Archive for June, 2008
June 30th, 2008 - Yogurt Spinach Dip
Based on Yogurt Spinach Dip at AllRecipes.
I have a lot of spinach–my own plus the CSA. Luckily we’re getting the CSA because I don’t have much. But still, too much of that plus other greens to keep up with even when eating 5+ salads a week. It doesn’t help that Maggie won’t eat salad this month. Looked up dip recipes online, knowing there are some great ones with artichokes. But I’d have to buy artichokes, so I looked for and found one that was just spinach. I adapted it a bit, mainly because I forgot I was cutting it in half and used the full amount of spinach. Came out just fine regardless.
Yogurt Spinach Dip
* 1 cup chopped fresh spinach
* 1/2 cup plain yogurt
* 1/2 cup mayonnaise
* 1/2-3/4 teaspoons seasoning salt (1 tsp was too salty)
* 1/8 teaspoon dried parsley (or more fresh)
* 1/8 teaspoon dried basil (or more fresh)
* 1/8 teaspoon dried oregano (or more fresh)
* fresh garlic (I used one garlic scape)
Lovely chip dip as well as salad dressing. I should make it without the spinach as a dressing. Unfortunately, Maggie who loves dips must have been put off by the spinach as she wouldn’t touch it except if prodded. She preferred to eat her chips plain.
June 30th, 2008 - Book review: We Belong to the Land
We Belong to the Land by Beulah Meier Pelton is a memoir of farming during the 20s, 30s, and 40s in Iowa. What I love most is that Beulah knows full well that “the good old days” weren’t all that great–from outhouses to no running water to backbreaking work. She tells it like it is (was). She talks about the delights and how when the opportunity came to quit farming she realized how much she loved it. But she also talks about the realities they face without pulling punches. (I skipped a number of bloody passages about birth and death on the farm.) It’s also quite funny; she’s not a “farm wife” and pales in comparison to many of her neighbors. It’s full of vignettes of their 18+ years (plus a few chapters about her grandmother and mother as well her childhood) as tenant farmers. Although only a little over 100 pages, I felt like I knew them by the end–and wish I could go meet them!
Actually, I wished they were relatives I could go visit; not too far fetched since my Mom’s family is all in Iowa. I recently read through the family genealogy looking for old fashioned baby names, and I don’t remember any Beulahs.
June 28th, 2008 - If you wondered what happened to acid rain
Have you noticed no one ever talks about acid rain anymore, which I strongly remember as the biggest environmental problem of our my adulthood? Mental Floss explains what happened to it. (Short article, but in short: It’s decreased greatly, although it hasn’t gone away completely. And what do you know: cap and trade WORKED.)
June 27th, 2008 - Cat treats
The cat treat industry is amazing. I like to think that I’m pretty good at eliminating unnecessary products from my life. But it never even crossed my mind in the last 5 years that we’d had animals that cat and dog treats are not necessary parts of life. Until 2 weeks ago.
Mom brushed Maggie’s teeth. Sith has been conditioned recently to come sit on the toilet while I brush my teeth and wait till I’m done for a treat. He did that while Maggie’s teeth were being brushed as well. Maggie sometimes gives him his hairball medicine on Sunday mornings so she clamored to do so. I told Mom that it wasn’t time for the hairball stuff, but they could give him a treat instead. “Give him 3 or 4 pieces, over on the cat tree.” “What? 3?” “Yeah, the package says up to 6 but I think that’s too many.” “Wow. I just gave him one.”
And I realized that our childhood cat Esmeralda probably never had cat treats. So why in the world did I give Sith (and Shmi and Pi and yes, we like cat names with “i” in them) cat treats at least once a week, sometimes daily? I’m going to finish up the bag that’s open, any other bags we might have in the house, and then not buy any more.
Unless we have to give him pills. Shmi got lots of treats because they helped the medicine go down. (So many that she sometimes avoided the treats because she knew they came along with medicine. She was on a daily liquid for her OCD/allergies and a weekly pill for 3 years.)
I might try veggies on Sith, too. Pi loved veggies. Frozen beans were his favorite.
June 27th, 2008 - The CSA Advantage
I was right about the CSA: I’ll eat vegetables they give us that I’d normally never buy at the farmer’s market nor plant in my own garden. It’s happened already, with only two weeks of food. They gave us radishes. I’ve never liked radishes and only eat them if they are part of a salad. I’d never put them in a salad I was making just for myself.
If others are around to eat them, that is. But since the radishes are here and no else will eat them and I don’t want them wasted, and one small radish in a salad isn’t noticeable, I’ve been willingly eating radishes for two weeks! Not all of them, mind you. I gave two bunches to Sean and Elissa. I also gave them the “braising greens” from last week. I still don’t have the courage to even try eating cooked greens. But if we get more this week, I’ll do it. I may as well try it when they are free. (I know, I’m paying $21/week averaged over an entire year for this food so it isn’t free. But I feel that way because I wouldn’t have paid for it and they’d be given away otherwise and I wouldn’t miss them if they hadn’t been in the weekly bag. So they are a freebie.)
June 26th, 2008 - Getting rid of stuff
Have been doing a lot of purging the last few weeks. Each week, I think I’m done for now and have made three Goodwill trips in a month. And I’m set for another one this weekend. Mainly, it’s baby/toddler stuff. Since we aren’t planning on more, there’s no point in saving most of it. We are keeping a box or so in each size of our favorites to hand down to Monkey and AnnMee when they have kids. (Only through size 3. Even if they were to have a baby in a year, that’d be 3-4 years before they’d need clothes Maggie wears now. That’s way too long to save stuff.)
A couple I know from work just got two foster daughters and they’ll be taking the indoor swing and highchair. At first, it was just the swing, but when I emailed her last night saying I’d found all the pieces, I mentioned the highchair again–and she’s taking it. We are thrilled to pass them along to foster parents. (I’d also offered clothes and toys, but they’d already hit garage sales the previous weekend.) The girls are younger than Maggie and they live on a small farm. We’re hoping to go visit them next week.
The crib still needs to go. For now, it’s still a handy place for diapers (since we never had a changing table and don’t have a dresser). We’ll see if the women’s shelter would take it.
Need to get the bag of baby bottles up for donation. And the cradle.
June 23rd, 2008 - Why I haven’t gotten rid of my cell phone yet
The Good Human has a nice post about why cell phones should be expensive instead of free. I really appreciated that mine was free, however, when we first got cell phones 2 or 3 years ago. It made it easier to switch having a bit less to have to spend on it. When looking at our bill the other week, I noticed that we could get a new phone for me without hassles. I perused the available free phones and left the site without doing anything.
Was I tempted? Sure! My phone is a bit banged up, the camera is barely worthy of the title (it wasn’t a consideration when I got the phone), and I don’t get very good coverage. I know other people’s phones work near my office, but I’m lucky to get reception by the doors–usually I have to walk outside and then wait a minute for it to find coverage. I’d love to have a phone that worked in the hallway at least. Or even in the entrance way. I work in the basement of a library. It’s not terribly surprising that the phone doesn’t work (Did you know libraries are exceptionally reinforced? Books weigh a lot.). I wouldn’t mind except that I see LOTS of students and others using their cells down here so there is coverage. My phone just isn’t powerful enough to find it.
On the other hand, I very rarely use my phone. It’s more of a watch and a timer than anything else. It’s simply not necessary for my to have coverage everywhere. I use less than 30 minutes a month, not counting weekend calls to my parents.
But an iPhone…..think of what I could do with that!
If I do decide to get a new cellphone, The Good Human also suggests a few recycling efforts.
June 20th, 2008 - Simple summer solstice
Happy Solstice!
I spent the day trying (off and on) to figure out something to do to celebrate. I looked a bit online and found that bonfires are quite common. (Seems like they are for all turnings of the seasons.) So I decided to pull out the little fire bowl I bought two years ago. We enjoyed it last year, but didn’t use it very much and haven’t had it out this year.
When I got home, I switched to work clothes and Maggie and I headed outside. I finished bundling the branches, including cutting a few more from unwanted trees and a half-dead shrub. Then I realized I should just quit and do more work tomorrow and Sunday. Inside to change to less grubby clothes. Maggie headed back outside and I fixed a light dinner for us to eat outside.
I started up the fire–all on my own. I set it up and Eric checked on it before going out the movies. He made one little change in it. And I got it going all by myself. I believe this is the first time I’ve ever prepared and maintained a fire. Every 30 minutes or so, as it died down, I added a chunk of wood or some smaller pieces. I was worried that we wouldn’t have enough wood for more fires this summer without buying it (and was tempted to keep back some of those bundles…). Around 7 I discovered another entire box of wood pieces I’d cut up last summer. I think we’ll be fine this year.
We ate a light meal, including peas and onions from the garden with a fresh dip I made yesterday (also including garlic from the garden and items from the farmer’s market. And homemade yogurt), pretzel pieces, and local cheese. Later, we had some teddy bear cookies (from Gram and PopPop) and a piece of chocolate. I sat by the fire; Maggie sat at her table.
Maggie and I had a small Solstice dance, but neither of us really knew what exactly to do then she decided she was done after 15 seconds anyway.
I brought out a book, and moved it from my lap to the chair to Maggie’s chair to the table for most of the evening without every opening it up. I decided that I would simply enjoy the fire and chatting with Maggie. And so I did for about 3 hours. I never just sit and essentially do nothing for 3 hours. What a LOVELY evening it was. Quiet, relaxed, no stress, peaceful.
Around 7:30, I pulled out sparklers. Maggie was initially hesitant as she was afraid they would burn her. (We warned her a lot about the fire bowl and she was exceptionally careful about it.) When she quickly discovered they didn’t hurt, she had great fun. The only accident of the night: I burned myself. With a sparkler. On my toe. I don’t know what fell off, but I figured it was a little spark. Until my toe kept hurting! I burned a hole through the shoe and the sock and have a small blister.
The fire had died way down, and around 7:50 I put a bunch of twigs and bark on top to have a small quick blaze for the Solstice (at 7:59 CDT). I think I had it blazing a few minutes earlier, but who’s counting?
I loved the fire. I intend to have one at each Solstice and Equinox as long as the weather is appropriate (IE, not raining or snowing).
June 19th, 2008 - Budget for a recession
Gather Little by Little talks today about increasing budget categories beyond what’s actually needed. I’ve just done this with Auto: Fuel. His reasoning and mine are the same: If you are pushing up against the amount you’ve budgeted and you’ve already taken steps to reduce your usage but prices are rising, you have to increase the amount you put in that category. But if you put in only a little bit, in another few months, you’ll have to adjust the budget again. And again. On the other hand, if you pad it by increasing it by 25% right away, you have more time before you have to adjust again. And having money set aside makes it easier to keep paying all the bills.
We’ve been doing quite well on Auto: Fuel. I was so proud of myself. And then, in the last three months, including one in which we took a 2-week trip and all gas was paid out of the travel budget, we went over budget. I was surprised, until I read that gas prices had DOUBLED since I last adjusted the Fuel category. We had definitely decreased our driving; for instance we used to take weekly trips to Neenah and probably 1-2x up to Appleton (not counting church). Now we go less than once/month (not counting church). (And due to illness and bad weather, we didn’t attend church much this winter, either.)
Since we are losing the car loan category, I decided to put the amount previously used for service into the fuel category, which increased it 50%. We’ll use the car payment to save for another car AND to pay for service. Tightens that category a bit, but I still think we can save enough for a major down payment on a new car in 5 years, even if we have something major go wrong with the current car.
I probably don’t even need to say that we will not be increasing out car usage simply because there’s more money in the account. We’ll continue to be careful. If there’s more than we need at the end of the year, it will be used to counterbalance other categories that weren’t properly budgeted.
June 16th, 2008 - I want to be Patti
I hope I can be the wonderful Mom Patti is. And that Maggie has the imagination and vision her daughter Tessie has.
We’re working on it. This weekend, she wanted to play with a walking toy for babies just learning to walk. We let her. She tried to turn it into a stroller for Baby Meg, which didn’t work at all. So I brought up the stroller we bought (and only used 3 times, in the basement, during tornado warnings, as a chair for her). She LOVED it and had all sorts of adventures with Baby Meg, including going to work, going to preschool, and the baby getting sick.
June 13th, 2008 - Rain, rain, go away
We got 4.88 inches of rain last weekend. It was wet and some places flooded but okay here.
We got over 5 inches of rain yesterday evening. It wasn’t okay anywhere in Oshkosh: they even evacuated some folks via boats. Lovely city here, but it’s between two lakes and the interconnecting river. That spells problems every time we get a heavy rain. Our basement had a small stream running through it (I could even see where a tiny spring was bubbling up). The back yard was mostly under water. The garage probably flooded, but we didn’t check it last night. Unfortunately, we still had some boxes of stuff from cleaning out the car a week ago. Hopefully, nothing important was in them. I’m pretty sure the atlas is back in the car already. A lot of the spruce tree needles are no longer under it but on the concrete in front of the garage. That’s pretty weird looking.
My garden was flooded. Mostly the paths on the west side, but a few beds were under water. I’m hoping the dill and carrots Mom planted Tuesday survived (they weren’t underwater).
The street was flooded up to or over the curb. Many people drove through the street, which surprised us. Until I read the online paper and discovered that most of the city streets were flooded. One crazy lady decided to drive on our grass to avoid the water. It doesn’t look too bad this morning; thank goodness she had a smaller car and not a heavy pickup.
BTW, my parents are visiting this week and I’m mostly on vacation from work. Hence the lack of posts. We had plans to go to Portage in the middle/west of the state today. Given that they had roads closed yesterday due to previous rains, we figured last night’s storm would make things even worse. Not to mention that many roads between here and there are probably flooded. (The river that runs through Oshkosh runs over to Portage and we’d be crossing it many times. Except that it’s flooded everywhere.)
I hope our farmers are okay, especially our CSA farmer. (I got to meet her last week at the farmer’s market, so I feel even more connected to her farm now.)
Hope you are all staying mostly dry!
June 7th, 2008 - Chemical free bug stuff
Eric found this for me, and I definitely want to try some of them: Homemade, chemical free bug repellents, particular the anti-ant one. I’ve just known about boiling water, and that always risks the other nearby plants. Ants always make colonies around my bulb garden. And I have some Dr. Bronner’s mint soap!
June 7th, 2008 - Car will be paid off in just 16 days!
For the past year, I’ve been thinking about how our car loan will be paid off in July. About 2 months ago, I started talking about it. Yesterday, I decided to look up what the final payment would be. I’d been guessing it would be smaller than the regular payment, as that’s the way our house mortgage worked (and that’s the only payment schedule I recall seeing).
To my great surprise, it will be paid off this month! Oddly the payment will be $2 more than usual, but who cares? 16 days till our car is our’s! Woohoo!
We’ll be setting that payment amount aside now. Our hope is that this vehicle (a Honda CR-V, 2003, BTW) will last us another 5 years. We hope to have a good amount saved up towards our next car. Given that this one will be 10 years old, we figure it will be needing work between now and then, so we are unlikely to save the entire amount we’re putting aside. But we’ll have money for repairs. And even if we needed no repairs at all, we’ll only save about $22,000–and that’s about what the CR-V cost 5 years ago. Unlikely prices will go down. But even if we spend half of that on repairs, that’s still a great downpayment.
This is the third car I’ve paid off. The first was from my parents, although I just kept paying them $100 a month until it stopped working and I bought a new one. I consider it paid off since I didn’t have a loan on it when I got rid of it. My second car was a Saturn which I loved. I had a loan via my credit union at grad school, and I think we paid it off a year after leaving. It was nice to no longer have to send a check back there. I guess we owned it for about 7 years. We didn’t need a new car at the time we bought the CR-V, however, we were pretty sure we’d be having 2 dogs and 2 kids eventually. We already had one dog, and he wasn’t so great in the back seat. And he was getting bigger. And Eric didn’t particularly like the car–it was a smaller car and he wasn’t terribly comfortable in it.
I know, I know, it’s odd to be an environmentalist driving an SUV. I realize that all the time! However, with 2 large dogs and one kid, a car wouldn’t cut it. We could do a mini van, but I don’t really like them. And the dogs would have freer rein in the car. In the SUV, at least most of the time, they are contained in the back. (Emma wasn’t restricted on that with her first family. So when we leave the car, she usually runs up and sits in the driver’s seat. And eats any candy or cough drops she finds. She’s awfully cute as a driver.)
So, anyway: 16 days until we have only the mortgage payment. WOW.
June 5th, 2008 - No TV for a week
A nice side effect of the floor work is that our TV was unplugged all week. The LR TiVO (the HD one) was also unplugged although the old TiVO was left plugged in–but the TV wasn’t attached. Not that it would be comfy watching it on the porch anyway. We picked up some videos at the library at the beginning of the upheaval. We started watching one, but both found it boring. And I never picked up the rest. I read instead! (Plus worked late 5 nights, but that had been planned long before.) The only show I missed was So You Think You Can Dance, which is my second favorite reality TV show (the first being The Amazing Race). But, we set up the old TiVO to record it.
And it didn’t record.
Oh well! I missed it and am disappointed, but the week without tv reminded me that I’m always wishing I watched less. A forced week made it lots easier to give it up moving forward. I have to be honest–I usually watch less TV in the summer anyway so it’s not completely due to the floor work. But it was a nice kickstart. I intend to delete a number of shows on the TiVO that I just haven’t felt like watching before and I’ll go through the scheduler and take off a few other shows that haven’t been very interesting lately. I’ll fill the time working outside (and in) and reading.
Oh, and another added benefit. Um, actually, not sure it’s a benefit and I’m not sure why it’s happening: I’ve been having trouble sleeping, like waking up around 4 am (instead of 5) each day this week. Gives me lots more time to get stuff down around the house. Last night, I stayed up an hour late to see if that would help. Nope. I was out of bed before 4:30 again.
June 3rd, 2008 - First exta payment $4
Sent off the first extra payment on the mortgage over the weekend. $4 from some rebates. Feels lovely to have sent something off!
Ummm, I should note that I wrote the previous post last week, saved it to check something, then forgot to post it. So it refers to the adoption. Obviously, that has changed, so we’re moving right into the new budget.
So far, I think we can put $50 towards the mortgage each month. After the new year, it might be even more. Right now, we’re dealing with over $1200 in vet bills from last month (besides Pi getting sick and dying, Emma was also quite ill. And we thought it was Jedi, so he was seen first, then Emma for something else. Then 2 days later we discovered Emma was the one throwing up during the night.). And we decided to up retirement to 17% and charity to 3% (each a 1% increase). The easiest way to do that is to take 17% of our gross income for the year, so I did. IE, we aren’t increasing it to 17% for the rest of the year, but rather for the whole year. Which means that during the rest of the year, we’re going to increase them each by 2% (actually, more than that, as I was paid extra for teaching and the MBA work through July. IE, a more than half of our income came during the first half of the year).
I didn’t actually do this intentionally. I created the new budget then when I could sleep that night, I started thinking about it and realized what I’d done. Blame Quicken–it shows the current month’s budget and the whole year’s. To figure out 6 month’s, you have to manually add up those amounts. I simply took the yearly total for my income and multiplied it by 3% and 17%, subtracted what we’d already budgeted, and divided the remainder by 6 to see what we needed to increase it all by. (Not including June because we’re using income from this month to pay off the adoption expenses already spent on the homestudy.)
Boy, does this sound complicated and I wonder if anyone is even interested. Oh well, this blog is also for my own records of things we’ve done to be frugal and live simply. :)
Oh, and I’m putting more of our retirement savings in my 403B, so we might realize more tax savings, and have even more to put towards the mortgage. Or the house fund–we want to fix up a few more things now that we have some freed up money. We’re loving the new floors. The guy to give a quote on the den is probably there right now, and we might see if he can replace our back doors while he’s at it. (If you didn’t notice on the pix, the den/office’s wallpaper is peeling. It’s ancient, so we’re 100% sure the paint behind it is lead based paint. We aren’t required to abate it at this point, but we’d rather since we can afford it. So we’re calling in the same guy who did all the other LBP work to do the room.) Every other area of the house has been painted or wallpapered in the last 20 years so it’s about time.
June 3rd, 2008 - Book review: America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money
I’ve subscribed to The Home Economiser newsletter for a couple years. The authors came out with a book recently, America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money.
It’s similar to all the other books about being frugal and saving money and all those things I love to read about. I like reading these books because there’s always something that jumps out at me, even if the books seem quite similar. In this case, it was their dedication and ability to pay off a house in just 8 years. (I think they’ve done it twice, but I might misremember that. They might be doing it for house #2 right now.) It gives me the drive and desire to work on paying off ours. We’ve often talked about it, but then something else comes up–lead paint, adoption, you know those sorts of major events that cost tens of thousands of dollars that always crop up. (LOL. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen to other people like it does us!) I’ve come up with a possible budget post-baby that would allow us to put a little bit more each month towards the house.
And we’ve agreed that the money we used to put in the pickle jar would go towards the mortgage. When we started paying off the lead HEL, we switched the pickle jar to that. Then, when that was going well, we started splitting the larger monies like from rebates, testing, Deal Barbie, and credit card cash back in 3s–pickle jar, Eric, and me. (And the pickle jar fund morphed into funds for treating visitors. Which we ADORE doing.) Except for testing, the money will go 1/3rd to treating, and the rest towards the house. Since testing is considered work (we pay taxes on it, and we split child care the rest of the weekend), we’ll split that as before. We’re not talking large sums of money, but an extra dollar now on a 30 year mortgage saves a surprising amount of interest. (Quick estimate with 5% interest on a $100,000 loan,an extra dollar a month saves you $471 in interest on a 30 year mortgage. Or almost 1 month’s payment.)
Well, anyway, back to the book. It was a fun and easy read. One nice touch I’ve not seen in other books is that they have comments from their kids (5 teenagers/young adults). Sometimes they love what their parents do, and sometimes they complain a bit. Some of the information is very specific (such as the section about what discounts they’ve found with insurance companies), but all of the sections talk about how YOU can do the research and figure out how to save more money.
At the same time, they encourage having fun and not denying life’s pleasures. It’s about moderation and what you choose to spend your money on.
The book’s chapters cover specific topics including groceries, budgets, cars, housing, vacations, kids (I rather like their payday system for allowances), investments, and finally, attitudes. Much of the information has also appeared in their newsletters, but I still enjoyed reading it again all in one place. (Plus a lot was new since I’ve only been a subscriber for 2 years or so.)
I’m considering getting the book and newsletter as a gift for my brother and sister for Christmas. What do you think?
June 2nd, 2008 - FlyLady missions: living room
This week, the missions have been in the living room. I’ve quite dutifully followed them. WARNING: Monkey and AnnMee if you read this, please don’t tell our parents. We want to surprise them next weekend.
On Monday, we were supposed to clear off all the surfaces clutter. Check. I rarely have a problem with this. And I solved it even better on Tues.
Tuesday, we were supposed to do a thorough vacuuming, including under the furniture. So we (okay, Eric) moved all the furniture out of the living room and den.
We skipped vacuuming, however. Went one better. On Wed, we tore up the whole darn carpet and threw it in the garbage.
Wed’s dusting mission will be saved for after all the sanding is done since there’s no point in dusting anything this week. On the other hand, we have completed the mission for the living room. There’s nothing to dust! (Actually, this mission is usually about decorative items. that’s always easy for me to complete since we have no decorative items to dust.)
Sanding? That’s right. The floor is being completely refinished! It’s dried to a satin finish; this photo was taken shortly after the third coat was put on.
June 2nd, 2008 - Not adopting
Want to let you all know that this weekend we decided to not adopt. It is a hard/sad decision but we know it’s the right one for right now.
June 2nd, 2008 - Blueberries
I thought Monkey and AnnMee came last June, and so I looked forward to picking blueberries with my parents when they visit next week. However, I didn’t blog about it last year (why not???) so I had to search a bit to find the blueberry place back. It’s Blueberry Haven in Bear Creek, WI. And they say “see you mid-July!” Shucks! Oh, and it’s about a 1-hour drive, not nearly as far as I thought it was last year. Eric’s said he and Maggie will come along this summer if we couldn’t go with Mom and Dad.
On the other hand, it means we don’t have to eat the remaining 4 pints or so of blueberries in the next 7 days.