on earth fall somewhere in between that, with many having "food insecurity," meaning, they have only enough to get by, day by day, hand-to-mouth.

And a vast majority of the world lives on around $1 a day.

I liked this book, a lot. It was interesting reading. Dramatic, a bit over-the-top, I thought at the time. I mean, really, how hard is it to eat on a dollar a day, in the USA? Everyone knows that if you cook from scratch and buy the best deals and use coupons, you can practically eat for free.

For the authors (Christopher and his girlfriend Kerry Leonard,) it wasn't that simple -- they are vegan, which adds interest, but also complication. They wouldn't use anything that wasn't available to anyone, and they wouldn't accept gifts. So, teachers' lunches and relatives "helping" wasn't going to work.

They agreed to try it for a month -- the book has the details -- but the long and short of it is that they pretty near starved, and about went crazy with the feeling of deprivation. A lot of the feelings Kerri describes resonated with me, as a chronic dieter: how, knowing you can't have something, makes it all the more desirable and a constant in your thoughts, and how mentally grueling it is to deal with (voluntary) deprivation.

Here are her words:

Since the meager dollar-a-day portions didn't satiate my hunger, food became the focus of my existence. When we weren't preparing food, we were eating. When we weren't eating, we were thinking about eating. It became increasingly impossible to ignore the abundance of food around me, and the fact that I couldn't have it. (p.31)

This book really fueled my imagination. I have thought about this many times: how cheaply can we eat (and eat well, mind you, I have little mouths to feed and not about to sacrifice health for ideology!) But I didn't have a goal number in my mind, nor a concrete reason to do it: so I would try to get frugal, use every little bit of everything, (read everything on the subject, goes without saying,) do it for a while, burn out, and order pizza.

Well, now I have a number, and a reason. The reason isn't a very good one; it basically boils down to: if a couple of vegan yuppies who don't know how to cook beyond beans and rice can do it, so can I, with my prior years of knowledge and experience. Plus, there are seven of us who eat, and only 4 of us eat full portions -- the others are still young children -- and $49/week is a lot easier to deal with than $14. Bulk buys and all that. Plus, I also have a very well-stocked pantry filled with food bought on discount (and I generally don't buy junk, or if I do, it gets eaten up right away so doesn't languish in the pantry anyhow.)

To my financial detriment, I also have a quarter share of grass-fed, organic beef in the freezer, which cost me $450 and gets doled out extremely frugally, as the cost-per-pound was astronomical. If I have $50/week to spend on food, and $450 went to beef, well, I better make it last!

So I went through the pantry, fridges and freezers, and came up with an estimated total of $1455 worth of groceries on hand. I have many pounds of beans and rice and pasta, etc., bought on discount (for example, my most recent stock-up purchase was 20lbs of botan rice -- sushi rice --for $6.99.) So I can probably at least try to stretch my pantry supplies out for the year, and that is what I based the "grocery shop" figure on. I'm giving myself $50/week instead of $49, because it's easier for figuring. So, that's $2600/year, minus $1455 in stock-on-hand, which leaves $1145, or $22/week, for grocery shopping.

I usually spend 7 - 10 times that much, especially if I am feeling tired and/or lazy.

Oh, and there is the problem of the chickens, which cost $12.50/month in feed. That used to seem cheap, for the wonderful eggs they give us; but all of a sudden, $3 a week is big money.

The immediate problem that I can see is having enough money to cover fruit and vegetables, and milk. For the recommended dairy allowance, at 3 servings a day, times 7 people, times 7 days a week, we are looking at 147 servings -- or, over 9 gallons of milk (the cheapest way to get dairy) per week. That is $20 right there, and then--how? do I get enough fruit and veg to feed 7 of us with only $2/week?

There are solutions: start using the great stash of powdered milk in the pantry (which has already been accounted for in the budget,) plant a garden (more on that later,) find cheaper alternatives to dairy (pick a vegan's brain, Hi Deb! *waves*)....

If I really only had a dollar a day to spend on food, I'd have to get my gardening money out of that, too. Which leads to interesting thoughts on: where can I get free seeds? Free supplies? How can I get something for next-to-nothing?

The bottom line is, I don't have to do this, but now I sure want to. Good exercise for the brain, the butt, and the wallet. At the end of it, I sure hope to have learned something, to be able to teach someone who needs the info and may not have the resources to experiment, and to be able to have saved enough to give a big chunk away to a worthy cause.

The thought strikes me that I've been awfully selfish and ignorant not to have given this much prolonged effort before. People have suffered because I have been lazy and selfish. That is the truth. And one of the people suffering, is myself -- suffering under the weight of, well, weight.

My husband said to me the other day, as I was doing all this figuring, "got another challenge going on?" And I said, "Of course! You know I would die, bored to death, without a challenge...and this is a good one."

Well, we'll see. And don't worry: for my purposes, the children come first, and I'll accept any freebies I can get, just like anyone who is really having to live on $1/day. LOL.

ADDED: here is the blog from Christopher and Kerri's experiment.