[5/365] Feather & Water droplet

This photo was an expirement with my macro lens. I used a feather from my Macaw Sunny and drizzled water on to it. I like the way this turned out.

Changing habits is tough

I hate to admit it by my husband and I fell prey to the world of infomercials. We recently purchased a "Redi Set Go" cooker. I just received it today and I am anxious to use it. The reason we purchased it is the flexibility it offers in preparing quick meals, especially breakfast. I'm trying to quit my McDonald's habit and I thought this would be a great way for me to make ahead breakfasts and also make them look visually appealing. This is not a shining example of frugal living, because we could have easily lived without it. Trying to change is tough.

I also saw Dr. Phil yesterday and I am fired up again on how important it is to live differently during this time of economic difficulty. I realized that I'm in control of the finances in our house and I have the ability to limit spending on unnecessary items. With a renewed sense of purpose I am going to work extra hard this week and try not to spend frivolously. Luckily I have a husband who always assumes we're broke and he always asks before spending. Now that we have settled in to our new house and most of the moving expenses have been taken care of it's time to get back on track.

I recently read a blog centered around 101 things you can do for free. Probably for half the items on the list one would not have been considered them "fun" in the traditional way but I found many of those items to be practical and worthy of doing. Some of the items hit on other goals I have of learning to live with with less, and decluttering. I know there are plenty of items that can keep me from spending extra money. I need to be creative in finding them.

My goals for this week are to utilize meals that are in the freezer; not to buy anything we don't absolutely need; and concentrate on unpacking and decluttering. I want to work on some of my personal goals I have established as well. This is a challenge I will be working very hard at it. Hopefully in the end we'll have a neater house, with less stuff and a fatter savings account.

Day One...or is it?

I've been doing my homework over the past few weeks since returning from California identifying and categorizing our spending habits. This meant going through bank statements and credit card statements and creating categories of spending. It was no surprise that food is our biggest tab every month...just as big a our rent paymen and there's only 2 of us. Pretty scary, all that money gone, literally. There's absolutely nothing to show for all the money we have spent on food. I think with dilligence and effort that I can cut our food spending by at least half and hopefully even more as I learn creative ways to stretch the food budget.

I also comb the web, reading up on frugal living, stretching food budgets, de-cluttering, reading articles about simplifying your life and so on. I have come to teh realization during my research that I really lack good ideas on this stuff. For example..."turn stale bread into croutons", I never thought of that. Perhaps its because I haven't been a very inventive cook, it's kind of hard when you eat out all the time. I can cook, don't get me wrong...I'm just not very good at coming up with ideas for food items I already have. We've never done well at eating leftovers, or re-facing them into a new meal all together. I can't really pinpoint why eating out is so appealing, I'm not sure if it's the fact that I don't have to shop, cook, clean or if it's the inventive ways they prepare and plate food. In an effort to make dining at home more attractive I have started outfitting my kitchen with nice equipment and dishes. This is a topic that I will return to some other time.

Today was my first true attempt at frugal shopping. I started out by creating a list and meal planning for the next 4 days. I reviewed all the sales fliers from 6 different grocery chains to see who the lowest prices on the items I needed to pick up. I went so far as to create a spread sheet (geeky/anal I know)and list all the items I wanted. I made a column for each of the 6 fliers and found that there was no store who was generally lower than all the rest. I'm not one for coupon shopping, although maybe I should be, or better yet...maybe one day I will be. I also don't want to go to 4 different stores to get the best prices on everything I buy.

I like to buy my produce from a local farmer's market and I go to the regular grocery store for everything else. While at the grocery store today I really paid attention to prices, sales, store brand vs. name brand items. I noticed that sometimes it's cheaper in the long to spend more, buying in bulk gives you a betder price...but that is not always the case, you have to watch the shelf tags and see what the price per unit is. I see the merits of bulk buying, however with only 2 of us it can lead to a lot of stock in the pantry. I don't want my pantry to feel like I've got enough canned food to last through the next century so this shopping thing is going to be a challenge unless I learn to be more crafty in the kitchen. I also noticed today the price difference in store brands vs. name brands. There is quite a difference there. I have to admit that I am a brand loyal kind of person, so switching to store brands is difficult for me. For items like vegetables I think store brands are fine, but I will have to remain loyal to Coca Cola, Tide and Heinz Ketchup, store brands are just not the same. It is a new challenge for me to find the lowest prices on those items which I am brand loyal on.

One of the ideas I had on making food go farther was to make a pot of soup on Sunday, carry it for lunch or serve it as a first course to dinner a few days during the week. Another idea is to learn what freezes well and put have of it back so that we don't get tired of it and have it go to waste. I do not have good containers for freezing soups, so I had to buy new disposable containers to freeze the soups. This was an impulse buy, I could have paid quadruple what a place like Walmart would have charged but I was there and I needed them. The containers added $12.00 to the food bill and also clutter in my tuperware cabinet) but I have good intentions on using the new containers and implementing my soup plan. I also really need a ladel but I was able to talk myself out of it, $8.99 saved.

When I arrived at the farmer's market I picked up the produce items on my grocery list. I did really well until I hit the checkout line. Right there front and center was a great cookbook publication which featured bulk buying items and how to use ever bit of them, which is right up my alley lately. I am a magazine/book junkie my favorite subjects are cookbooks, digital scrapping, photoshop, and photography. I am a frequent flyer at Barne's and Noble, where I pay annually for their member card to save 10% on my purchases. So to make a long story short, I bought the publication $9.99 over budget, which basically wiped out my savings from talking myself out of the ladel. I need to learn patience, I could have gotten that book a dollar cheaper if I would have waited to get it until we went to B&N, but no...I needed instant gratification. This is now 1 more cook book among a gazillion of them I already own and really don't use. I go to the interent when I want recipes now, and I always forget to start with my cookbooks.

I keep telling myself September 1st will be the real date to start living frugally. The next few days are my break in period, right? So I am not doing very well at this whole Frugal living lifestyle, but at least I took the time to study the items I was purchasing, and I successfully talked myself out of buying 1 item even though 2 others crept on to the list.

Learning to live frugally one day at a time

After a recent trip to California, Michael and I decided that some day in the not so distant future we'd like to live by the beach. While we were there we devised a plan to live more frugally. The main goal of our plan is to of course build a nest egg in order to accomplish our goal, but it doesn't stop there. Hopefully through this effort we will learn to spend wisely and live below our means without sacrificing quality of life, find more ways to enjoy life and be appreciative of what we have.

I thought this warranted a special category in my blog called "Frugal Living". I want to document the journey so that others trying to do the same thing might find something useful here or at least know that there are others going through the pains of learning to live frugally. We enjoy eating out daily, going to the movies, making sure we have the latest and greatest in electronic gadgets, and forgetting to save for a rainy day. I am ashamed to admit that I have no idea what a good price is on meat, milk or eggs...if we need it we get it. I am thankful that we are in a position to be this way and at the same time I am regretful that at our ages we are not where I think we should be financially.

This goal falls right in line with wanting to simplify our life and our home. I have done a LOT of de-cluttering over the past 2 years but for all the stuff we manage to discard or pass on, new items come into the house. Those new items often times provide us with immediate gratification but in the end it continues to add to the clutter and stunt the growth of our nest egg. In hindsight a lot of those items shouldn't have been bought at all. This became very apparent at the beginning of August when we moved very quickly. You don't realize how much crap you have until you have to move. When the next move comes up I hope to be moving much less than we did this time around.

Living frugally sounds so exciting when you read what others have done on the internet, for many of them it appears that it's better than sliced bread! I have to grow and learn that frugal doesn't equal deprivation, it shouldn't anyway. It should not change my quality of life, it should only change the things that I find important, comforting and fun. So as time goes on hopefully those changes will happen for me. Of course like anything else it takes time.

What's on your coffee table??

I was reading email today and came across a weekly photography newsletter from Digital Photography School. One of the topics in it was titled "What's on your coffee table?" I thought that was a perfect item to photograph today. I think it is a great opportunity to capture a piece of every day life, which is often overlooked. It is however a piece of what makes us who we are. It is the surface that holds our drinks, our TV remote controls, items we are reading or items we choose to put on display for guests to look at. Mine often is dusty, and there is usually a cat sprawled out too. Luckily I dusted on Monday so it was in pretty good shape. I took care to arrange the items so that they would fit in one picture, and for once there was not a cat laying on the table!

On my coffee table sits my stitching. I have been working on a picture of a preening scarlet macaw for a couple of years now. It has captured my attention almost exclusively and I haven't had the desire to work on much else. I've been working on a particularly difficult page and yesterday I pretty much completed it except for a few colors I am missing. Right now all my stitching stuff is packed away awaiting our big move.

Also on the table are some books I have been looking at. I've been working my way through the pink book Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a book. Today I will be starting chapter 5. I'm learning this software because I want to redo my Wired-Works Chainmaille tutorials and make them look awesome. I'm learning that there is a lot to learn with this app and I hope I can succeed. I also have been interested in gardening this year. A good friend Lois suggested Square Foot Gardening. I will be employing some of these methods at the new house. Also I love to pick up my quarterly edition of Artful Blogging. I love reading other people's blogs and this book features the best of the best and gives great insight into some really spectacular blogs. I hope one day that my blog will take on a life of it's own.

Last but not least is the takeout menu from a local pizza joint we tried for the first time. Lately I have not been motivated to meal plan or cook so we have been eating out more than we should be.

Tell me what's on your coffee table.