Tipping Resentment Rant

So I have to take my son to get his hair cut today. I'm scrambling around trying to dig up enough cash to pay for it, and then I realize I'll have to tip the stylist too. Now, I understand that they have to pay booth rental, supplies, etc., but come on, why should I have to bribe them to do a good job?? It's not like they are wait ppl, making $2.45 an hour. ( and they actually WORK for their tips!) The way they whip through a cut in 10 minutes or less, they are making $25+ an hour! I'm seriously thinking about learning how to cut hair, adding yet one more thing to my already busy day. Ggggrrrr.

Quick Update

It's been awhile since I was able to post. My mother finally passed the veil on Friday Nov. 21 2008, after two years of illness. We have been dealing with the arrangements for several weeks now, and finally finished up this week. I'm getting back into work and research, will post more next week sometime.
Thank you for all those who gave their love and support during this stressful time.

Finally, a really good use for recycled paper!

So, I'm cruising the Net reading other ppl's frugal ideas, and I finally run across one that uses waste paper in a good way.
Now, I've already got several uses for waste paper (junk mail, phone books, sale papers), such as hand made paper (fun, but really only usable for crafty stuff), worm bedding (White paper only), compost, filling in holes in the yard or putting in the bottoms of potted plants to keep the dirt from getting out of the holes. Still, we have bags and bags of paper lying around.
Enter home made kitty litter! I ran across a website that uses waste paper to make kitty litter. So you are asking about now, "What's the deal, kitty litter isn't THAT expensive!" It is, when you have 11 cats. And with any luck, it won't track all over the place from the 3 cat boxes.
I'm trying it today, I'll post more once it's done.

Happy New Year!

For those of you who are looking confusedly at the date right now, It's Samhain, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one. If you really want to know more about it, here's the Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain
November is our second frugal month. Until December 1, we will not spend any money except for bills, food, gas and medical needs. This one's gonna be a bit tighter than the previous one, since our food stockpile is running low. The chickens are cutting back on egg deliverys due to the shorter days, the fall garden's barely got a start, and no more freebie produce from the local natural foods store, as they've been bought out by a corporation in CA, and corporate policy is all culled produce must go into the dumpster to be taken to the landfill. They throw out at least 50-100 pounds of perfectly edible produce every DAY. Staggering to think of how many people that could feed. So, it probably won't be till tax refund time until the food stockpile is totally restocked. At least gas prices are dropping, thank the Goddess!

And the government has screwed us yet again....

So the feds decide to cut the interest rate yet again, to "stimulate the economy". Yea right. I'm pulling my $$ out of savings and putting it under the mattress. Not like I'm making anything off it anyway.

More on frugalness

As we continue on our frugal lifestyle, I can see where many people are blindsided by all of a sudden loosing their lifestyle and having to adopt a more frugal one. I'm really glad I'm not one of them. I guess I'm just an old hippy at heart, I'm enjoying raising my own food, cooking from scratch, riding my scooter instead of driving the car. For the most part, my family seem healthier and happier, and definitely more appreciative of the things we do have.
We're actually living better on less. I do get tired of it on occasion, but there are enough windfall periods that we don't really feel like we're missing out on much of anything. Of course we're worried about things, but we're doing a lot better than many people. We are still enjoying our life, but then, we've always been a little different. ;)
Gonna try to do the frugal month every other month. November is the next one, which means holiday shopping is put off till December. No biggie really, since most of our gifts this year are home made, and it'll be a good time to work on them.

Continuing The Frugal Lifestyle

Our month of frugal living went very well. We were able to sock away a fair amount of $$ in savings, and it definitely helped us see where we were wasting money. A good $50-$100 a month was going to Half-Price Books for dvds and books. While we still love our dvd and book collection (we re-read and re-watch everything we own), we've gotten used to using the Net for free entertainment. W has discovered his fav show, Avatar:The Last Airbender on Nick.com, S and I have been using Hulu, plus channel websites to watch alot of shows. S has class 4 nights a week, so he uses it alot more than I do. The downside: having to watch on our computers. We get a little closer to getting rid of cable every month, but just can't bring ourselves to do it just yet. We have a great t.v., a freebie from a friend who never watched it, that won't use a remote control, so the digital box is on it, so we can change channels. Still, if we have to get rid of cable altogether, that tv will probably be used for the Net thing.
Broadband is the one thing we all agree we are not willing to give up. We have three computers (All build by S for much cheaper than buying a prebuilt) and we all game online. Another thing we are not willing to give up is our WoW accounts. We play evry day, and would rather give up cabvle than these. It may yet come to that, seeing how the economy is heading south in a hurry.
Food has been one thing that is easiest to deal with. Since I cook, and cook well, I know how to use cheaper ingredients to make scrumptious meals. Some are healthy, others not so much, but we don't lack for good tasting food. Do I get tired of spending 3-6 hours a day just on food prep? You bet! It is a hassle and takes up alot of time, but saves us so much money that it is totally worth it. We also have our chicken women, 4 lovely hens I got for my birthday last year. They give us the most marvelous eggs, and eat all kinds of things like peels and stale foods that would otherwise go into the compost or trash. Don't worry tho, the compost still gets its share of stuff, like shredded junk mail, leaves and citrus, which the girls don't care for. We also have a garden, altho we lost most of it this year to extremely high temps coupled with massive drought. We're looking forward to planting the fall garden, hopefully it'll do better.
One thing we've done in put every electronic on a plug strip and turn it off when not in use. We even unplug the microwave every time we use it. Sure, we no longer have a clock in the living area, but so what, we can walk a few feet to another room and look at that one. We also use a clothesline for drying, and then run the clothes through the dryer for 10 minutes to remove the animal hair from the 11 cats and one Chow dog. These few things have saved us about $30 a month on our electric bill.
Pet food does make up a fair amount of our monthly expenses, but we've found feeding the cats a better quality food results in healthier and happier kitties. We don't advocate dumping pets when times get tough, they are living beings with feelings and you CAN keep them and cut back elsewhere. All of our cats are strays or rescues, and they bring us much joy, and sometimes are a hassle (like our last housemate who left her cat, and he sprays), but we do like having them around. The dog is more of a worker than a pet, he is a guard dog, and living in a city, is something we need to help protect ourselves.
We will be continuing the frugal lifestyle for the foreseeable future. Xmas is taken care of, my surveys net us between $200 and $400 a year, all used for Xmas presents, and none of us want a whole lot, so we don't go overboard on spending like we used to. So, things are going well, and while other ppl are having major problems hanging on to their homes, cars, etc, we are doing well so far!

The Raw Experiment

I made two batches of nut/seed milks, which came out ok. The resulting leftover pulp was used for raw cookies and crackers. Batch of cookies #1 had shredded raw carrots and dried cranberries added to it, and it was ok. Chewy, with a nice mellow flavor. W, however, asked if they could be made with chocolate chips. (Of course!) So Batch #2 had brown sugar, flax seeds and chocolate chips in it, and were excellent! I will definitely be making them again.
The crackers were very tasty, if fragile. I added lemon pepper, garlic powder, flax seeds and Italian seasoning to the mix, and dried them until they were crisp. They kept well for the couple of days it took to make them. I'll need to find out how to make them a little less delicate.
I did some reading up on raw foods, and the recipes I found were amazing. Unfortunately, most would be rather expensive to make, so I will keep reading and see what I can find that is more practical. I would like to try raw bread, and a few other things. At least if I should have to go on a raw diet for health reasons, I'll be semi-prepared!

Almost Over!

The month of Frugal Living is almost over. Except for one expenditure for eating out (We had free coupons, which did not, however, cover W's chicken strips and fries, cost $3.99) we stuck to our guns and didn't buy anything except necessities, food and gas. LOTS of coupons got used, and I am once again trying the library. Being back on the school schedule should make it a bit easier to get the books back on time, since I have to pick up W from school several times a week.
While we would like to do this every other month, it'll have to wait until January, since the next month would be November, and I do my holiday shopping then. Yes, I COULD do it in October, or December, but there are several reasons I won't, the main one being that I use my earnings from surveys for the majority of it, and the closer I get to December, the more I will have saved up.
We won't be going hog-wild in three days. There are a couple of things I want to get, and after seeing how much we were blowing on Half-Price Books, eating out and other stuff, we realized that it's not that hard to trim down our expenses and put the money in savings. We would like to be mostly debt free in 10 years, and we are halfway through Year 1. So far so good!

Some Like It Raw

So, I'm cruising around the Net looking for homemade almond milk recipes, when I notice something in common with all of them: leftover almond pulp. Not being one to waste a food item, I set out to find something to do with all that pulp I would soon be producing. Lots of people suggested using it in baking, or soups, or several other good ideas. Then I stumbled across a raw foods site that talked about using the leftover nut pulp from milk making to make things like raw cookies.
So I made up my first batch of nut milk (a huge success!), took my leftover pulp, mixed it with shredded carrots, coconut, dried cranberries and honey, formed it into cookie shapes, put it in my trusty food dehydrator, and out came raw cookies! No, they don't taste like a fresh baked Tollhouse, but they are a nice snack, and (hopefully!) a bit healthier.
Being intrigued with the whole raw thing, I'll be doing some experimenting in the coming weeks to see just what can be made with raw food, and more importantly, how does it taste.

Things to do when Bored

So, I'm sitting here being a bit bored, don't feel like doing much of anything till the coffee kicks in, so I decided to type in "vegans are stupid" in my search engine. Oh, my, the things I read (and laughed over) this morning! Try it and see what comes up. LOTS of self-righeous vegans trying to convince the rest of the world that humans are not physically evolved to eat meat. (Um, hello, CANINE TEETH!) One poster on a blog comment remarked how the Kzini (a fictional bipedial feline race created by sci-fi author Larry Niven) referred to vegans as Prey. Nice.
I look at diet the same as I look at religon: if you want to do it, fine by me, but don't try to force it on me, or you will regret it for a veeeery long time. Don't lecture me, because you won't win. Get over yourself and keep your lifestyle where it belongs, in YOUR life. ;)

Soy, the new Demon Food

OK, so I admit it, I really got into soy a few years ago. When food prices started heading north, I looked around for a cheap meat substitute, and found soy products. All the veggie websites were FULL of recipes using this stuff, so I gave a few a try. With much experimenting and tweaking, I found some of them to be rather good. Then the bad news hit....SOY IS BAD FOR YOU!
Oh my! And here I thought I'd been doing something good for my family. I was crushed. So I did alot of research, and turns out that most soy products are fairly new, and heavily processed, so they are just now finding out what the long term affects are. Damn. So, once the soy products I have in the fridge and pantry are gone, no more for us. Whaa. On the lighter side, I have been experimenting with more good old grown-in-the-ground veggies, and have been happily surprised that most of the soy recipes can be made with regular old veggies. Yay!

Sun Butter

Update on the sun butter experiment, it was a success! The recipe does need a bit of tweaking tho. I used roasted salted seeds, which turned out WAY too salty. Mixed it half and half with roasted unsalted almonds, still salty, but edible. I will look and see if I can find unsalted roasted, or I might have to dry roast raw ones myself. Other than that, the butter was great, nutty and very tasty. At about .75/cup to make, this is definitely a keeper!

When did my spouse become DH??

Over the last couple of years I've noticed a trend in online postings, referring to someones husband as DH, meaning Dear Husband. It seems to have caught on almost everywhere I look. Personally, I think this is rather stupid. I also don't see anyone posting "DW", as in Dear Wife. Could it be that these women using this term are stuck in the Leave It To Beaver era? Or is this just some stupid fad that will pass. I don't know, but it irritates the fuck out of me!

Gardens, they're not just for homes any more!

Having volunteered to work at the school this year, I was put in charge of the beautifying the campus grounds section, i.e. grunt labor for the pitiful excuse of gardens. Now, it's not the gardens' faults that they've been ignored or neglected. The staff does what they can, but with the budget cuts plus the craptacular "standardized testing" bullshit, they can barely keep up with what they are supposed to be doing. So S and I decided to take a hand this year and do some of the work.
We were met by grateful and enthusiastic staff and faculty where ever we turned. Many people have offered plants out of their own gardens, or promises of materials. Labor would be nice, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

SunButter

OK, so I've seen this product in the stores, but never paid much attention to it until now-SunButter, a "nut" butter made from sunflower seeds. W is getting very tired of the same old PB sandwiches for lunch every day, and I've been checking out different boards to find ideas for him. SunButter is being used by many people who have peanut allergies, and is supposed to be as good tasting as PB. So, I'm going to whip up a batch and give it a try, more on the results later.

The Month of Frugal Living

Even though we've been practicing frugal living for several years now, it occurred to me that we could be doing better. I started keeping track of things we were spending money on, like once a week trips to Starbucks, and once or twice a week eating out. When it comes down to it, it all adds up. So for the month of September, we are living very frugally. Instead of buying Teddy Grahams for the boys lunches, I spent a good part of Sunday in the kitchen, baking dried fruit and nut filled cookies. We also are resurrecting Meatless Nights, where once or twice a week we have a meat-free supper. (Last night was millet/chickpea patties, very tasty!)
Something else we're doing is spending no money this month on anything except necessities. No trips to Half-Price Books, no eating out, no buying anything except food, medical stuff, and gasoline until October. This also includes no going out, unless it's to a free event, and then we take our own food and water, since we can't buy anything there. So far none of the free events have been anything we've been interested in, but hope springs eternal. The first week hasn't been too bad, except for S's trip to the game store to watch the new 40K rollout, but he managed to restrain himself from buying anything. (Way to go S!)Three and a half more weeks to go, then we can see how much cash we have at the end of the month, which will be put into savings. If it goes well, we're going to try doing it at least one month out of every three.

Better Living Through Eating

This might seem to be counter to what any diet guru will tell you, but food is not only my life, but my passion. I have watched cooking shows all my life, since I was 6 years old. I started with the Galloping Gourmet and Julia Childs, dreaming of being able to create beautiful dishes when i got a bit older. I later found The Frugal Gourmet, and my cooking (which was fine already) really took off.
I was always a foodie, and a slow food person, altho I didn't know it until a couple of years ago, when it because vogue to eschew fast food and restaurants, and grow/cook for oneself. My German grandmother taught me the basics of cooking, those techniques that she learned from her relatives from the Old Country, like slow roasting, cooking grains from scratch, pots of spaghetti gravy simmering day-long on the back of the stove, and oh, the baked goods! Cakes and cookies and pies, oh my! Nothing could be better!
When I was a young adult, I was dirt poor, and fell into poor eating habits fostered by the American (and I use the term loosely!) food industry. I bought Hamburger Helper, and boxed mac and cheese, all those things which now have been termed "edible food-like substances" by food author Michael Pollan. I was calling it Plastic Food 20 years ago, guess I was ahead of my time once again!
Having a food-challenged child has been an exercise in stealth. A couple of years ago I discovered smoothies, that blended concoction of juice and fruit. This year, I began incorporating veggies in the mix, starting with carrots, and graduating to raw greens such as spinach, and raw cucumber. W either hasn't noticed, or had decided that they taste OK anyway, but he does drink them, which is the whole goal. I was totally amused at the two authors who came out the the 'hidden food' cookbooks, mothers like me have been doing this for decades, we just never bothered to write books about it. Oh well, another money-making opportunity missed!

Week Two almost over!

It's that time of year again, the start of school. Both the spouse and the son started school last week, and both seem to be doing fine. (I put my return to school off until the spring semester)It's going to be a long semester, with S taking classes in the evenings, Monday thru Thursday, we seldom see him except for a few minutes after he staggers in the door and checks his email before falling into bed.
I will be volunteering at my son's school this year, for the first time in three years. I was a substitute teacher during that time, and it totally sucked! The pay was crap, and what the subs have to put up with was unbelieveable. I'd much rather do it for free, that way if I don't like a kid, I don't have to deal with him/her.
Healthy lunches have been a bit more difficult to come up with, since we are limiting processed foods. This means more work for me in the kitchen, altho I don't mind, since I love to cook. S's lunches are usually whatever is leftover from supper the night before, but coming up with healthy selections for W's lunch box was a bit more challenging, since as an Aspie, he has major problems with texture and colors of any new foods.

Wow, it's dark in here!

Welcome to my blog! After certain peeps complained about no rss feed, I decided to go ahead and join the masses on Blogger. I hope you will enjoy reading my varied random thoughts, musings, rants and interests. So sit back, grab a drink and a snack, and enjoy the ride!