Day 1 $1, Saturday August 16
If I had an extra dollar today, I would send it to The Elephant Sanctuary for Tange’s Endowment Fund, my personal favorite charity.

When I was garage saling for clothes for Maggie, I made a lower offer on a collection of clothes and saved 75 cents! I hate bartering at sales, even though everyone says you should. However, the lady had come over and told me to make an offer when I started browsing. Plus, it was a way to actually get most of an extra dollar today. Yes, I would have bought the clothes even if I’d been turned down. (Funny part, she first said no, how about $6, then when I said nothing, she looked again and realized the original total wasn’t $6!) Technically, you could say I saved way more than $1 since I don’t buy MJ’s clothes at the stores, but since I never buy brand new clothes for her (unless at garage sales) I’m not going to count that.

Nothing’s stopping me and in fact, I have money set aside for Tange already. I should go send it in. And tack on an extra dollar.

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Oh shucks, in getting the links for the first paragraph, I discovered she started with $100, not $1. AND, we’re not allowed to duplicate what we spend it on. So I’m going to up the ante, and I’ll save Tange for a bigger donation. So, let’s do this again.

Day 1 $100, Saturday August 16
If I had an extra $100, I’d buy organic bread or white flour. I decided to actually do so this weekend, as I have spending money, and I’d really like to have organic homemade white bread. I have organic whole wheat, but don’t care for 100% whole wheat bread all the time. Given the current cost of flour, and the amount we use, I haven’t considered going organic in the grocery budget. But I can certainly afford to with my own spending money. But I can’t find it in town–checked the natural foods store and the grocery store. The former said she’d never seen organic white flour. I’ve found it at King Arthur, but it’s not available.

Find the money: Donate items no longer needed for a tax deduction. I just can’t stand selling things on EBay or Craigslist. The hassle and arrangements are difficult for me. I prefer to donate. And we just made some significant donations after clearing out the garage that should net us at least $100 savings on our taxes.

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By the way, although MMND started this back in June, she’s only up to day 14, as in the midst of it, they decided to move and did! I’ll try to do it more quickly, 5 days a week, but it is the beginning of the school year so who knows? At least it will be a fun break, especially as the amounts get large in a week or so!

If you’d like to help change the world, too, donate to The Charis Project. Even a dollar is enough to give one child a meal.

Maggie looks around and asks, “Where are we, Daddy?”

Woohoo! My daughter doesn’t recognize this grocery aisle!!!!!!

That’s why we only use it for storage. So far–I bought a solar light this spring. But sort of forgot about it and now it’s just one item on a long list of things to do around the house this summer.

Since she likes to eat meat, we want to be sure she knows where it comes from. Although she is rather doubtful of it, she does know that burgers come from cows. (She’s a bit confused on this point, as she also thinks that our veggie burgers come from cows.)

This weekend, we’re going to the county fair. Part of it is a petting zoo of farm animals. Eric told her about it today. They went through a number of the animals each of us would get to pet such as a pig and a chicken. Then she says, “And I will say thank you to the cows.”

Surprised, Eric queries her, “Why?”

“Because they make hamburgers!”

Wondering if she’s thinking that cows sit around making burgers with their hands, he says, “Maggie, hamburgers are made OUT OF cows.”

“I know. They are made out of little pieces of cows!”

“OK. And yes, you can say thank you to the cows at the fair.”

So she both knows where her meat comes from AND she wants to properly thank the cows for providing us the food. I love her!

We need to take her to Cattleana Ranch again so she can see the cows we actually eat. (And are eating for dinner tonight. Eric picked up burgers at the Red Radish.)

First, let me explain the layout. We have a detached garage which is technically for 2 cars, but only 2 compact cars. Which we don’t have. So we use about 1/3 of it for bikes and mower and such stuff, plus storing recyclables. This area generally gets pretty trashy in the winter as we don’t take time to store things properly. The previous owners built a “workshop” on the back that is a little shorter than the garage and about 8′ deep. There is electricity in the garage–one outlet and the garage door opener. Although it enters from the workshop, there is no electricity in the workshop itself. IE, it couldn’t actually function as a workshop, despite it’s name.

These first pix are in the workshop. The white wall is the former exterior back of the garage. Newly painted when all the lead paint abatement was going on. The tool hangars are just what I’ve always wanted–but it took Eric four stops to find them! We first got something at Menards, but it was all aluminum, and didn’t cinch, so it would have worked only for items with handles not just poles. He spent a couple hours the next evening running around to all the hardware stores to find the right item, finally at Lowe’s (which we avoid since it’s a new big box retailer in town). Woohoo! All these tools used to be a pile against the wall next to the door instead. In between the tools is the doorway to the garage (just barely visible in the first pic).

Just inside the workshop door (the one to the outside, not the one to the garage) is an old cabinet that I’ve used for gardening tools and supplies. The tools were in front of this cabinet before, meaning I could barely use the cabinet. Now it’s free and clear! And many of the hand tools are out of th drawer and hanging up. The fancy organizing tool for this job? A bunch of large nails! We also got a few hooks, which the green bag and whatever’s next to it are hanging on. We still need to find something for Maggie’s gardening tools, which don’t have holes in the handles, so they need some kind of double hook. Or to have a hole drilled in them; then I could loop some cord for hanging, just like some of my tools already have. You can see that we haven’t completely cleaned this area up yet.

And in the main garage, here’s a shot of the drying rack for the onions and garlic. It’s an old screen from our front porch when it had cool old windows (that didn’t work well and were covered with lead paint).

Last but not least, while I had the camera, I shot my bike and Maggie’s, plus her Trek bike trailer, since I’ve mentioned them before. You may be able to make out the lovely interior walls of the garage in the shot. If you can call them walls. That’s being generous. There are just various pieces of wood (mostly thin particle board) put up here and there, plus one nice section of peg board, except that it’s on the driver’s side where we park the car, so not very useful. And we can only part the car there, because the other side, the one with the bikes, has a beat up floor that includes some, for lack of a better term, potholes. Someday, we’ll replace the floor.

That paint wasn’t in great shape. And, as we found out, there were lots of cracks (expected) and even a hole:

Ralph spent the first 3 days tearing off the wallpaper, putting up a bonding agent (which had to be redone many times due to the amount of wallpaper glue–as we expected and told them to expect given the living room), and fixing the holes (they had to cut out one area it was so bad) and cracks.

Then he skim coated it all on Thurs. It took way longer to dry, despite the heavy duty fan in there for hours (and overnight). They had planned to put up the orange peel coating in the afternoon, but couldn’t. It was hot and humid outside.

Then he got an abscessed tooth early Friday morning–sudden and requiring something like 6 stitches. So nothing was done Friday.

Monday, they put up the orange peel. That hadn’t dried by evening, as I found out when asked to check it. Everything was dry, except one small area that I put my fingers on. See how well they covered the woodwork and floor. Far more than we would have done if doing this job on our own. I appreciate the care that was taken.

Tuesday, it got the primer and the first coat of paint, Sherwin William’s Derbyshire (just like the street my Mom grew up on), in their low VOC version! (Couldn’t get the no VOC one as the color was “too dark” for it. It did not look dark with one coat and we were afraid.)

Yesterday morning, the final coat was put on and most cleanup was finished, with a bit left for this morning. Ralph also said he could put the woodwork back on that was removed for the floor refinishing. Way cool! (unfortunately, we still have to have someone else come in for the living room as it’s too crowded with the den furniture for Ralph to do it this morning.) I like the color; haven’t asked Eric yet.

At some point in there, the ceiling was painted white, too. I have no idea when. All of the ceilings in our house are white. Except for the two that are drop ceiling tiles like you see in office buildings. (The LR, DR, and den also have ceiling tiles, but the kind that are attached to the ceiling itself.)

Speaking of which, is it still a lettuce salad where there are more other veggies than lettuce? Today’s contains: greens, basil, dill, summer squash, carrot, tomato, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, peas, green bean, Dragon’s Tongue bean, and flowers (3 kinds).

But now…I can make it Saturday morning or one night AFTER dinner and store it. Woohoo!

The timings great as I just made my first batch of pesto for the year. I’ve been putting it off, although there’s been plenty of basil and we got the cheese a couple weeks ago. Last year, I did it all at once, taking 3 hours! I just didn’t want to spend 3 hours making pesto just now. Then it occurred to me (aren’t I just brilliant today?) that I didn’t have to do it all, I could just make one double batch. A cinch to complete, and I have about 1.5 cups of pesto in the freezer. (The other 1/2c is in the fridge awaiting pasta.)