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I'm not sure why any Texas Xtain would be afraid of Hell, it's got to be cooler than Texas in the summertime. The heat paired with a major drought (unlike our usual yearly drought, which is much shorter) has pretty much killed everything in the garden EXCEPT the xeriscaped areas. Hhhmmm..... We have 4 struggling tomatoes which are no longer setting fruit, no matter how much water we give them, one pitiful pepper plant that will probably drop dead pretty soon, and one basil in a pot which is kicking ass. Guess what I'm planting lots of next year? Pretty much all the Mediterranean plants are thriving, like the lavender and rosemary, and the one basil. I'll be planting alot more of those next year. We got a tiny bit of rain, enough so I didn't have to water the plants for half a day. Three days of a nice steady soaking rain is what we need.
I'm almost finished with my first semester back to college, and it was tough. No more summer classes! The garden's pretty much burned up, we're going to try to start some new plants indoors where it's not 106. Other than that, working around the Farm to get things cleaned up and built. More to follow!
I am almost done with the killer summer semester! I don't really remember college being this hard, but then, I was pretty much in a haze those days. Grown up college is more concerned with the artical callwork, as opposed to what groups you join and what parties you go to in kid college. I do have to admit that this semester certainly opened my eyes as to how many different specializations there are in the field of anthro. And many subsets of my own field of interest, food anthropology. Maybe experimental arxhaeology.......
I've been doing mucho reading about food and food related things lately due to my return to college. What exactly does food and college have to do with one another? Because my degree is in anthropology, and my specialization is food culture. How we relate to food at a species is totally fascinating to me, as well as body size in other cultures. There's a new movement afoot called Fat Acceptance, which pretty much means give up the crap dieting and work on being healthy instead. We have been doing this for the last couple of years, after my partner and I had lost tons of weight during our courting stage, and gained it back after we married. I was in a band at that point in my life, and living the rock star lifestyle, with everything that entails. Little food, combined with large amounts of caffeine, little sleep, and other things produced a 125 pound loss over a 2 year period. As soon as I quit that life, I started to gain again. Funny how cooking and eating will do that to a person. It didn't help that my partner was a budding foodie, after a fairly limited food life, and as a former chef who LOVES to cook, I went hog wild. We also had a string of housemates in the early days to help make ends meet, who all loved my cooking. Even our tweeker housemate gained weight! I began to think about halting the gain when I had to go buy larger jeans once again. As I began to take stock of my life the last few years, I realized that I had been totally happy. Was life easy? Uh, no. Some of the worst times in my life have been in the last 6 years. (But so have some of the best!) I realized that I had been cooking many foods from my childhood, as well as new things. Almost all of these were new to my partner, he really didn't have a 'food culture' like I did. My maternal grandparents were first generation European-Americans. Papa was Italian, with the family coming from Salerno, Italy. Grandma was German, and was a wonderful gourmet cook. Some of my earliest memories are tied to smell and taste, just a whiff of a certain type of spaghetti gravy or barley-beef soup will trigger a memory of my grandmother standing at the stove. I noticed more and more the anti-fat ads, the horrific reports from the medical community, the out and out bigotry caused by someone else's phobias and fears. So it has lead me to a search of not only "Why?", but "How?" as well. Why and how did we come from the Baroque Period to The Stick Period? I'm thinking this is going to be my doctoral thesis.
So, the whole housefrau thing just wasn't working for me, and several attempts at some sort of business didn't do it either. Yea, I made a bit of scratch here and there, but was becoming increasingly depressed and unhappy, so after lots of long hours thinking "What do I want to do with myself?", I have decided to return to school and finish out that particular dream/fantasy. Returning to school took a bit of retraining, as a few things have changed since I was there 15 years ago. Looks like I can take most, if not all of my classes online, which helps with saving gas. So I'm currently working my way through Intro to Archaeology, which means at the end of the course I should be able to at least spell it! More on return to school later, it's time to do homework!
Yea, yea, I know, it's been forever! I totally suck at keeping up with these things! With that in mind, on to news.... I have decided to return to college and finish my degrees in nutritional anthropology. This willb e taking up the majority of my time, but I will try to post when I can.
Welcome to the fist installment of my March month long series, How to Survive The Economic Meltdown For The Everyday Person 101. I looked around the other day, and it seems like while everyone else is tanking financially, we're doing ok, on half or less of what many other people are making at the moment. So I started thinking "Why is that?" Turns out, many reasons. Some easy, others not so much, but all doable by just about anyone. We're doing our best to live within our means, and it's not always fun or easy, but so far has been worth it.And what exactly does that mean? In most cases, effort. It takes effort to deny yourself something, and believe you me, I know, especially when looking down the barrel of a chocolate eclair. There's lots of things you can do, you just have to try everything and see what works best. Some things, however, are a must, like reducing your debt. First you have to stop creating it, then you have to whittle away at it until it's gone. It may never be gone, but it can definitely be made less of a burden. Here's some of the things we've used successfully so far to reduce our outstanding debt and still enjoy life;1. Pay yourself first.I can't stress this one enough. I'd heard this all my life from older relatives, and thought "What a silly outdated idea!" OK, so I was wrong. It really means 'Have cash/money in the bank at all times' which is a really, really good idea. I'm not talking Roth, 401k, money market accounts, etc. I'm talking the most basic of basic. There are a few ways to accomplish this on even the most limited budget. Cash is a good way to start out. For every day spending like food, gas, bus/cab fair, pay cash for anything you can. Now, get yourself a jar or can, and set a 'carry limit' for yourself, like you won't carry any denomination of cash with you larger than X. We started out putting all coinage in our jar. After awhile, it got to be a game, seeing how fast the jar filled up. We now put anything smaller than a $10 bill in the jar, and when the jar becomes full, it's off to the bank to savings. The jar is great for immediate emergencies where you have to have money RIGHT NOW, like for medical stuff, cab fare the day car breaks down an hour before you're supposed to be at work, less diapers in the box than you thought and it's all the money you have access to till Friday, fun things like that. We do sneak a fiver once or twice a year for something naughty, like Starbuck's. It is NOT for things like cigs and beer. You can get a savings account with very little effort. I started out with a basic no frills savings account at the local branch of a national bank. It didn't pay much in interest (like next to none!) but it was a good place to park some money. We eventually opened a higher interest account with an online bank. We've found this has been a great way to save, since it takes 3 business days to get the funds from the online bank to our local branch national bank, it forces us to think very hard about using it. You will be surprised how fast this adds up to a healthy savings. 2. Limited credit card usage. Credit card usage like it was meant to be. We try really hard to not use our cards, and to pay off any outstanding balances. Yes, weakness does strike when we see that Ultimate Thing we've been Wanting for Ever So Long. So if we do buy it, then nothing else goes on the card until that Ultimate Thing is paid off. And of course there are the unavoidable things, like my mother's death last year. Had to be dealt with, plastic was the solution at the time. We are still paying off debt from several years ago during a bad spell of no employment. It'll be a few years before that's gone, but it's shrinking, and that's the important thing. Small purchases are used to maintain the cards, like using it for gas and paying the balance every month. This will hopefully keep the credit card company from doing anything really nasty like dropping our limit or jacking the interest. Fingers crossed there, there's only so much when dealing with credit card companies that the consumer can do, except not use them at all, which can be it's own hassle, unless you've got enough cash in a debit account to cover things like rental cars, which need a credit card. Tune in this week for the next installment, paying down/off outstanding balances.
