On Top of the World

A slow news month.

2010-03-10T04:09:00.001-08:00

There really hasn't been much to say on this blog lately. I haven't done a whole heck of a lot. I'm still unemployed, but finally got off my duff and applied for EI, so hopefully that'll help keep my head above water for a while. I sent off my tax return, and expect a decent amount back so that should also help.

Haven't done grocery shopping or much cooking or major cleaning in a while, so I can't even report in on that.

In short, I am in a simple and green slump.

Does that happen much to any other green and/or simple-living bloggers? Do you ever get a touch on ennui and just end up not doing much to move forward with your goals, instead just sitting back and resting for a while. Not even rest to recover from something. Just lazy rest, where you can't be bothered to make headway.

Absolute disgust

2010-03-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Rachel and I went to a local pet store, Village Pet Centre, to pick up some eye drops for one of our cats, who's had some eye irritation over the past few days. While there, we checked out the pets for sale, not with an eye to buying them, but just to spend a moment looking at cute fuzzy things.

That's when we noticed the hamster with the bleeding hind foot. We called over an employee and told him about it.

"Huh. Nothing I can do about it," he said. He looked closer to make sure that the hamster still had all his toes, said that the little thing had probably gotten its foot stuck between the bars of the cage and had ended up biting it, but nope, there was really nothing he could do. He wandered away to continue doing whatever he'd been doing.

Absolutely disgusting.

Yes, there was something he could do. He could take the hamster from its cage, clean off the foot, apply a bit of Polysporin (it's suitable for animals as well as humans), and clean the cage of the blood that was smeared on the bars, bedding, and food bowl. It's not rocket science; it's basic animal first aid. If he wasn't trained in it, that's not much of an excuse either. The store should train employees in basic animal care, and the employee at least should have thought to call someone over who did know how to do what needed to be done.

If it wasn't for the fact that our cat needed the eye drops pretty badly, we would have walked out right there and then, but neither of us could justify causing yet another animal additional suffering on principle like that. The only other pet store in the city that we know doesn't mistreat their animals was too far out of the way to get to at that point, clear across the city and off a bus route.

Needless to say, Village Pet Centre will no longer be getting our business, and we plan to write a letter to management about this incident. For the mistreatment of a $20 hamster, they have now lost potentially a few hundred dollars from two customers, and I have no problems with spreading the world about what happened today.

I beieve in treating animals properly, in acting as though they have as much worth to a comfortable and happy life as any human does. This was a blatant violation of what I hold dear to my heart, and might even be something the SPCA should hear about. It's neglect, pure and simple. Willful neglect of animal pain.

My heart goes out to that hamster. Believe me, if I had the money, we'd have brought the little guy home with us so we could take care of him. Apparently we have more knowledge of how to do that than the guy whose job it is to do so.

Happy birthday kitties!

2010-03-04T05:32:00.001-08:00

My cats turned 7 years old yesterday. Or rather, we celebrated them turning 7 yesterday. We don't know their exact birthday, having gotten them from a pet store rather than a private sale, but we know they were born sometime in early March, 2003. So we decided, for fun, to designate March 3rd their birthday, so that we could say they were born on 03/03/03.

They celebrated by playing with catnip toys, getting lots of pets and cuddles, and then sleeping a lot. I'm pretty sure they enjoyed their day, and so did we!

Good news!

2010-03-02T06:28:00.000-08:00

My mother did not have a TIA last Thursday! We went to see a neurologist today, as she had been directed, and he said that from what she described, coupled with the fact that she had a headache later that day that went to the following night, it sounded much more like a migraine with aura than a mini-stroke.

This was such good news to hear!

It did get me thinking, though, about the popular image of migraines in culture. A large number of people use the word 'migraine' to describe a bad headache, and while head pain is common in migraine sufferers, the two are not one in the same. This has also led to people who actually suffer from migraines being told, "Oh, you just have a headache. Stop complaining and just deal with it."

On the other hand, my mother's migraine was mistaken even by doctors as a potentially dangerous attack of something else entirely. If a migraine can look like a mini-stroke, tingling limbs and slurred speech and all, you'd think that would make people give it a little more credence.

But most people don't know that. Heck, it fooled all the doctors she saw except for a specialist.

Much like my roommate's IBS. People brush it off and tell her that a stomach ache is no reason to miss work. On the other hand, the pain associated with it has been compared to the pain associated with childbirth. She's been tested for kidney stones, more to rule it out than because they seriously suspected it was happening, but they wouldn't have wanted it ruled out if there wasn't a chance that it could have been happening. They don't X-ray your hand when you sprain your ankle, after all. Kidney stones are notoriously painful. She has that pain. And yet people tell her she must be exaggerating her illness because "no stomach ache can be that bad."

Which is why I'm spreading the word. Misconceptions like this cause poor quality of life for the sufferers, because not only do they have to live with the condition, they have to live with nobody taking them seriously and nobody making accommodations.

I'm glad my mother's doing well and that things aren't as serious as we both thought. But I hope this doesn't mean that even she'll ignore such health problems again, figuring that it's nothing the way so many other people do.

A connection to the people who let us live cheaply.

2010-03-01T05:22:00.001-08:00

What is that strange thing in the image above? It's a candy wrapper for a banana-and-cream sucker from China. Not something you typically see outside of Asian markets, unless you're, well, in China.

This was found inside a newly opened box of shoes last week, at the store where my roommate works. She was putting new shoes on the shelves, and opened a shoebox for the first time, and found this tucked inside.

This is a connection to the people who made that pair of shoes, the people who work and live in substandard conditions so that we in the affluent west may spend a little less money on our belongings. I don't mean to come off as preachy when I say that. I'm sadly aware that my clothes, my electronics, most of my belongings, were all made by cheap labour so that a big company could save on production costs. Alas, I don't let have all the skills I need in life to make my own clothes properly to cut down on things like this.

But when my roommate showed me that wrapper, I really started to think. It's one thing to think of some faceless mass of underpaid workers toiling to make cheap goods, but it's completely another to think that the person who made that shoes left a little something of themself behind. Did they have to sneak in that little treat? Where did they buy it? Do they like banana-flavoured things, or was it just a random grab from a box of suckers?

That faceless worker suddenly got a face, and it made me all the more aware that they all have faces. We tend to forget that, and lump them all in together because of a similar condition they all share. But they're all individual people, driven to the factories for one reason or another, trying to live their lives as best they can. They all have failings, foibles, fantasies. They're all individuals, and I'm going to try even harder to keep that in mind from now on.

After all, I've got hard evidence sitting in my hope to attest to that.

Simple Saturday

2010-02-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

A very simple Simple Saturday today. The thing I'm most thankful for right now is that my mother's in good health again and isn't suffering any bad effect (aside from being scared) from her mini-stroke.

Prayers and well-wishes appreciated.

2010-02-26T03:57:00.000-08:00

My mother had a transient ischemic attack, also called a mini-stroke, last night, and was taken to the hospital. She's doing fine now, all her functions have returned and her diagnostic tests (CAT scan, ECG, and blood workup) came back clean. The odds are in her favour that this won't happen again, technically, but all my research in the past tells me that TIAs like that are often warning signs of deeper problems, and that 1/3 of people who experience them once experience them again.

She's only in her mid-40s, and this understandably scared her very badly. If you have any extra energy today, I, and she, would appreciate some good vibes sent her way, to help her recover from this properly, both physically and emotionally.

Insults disguised as other insults.

2010-02-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

My temp agency called today, to discuss with me a complaint given to them by one of the supervisors at the temp job I'm doing. Turns out they had a complaint about my hygiene.

Oh dear, I think. Until they told me the reason for the complaint.

I wear the same clothes to work every day.

Yes, that's right. Wearing the same clothes, regardless of whether or not they're clean, in a hygiene concern.

Now, had they said, "She wears the same clothes every day and they smell bad," I could have seen a legitimate complaint. But no, that wasn't the issue. The issue was merely that I come to work wearing the same clothes all the time.

Which I wash quite often,I might add. I need to, since I don't like to stink.

I've been advised to change this habit. I wanted very much to ask where they think I'll get the money to buy a new wardrobe to satisfy people I'll only be working with for another few days. My three weeks of employment is going to get me the following: a month of rent paid, a bus pass for next month, expensive medication that I need to stay alive, and the payment of debt which hasn't been paid in months. I'm not overly concerned with the fashionistas I'm offending by wearing the same clothes.

I wear them because they're the only business-casual clothes I have. I also have about 5 pairs of pants that are the same style, colour, and size, because I like them. I could actually wear a different pair of pants each day and without looking at the label, nobody would be able to tell.

This wasn't a complaint about my hygiene. It was a complaint about my fashion sense.

I tend to wear the same style of clothing a lot because I like it. Unlike most females, I don't feel the need to have a large and colourful wardrobe to select my clothes from. I have a few t-shirts, a few pairs of pants, a couple of sweaters, and a nice big skirt. The skirt's not suitable for work, and I wear the sweater over my t-shirts when it's cold. I can't afford more than that right now, and wouldn't need it even if I could.

I'll keep wearing my black sweater and black pants, thank you very much. I like the style, and I call myself something of a demi-goth anyway. The Green Goth... Maybe that's what I should have called this blog.

(Or the Gimpy Green Goth, given the way my ingrown toenail has been playing up lately...)

Silent Sunday

2010-02-21T05:13:00.000-08:00

Simple Saturday

2010-02-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

Simple things I've enjoyed this week:

The sun is shining on this glorious false-spring day

I feel better, health-wise, than I have all week

I bought myself a treat last night in the form of a sinfully delicious chocolate pastry

I've been enjoying a lot of reading lately

Haste really does make waste.

2010-02-19T08:40:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty quiet, blogwise, this week. Too much work, not enough inspirational stuff happening or to say.

But today it hit me that I've been getting lessons at work that I can so very easily apply to other areas in my life. Specifically, the concept of doing things right the first time.

You'd be amazed at how much time it takes to correct mistakes or ommissions when you're putting data into a computer system. It may seem simple, just typing in names and addresses for 8 hours a day, and in some respect, you're right. Assuming, of course, that all the information's there.

If it isn't, then I have to take extra steps to make sure it gets into the system.

It may seem a trivial thing to leave out your postal code (or zip code, for you USians) when filling in your address, but consider that when you do so, the time it takes for the data entry agent to go online and look it up will take more than twice as long as it takes you to write it down in the first place.

And while they're looking up your missing information, there's more time before they can move on to the next entry.

Or perhaps longer before they can move on to your entry because they're busy finding info for other people.

This isn't my way of nagging people to be complete when filling out forms (though you should be, really). This is my way of comparing that to the rest of my life. If I take a little bit of extra time to do things right in the beginning, then it saves time in the end. Even if the time saved isn't my own, the overall process runs more smoothly because I did what I was supposed to do.

Whether it's in regards to recycling, finding a job, keeping my apartment clean, or any number of other things, I'm going to try to really focus on this lesson. It's been drilled into my head over the past two weeks, and it's not a bad lesson to be drilled on. It's like what I was saying the other day, about how it's a lot of trouble to clean up the accumulated messes in my apartment. I did things wrong the first time, and now it's a lot of trouble.

But if I'd been more diligent, done a little bit of work then, I could have saved myself a lot of work now. It's a humbling lesson as well as a profound one.

I just regret that it actually took me this long to properly learn it.

Taking a sick day.

2010-02-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

I really shouldn't have, but I came home early from work. I ended up waking up an hour and a half earlier than normal this morning, after only about 6 hours of sleep, and then had an upset stomach for the better part of the morning. Add that to the cold that's been steadily growing inside me for the past few days... Even my supervisor deemed it better that I go home and rest rather than infecting everybody there.

Of course, since I was there yesterday, part of today, and will be there tomorrow, I'm still likely to infect people. It can't be helped. That's the catch-22 of sick days. A lot of workplaces say they want you at home when you're sick, not at work, so that you don't pass your sickness around. And yet they will punish you for taking what they decide are "too many" sick days, and unless you're lucky enough to have paid sick time, the day you spend at home will be an unpaid one.

I'm going to have to work late tomorrow and Friday, and possibly go in for some overtime on Saturday, to make up for losing part of today's pay. I can't afford to do anything else right now.

This is why I wish most fervently that I had a steady well-paying work-from-home job, one that could give me enough money to meet my financial obligations. I don't even want enough to meet my financial obligations and then some, because that's just being greedy. There isn't much I want to buy for myself that I can't do without, and quite frankly, being able to work from home is enough of a bonus that I'll gladly take some losses to personal possessions.

Working from home when I'm sick will be a sight easier, too. I can lie around in bed in pajamas all day if I want, so long as work gets done. I can work in short stints, taking many little breaks, so long as the work gets done.

It's a goal of mine. I want to make enough money from doing side-projects and things I can do at home to be able to support myself. It may take a year or two to properly set up, but if I work at it, I'm sure it can be done. My lifestyle won't be exravagant, but then again, if you know anything about me from reading this blog then you'll know that I'm not looking for extravagance. I'm looking for simple frugal comfort. I want a cabin, not a palace.

The flip side of simplicity

2010-02-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

You'd think that simplifying my life would involve less work than normal, right? After all, work is a complicated thing, so it just stands to reason that making things simple would make things easier.

Not if you've been living in a complcated mess for years!

In striving for a simple life, I first have to start picking up the pieces of my old life, tidying them up, and storing them where they need to go. This can be the very opposite of simple when you've got years of crap to sort through.

And I don't just mean physical crap, though that is a huge part of it. Right now, I've got an apartment full of junk that needs wading through. We need a storage room to put a lot of the boxes that have things that we need or want but don't have room to keep around without having boxes piled five feet high in our hallway. Somne of those boxes are filled with things we legitimately don't need, things that were thrown in there in a hurry during our last move. Things that we needed but couldn't find and so bought another of. So much stuff, and it's toxic!

Not the possessions themselves, but how they are kept, how they are used or not used. Seeing the high piles of boxes in this place is an energy suck. It makes one feel tired just to see them, because you know just how much work is going to have to go into sorting it all out. You feel defeated before you even begin.

Or, to put it more accurately, I feel defeated before I begin. Which is why this stuff is still sitting around after 4 years.

But not all the crap to wade through is physical. Some of it is mental, and by that, I mean my attitude. I'm not a get-up-and-go person by nature. I am, in actuality, something of a lazy person. I enjoy sitting on my behind with a good book in my hands, putting off housework until tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe next week... You can see where the problem lies.

So in simplifying my life, first I have to make it way more complicated. I have to clean up, both inside and out. I'm used to this way of thinking, though. When I was young, and my parents told me to clean my bedroom, I always knew it had to get messier before it got tidier, because I'd have to sort through things, move stuff around, all that jazz. It would see like hours passed with no progress made, but then nearly everything would be finished fifteen minutes later!

And once the major complication of tidying is over, the rest is just maintenance, which is much easier. It's a lot easier to make yourself wash the dishes when you know there's only a few plates and some cutlery to clean. It's really hard when you know you've got about 5 or more loads piled up on the counter because you got slack.

I did get slack this past month, with just about everything. Cleaning and cooking fell by the wayside. Last week I gave myself a bit of a pass, since I started working again, but that's no excuse for the three weeks before that! Some food has spoiled in the fridge. Lots of dishes need washing. Laundry needs doing. The floor by the front door needs a good sweeping and mopping.

In addition to the zillion and a half other chores that need doing around here.

Tonight is the night we put the garbage out. I'll get rid of the spoiled food, at the very least, and wash some clothes for the rest of the work week. If I have time and energy (work was tiring today), I'll see about washing up some of those dirty dishes. I'd much rather spend the evening reading, but I know, when I remember to remember, that there are more important things I can be doing with my time.

Silent Sunday

2010-02-14T05:03:00.001-08:00

Simple Saturday

2010-02-13T03:59:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start doing Simple Saturdays in addition to Silent Sundays. In a sense, this gives me a nice little weekend break from heavier blogging, and yet still allows me to post and to focus on the finer and simpler things in life, which is what this blog is all about.

Simple Saturdays will basically consist of a short list of the simple things that I am currently thankful for. There are a lot of simple things that are in my life that I don't give enough thanks for, really, and it's time that changed.

So, without further ado, the following list contains some of the sweet simple things that I have appreciated this week.

Going for a short walk at lunchtimes

The love of two beautiful kitties

Sleeping well for the past two nights

Weather warm enough that I can open my coat without freezing

Knowing that I'm earning money again, even if it is just for a little while

First week = done!

2010-02-12T13:50:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of my first week back at work, and also that a third of the assignment is already over. The days may have passed slowly at times (especially after lunch), but the week just flew by, and it's hard to believe that it's over already.

For the curious, what I've been doing is working for the local branch of the Red Cross, processing donations for Haiti relief. The government has pledged to match the amount of money donated by individuals (companies and anonymous donations don't count), but there's a deadline to be met in order to get that matched money. The deadline is a week and a half away now, and there's still a ton of work that needs doing.

Hence hiring a few temp agents to do some data entry.

I didn't donate money to Haiti. Though perhaps it's more accurate to say that I couldn't donate money, seeing as how I had none to donate. But even though I'm being paid for the work rather than volunteering (I don't even know if they'd take volunteer data enterers), I know that I'm still helping out, since every donation I process is going to be matched. Every $10 that I enter into the system, $20 goes to Haiti.

And thanks to a donation I processed that was over $20000, that's a heck of a lot of money going to help people!

Yes, that donation was made by an individual. Bless them, whoever they are. And blessings upon all who gave up time or money to help others, this time and every time in the past and every time in the future.

Planned Obsolescence

2010-02-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

If there's one thing that really cheeses me off, it's the notion that things are made to break apart. And I'm not just talking about knowing that things will biodegrade eventually. I mean things that are made to fall apart earlier than they ought to, so that consumers will be forced to rebuy a product.

Drives me nuts, it does!

Computers are the perfect example. Provided one is interested in having a top-of-the-line computer, things are set up so that by the time you get a new computer, it's already fallen "out of date". Granted, that's partially due to a fast-moving industry, but on some level, manufacturers push this kind of marketing. Release a product and then very quickly have it become second-best, forcing the buyer to buy upgrades (hopefully from the same company, of course, to ensure maximum compatibility) to get their machine to the peak again.

It's a vicious cycle. And sadly, it works. How many people go out and buy new computers these days when they still have one that works perfectly well?

When I got my latest desktop, it was because the old one had finally kicked the bucket. The power supply was shot and the hard drive had already been replaced twice. My parents offered to pay for a replacement for me, and when they asked me what specs I wanted, I told them that I just wanted no more than what my previous system had.

Turned out that they didn't make 'em so crappy by that point. What I got was about 5 times as good as the one that had died, and that was the lowest and cheapest model I could find in the store at the time.

But this sort of thing is seen other places than computers. Companies build their products with flimsier and flimsier materials these days, charging the same price as if they were using sturdy materials, of course. The products break sooner, have to be replaced more quickly, and then the company has more of your money than if they'd made a sturdy product in the first place.

On one hand, using less of a material to make a product is beneficial, since when you pare it down to the bare minimum of what's needed, then less gets used so less gets wasted. It doesn't take as much plastic or wood or the like to make something. On the other hand, if your product breaks when you accidentally drop it only once, that has now become waste, and you've got to go buy another flimsy copy again. Funny enough, making things 50% more sturdy could save a lot of hassle and money.

But manufacturers aren't out to save you money and hassle. They're out to take money from you. I don't begrudge hard workers their wage, but I do dislike shady business practices that make sure what I buy is of lowe enough quality that it's practically ensuring that I have to go back to buy a replacement before I need to.

I've seen cell phones made in the early 90s that still work. I've seen the majority of cell phones made in the early 2000s (the "naughties?) that aren't good for anything but being a paperweight now. I think I'd rather have a "brick" that works in 20 years than something small and stylish that fails in 3.

Affluenza

2010-02-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

I recently watched the documentary Affluenza, which talks about the culture of overconsumption in America today. Not living in America, I can only base my opinions and thoughts on what I see of my own country and of the media of other countries, but it does seem to me that this documentary hits the nail right on the head.

This comes as no surprise to any of you. Why would you be reading this blog if you didn't at least have some small interest in the commitment I've made to a simpler and more frugal life?

I agree that there's a huge culture of overconsumption in the more developed countries today. I'm also thankful that there are people out there who are working to fight it, or at the very least to not be as big a part of it. Every time you buy second-hand, that you recycle or reuse, that you acknowledge that you don't need the biggest newest product, you're doing your part against that overconsumption. Even if nobody is really listening, you can rest with a clear conscience, and you can tell yourself, "I didn't contribute to a problem."

I see a lot of people participating in "no spending" challenges lately, on the various blogs I read. For a certain number of days during this calendar year, they are trying to not spend a single penny. They limit themselves to spending money out of maybe a third of the year, and I admire then for it.

The biggest reason I didn't bother participating in such a challenge this year is that it didn't seem fair. I'll have a job starting on Monday, but before that, I had no money, and aside from borrowed money for groceries and other essentials, it didn't seem fair to participate in a challenge where I wouldn't be spending purely because I have nothing to spend. It would be like a vegetarian participating in Meatless Mondays. Not much to brag about when it's just a part of your everyday life.

(On a side-note, I have found employment again, evem if it's only for 3 weeks. I'm very thankful for it!)

Being unemployed has taught me a lot. For one thing, as much as I said before that I wanted to have a simpler life, I didn't have a great amount of motivation to do so. I was trapped in a consumer spiral. I worked, I had plenty of money, and I spent the excess on fun stuff to fill the void. And the void got bigger, and I knew that to fix it I had to simplify, but maybe I'd do that after this next paycheque, because there's a new book and a new video game that I want.

Next time, next time, always next time.

But being unemployed taught me, more than anything else could, that I've got plenty, I have even more than I knew I had, and I didn't need to keep buying more. I'm a stockpiler by nature, but I stockpiled all the wrong things. My stash of yarn will keep Rachel and I in socks and scarves for years, no doubt, and my video games will provide endless hour of entertainment, and so will my books and my burned DVDs of podcasts. But oh, there's that pesky manner of food.

I got so used to food being always there, and always more than I could eat, that I didn't really seriously grasp the thought of being without it, having it limited. My video games won't fill my stomach. My yarn won't make dinner.

I've learned to take stock of what I have and to be more appreciative of it. And I've learned that when I get regular steady income again, I know my priorities have been re-arranged. First, I pay my allotted amount into the joint bank account that Rachel and I pay our rent and bills from. Then I pay money toward my debt. Then I buy any medications I may need, since I do need a steady supply of some kinds.

Then I start looking at two main things. The first is storing and preserving food for lean times. If I ever lose my job again, it will be a great load off our minds to know that we've got enough food to last us for a few months without real worry, for example. The second thing, and equally important, is to start an emergency savings fund. Stored food won't do us too much good if we have no way of paying the rent. I'm pretty sure our landlord won't accept a bag of dried apple slices in lieu of $535 each month.

It's funny what having so little can do to make you realise just how much you actually have, and to help you put your priorities in place.

Green Goes with Everything, by Sloan Barnett

2010-02-08T03:45:00.001-08:00

Thoughts: Not going to do a "back of the book" intro to this today, because what this book is about is fairly obvious. The green revolution is upon us, and this is another book filled with info about the toxic products in our lives and how we can make little changes to our lifestyles in order to make us more healthy, and the planet more healthy along with it.

I have to admit, this book did have some good advice and good information in it. It was very America-centric, which is good for Americans, but bad for anybody who happens to live outside America when they read this book. I have plenty of research to do now to find out if Canada has pretty much the same view on chemicals and additives that America does. I know we don't allow bovine growth hormone to be used anymore, but beyond that, I have to admit that I have no idea what my country's green regulations are.

Green Goes With Everything was broken up into easy-to-understand sections relating to the products and processes covered, from household cleaners to makeup to clothing, which prevented a whole lot of jumping around that I've seen in other books. It also had a handy listing at the back for companies that make green versions of a lot of the everyday products that we use, so as to give us a little more choice in the matter, which I'm quite thankful for.

However (and isn't there always a 'however'?) this book felt like a huge advertisement for Shaklee products. Which I wouldn't necessarily mind so much if the author didn't have a personal stake in flogging Shaklee products. The company may make some good green alternatives to common products, but when the company is owned by the author's husband, I really have to ask myself how much she was recommending the products because she'd feel bad not recommending them, or because she gets to benefit from the potential increased sales. They may work just fine, but since her motives are suspect, now so are mine. I don't like branding being thrown in my face like that. It makes me take the advertising less seriously. Minus points on that one.

This book also seems to be heavily geared towards women rather than men, or women and men together. Since it was written by a woman, I can't fault her too much, since most people tend to write what they know and for whom they know, and most people tend to generally have a majority of same-gendered friends. But this struck a chord with me and made me wonder if the proponents of green living are, as a majority, female rather than male.

Either way, this made for some pretty odd advice. Like throw away your chemical cleaners right now, but even though your makeup might be dangerous too, yeah, just keep using that stuff and replace one item a week with a green alternative from now on. Is makeup actually that important to women? I understand that chemical cleaner are more dangerous all around than foundation cream or lipstick, but it still seems odd to say, "By the way, some lipstick has been shown to have dangerously high amounts of lead, so keep using it until it's gone, but if you can, try to find a green alternative, but if not, meh, that's not so bad." Minus points again on skewed priorities.

But if you can get past the rampant advertising for her husband's company, you'll find a lot of useful information and advice in this book. Though it has its problems, I can't deny that this was a helpful book and an informative read.

And now, if you'll all excuse me, I'm off to get ready for my first day of work at this new temp job!

2010-02-07T05:42:00.000-08:00

What the heck is Swagbucks, anyway?

2010-02-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

Some of you have probably noticed the Swagbucks banner in my sidebar. Some of you know what it is, but undoubtedly there are a few of you who have no idea and who hesitate to click on it because goodness knows where it could lead you. Winning stuff by searching online? Scams start off with a hook like that all the time, after all.

This one? Not a scam. What it is is a search engine that rewards you with a certain percentage of their ad revenue when you search. Use their site to find what you're looking for, get a little reward every so often, and keep coming back to get more rewards. It's a benefit for everybody.

You exchange the points for prizes once you've saved up enough, and the prizes are pretty good. Magazine subscriptions, gift cards to websites and restaurants, TV shows and songs to download through iTunes. There's a good variety of things, and you get to earn them by doing nothing more than you'd be doing when you search for something online anyway.

It's not a bad search engine, either. Not as good as Google, I have to admit, seeing as how quite often you actually have to ignore the first few links that it brings up because they're nearly always sites that will try to sell you something, but if you know how to read it, it's a pretty decent system.

They also have things like Megabucks fridays, where when you search for something on Fridays, you have chances of winning increased Swagbucks. It's not unheard of for a person to win 100 Swagbucks at a time. What does 100 Swagbucks mean, though? Well, it can mean $5 directly into your PayPal account, for one thing, with some points left over.

It's also got a nifty referral bonus, too, where for everybody that signs up under your referral, Swagbucks matches the points that they earn, up to 100 points. So when somebody who signed up under my referral earns 5 Swagbucks, for example, so do I. And so does anybody that signs up under your referral.

I've tried out a few "search and win" sites before, and some of them have been scams, or give tiny points values, or some other thing that makes it not worth it to stick around. But Swagbucks is actually one of the best I've seen, which is why I use it as often as I can. My trick is to search for things I already know. Need to look something up on Wikipedia? Just use Swagbucks to search for Wikipedia instead of typing in the URL yourself. You'll get there with just one extra click, and you've got the chance to win some points in the process. Sneaky, but effective.

Sign up and give it a whirl. It may take a while before you get enough to exchange for something, but the fact that you can get it for free is a big bonus, in my book, and there are some pretty cool prizes to choose from in their catalogue.

A wonderful surprise.

2010-02-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

I had a delightful surprise the other day with the delivery of a huge package in the mail. I couldn't for the life of me remember sending away for any freebies that large, and it took me a while to remember that yes, my part of a knitted shawl exchange had arrived.

Inside was much more than a shawl, though. A scented candle, 6 skeins of yarn, a desk calendar, some cat toys, a pin, and a lovely card came along with the shawl, which I shall get pictures of as soon as I can. It's very long, and in variegated shades of purple wool. I just love it!

I'm the kind of person who loves getting things in the mail. Letters, little free samples I've sent away for, all kinds. There's something thrilling about seeing an envelope addressed to me and wondering what's inside, or opening it up to see something you've been hoping would arrive soon. I love hearing that the mailman has just been by, and I go straight to our tiny little mailbox and see what's inside. More often than not, it's junk mail or bills, or something for Rachel, but it's fun all the same just to look and see.

That's why I tell people that my favourite part of my birthday is getting cards. Often they forget, especially family, and opt to send an e-card, which I have to admit is an eco-conscious decision and I can't fault them for it. But I love opening cards and reading them, and I save each one. I don't know how many cards I have from years gone by now, but sometimes I'll look at them again, and instead of a flutter of excitement I feel a warm sense of love and appreciation. I was remembered by somebody, and here's the physical proof of it.

Good news!

2010-02-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

I have a job again!

Granted, it's only a temporary job, but 3 weeks of working for $11 an hour will give me enough money to pay the rent this month, buy the medications I need, but a bus pass for next month, and still have a little money to pay toward my debt. That is, of course, assuming full-time hours of 40+ hours a week, but since I've been told the project has a 3 week deadline and they're seeking temp staff because they're a bit behind, I imagine that I'll get decent hours.

I am so happy about this! Yesterday I received a call and found out that I didn't get a job I was hoping for, so finding this out today really softened that blow. The rent will be paid this month, and we won't have to tighten our belts further in order to do it!

Definitely a good thing to get out of bed for this morning.

And I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that by the time this contract ends, there'll be some other work soon after, so that I can pay March's rent too. But that's in the future. For now, I'm just going to be happy about starting work again on Monday, doing something I'll like to do, doing it close to home, and making good money once more.

Blogging and money

2010-02-01T04:15:00.000-08:00

I read yesterday that Emily of Under $1000 Per Month actually made over $1000 in January from ad referrals and the like. She made over her monthly budget by blogging.

In reading through the comments that announcement made, it got me thinking about the ethics and philosophy behind making money by blogging.

The way I see it, there are two real distinctions. There's blogging for money, and making money by blogging. I actually see them as two very different things.

To me, blogging for money is blogging with the express purpose of making money. Sponsored product reviews, SEO optimized posts every time, only saying things that you know will get some financial gain, or partnering with companies and getting financial compensation for flogging their products.

Making money by blogging I see more as a compensation for doing work. Although blogging is a hobby for the majority of bloggers, the upkeep of a blog, the advertising to get readership, maintaining a community in the comments, it all takes time and effort. And I don't see a problem in placing a few ads here and there to get a little compensation for that.

Particularly when it comes to the blogs of writers, I've noticed that they seem to be the ones that mind making a little ad money the least. Why? Because in blogging, they're writing, and writing is their profession. It makes sense to me. They aren't writing to make money, but they are making money by writing.

If that money happens to be the entirety of your income, then that just means you're one of the lucky ones, since that won't happen for everybody. I wish it would happen to me, to be honest. Having no outside job and no source of regular income would be made a lot easier by having some money come in from blogging, since I tend up update this blog on a regular basis. But that will take a lot of work. Not only will I have to keep updating regularly, I'll have to make interesting posts that people want to read. I'll have to advertise my blog on community sites. I'll have to comment a lot on other blogs so that people see my name and click back here and read through a few things. It's not like I just expect to sit back and watch the money roll in. I have to work for it.

The fact that I enjoy working for it makes it all easier to do. I enjoy reading blogs, I enjoy writing blog posts.

Making a little money from blogging is one of the ways I'd like to simplify my life. If truth be told, I'd much rather stay at home and work on making handmade items for sale or barter than go out 5 days a week and work for somebody else. If I can make a little trickle income by blogging about my experiences, then that just gets me one step closer to my dream.

Making room for progress

2010-02-01T03:51:00.000-08:00

A local cafe has closed, and the Celtic shop beside it is relocating, I discovered last week during a walk uptown. Why? No particular reason. Oh, except for the fact that a new clothing store came along and said, "We want your spot in the mall." And the mall let them have it, in spite of having to uproot two stores, both local businesses.

The House of Tara, the Celtic store, moved to that spot originally because it was in a better place for foot traffic than their first location. I don't much like the owner of the store, since she seems to have a frown for everybody who looks younger than 35, but I'm glad to at least see that she's relocating rather than closing down, because there's been a House of Tara in this city since I was a child.

Holly's Cafe Soha, on the other hand, just rolled belly-up at the news and is closing down completely, isn't even trying to relocate. They were doing good business there in a good spot. Rumour has it that they were on top of their lease but evicted from the spot anyway, because the mall owners felt that the new clothing store could bring in better business.

As I said to my roommate, this is the biggest problem with living in a "city on the grow." Big businesses come in and get rid of the smaller ones, the local ones that were loved as established for years. It's the price we all pay for progress.

Assuming you define progress as a wider choice of clothes, that is. I know I don't. I get 90% of my clothes from thrift stores anyway. But even if I bought brand new, I think I'd still avoid this new store on principle. I don't like it when big companies evict smaller ones. It's like playground politics. "I like what you have, so gimme!"

I was annoyed when the first Starbucks came to this city a few years back. Their first location? 50 feet from the local equivalent, Java Moose. Sure, it's great that people have another choice, but when the majority of sheeple see a bi famous brand versus a small local one, they're going to choose big and famous. Then another Starbucks came. Then another. We now have 4 in the city, 3 of them in less than a square mile, and the other uptown.

I don't buy from Starbucks. I don't like their lack of commitment to fair trade (they advertise fair trade for only one of their coffee types, at least here, whereas Java Moose advertises that it's on board with fair trade for all of their coffees), and besides, Java Moose makes a much better chai! (And Starbucks doesn't do iced chai, either, which is one of my favourite drinks from Java Moose.) If I'm going to pay $4 for a chai, I'm going to give it to the company I support the most and who makes a better product!

I buy local when I can. It prevents the world from being taken over by Starbucks and WalMart.

Silent Sunday

2010-01-31T06:08:00.000-08:00

My first blog award!

2010-01-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

I found out over at Striving For a Simple Life that I've been given the Kreativ Blogger award! Huzzah! I'm right proud of this, given that On Top of the World is pretty new to the blogging scene, and it makes me happy to know that people are reading and enjoying the things I have to say.

(Hopefully enjoying it different than my cat enjoys yowling in my ear, standing on my shoulder, and whacking me in the side of the head with his tail as I type this.)

Part of this award involves me telling you all seven things you don't know about me. The hard part of this is trying to find things that I may not find cause to mention here otherwise! But here goes!

1. My obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder started when I was about 8 years old. Through all these years, the obsession hasn't waned, and I still consider her a hero and role model.

2. I have Tourette Syndrome, and yes, that includes the occasional verbal tick. There's a reason my friends sometimes joke that I'm "barking mad."

3. I can knit lace shawls but can't make a simple crochet stitch to save my life.

4. I have a weakness for dill pickle popcorn seasoning, pink lemonade, and British chocolate. Not all at the same time, mind you.

5. I love watching Japanese horror movies, though they often scare the crap out of me.

6. I'm a terrible procrastinator. That's one of the reasons I got this blog. It's a lot easier to commit to doing something when I've already announced it and a bunch of people know about it.

7. I rode a horse for the first time a few years ago. I had always wanted to go riding when I was a child, but my parents would never let me. I told them that it didn't look as hard as most people made it sound, and they told me that I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm happy to say that I rode pretty well the first time I did it, and that I was right. It wasn't as hard as most people make it sound. (Not for just a little trail ride, anyway. Show-jumping's another matter!)

Now, the 76 people (I don't know enough bloggers, clearly) I have selected to receive this award are:

Sam, of It's Me, Sam!
Simple Mama, of Homemade Serenity
Susy, of Chiot's Run
Kathie, of Two Frog Home
Canadian Saver, of Saving4Later
The witch, of The Witch's Island

More free entertainment!

2010-01-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

My mother and her roommate are moving this weekend, and did a little bit of destashing to avoid packing and transporting things they hadn't used in a while and likely wouldn't use again. I got to enjoy their clearing out a little bit, and I now have five new board games: Trivial Pursuit, Trivial Pursuit TV edition (from the very early 90s, and I'm lucky if I can answer one question every 10 cards), Battleship, a Lord of the Rings trivia game (this had never been used at all, as all of the question cards were still wrapped in plastic and the cardboard pieces hadn't been punched out), and one of the CSI board games.

I enjoy board games more than a lot of people these days, the downside to which is that few people ever want to play them with me. But I'm fortunate to have a couple of friends (including my roommate) who enjoy a good board game every once in a while, so this is going to give us even more ways to enjoy our time together.

Playing Trivial Pursuit is rather fun, since half the time if we don't know the answer we just give some sarcastic pat answer that doesn't make any sense in relation to the question. I try to have one sarcastic answer that I use all the time, which gets some really funny reactions sometimes.

I'm really looking forward to playing the Lord of the Rings trivia game most of all, though, but it'll be a while before I do. All of the questions are in relation to the books, which I don't know quite as well as the movies, so I want to read the books once more (and make sure my friends have read them) before we play. This'll undoubtedly save a lot of annoyance on all sides.

It really is great to get things like these games. I didn't spend any money getting them, have additional entertainment for when I'm bored, and in a way, helped my mother with moving, since she didn't have to pack these and cart them halfway across the city.

On a similar note, this is also why I love Value Village. They often have a lot of board games and puzzles for low prices, usually $2-5. Puzzles are a real hit-or-miss thing there, since there's never any guarantee that all the pieces are in the box, but sometimes you can tell right away if all the pieces of a game are there, making it easier to choose which to buy. I stood in line behind a family once who bought 7-10 games and puzzles around Christmas last year, as gifts for family, and I know some people who go there to buy new games for when they go away on a camping vacation, to help keep the kids amused. It's amazing the amount of entertainment you can get practically for a song!

Hmmm, now if only I could really sing for my games. That would be cheaper still!

A little look at what you don't see

2010-01-28T10:34:00.000-08:00

Recently I talked a bit about my religion and belief structure. Now I'm going to bring something even more controversial to the table: I cover my head.

Yup, it's not just reserved for the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths anymore.

I belong to an online community of pagans who veil, and we all do it for different reasons. Some do it because it's easier than shampooing some days, to cover up dermatological issues, or for religious reasons. What a lot of people don't realise about pagans is that, much like with any other religion, you can't lump us all into the same category and expect us to be cookie-cutter pagans. Some of us dance skyclad under a full moon, and others of us cover our heads.

Why do I do it? I do it because I feel called by my deities to do so. I feel that it's the right thing for me to do, as a sign of respect to the deities I pay respect to. I do it to remind me that there's something above, around, and beyond me. I do it to give myself a layer between me and the world, so that on days when I feel extremely shy and afraid of going outside, I can disconnect a little, reminded that I'm safe within the world I create and that my deities are watching out for me.

It feels right. That's about the gist of it. And while some people think it's a little strange, I'm comfortable with it. I don't expect everyone else to do it. I don't do it as a sign of submission to anyone. (Even my deities know it's not a sign of submission, but rather a sign of respect and reminder.) I don't do it to be oppressed or oppressive.

I'm bad at doing it all the time, but I'm getting better. And so to help me along the way, I think I'll post the occasional picture of myself, in various style coverings. It'll remind me more to do it, even on days when it feels like a little too much trouble to do it all properly.

So without further ado, I present myself, with my head covered hijab-style.

I find this stle comfortable and protective. Takes a little fiddling sometimes to get it right, more so than just typing a bandana on, but I find the effect is worth it, since I alsolike how it looks.

It's raining on top of the world

2010-01-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

And wouldn't you know it, I got caught in the downpour. Carrying 2 bags of groceries weighing about 10 lbs each, I ended up walking fifteen minutes in the pouring rain to get to the busstop, and fortunately the bus driver saw me attempting to run to catch up, since he was pulling away before he finally stopped to let me on.

So as a reward for being cold, wet, and tired, I treated myself to a nice mug of hot chocolate at The Infusion, a local teahouse.

I'm pretty proud of myself today where groceries are concerned. I went shopping at the local bulk store, in the hopes of saving a few bucks by focusing on buying the product rather than the packaging. 22 cents shy of $40 got me the following:

5 pounds of sugar

About 7 pounds of 12-grain flour

A bag of trail mix

A bag of mint candies

A bag of dried sage

White navy beans

Vegetable fusilli

A jar of yeast

Granola

The beans will likely last for 4 meals, 2 meals each for Rachel and I. Possibly more, depending on how much we eat. The vegetable fusilli will probably make about 3 meals: 1 meal each when added to chicken stock, and 1 meal for Rachel, since she loves pasta all on its own. The bread and yeast will do for quite a few bakings of bread. The granola's for breakfasts. The trail mix and mint candies are for snacking on. The sugar's for, well, tea and whatever else we happen to need sugar for. (My weakness is a mug of hot sweet tea!)

$40, for another week's worth of meals, or there about.

Of course, this is assuming we eat nothing but bread, pasta, and beans for the week. This stuff is all going to be pieced out with the food we still have in, like the ham and eggs and turkey and potatoes and pork and cabbage and everything else still in the fridge and cupboards. I'll probably be heading out again tomorrow with another $10 to buy milk and apples and cheese, too.

It may seem like I'm spending a lot of money on groceries. But consider that our monthly grocery bill used to be about $300. I'm whittling it down to about $40-$50 a week now, cutting out the junk and cooking large batches of things instead of eating microwave frozen dinners and cans of spaghetti as much as we used to.

Oh, and I won't even go into how much we're cutting back on the junk food! I'd say about 1/4 of the grocery budget used to go to snacks of a more junk foody nature. Now our big sin is trail mix and some mint candies. Beats the heck out of chips and chocolate bars!

Really, cooking more and controlling more of what goes into my body has done wonders for me, and I haven't even been doing it that long. I enjoy getting in the kitchen and making food now. I enjoy the work behind it, I enjoy the satisfaction of eating something I worked hard to make, and I enjoy knowing that there's nothing going into me that I didn't make a point of putting into me, instead of all the sneaky chemicals that come along with a lot of pre-packaged food from the grocery store.

Tomorrow, when the ham and potato soup has run out, I think I'll make that quiche before the eggs go bad, and then boil up the leftover eggs so we have some hardboiled eggs for snacks. The turkey soup, turkey sausage, beans, and pasta can wait until the perishable food's been used up more.

I might also be brave and attempt another batch of bread. The last loaf I made made me ill, but I think that's probably because the yeast was past its best. Serves me right for not checking, really, but this time, I've got fresher yeast and understand dough a little better, so hopefully it'll turn out tasty.

Potato and ham soup

2010-01-25T05:29:00.000-08:00

There's something freeing about only loosely following a recipe when you're in the kitchen. Yesterday, I did just that. I made a huge pot of potato and ham soup, mostly made by experimentation rather than strictly following any one recipe, and happily it worked out rather well. It needs a few adjustments if I ever make a batch again, like smaller chunks of ham, creamier milk, and perhaps a bit more salt, but over all, I enjoy what it turned into.

The ingredients are wonderfully simple, too. It's 3 parts milk to 2 parts water, then you add in chopped and cubed pieces of ham (remember to cut off the rind if it's there), a small amount of finely chopped onion, 3 tablespoon of flour to help thicken the mix, then some salt and pepper to taste. Then just wait for it all to cook, and voila, you've got a nice batch of soup.

Or chowder, technically, since it's made with milk, but since I always think of chowder as being much thicker and more packed full of various ingredients, what I made last night is still soup to me.

I learned a few things in the process, too. Like remembering to always be on hand to stir the soup when you're making it with milk, because if you don't it can and will foam over, or get a skin.

No word on how long this soup will keep, as I only made it last night. All I can tell you is that it's still fine this morning, but for all I know that will change by nightfall. I sure hope not, though.

We're supposed to get a lot of rainfall today and tonight, which means that in all likelyhiid the snow will melt and then all the water will freeze over to make the streets into skating rinks. Fortunately, there isn't anything I particularly need to leave the apartment for today, and possibly tomorrow too, so I'm content to stay comfortable inside while all this happens. I've got plenty of food and drink, and am not likely to run out of essentials suddenly before the horrible weather passes.

I knocked on wood as soon as I finished typing that, just to be safe.

Take care, wherever you are, and stay warm and dry!

What I am, and what that means.

2010-01-24T08:47:00.000-08:00

When I first decided to start a simple living blog, I have to admit that even that was a daunting task. Not in the thought of upkeep or content or the like, but because of how dissimilar, in a lot of ways, I am from the majority of other simple living bloggers.

Most of the blogs I read that espoused a simple and frugal life had two threads that ran through them. They were written by Christians, and they were written by mothers.

Being neither of those things, I wondered if reaching out for a community was a pointless venture. I don't much care for children (personal issues where that's concerned, and it isn't that I hate them so much as I don't have the patience for them, nor do I understand them) and I have, to be frank, had some bad experiences with people who are vocally Christian. Even the ones that didn't tell me I'm going to hell spent hours trying to convert me rather than accepting me for who I was.

I am pagan, at the heart of it all. And I tend to live by a simple rule where religion is concerned. "Don't try to force your religion on me and I won't try to force mine on you."

I call myself a Quakerversalist Pagantarian, which I find fits rather well. The message of silence and simplicity in Quaker beliefs appeals to me, and I was thrilled when I learned that one could be both a Quaker and a pagan, since the Divine speaks to people in many ways. I know in the nod to Universalist Unitarians since they have a nearby church that I enjoy going to when I can get there.

Why am I coming right out and saying this, instead of just hinting at it or acting like everybody knows in the first place? Because in avoiding saying it right out, I was making things more complicated on myself (the antithesis of simplicity, after all), and I was also acting as though I'm ashamed of my faith. I'm not. My faith gives me strength the way the faith of others gives them strength, and there's no shame in that.

As for myself, I'm confident enough in my own faith that I don't feel threatened by other people talking about their faiths. I enjoy reading about the relationships that people have with their deity of choice. Often their lessons are lessons I could stand to learn. Maybe some of my lessons are lessons somebody else could stand to learn.

But no more hiding. No more veiled hints. No more sneakiness and avoidance. I am what I am.

When bad bosses get worse.

2010-01-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

My roommate, Rachel, has health problems, ones that are not competely cured by having a regular schedule, but the predictability of a regular schedule means she can more easily handle flare-ups and be better able to take care of herself.

So in the grand tradition of lousy workplaces, her bosses refuse to give her a regular schedule. She has asked them repeatedly. She has givn them doctor's notes that recommend she have a regular schedule. And they keep blowing her off, either ignoring her or outright lying to her. They said at one point they might be able to reach a compromise by making her schedule a little more regular but not completely so, and then they didn't, instead making it more irregular. They said that there was no way, after Christmas, they'd have enough hours to give her a regular schedule and that there wouldn't be enough part-time hours available for people to cover her old shifts if she switched her shifts.

So far, the part-time hours have equalled the full-time hours since the beginning of January.

(I should explain at this point that part-time and full-time where she works don't actually correspond to how many hours you get. Full-time people get some insurence benefit and a guarantee of at least 28 hours a week. Part-time people get no benefits and no guarantee, but when the hours are available, still will work 40+ hours in a week anyway.)

As if this weren't bad enough, her bosses are now saying that all full-time staff must work one Sunday per month, and they "don't care about [their] reasons" for not being able to do so. Yes, that quote comes from one of the higher-ups in the store, who didn't take employees aside to tell them this but instead told them right on the floor, where they couldn't speak out against it because customers may overhear.

Now even aside from religious views, aside from the fact that the bus service in this city is lousy on Sundays, there is the law to prevent them from doing this. We've looked it up. In this province, an employee has to give their employer at least two weeks notice, written or verbal, about not working any given Sunday. And yes, saying, "I'm not working any more Sundays after two weeks from now" is valid. The workplace must comply.

Her work place (less-than-affectionately nicknamed "Hellers") is refusing to comply.

Most employees there know the law to some extent, but are still afraid for their jobs if they refuse to work that day. They know that technically they can't be fired or punished or discriminated against for refusing to work, but most of them insist that they'll just be fired for other reasons, even stupid ones. Even though wrongful dismissal is something they could sue the company for, they don't want the hassle, or are still too afraid for their jobs to do anything about their rights.

Not Rachel. Rachel has called the Labour Board to file a complaint against them, not just for trying to force them to work Sundays but also for ignoring health problems that she has repeatedly told them the consequences of. Where that's concerned, the law states that they have to accommodate her within reason, and it's not unreasonable for her to work all morning shifts throughout the week, or all evening shifts, rather than working a morning one day, night the next, morning after that, and so on, but with no preditability.

Since my own employment problems started last year, where I got laid off with no notice and was refused both severence pay and pay for the time I'd worked (still waiting for that, by the way), I've learned a lot about the labour laws of this country and this province, and it's astounding to see what employers will try to get away with, banking on people not knowing their rights under the law.

I can't call myself a crusader for the little guy, but I'm tired of myself and others putting up with crap from employers because they either don't know their rights or are too scared for their jobs to fight for them. So I beg you, if you work for somebody else, learn the labour laws that apply to you, don't let your bosses try to screw you over, and remember that you can't be punished for reporting them for doing something illegal. The reason bad employers do this is because other people let them get away with it. If you're mugged, the police can't do anything to help you unless you file a report. The same principle applies here.

Fight for your rights, or else you may as well not have any.

21 things to do that don't cost money

2010-01-21T03:46:00.000-08:00

A lot of people love to claim that entertainment these days is expensive and that it's nigh impossible to have a good time without spending a lot of money. They're right, so long as your idea of a good time involves going to concerts and seeing a new movie in theatres with your family every weekend.

But there are a lot of free ways to entertain yourself these days, even ones that are fun for the whole family. The shame is that so many people overlook them.

So here's a list of ways to keep yourself entertained that don't cost you a penny. (Some of them may require Internet access, but I assume if you're reading this blog, you already have that.)

1) Visit your local library - If your local library's anything like mine, not only will you have access to a lot of books to keep you entertained, but also video tapes, DVDs, and music CDs. If your library doesn't have what you're looking for, ask about inter-library loans. Plenty of libraries have book clubs, too, which can add a community experience to the event.

2) Take a walk - Either alone or with friends and family, going for a walk is a great way to pass the time and get exercise in. If you have small children, consider a nature hike. Challenge yourself or your friends to see how far you can walk in a day before you're too tired out to keep going.

3) Learn a new language - There are a ton of websites that offer introductory language lessons for free. I can't say you'll become proficient using only online tools, but you can certainly get a good feel for the basics of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary for a lot of world languages, and even some fully-functional made-up languages.

4) Read or watch TV online - I already made posts about free online books and TV channels in Canada.

5) Listen to podcasts - Podcasts these days can range from general observations on just about any subject you're interested in, to full audiobooks written and read by up-and-coming authors. I myself have a backlog of over 500 hours of podcasts to listen to, and I didn't spend a cent on any of them.

6) Start a blog - Or join message boards. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that everybody has something to say, and there are always people out there willing to listen to your opinion. Take advantage of that. Write, and build a community around yourself.

7) Browse your local Freecycle listing or Craigslist for free hobby supplies. - Books, yarn, cloth, furniture, there's always somebody giving it away for free, and there's no reason you should spend money when you can recycle and reuse and get the same benefits. More benefits, even, because you're taking part in both helping somebody declutter and saving usable things from landfills.

8) Volunteer - If you're so inclined, join a volunteer group in your area. Spend time with underprivileged kids, teach an adult to read, serve food to the homeless, or any number of things.

9) Play games - From board games in the closet to free online games, this sort of thing can keep you busy for hours! I speak from experience.

10) Go Dumpster-Diving - Your Mileage May Vary on this one, but I hear that Dumpster Diving is very entertaining and even profitable. Plenty of stores and companies just throw things away even when they're still perfectly good. From fabrics in no-longer-popular colours to canned food that the grocery store has decided to stop carrying, if you go with an open mind and a pair of rubber gloves, you can come away with plenty to keep you busy or fed for weeks! (A movie store I used to work at would rip the covers from unsold game guides and movie books and just throw them away. I can't count how many free game guides I got this way. Movie theatres will put the night's leftover popcorn into a single bag, nothing else in it, and throw it out though it's still perfectly edible. They can't sell it, often can't donate it, so they trash it. And their loss can be your gain.)

11) Be a local tourist - Cities often give tourist info away for free, and you'd be amazed at what you don't know about your hometown that tourists do because you've never taken the time to explore. Act like a tourist, look around, and I bet you'll learn things that you didn't even know you didn't know!

12) Learn a new skill - Instructional diagrams and videos are all over the Internet these days, so why not think of a skill you don't have that you want to learn, and go learn it. Juggling, quilting, knitting, bookbinding, any number of things! You can often learn the basics in only a few hours, and practice take care of the rest.

13) Alphabetize your books - It may not sound exciting, but it takes up some time, and you may come across books that you'd forgotten you even had.

14) Organize a neighbourhood yard sale - Not only will you get rid of stuff you no longer need, but you'll also get a little bit of cash for it, and have a chance to meet and greet your neighbours.

15) Get involved in a barter community - Just because you're not spending any money doesn't mean you can't get something new. If you have a local barter group, or can find one online, why not barter your skills or homemade stuff for something that somebody else has or does. It doesn't cost you anything (assuming you've got the materials on hand to trade, that is), and you get something new in return.

16) Make your own recycled paper - It's easier than it sounds. Take non-glossy flyers that plague just about everybody, rip 'em up, put 'em in a pot with some water, then wait until they're a soggy mess. Layer that mess on something that the water can drip through (old window screen work perfectly for this) and when it's dry, voila! Your own coloured recycled paper!

17) Read back entries of blogs - I love starting from the beginning when it comes to blogs, because I get to see how people started and go along with them until I get to today. I can learn skills that they wrote about once but may not reference often, or find link to other fascinating blogs and bloggers that they may no longer be in contact with for whatever reason. And if nothing else, if the blog is interesting, then I just enjoy reading it for the sake of reading it.

18) Clean up - Not the most exciting task in the world, but it does take up your time, doesn't cost you anything, and is beneficial in the long run. I myself ought to pay closer attention to this suggestion sometimes...

19) Take a bubble bath - Yes, men, even you! Bubble baths can be wonderfully relaxing things, good for destressing, and just taking a little bit of personal time to ignore the world and find your focus again.

20) Improve your cooking - See what delicious things you can make using the ingredients you already have in the house. Get a little creative and experiment with new flavours, look up recipes online or in recipe books, and try something new. It can be a lot of fun.

21) Go to gallery exhibits - Some art galleries and museums will have open-to-the-public exhibits, so check them out when you have the chance. You'll have the chance to meet people with similar tastes, and perhaps even meet the artists themselves! And you'll get to spend a great afternoon surrounded by culture.

Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list, and additional ideas can be found all over the place online. But it's a good start to filling your days with interesting and exciting events when you're really low on cash, and given the economy these days, finding free entertainment is getting to be high on a lot of priority lists.

(As a little aside, too, Sudsmuffin is having their anniversary contest, so drop by their blog and enter for the chance to win some free stuff to pamper yourself with.)

Fluffy flakes are falling

2010-01-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

It's tough living on top of the world. Especially when the snow comes down in thick clumps and makes it hard to see or walk outside.

Of course, this would happen on the day I have a job interview. It couldn't be a mild temperature and a little slushy or something. No, it had to be lots of snow.

This city and the currounding area is currently under a snowfall warning, and around 15 centimetres are expected by nightfall. Looks like today is a very good day to stay inside with hot drinks and good homemade food.

Shame I was planning on going out to a knitting meetup tonight, though. But oh well, I think I'd rather be inside where it's safe and warm. Though I won't get to share in the comeraderie of fellow crafters, it's not like I can't knit from my chair in the living room, and I won't have to worry about waiting for the bus and slipping on icy snowy streets.

I think it might be time for a nap soon, though. I did sleep well last night (nightmares aren't conducive to restful sleep), and I could use a little extra.

Florida's colder, so global warming is a conspiracy theory.

2010-01-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

If you smacked your forehead with your hand when reading this post title, then raise that hand.

Hmm. I see a lot of raised hands out there.

I don't actually believe that, mind you. But I recently got into a discussion on a message board about whether global warming was real and worrisome or just a load of hogwash. Though a lot of people voted in that thread's poll that global warming was a problem, most of the people who posted a reply message seemed to give opinions like that. Below average temperatures in their area this year clearly meant that global warming was just a big lie.

(Good to know that global warming and climate change aren't a problem. I guess the fact that in August we saw temperatures near the freezing mark is just something I forgot happening every other year. No climate change here, folks, move along.)

Someone heard from a friend of a friend who saw it on TV that some emails from "scientists" were leaked, and it turns out that they're worried because they can't prove global warming and their funding might be cut because of it.

("Scientists". I love that. Because physicists and climatologists are exactly the same, have the same career interests, and the same knowledge about the same subjects.)

Plenty of people claim that because the earth goes through cycles and that both hotter and colder temperatures have been the norm for the world in the past, that this really is just all natural and not a problem at all. It's just part of the cycle.

(Never mind that it's happening faster than it ought to, coincides with a lot of other problems that humans have caused, and is partly occuring because of man-made pollutants and interferences. It may have come about naturally eventually, but not so quickly and not because the planet always needs an atmospheric toupee.)

I see people saying that sure, it's probably a problem, but it's not going to make that much difference in their lifetime, so why should they bother making sacrifices in their lives anyway?

(Good to know that they care so very much about everyone who has to live on this planet after them, and that they're perfectly happy to leave their messes for somebody else to clean up. Didn't we get taught to clean up our own messes in elementary school?)

Sometimes I want to scream at these people that if they'd just open their eyes and look beyond their own tiny portions of the world then they'd see there's a problem. I want to shout at them that global warming doesn't mean that every single place in the world gets above-average temperatures, and that atmospheric heating can, in fact, lead to colder temperatures because of air currents and evaporation. I want to beat them about the head until they understand that we need to do something other than sit around and talk about whether or not it's all a big conspiracy theory.

Which makes this post somewhat ironic, in retrospect, but I'm making it anyway.

I admit that I don't do as much as I can, and I admit that the actions of one lone person are probably going to mean jack in the grand scheme of things. But I'm trying more and more each day, and I also know that I'm not alone. There are thousands of others out there like me, trying to do their little bit to reducing the carbon footprint and to living sustainably and without so much excess, and little by little, the effects add up. We likely won't see the planetary effects we're having in our lifetime, but by damn, we're trying, and that's more than some people can claim.

And you know, even if we're all wrong and the world's doing just fine despite us, I won't be ashamed to tell people that I'm living a better life. I waste less, I do more, and I'm happy for it. How, I ask you, is that worse than they people who waste more and do less and are only happy when they can prove they have more than their neighbours?

My lifestyle isn't for everyone. But this planet is. And isn't it about time we started taking better care of it?

Piecing it together.

2010-01-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Piecework Magazine, done by Interweave, and today I was pleasantly surprised by the delivery of a few back issues that I had ordered with some of my holiday gift money. It may see a strange thing to talk about on a simple living blog: magazine subscriptions regarding historical textiles. But to me, Piecework is a good magazine to have around when you want to do some needlework and yet want a reminder of the simplicity of times gone by.

Piecework's historical patterns are a treat to see, and a lot of the articles in the magazine include cultural and historical information that often make it pretty clear that the majority of needlecrafters didn't have a lot of money or resources, no matter which country they lived in. They used what they could, used it frugally and wisely, and made stunning heirloom pieces, some of which survive today. If you're amazed at a pair of jeans lasting you a decade before you consign them to the scrap pile, imagine a lace shawl, knit or crocheted or tatted out of something as fine as sewing thread, lasting a hundred years or more.

This sort of things reminds me that although making something fancy like that is arguably "not simple", it is a good way to remind myself to slow down, to take my time, to do it right the first time so that it's all done properly and will last as long as I need or want it to.

When I knit or sew or embroider, sometimes I'm struck by the amazing complexity and simplicity of it all. One tiny stitch, the same as a dozen, a hundred, a thousand others, insignificant on its own, but perfectly made just the same, and when put together with all those other insiginificant and perfect stitches, comes together to make something beautiful and meaningful and worthwhile. It's like the world, I sometimes reflect. Each person is perfect in their own right, insignificant on their own, and part of something wonderful when put together with others. What one cannot do at all, many can do easily.

A lot of people think of needlework as a sort of spiritual craft, and in some ways, I can't deny it. It's like playing Fibre God. You form all these little things out of next to nothing, and when you're done, you've got so much more than you started out with even though it's all still made of the same stuff. There are challenges and failures and successes, but overall it's all just a part of the process, and you learn and you improve and you've got something to be proud of and to make you proud.

And it's a connection, to all the hundreds of thousands of women and men who did it all before you, who started off and paved the way for you, made mistakes so that you don't have to, learned corrections so that you don't have to muddle your way through in the dark, and who made a beginning so that you can experiment and make the future. It's history, built one stitch at a time and wrapping the whole world together.

I don't often think of it quite like this unless I'm waxing poetic, but I don't feel any lie in my words when I write them. This is how it is to me, and this is how to is to others, how it was, and how it will still be long after I'm dead, so long as handmade textiles live on. Even if they live on as hobbies instead of careers, they still live, and it's another stitch in the fabric, another knot and bind to the past and the inevitable future.

It's humbling to think like this, and even though the sky outside is grey and threatening to bring snow and wind tonight, and I have work to do that I don't want to do, and I'm still unemployed and without much money, I want to thank the world and history and deities of all kinds of giving me this chance to be a simple insignificant stitch, to reach other and hold and support other stitches, and to be a part of the fabric.

So, Silent Sundays?

2010-01-17T10:16:00.000-08:00

A local artist is having a giveaway for some of her greeting card designs. The contest is open until tomorrow night, so check it out while you can. Her art is really awesome, and I'm a proud supporter of pimping out local artists.

She inspired me to pick up my pencil and art pad again and to start drawing once more. No reason why I shouldn't, I suppose. I find drawing relaxing and challenging at the same time, and I like trying to find another talent niche.

Today, I suspect, is going to be a nice quiet day around the apartment. I'm not one to take Sunday specifically as a day of rest, but it is a convenient day for it.

I'm thinking of starting a bit of a theme here On Top of the World, in the form of Silent Sundays. On Sunday, if I post I post only a picture of something meaningful and relevent to me. It sounds silly, but I think that by doing that I might be able to better keep my thoughts on what really matters in life, instead of the pointless little fleeting things. The fleeting things make up the moment, certainly, but in ten years from now, then fleeting things and the little moments may not matter at all anymore.

But it will be interesting to look back and see what I considered important, whether I still consider them important, and whether or not it's for the same reasons.

Now, the trick is to find my camera before I commit to this idea...

Trickle income and barter

2010-01-16T06:32:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine turned me onto this concept, that of trickle income, and I've been looking for ways to achieve it ever since I first heard about it. I can't help but wonder if perhaps the time has finally come where I can start really getting the first few trickles.

Trickle income, in a nutshell, is when a person has many small flows of financial income rather than one large one. Instead of having a full-time work-for-somebody-else job, maybe this person makes money by selling crafts, doing a little web design, writing articles, and browing second-hand stores for stuff to resell on Ebay. Lots of little flows instead of one big one.

The past few days have made me see that perhaps it really is possible for me to have the same thing going in my life. It may take years to set up in a stable way, but it's possible, not just some silly pipe dream concocted by advocates of laziness who should just go out and get a "real job".

I'd have a real job. A lot of little real jobs.

The thought of knitting and teaching classes to bring in a little bit of money appeals to me. So does the idea of continuing to write little things for HubPages, to get my AdSense earnings up, and perhaps writing for actual magazines or books someday. Reviewing books doesn't bring in much money (the site I use for my book review blog doesn't do ads), but by being an Amazon Affiliate, I can still earn money. Same thing with Swagbucks.

It's not much, but it's a start. And I really do think my life is reaching a point where doing this is going to be possible.

I'll still need a regular job for a good while yet, to give me support while I get up lots of little tributaries into my income river, so to speak. It can't happen overnight, and I don't expect it to. But it can happen, and that's an uplifting thought.

One way that I think gets left out of "trickle income" plans is bartering, too, or exchanging goods and services for different goods and services rather than money. By working for half an hour at Sudsmuffin the other day, I ended up coming away with a free bar of soap. This means that I can go even longer before needing to buy more soap, which saves me a little extra money. I'm not opposed to exchanging things for other things. In fact, if it wasn't for having to pay the rent in money instead of yarn, I'd prefer doing a lot more barter for my services, and wouldn't give much thought at all to things like AdSense revenue or the like.

For Yule gifts this past year, I traded some embroidered bookmarks for some personalized calligraphy for Rachel. Barter gives me access to things I might not otherwise get, and lets me do it by exchanging my skills for theirs instead of having to spend money that I may or may not have. Money isn't easy to come by for me lately. But I have a lot of craft supplies that can be turned into any number of things for trade!

I'm excited about this, and just thinking about it makes me optimistic. What about you? Do you have any sources of trickle income? Do you ever want to develop enough trickles so that you have a river?

Making connections

2010-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

I planned to meet my mother for lunch today, but had a bit of time to kill uptown before she got out of work for her lunch break. On a whim, I decided to check out the new yarn store in City Market, Cottage Crafts. Their home base is in St. Andrews, but they've opened up a new branch here, and I had to see what they had in stock, even if I couldn't afford anything.

I left there with a free skein of yarn and the owner's contact information. She gave me the yarn to knit mittens for the store, which she will also pay me for doing. She sells mittens so quickly that they're nearly always in need of them, so I'll likely have that to bring money in on the side for a little while.

She took my phone number and said she'd consider me for a job there if any of her current new-hires don't work out.

She seemed very interested in the fact that I recycle old sweaters for new yarn.

She asked if I'd be interested in teaching classes, and seemed even more interested when I said that I knit lace.

On a complete whim, I made a friend and a business contact today, and potentially have my name in for a new job. Even if I don't work there permanently, if all I do is knit samples and teach classes, it'll bring in some money on the side, and right now that's a wonderful thought.

I came home to find a message on my phone saying that a 4-6 week temporary work position might be available for me, too. And a package containing a new book to review, which I shall start reading as soon as I'm finished my current novel-in-progress.

Today has been a wonderful day, and it's only half over. I expect a delicious supper tonight, followed by an evening of knitting mittens and watching Rachel play video games. And really, I couldn't ask for more.

Helping a friend.

2010-01-14T18:43:00.000-08:00

I saw on Facebook today that a friend of mine was looking for somebody to watch his store while he ran out to do a few errands. Not having anything else to do today, I dropped by and kept watch while he was out. He runs a handmade soap store, and I have to say that the place smelled delicious!

In thanks, he gave me a free bar of soap, which I appreciate very much. It's Buzz & Munch, a goat's milk soap with organic honey and oatmeal. It's unscented, but still technically smells like oatmeal and honey. Kind of like cookies, really. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I also met somebody who's going to try to organize a renaissance faire in this city next year. I've wanted to go to one for a while, but they never come any closer than two provinces away, or down in the States. I offered to help out where I could.

It felt good doing this today. I got to help a friend and make a friend, and when Ivan tried to give me the soap, I at first refused. I didn't help him for a reward. I helped him because he needed help, I wasn't doing anything, and because he was a friend. But as he insisted, it would have been rude to refuse further, and I am very appreciative of what he gave me.

I hope to help him out again in the future. Just being in his store makes me feel good inside!

(And for the curious, I have used his products in the past, and they smell good and work well. If you're interested in anything from his Etsy shop, it definitely gets my approval, and you'll be helping out a small local company that makes great stuff.)

Contests ahoy!

2010-01-13T05:22:00.000-08:00

Zach Ahoy is holding a contest at the moment for a free product from Scratch & Sol. Not a contest I can enter, since it's for a children's item and I have no children (unless my cats count), but I figured I'd pass along the good word.

Homemade Serenity is also hosting a contest draw for a set of handfelted wool hearts and a paper lantern. I adore those lanterns!

I've thought about using this blog to host a content or a draw or two, but at the moment, it just isn't feasible. For starters, I haven't exactly shown off any crafts that I make to pique any interest. Secondly, this blog is too new and has too low a readership at the moment to really make it fair. It might be a contest between all of two people!

Also, I have nothing in the way of spare cash right now to cover shipping charges.

But maybe in a month or two, when this place has more content, crafty pictures, and a higher readership. Maybe then I can do a draw for a set of embroidered bookmarks or something like that.

Speaking of crafts, though, I really should get a move on with a shawl that I'm supposed to be knitting for somebody. I joined a shawl trade a while back on Ravelry, and it isn't finished yet. I still have over a month to finish it, but there's no time like the present, after all!

Free online TV in Canada.

2010-01-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

So I promised a post earlier last week about free online TV for Canadians. Most of the free online TV channels that gets mentioned a lot are, sadly, for Americans only, which means that even though Canada gets American stations, we can't watch them for free online.

I can see some degree of sense in that. After all, most of the free channels a person can get are local anyway, and another country's stations don't count as local. We'd pay to get access to them. So I can see why official sites and the like wouldn't give free online TV to Canada.

But there are plenty of unofficial sites that host TV shows that don't have a TV station that one would pay for anyway, and yet will only broadcast if it detects that you have an American IP address. Meaning that great sites like Hulu are out if you happen to live in the frigid north.

We do have our options, though, limited though they may be. And I'm not just talking about sites like YouTube or GoogleVideo or other such sites. They're great, and I use them all the time, but for those concerned about doing things the legal way, the TV shows you watch on those sites are often uploaded illegally, without copyright holder consent. It's a risk you have to take when watching shows on sites like that.

(For those that don't mind dubious legality, though, you can always use SurfTheChannel to find TV shows, movies, documentaries, and so on, that have been uploaded to free video sites.)

But as for the legal stuff...

Global has videos for a lot of the most recent primetime shows. Downside is that if you happen to be interested in a show but haven't seen it from the beginning, you're out of luck, since they don't keep man back episodes on hand to watch.

The Comedy Network is great... if you're into comedy and/or watch every single episode of South Park. (For some shows, you'll have to install SilverLight, a new Microsoft media product. It's not harmful or annoying in itself, but I hate having to download programs that I'll only use to watch one of two things on one site.)

CTV isn't bad, but it's much like Global in that you'd better only want the most recent episodes, or at best the most recent season.

The Discovery Channel seems to, thankfully, have a few more options for back episodes, and is great if your tastes tend towards educational as well as entertaining. Even if you can't access entire back seasons, though, you're not likely to start watching halfway through a story arc of some kind, which makes this a bit more tolerable than on other stations.

Really, aside from news channels, that pretty much cover the big-name stations that give us some online show access. But still, considering it's free and actually accessible in Canada, I can't complain too much. I don't watch much TV as it is, but it's nice to know that if the mood takes me, I can watch a little without paying extra for it, even if my choices are limited if I don't want to come into something halfway through Season 4.

Baby steps.

2010-01-11T05:41:00.000-08:00

Even in Japan, it seems that small-scale farming is taking off. Which makes me think that any exceuses I had for not doing it in the past, like not having much room or not having a lot of time, really don't mean much.

Now I'll grant you, it didn't take finding this article to make the decision to do some small-scale gardening. It really just cemented the idea in my mind.

For a while now, I've been a strong advocate of the "baby steps" way of doing things. Doing too much at one time didn't get me anywhere, and left me discouraged when I realized that it didn't get me anywhere.

But then I started thinking of doing things in baby steps, habit-building tiny changes that add up over time, and I've found more success in such projects.

Like knitting. Just because I couldn't knit a huge lace shawl in a week didn't mean that knitting a single pattern repeat a day wouldn't show progress, and wouldn't take much time out of my day.

I couldn't lose weight for a long time, no matter how hard I tried. Then I started doing tiny little things like stretches twice a day and drinking a little more water, changes so small that they didn't feel like they could possibly be doing anything to help me, and suddenly I lost ten pounds in only two month. Strict diets hadn't worked. Trying to go to the gym three times a week hadn't gotten me anywhere. They were large gestures that become a chore rather than an enjoyment, and I stopped them quickly.

Baby steps work. So just because I don't have an acre to plant a field of corn doesn't mean I can start off by filling a tote bin with soil and trying to grow a few carrots. They may only provide a meal or two worth of food, but it's a start, and every little bit will count.

And if a bunch of pressed-for-time inner-city Japanese business men can take a little time to tend a tiny g=vegetable garden, then so can I.

A good deal or a waste?

2010-01-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

While getting groceries yesterday, I was struck with a dilema in the produce section. I needed to pick up an onion. A single onion would do, really, since I only planned to use it for one meal and don't use onions that much to start with.

Spanish onions were $1.29 per pound, and getting only one of them cost me a grand total of $0.17. But yellow onions were selling at $1 for 3 pounds.

I was tempted to get the 3 pound bag of onions and just find ways to use them. I mainly wanted one to add some flavour to soup, and since I'm not a big onion fan anyway, adding more than just a little would probably spoil the soup for me. But I could probably add little bits of onion to other recipes. I'm planning on making a quiche next week, and I'm sure some little bits of onion could go in that. Normally Rachel pan fries potatoes with French onion soup mix, but fresh onions might be better, and it would be another way to help use up some potatoes.

And onion skins make a really good dye for wool yarn!

But did I really want that many onions around, especially when I didn't plan on using many. They could probably last for a long time in the fridge, I was sure, and 3 pounds of onions for only $1 was a good deal...

I hemmed and hawed over it for a while, but eventually decided against getting the bag, even though it was a much better deal. I only needed one small onion, after all, and although I was sure I could find uses for the rest of them, I couldn't guarantee it to myself. Likely some of them would end up being wasted and thrown out, so that would be wasted money as well as wasted food. Better to just buy the one onion when I need it and know I'll use it.

It taught me that sometimes what seems like a good deal actually isn't. It all depends on what use you'll get out of what you buy. The yellow onions were cheaper per weight, but when I didn't need that many and probably would use them all up before they started to go bad, it didn't seem like quite as good an investment. I got less, at a higher unit price, but at least I know I'm going to use what I bought and not waste any of it.

That, to my mind, is a better bargain.

Reading on top of the world.

2010-01-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I lied. Today's post isn't going to be about free online TV for Canadians. Rather, it's inspired by a comment I made on somebody else's blog, and relates back to yesterday's entry about books and reading.

I've been an avid reader right from childhood. It was rare to find me with my nose out of a book. Books took me away from the problems in my life, and let me deal with emotional problems in my own time. Books probably kept me sane during difficult periods.

But that wasn't how I started being a bookworm. Truth to tell, I don't know how it all started. But I don't ever remember disliking reading. I barely remember not being able to read very much, when I was little.

It's a shame I had the bad luck to live in a city with the lowest literacy rate in the province, and possibly the whole country.

And the highest teen pregnancy rate. I'm too jaded to think that there's no connection there.

But for a while, things weren't too bad. There were about 5 second-hand book stores within walking distance of my high school, and that's where most of my allowance went. When I got a job and started working for pay, that's where a fair portion of my paycheques went, too.

But those stores didn't last very long. They rarely did. There just wasn't much of a market for books, unfortunately. The only people I ever saw who were my age in those stores were a few close bookworm friends, and I rarely saw adults there either.

So inevitably, the bookstores closed. Now there are two second-hand book stores in the uptown area, to the best of my knowledge: one that makes more money from the sales of comics and magazines, and the other that's also a coin collector's shop and semi-antique store.

I once signed a petition to bring an Indigo Books or Chapters to this city. For a long time, the parent company declined. We had 3 Coles Bookstores in this city, and that should suffice, they said. Those stores were small enough as it was, but their sales weren't high enough to warrant bringing in a larger store.

We have an Indigo now, after a lot of economic and business development on the east side. But I think that Starbucks coming to this city was more of a deciding factor in bringing an Indigo here than our reading rate was. (Yes, we've only had a Starbucks in this city for a couple of years now. For being one of the oldest cities in Canada, we don't have much to say for ourselves most of the time.)

(I should mention that I don't much like Starbucks, and will instead buy from a local company called Java Moose. Java Moose makes better chai anyway.)

This is a city where more people brag about not having read a book since high school than there are people that read a book a month. (I read far more than a book a month, it should be said.) The reason for our recently business development boom is because of an influx of Chinese university students with money to burn, not because the native reseidents were outgrowing our surroundings and yearning for more culture, more entertainment, more education.

The library has more people signing up to use their DDR and Rock Band equipment than for their book clubs.

I could rant on for pages about declining educational standards and all sorts of reasons for an overall lack of interest in reading in this city, but that isn't what this blog is for.

So why am I ranting at all about it? Because it relates back to a simple lifestyle, I think. A lot of people here have forgotten, or never knew, the simple pleasure that can be found in opening a book and getting lost in a story. One of my skills that I prize very highly is my ability to read, and my subsequant enjoyment of it. I can't imagine not reading. I can't imagine taking a bus ride even for ten minutes without a book to keep me entertained.

And for that ten minutes, one sixth of an hour, I was somewhere else, transported away on a great adventure, making new friends and seeing new places, experiencing things that others can only dream of, if they dare to dream at all. Ten minutes is all it takes.

And it seems that for ten minutes, far too many people find it more fulfilling to stare out of a dirty window at passing cars.

Free books at your fingertips.

2010-01-08T07:50:00.000-08:00

When it comes to free books, most people will advise that you go to the library, and this isn't a bad suggestion. Your local library's bound to have a ton of interesting books for you to peruse and read through, after all.

But if you're like me, there are going to be times where you wake up at 2 AM and can't get back to sleep, and you'll want to read some book you read a few weeks ago but had only borrowed, so it's not in your possession anymore. Waiting until the library opens to go and borrow it again isn't always the most convenient thing when we have jobs, families, any number of obligations that come before enjoyment.

To help combat this, I've turned to free books online. It's not the best solution ever, but it gives me great access to a lot of books without even having to leave the apartment. And best of all, because they're free and easily accessible, if I want to read them again at 2 in the morning, nothing stops me!

The Baen Free Library hosts a small (but still decently-sized) collection of fantasy and science fiction books published by Baen that are available to read for free online, or for personal download. I've made use of this site many times.

I'm sure most people have heard of Project Gutenberg by now, the site devoted to creating free online books that have an expired copyright. The expired copyright means that essentially the books are in the public domain, and Project Gutenberg is collecting them all to make them more public than antique stores and libraries can manage. Thise is a great site if you like the classics, or, like me, are interested in historical books or all kinds, since the expired copyright often means they're old and obscure.

Questia has a similar online free library of books with expired copyrights.

FullBooks.com is a site I only recently discovered, but it seems to have great potential. I found the autobiography of Helen Keller on here, and that's definitely been added to my "To Read" list!

WikiBooks is a compilation of open-source textbooks, and so if you trust open-source content (and/or can take it with a grain of salt if things don't seem to be adding up), then this can be a wonderful resource for anyone interested in continued learning. Very handy, I must say!

OnlineNovels.net is a site for authors to host their own novels and short stories and the like. You may be taking a chance on quality, but remember that not even unpublished author is unpublished because they can't write well.

If romance is your thing, why not try Public Bookshelf?

Literature Master has a lot more expired copyright books, though these are a bit easier to search through than Project Gutenberg, and are more likely to be ones you've heard of before.

This article has a listing of even more free online book services. Just in case the ones I listed aren't quite enough to keep you going!

If you prefer audiobooks, then why not give Podiobooks a shot? These are serialized audiobooks, often written by new and up-and-coming authors, and there are some wonderful things to keep you entertained here no matter what your preferred genre is!

Librivox is like a cross between Podiobooks and Project Gutenberg. They take books that are in the public domain and turn them into audiobooks for your listening pleasure.

Still prefer the feeling of a good old-fashioned book in your hands? Then maybe Paperback Swap is right for you. List the books you have that you no longer want, and mail it to whoever requests it. In return, you can do the same for the hundreds of books listed to trade across the site. This not only helps you cut down a bit on clutter, but can also act much as a library does, only by delivering the books right to your door instead of having to go out and get them. And unlike the library, if you really like the book and want to keep it, you're not under obligation to return it!

The downside to Paperback Swap is that it's useless to people who live outside the United States. Go figure. Someday people will remember that Canada exists, I swear!

Tomorrow, I'll go over some free online TV sites that are actually available to Canadians! Yes, they really do exist!

Meal planning.

2010-01-07T09:49:00.001-08:00

A lot of people advocate planning weekly meals in order to better manage their budget and food consumption. In the past, I pretty much bought on the fly, grabbing what looked tasty from them shelves, and thinking to myself, "I could use that thing to make this other thing," and convincing myself that I truly would.

And I didn't. And it led to a lot of spoilage and waste.

I don't strictly plan out my weekly or monthly meals, but I do now have a better handle on what I do in the kitchen. (The fact that I'm getting better at not putting off washing the dishes helps with that.) But I do plan out some meals in advance, and I've found it helps me a lot with grocery shopping.

I've also found that planning meals in advance opens up more meal ideas for me almost immediately.

Take the turkeys I've been using over the past while. I made turkey porridge out of one (why is it that so many recipes I try turn into something else but still end up being good anyway?), and got the bones and skin from the turkey that my mother had over Christmas. Because she couldn't fit all the leftover meat in her fridge, she gave a lot of it to me.

So from those bones I can make another soup stock, and can fill it with some of the meat. Just as I'd do if I bought the turkey myself from a store because I'd planned to make a soup.

But given that I can't use all the meat in the soup, what can I do with the rest of it? (Besides turkey sandwiches, I mean.) I came up with the idea of making turkey sausage, forming it into patties, and then freezing it for later consumption. With some bread or bagel or something like that, I might not only have half a week's worth of soup, but also a week's worth of breakfast!

In my next grocery order, I need to pick up sushi rice, flour, ground pork, cabbage, and spring onions so that I can make gyoza (also called potstickers), and likely some leftover pork will be used to make nikuman (steamed pork buns) too. Rachel and I are big on Japanese food; can you tell?

I'll get eggs and milk and cheese, and use some leftover ham to make a quiche. (The ham will come from whatever's left after I make the ham and potato soup later in the week.) Leftover eggs gets hardboiled for snacks, and possibly turned into Scotch eggs if I'm feeling adventurous.

I might get a bag of apples to turn into apple pie or apple turnovers, too, and I've also been dying to try baked apples, so I'll likely pick up a small container of cream.

So let's take a tally of that, shall we?

Eggs, milk, cheese, flour, ground pork, cabbage, spring onions, sushi rice, and apples. Not exactly a budget-breaking grocery order! And combined with a few things we already have in the apartment, those little top-up items can pretty much provide meals for at least another week here.

The best thing about planning my meals in advance, even if I don't stick to a rigid schedule, it that it allows me to think of what I can turn the leftovers into. It saves me money, allows me to eat better, and gives me some creative license in the kitchen, something I'm coming to enjoy more and more.

And now if you'll all excuse me, I hear a cup of tea calling my name.

Ways to reuse worn out clothing.

2010-01-06T08:12:00.000-08:00

In my last entry, I mentioned things that you can do with all sorts of stuff you can get from thrift stores. But before going to thrift stores, you may want to take a look at some of the things you have lying around the house that you don't use any more, especially clothes. There are a lot of uses for clothing too worn out to wear anymore.

Aside from cutting them down to rags, I mean.

Old sweatshirts and sweatpants can be used in place of quilt batting, if you're a quilter.

Sweaters can be unraveled for their yarn, and you can knit, crochet, or weave that yarn into something new and wonderful.

I mentioned that blouses can be cut into squares and embroidered with initials to make personalized handkerchiefs. Men's dress shirts can be put to the same use.

Got a pile of t-shirts sitting around that no longer fit or have too many holes in them? Cut them into strips and use them to weave or crochet a squishy rug for your house. Cotton t-shirts turn into very good absorbant bath mats with a little effort!

Any old material can be cut into strips and then braided and sewn into lovely rag rugs, too.

Want to improve your sewing and embroidery skills? Use an old pair of pants or a shirt and embroider something on it. Maybe a sampler, or a bright design in contrasting colours. Then hang it on the wall for a nice homemade decoration.

Cut old pairs of jeans into squares and sew them together to make a heavy-duty denim blanket. It's good for anything from a cold night to the perfect thing to sit on when you have a picnic.

Old towels? New facecloths or dishcloths!

Done all this stuff and ended up with a whole load of oddly shaped pieces of scrap material? Make a crazy quilt!It's a good way to use up those little scraps that can't be used for anything else, and you get something useful at the end.

Got enough scraps to take up space but not enough to make a quilt? Use those scraps to stuff a handmade rustic-style doll.

Take the threads from scraps and very thin strips of material and spin them into new and unique yarn for your knitting/crocheting/weaving pleasure.

Cut up old pantyhose into rings and weave a potholder on a potholder loom.

Even though something may not be in a condition to be worn again, there are still a great number of things you can do to old clothing before even thinking about consigning them to a trash bag.

Frugal crafting alternatives.

2010-01-05T05:54:00.000-08:00

One thing I am is a die-hard crafter. Honestly, I have yet to meet a craft that I don't like. Plenty I'm not good at, I'll grant you, but I can see use, art, and entertainment in them all.

But how, on a limited budget and an attempt at a frugal lifestyle, can I get my hands on the materials to satisfy my crafty urges? It's not like most of them come cheap, after all! I ball of wool to make a single scarf can cost $8, depending on the brand and the quality of the wool. (And I do mean wool as in the fibre type, not as another way of saying "yarn.")

Thrift stores.

Some thrift stores are good enough to have a small section for actual craft supplies, and this can come in handy, but the downside is that there's no guarantee of finding something for a specific project that you have in mind. It's worth taking a look, if the thrift store you patronize has such a section, but really, there are better and cheaper ways to get your hands on good materials, so long as you know how to look.

The trick is to look in the rest of the store. With a bit of creativity, old clothing can be remade and repurposed into things that most people wouldn't even imagine!

I get most of my yarn for knitting by buying sweaters from thrift stores, unraveling them, and then reknitting the yarn into whatever I so desire. Sometimes I'll overdye the yarn with drink crystals like Kool-Aid, if the yarn is made from animal fibres like wool or angora. In this way I can get a sweater's worth of cashmere, for example, for the same price it may cost me to get a scarf's worth of acrylic, if I were to buy brand-new.

Look in the larger sizes of clothing for the best buys. Some stores price the oversized things at the same cost as the smaller items, so by buying large, you're saving yourself that extra bit of money. That size 22 skirt could be turned into that new pillowcase you've been needed, after all. (And before anyone thinks I'm ragging on large people, I'd like to say that I'm one of them. I could probably wear that size 22 skirt!)

Old second-hand books, if you don't feel like reading them, can be turned into hollow books to conceal little trickets and treasures.

Beaded necklaces can be snipped and just "harvested" for the beads they once held.

Old blouses? New handkerchiefs, and if you personalize it by embroidering an initial in the corner, it makes a wonderful gift option!

My local thrift store often has fabric remnants for really low prices. I once bought enough plain black cloth to make myself two pairs of dress pants, and it only cost me $3.

I once read a story about a woman who bought old fur coats from thrift stores, cut them up, and resewed them into teddy bears. She apparently made quite a tidy living by doing so, and it allowed the fur to not go to waste. Very few people are brave enough to wear furs anymore, and if my thrift store is any indication, half the time the fur coats they have already are ripped or cut up to start with, so nobody could wear them again anyway. Giving the fur new life lessens the blow, a little bit, of the fact that an animal was made to give its life for the sake of fashion. At least it's not going to waste.

A friend of mine once told me he used to buy cheap velvet dresses and gowns at thrift stores, cut them up, and turn them into embroidered pouches to sell to tourists.

Some people buy old wooden furniture from thrift stores, sand them down, give them a new coat of paint, and end up with something that looks as good as if it had just come from a speciality store. Chairs, dressers, you name it. Some thrift stores even sell cans of paint, though those are a little harder to come across than the furniture.

With a creative eye and a mind for frugality, second-hand stores can become so much more than just a place to get cheaper clothing.

In a few days I'll probably also make a follow-up post about crafty things you can do once old clothing wears out, too, to stretch the dollar that much further.

The Last Best West.

2010-01-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading Eliane Leslau Silverman's The Last Best West, which is a collection of anecdotes from women who lived and worked on the Alberta prairie between 1880 and 1930.

This isn't a book I can imagine too many people scrambling to get their hands on, since it's an old book, and even I could only find a copy at a second-hand bookstore. But it was well worth the $5 I spent on it.

Aside from the general interest in the lives of pioneer women, the sadness and struggle they all went through when settling and cultivating a barren wasteland of a place, I found one of the themes of this book particularly apt to write about on this blog.

Just about all of the women who told their stories had the attitude of, "we made do, because we didn't have a choice."

Now, I'm all for choice. Choosing the ways in which we live is one of the freedoms I love. We don't have choices for everything, but we have enough to make ourselves feel truly free.

But the sentiment of these women, making do because they had to, is so very different from the attitude in modern society that I think it's worth contrasting.

I think a lot of it comes down to choice. We live in a much more affluent society than the women back then did. We've got so many luxuries, so many choices, so many paths we can take.

But these choices are a double-edged sword, and come along with a bit of society hypocrisy. We've got all kind of fancy new technological advances, little luxuries to make our lives easier, all manner of wonderous things to buy. And we do buy them, make no mistake, because they keep selling.

And yet, it's often said that a family cannot get by on a single income anymore.

Maybe they could if we all stopped being so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, with buying the newest and shiniest gadget just because it's new.

I think we've lost the sense of what it means to "make do". We don't make do anymore, we struggle along from paycheque to paycheque. We spend our money on the newest toys, sometimes more in the urge to show off to others than to enjoy it for ourselves. "Look at me, I just bought a new computer and flat-screen LCD TV!"

We've lost a lot of "making do" skills, because society teaches us we don't need them. Why bother learning how to cook when so many prepared meals are available? Sure, they're more expensive, but they're less work. Why learn how to sew or knit or crochet or weave when going to a department store will be cheaper. The clothing might not last as long, fit as well, or be the style or colours you want, but hey, it takes less time to get and doesn't require actually doing anything beyond getting in the car and spending money.

And then when lean times hit us, when we lose our jobs and can't afford to keep up our old lifestyles, we don't know how to get by on the little we have left.

An old coworker once bragged that "nobody lives within their means anymore." That isn't completely accurate, but in the age of credit cards, where all you have to worry about is making the minimum payment each month, people live outside their means all the time. Using a credit card might be a nice way to get a new TV right now, but with interest, you end up paying more than if you'd just had the patience to save up in the first place.

Debt is commonplace, and some people actually expect to die before they pay off their debt. Houses stuffed full of expensive technology while people struggle to put food on the table is just the norm these days. We live in a time where once-essential skills to survival are no longer a part of our lives. They're hobbies, at best.

And the thing is, they could be enriching our lives at the very least. In a time of serious financial crisis, knowing how to cook a decent meal (that isn't Day-Glor orange and from a plastic container) might be the difference between eating and not eating that day. Knowing how to sew might be the difference between looking presentable and going out with holes in your pants and shirt. Having a little windowbox garden might only give you enough for a single meal, but it's a meal you don't have to go out and buy.

The old "making do" frugal skills might actually stand us in good stead these days. That's why I love reading about those women, and how they lived. Their past can enrich my present and my future.

Starting the year off right.

2010-01-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

Right cold, that is! This city, and surrounding others, are expecting snow and rain-and-snow mixes for the next four or five days, and on top of that we're under a wind warning, too. "Potentially damaging wind gusts", says the weather channel, "forecast for Saturday night."

I can't say I'm looking forward to that.

This weekend might be a good time to bundle up under many blankets, with mugs of tea and hot chocolate located conveniently close by.

My biggest hope is that the winds don't break the window in the back room of the apartment. Right now that room is so crammed full of old junk and things that need to be sorted that getting to the window is a tough job. If it breaks, well, even arranging a temporary cover is going to be a challenge, and then cleaning the whole room up so that a proper replacement window could be put in.

Have I mentioned that the back room has no insulation? It's technically supposed to be this apartment's second bedroom, but since it's only fit for using during half of the year, we just use it as a storage room instead, and Rachel and I share a room until we can get another apartment.

So yes, cleaning and sorting everything out in an uninsulated unheated room with a broken window sounds particularly hellish. That's why I hope it stays unbroken in the high winds.

The winter here has barely begun and already it's been a hard one. Snow on the ground for almost the entire month of December, and normally we're lucky if there are a few piles of slush around on Christmas day. Two instances of absolutely bitter windchills, dipping down to near -30 degrees Celcius.

It isn't surprising, really. We had a cold year in general. July was unusually rainy, and we had a cold snap in the middle of August that sent temperatures down near the freezing mark. Once that happened, everybody began predicting a hard winter, and so far those predictions have proven accurate.

Going slowly.

2009-12-29T17:36:00.000-08:00

I was watching a documentary on Amish teenagers recently, and something that one of them said really struck me. It was about how hard it was to be in a horse-drawn buggy and to see cars zipping past them so quickly, going fast from one place to the next.

My first reaction was, "How lucky the person in the buggy is."

Right now, I don't have a car, and I rely on public transportation to get from point A to point B when my own legs can't take me there for whatever reason. Public transportation costs money, and so I can only take it when I have a bus pass or when I have spare change.

This means that my outings are usually carefully planned to kill as many birds with as few stones, so to speak. While some days it might just be nice to go to the library to get a new book to read, and then worry about nothing else, I have to consider whether or not I can do that on my bus pass. Would it be easier to wait a week and get a new book then, and while I'm at it I can pick up a few groceries and give the rent cheque to the landlord? Or would it be better to do that in three trips?

If a car, I could get quickly to as many places as I want, but what would I do when I got there?

I noticed that when it became harder for me to go places, even by bus, my trips became more carefully planned, and I wasted less over all. In times past, I would buy groceries with the intent of eating them, but sometimes I just wouldn't get around to it before the apples turned spotty or the milk went off. But it was okay, I could just hop on the bus and go buy some more.

Now, I consider things more carefully, waste less, and enjoy the trip more, because I have to go a little more slowly and don't have steady access to a convenience that a lot of people take for granted. I think that perhaps when we start to take one thing in our lives for granted, it becomes easier to start taking the things connected to it for granted. I take the bus to get food, therefore I take for granted my easy access to food. When you give yourself a little challenge, a little struggle, you appreciate the gain all the more.

I've noticed that too when it comes to cooking. I used to eat plenty of microwave dinners, plastic food in plastic trays that got zapped to be heated. They filled me up somewhat, but didn't leave me satisfied, not really. But if I cook a meal, take my time with the preparation and let myself enjoy the act of working for it, the final meal tastes so much better and is more of a satisfying experience.

There are times when convenience stops being quite so convenient.

Tonight.

2009-12-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I heard that somebody I used to work with died. Complications from a struggle with H1N1, his obituary said. He was only two years older than I am.

It's strange, but part of me feels like I should be feeling worse. I didn't know the man very well, but I did know him. A year ago, we worked together. He sat a few seats down from me. He was a funny man. A little weird, but funny. I know he was fired for carving his name into a filing cabinet. I know he was overweight and that walking up and down two flights of stairs numerous times, five days a week, was helping him shed pounds like crazy. I knew he liked computers.

But we went our seperate ways when he left the company, and I didn't think much of him until today, when I found out about his death.

His passing didn't leave a big hole in my life, but it left holes in somebody's life, and that's something to be considered. He wasn't a perfect person -- nobody is! -- but he is no less worthy of remembering, and no less worthy of being mourned.

Tonight, I send out prayers of healing and comfort to his family, and a wish that his soul goes speedily to the afterlife of his choosing.

Turkey soup? No, more like turkey porridge.

2009-12-27T05:58:00.000-08:00

Cooking is a learning experience. Even when you know how to do something, there's always room for improvement, experimentation, and finding new ways of doing things that will perhaps work better next time.

Yesterday contained one such example for me. I decided to make turkey soup from the leftover turkey bones from my Yule supper. Not a hard thing to do. Throw the bones and skin in a pot, cover with water, put the pot on the stove, and let it bubble away for about four hours or so. That part worked out just fine, and left the kitchen wonderfully warm. (The kitchen is in the back area of the apartment, which isn't connected to the heating vents, so it's always cold in there in the winter.)

After fishing out the bones and skin and fat, it was time to put in the rest of the meat and the chopped vegetables. I was running low on variety for veggies, so in went carrots and potatoes only. Enough to be filling, but I admit I would have liked to add turnip and onion too, if we'd had any, and Rachel suggested peas also. But we make do with what we have.

After that had been cooking for a while, Rachel asked if I'd put any rice in the soup. I said I hadn't, but it was a good idea. So back to the kitchen I go to add some rice to the mix. I didn't know how much to add, mind, and I seem to have this interesting tendency to add more rice than there needs to be.

Yesterday was no different.

When when the rice had fully cooked, it had absorbed almost every bit of the broth in the pot! What I was left with wasn't so much a turkey and vegetable soup so much as a rice porridge with turkey and vegetables in it! Not quite what I'd had in mind!

But it tasted fine just the same, and that's the important thing so far as I'm concerned. It was also much more filling than soup on its own likely would have been, so I'm definitely not complaining at that!

I have another turkey carcass in the freezer from my mother's Christmas dinner, and when I use that to make another batch of soup (which will be as soon as I get some more containers, since all of our Tupperware ones are now filled with turkey porridge), I'll use considerably less rice. Perhaps no rice at all! And I'll make sure to get turnip and onion and peas to go in the mix.

Even when I don't quite get it right, I'm learning something, and to be honest I'm enjoying myself while I'm doing so. Sometimes I fret over having spent too much time in the day not doing "productive" things. If I've cooked something, I feel better later, since I spent time making things for Rachel and I to eat. If you can't call that productive, I don't know what you can!

Planning for next year already?

2009-12-26T06:51:00.000-08:00

I know I am. Except for the people who give gifts for New Year, the gifting season has pretty much ended, and one of the first thoughts on my mind is what I'm going to do for next year.

A bit early to be planning so far ahead? Piffle! I, like many other people, have this unfortunate habit of leaving my handmade stuff to the last minute. Evidenced this year by the fact that I didn't get to make everything I wanted for people, and have had to informed a couple that their present will be a little bit late. So starting to plan early may not be such a bad idea.

Especially because I'm been branching out more in terms of what I make. I got a beading loom for Yule, so beaded bookmarks or bracelets are certainly on the table. I've been experimenting with small amounts of weaving lately, and have recently found instructions on how to fingerweave belts.

There are my usual Celtic knotwork embroidered bookmarks to pass around or to trade for other crafts that I can't come by so easily, also, the way I did this year to get Rachel some personalized stationery.

I'm all for making cookies and fudge and other little edible treats, too. This year I want to try making jam, so it could well be that small containers of homemade jam or jelly will find their way into gift bags for friends and family.

Handmade gift bags, of course. I wrap my presents in fabric these days, and let recipients know that if they can't think of a use for it then I'll gladly take it back and use it again myself, but they're welcome to keep it if they're the crafty types. Most, I've found, keep it anyway, even if they likely won't use it. So I think homemade giftbags will be the way of things next year, since a bag can be reused in all sorts of ways, and adds another layer to the gifts.

Does anybody else start planning and making ideas for next year's holidays right after the current holiday ends? For those who do, do you still fall into my trap and forget until it's too late to do and to give everything you wanted?

A Christmas eve alone.

2009-12-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Not that I mind spending Christmas eve alone. Given that I don't celebrate Christmas in a religious, or even really secular way, today and tomorrow are pretty much like any other days of the year to me. I've already had my festivities, and I don't need two.

That being said, mind, I am going to my mother's apartment tomorrow for a turkey dinner and some good old-fashioned together time, the kind I haven't enjoyed in probably the better part of a decade now.

But I must admit, I am a bit lonely. Rachel has gone to spend the night with her parents, a tradition in her family so that everyone can be there bright and early on Christmas morning. I was invited to go along too, but really, I've never been fond of crowds, and with Rachel's brother and his growing family coming along too, things would likely have been a bit too much for me to find enjoyable.

I wouldn't mind being alone so much, if I wasn't so very bored right now! I wanted to do some cooking, but the yeast is dead so I can't bake any bread, and the pot I was going to make turkey soup stock in has some sort of horrible grease in it that resists scrubbing, so that idea's out for now. I might end up removing that grease tonight, but likely by then it will be too late to make the stock before I get tired and go to bed.

I'd be knitting right now, but I've been doing so much of that lately that the tips of my fingers are starting to feel numb! Let it never be said that I don't do a lot of knitting! Fortunately I'm almost 3/4 of the way done the squares for the blanket, and then all that remains will be sewing them up. I do wish I could have finished it before the holidays really started, but the intended recipients don't seem to mind getting it a little late, thankfully.

Maybe I'll make myself a nice cup of herbal tea, to coothe my numb fingers and bring a little bit of energy back into myself. There's no sense in moping around when I could be doing something productive, after all.

A Merry Christmas, to whomever celebrates it!

Kitchen experimentation!

2009-12-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I experimented with some leftovers and made a rather tasty turkey hash. It's simple to make, and is pretty yummy too. So I figured I'd post a recipe here, for any readers who want it and just in case some day I forget it.

Turkey hash
Serving for 1 person

1 potato

leftover pieces of turkey

Butter or margarine

Water

Tasty spices

1. Peel the potato, then dice it, lots of little pieces.
2. Take some leftover little scraps of turkey, about a small handful, and rip it or cut it up into small pieces too. White or dark meat, whichever you prefer. (I used a mix of both.)
3. Heat a frying pan on medium heat, and add a teaspoon of butter or margarine to the pan. Cooking spray may work well too, but I find using butter or margarine adds a little extra flavour.
4. When it's hot enough, put the potato-and-turkey mix into the pan.
5. When the mix starts to stick to the bottom of the pan a little, pour a little bit of water in, about enough to make it a millimetre or two high.
6. Keep mixing the mixture around with a spatula, so that it doesn't burn or stick. Do this until all (or at least most) of the liquid is gone.
7. Add your spices. I used Lowry's Seasoning Salt and a dash of No-Salt Herb and Garlic seasoning. Mix this all into the potatoes and turkey.
8. Put on a plate and eat!

Quick and easy. The cooking takes less than 10 minutes. Really, dicing the potatoes took longer to do, and the meal was well worth it. I have enough leftover potato that I think I'll make myself another serving for lunch!

Freebies and samples and giveaways, oh my!

2009-12-22T03:51:00.001-08:00

Progressive Pioneer is giving people the chance to win a set of essential oils! 9 oils, $150 value, and a chance to try them out for free. Can't complain about that!

This is one of the things I've come to love about reading frugal/simple living blogs. People are all about giveaways, chances to try things out for free, passing on the good word. And not just passing on the word that large companies are offering free samples, either. I've seen a lot of blogs that have giveaways for crafts, foods, all kinds of things that are made by the blogger themselves. There seems to be a big "share and share alike" attitude running through, making a community out of people who haven't ever met each other but who all have similar goals.

It's a very encouraging feeling.

I'm definitely a fan of getting things for free, even if those things are small. Free-Samples.ca is pretty decent, sending me email newsletters with links to offers and free sample giveaways. FreeSamplesCanada.net and SamplesGalore.ca aren't bad either. Even if the samples are small, every little bit helps. Whether it's a single-use pouch of moisturizing cream or a box of hot chocolate mix, if it's something I'll use I'll sign up and send away for it. This habit I learned from my parents, who stocked a fair number of treats and other niceties we wouldn't normally buy, all through free samples.

I'm also a member of Swagbucks, which I have come to love. In a nutshell, it's a search engine, almost as good as Google.com, that gives you a chance to win points whenever you search for something. You save up the points and enchange them for prizes. You can get anything from magazine subscriptions to giftcards, and even get $5 deposited right into your PayPal account! For any referrals you get under your account name, the site will also match point for point what those people earn, up to 100 points. Not too shabby a way to get rewarded just for searching stuff online!

And every link on here except for the Swagbucks link is not going to benefit me by some referral bonus. I'm passing along these links for the benefit of people (especially Canadians) who want to take advantage of a few free offers.

Do you have any freebie sites that you recommend?

Blessed Yule.

2009-12-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

The day that has the fewest hours of daylight in a year. For months I look forward to Yule. I celebrate it much the same way that people celebrate Christmas. I get together with friends and family, have a good home-cooked meal, exchange presents, and have a grand old time.

We celebrated Yule yesterday, Rachel and I. We went to a friend's house, where we were kindly given use of the kitchen to prepare the meal. It was the first time I cooked a turkey pretty much by myself, and it was quite an experience. Laura, our host, gave me pointers, for which I'm very grateful, and also taught me a good recipe for sausage stuffing which I plan to use again as soon as I get some sausage and something to stuff it all into!

I've also got the skin and bones from the turkey in the freezer, and I expect we'll be eating soup for many days now. Over half the meat came home with us, too, which I'm going to try to stretch as far as possible. I may ve going to my mother's place on Christmas for another turkey dinner, but there's no harm in making food stretch while I have it. It saves money and cuts down on waste, and those are going to be increasingly important themes in my life.

We also have a tradition of acquiring some sort of Yule log. Not a real log, since we can't exactly light it on fire and keep it going for many days of festivities, but we have our symbolism. In years past, it's been an ice cream log cake, with candles. This year it was a small homemade carrot cake with candles stuck in. I think the Yule log might be my favourite tradition, really. The meal is always good, but I look forward to seeing the log so much. Not eating it, but just seeing it.

I recieved some wonderful gifts, too. A kit with wax for crafting, and a bead loom. The loom needs a little tweaking, since the grooves aren't deep enough to keep the threads from popping out every time I breathe, and the instructions are far from clear, but once I figure it out I expect that I'll be making plenty of beaded bracelets and the like!

All tied in with this is the knowledge that this is a season of death, of hibernation, and of privation. It's the start of a hard time, both in the past and for us today. Cold winds, snow, ice, and with me having no job at the moment and money running a little thin, it isn't exactly a happy situation.

But through all that is the knowledge that despite it all, we had enough to pull together to have a good meal and to be with friends. Even in the darkness, there's plenty of light, and the days are only going to get longer and brighter from here. It was a heartening thought.

May all your days be brighter from here on out, too!

Meat with meaning.

2009-12-19T14:50:00.001-08:00

I like meat. I like the taste of it, I like the texture, I like the energy it gives me.

I also know very well where it comes from. This bothers me, as it bothers most people who think of animals as something more than just pretty fuzzy things to look at. I'm aware that the majority of the meat I eat, possibly every single mouthful of it, has been raised in conditions that no human would consent themselves to living in, conditions that are appalling.

For a long time, I've struggled with how to handle this. Liking meat the way I do, I don't entirely want to give it up and become a vegetarian. I envy the people who have the strength to do this, but it's strength I lack, and I'm not 100% sure I could stick to my guns about it anyway, given how I like it. But I've been doing a lot of thinking about it lately, and I've come to a decision that appeases my conscience a little and still allows me to eat meat.

First of all, I, like many other people, have a spiritual side, and believe that animals have souls. Thus when I eat meat, an animal has given its life so that I might gain strength from it. This is something to be thankful for, appreciateive of, and I'm making the vow to show that appreciation by saying a prayer of thanks whenever I eat meat. The animal may never have known sunshine or fresh air, but it was no less a living breathing creature for it, and I'm grateful for what it has given me, albeit unwillingly given.

Second, I am changing the circumstances under which I will allow myself to eat meat. From now on, when I have meat in my diet it will be meat that I worked for. Which means that I spent time preparing it, cooking it, doing actual labour.

In this way I feel like I've done something to earn my meal. I didn't just go to a fast food joint and order a burger. That's meaningless meat. Yes, I worked to earn the money to buy the burger, but what did I do to deserve the life that was given up so that I can have a meal? If I take the time to personally prepare the meat, then I'll have actually done something to remind myself, "Hey, this was one alive, and I should be thankful for it and treat it with care in its preparation."

This will also mean I'll likely end up being more choosy about the meat that I do eat, and will buy meat that will be healthier for me. I'll be thinking about it more, after all.

The grocery store I shop at is slowly getting more organic meat in stock, and I expect I'll end up taking advantage of that. It won't be a perfect solution, but it will be a few steps closer.

Thinking this way, I'll also be less likely to allow myself to waste anything. Why throw away the skin and bones just because I'm not going to ingest them? They can still be used to make stock. The animal's sacrifice can go a little further and provide food for me even longer.

So no more fast food burgers. No more luncheon meat sandwiches. No more sticks of jerky as a snack from the corner store. No more meaningless meat. This isn't going to be easy to live by, but I'll be better for it in the end.

And, I like to think, so will the essence of the animals.

Domestic day.

2009-12-18T07:22:00.001-08:00

Since Yule dinner is going to be this Sunday, I have a lot of cleaning up to do today. Dishes need washing, some food needs to be prepared in advance, a kitchen to be rearranged so that it comfortably seats 3 instead of just 2. And all of this (or at least most of it) has to be done by about 6:45 tonight, since that's when Rachel will be home from work and we'll be getting ready to go to a show that my parents bought us tickets for.

Hectic day!

So here I sit with my hair covered with a nice cotton wrap (I'm the flavour of pagan who covers her head, you see, out of respect and rememberance of my deities), trying to decide whether I should wash some dishes and then bake bread and then wash dishes again, or bake bread then wash a large load of dishes. One's more efficient, but it also means I do a lot of dishes in one stretch, which I don't much like doing.

Maybe I'll be good to myself first and have a bit of a snack and drink my tea before I begin. Another 15 minutes probably won't hurt anything, especially considering I didn't get a chance to eat breakfast before I ran out the door for job orientation this morning. I ought to fuel my body before I tackle all this housework.

Not just fuel my body. Take care of my body. For too long now I've let this vessel I call myself turn into something weak and flabby, and I don't like it. Nothing will change it but me, and I'm going to be living in it for the rest of my life, so I really ought to take better care of the thing before it's too late. I already have health problems that stronly affect my life, and I don't want to make things worse for myself if I can help it.

If I have the time today after baking bread, making chicken soup, and cleaning, I think I'll also make some johnnycakes. I've been dying to try them ever since I found a recipe over a year ago, and even if Rachel doesn't like them, I expect I will, so they won't go to waste.

And that's enough blathering from me. Time to drink my tea and get to work!

~ Ria, that happy heathen.

2010, and what I want from it.

2009-12-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

There was a post recently on Living the Frugal Life about goals for 2010 that really made me think about just what I want to get out of the coming year. A lot of my goals are long-term, things that don't have definite endings and will probably take more than a year to complete them to my satisfaction, but there's something to be said for making resolutions like that. A calendar year is an easy way to mark a period of time, to look forward to and to look back on, and to give one ample time to work on various projects and goals.

So with that in mind, here's what I want out of the year 2010.

Clean my apartment - I've been saying for years that this place is cluttered and a mess, and it's true. Things are still packed in boxes from when we first moved here, because we have nowhere else to put them. I want to declutter, I want to get rid of the things we no longer want and no longer use. Too much mess is sucking the positive energy from this place, and Rachel and I have been through a hard enough year this year. Next year, we should invite more positive energy in, give ourselves some comfortable and clean breathing space.

Start my Rubbermaid garden - I don't have any land to call my own, but the apartment I live in does have a porch right out front. Dirt is cheap, and with a few Rubbermaid tote bins (or any kind of bin, really), I could start a small garden. I'm thinking of sticking mostly to herbs, since I can grow a decent number of those in a small space, but I might try for tomatoes, just to see if I can. Maybe squash if I'm feeling very adventurous.

Have more food in storage - I don't have the equipment to can things at the moment, but my oven can dehydrate apple slices as well as anyone else's over. If I invest some money in some good storage containers, I can stock up on rice, beans, flours, sugar, and salt when they're cheap, and then perhaps if another situation comes up where I lose my job and find myself very strapped for cash, food won't be as much of an issue.

Cook/bake more - This one's self-explanatory, really. If I cook more meals instead of ordering out or just eating some microwave meal, I get to understand food better, and I get to save money while I'm at it. I'm trying to reduce the waste from my household, and reducing food waste will be a big step. Everything from candying citurs peel to making soup stock from bones and skin to trying all kinds of different bread recipes. There's something very satisfying about making ones own meals. Also, I have another entry planned for this blog regarding my feeling on eating meat, which will come in a few days.

Exercise - Exercise is hard to get around here in the winter, since snow and ice cover the streets and the wind is often bitterly cold. But when weather permits, I want to be sure that I walk for at least half an hour, three times a week.

Barter instead of buy - Where and when I can, I'd like to do more bartering. Whether this means an exchange of crafts come the holidays or maybe a good meal gets exchanged for washing and drying a load of laundry, it doesn't really matter. But I want to stop thinking of money as the be-all and end-all of life, and to prove to myself that I can get things that I don't have in exchange for what I already have.

Go gathering - Around here, there are plenty of places where free food can be gathered. Rhubarb grows in wild patches, as do blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. Wild rose bushes along the sides of roads yield plenty of rose hips that just rot on the plant because nobody ever picks them. We have pine trees aplenty, so I want to try gathering pine nuts. Chestnuts litter some streets in the fall, and just get kicked aside, unused. Crabapples, I hear, make a nice jelly, and everyone always complains that there are too many crabapple trees in this city. I'm sure there are plants that I haven't even considered looking for that are growing in abundance and not being used, too.

Make butter - I haven't made butter in years, and last time I did it was using a churn made from a yogurt container and a dash made from popsicle sticks, all for a craft project. I'd like to try it again. Even if I don't end up using this for all my butter, I'd still like to give it a try.

Pickles! - Rachel likes cucumber pickles. If I grow tomatoes this year, I can pickle the green ones that don't make it before the frosts. We all enjoy watermelon, and I can pickle the rind so as not to waste it when I don't have to.

Make two blankets - I've got a large fabric and yarn stash that ought to be used up, and we always like and need blankets around here. A knit one and a quilted one are good goals to have for the coming year.

That about covers it, really. It may not seem like much to people who are used to living a more sustainable life than me, and who have done it for much longer, but I have to start out somewhere, and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of these things I can do, and how much better my life gets because of it all.

My greatest weakness.

2009-12-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

I admit it, I love grocery shopping. I love leaving a place where the cupboards aren't well stocked and coming back with good food to stock them. I love the rich feeling of knowing that I have variety for my meals once more. I love looking at all the different foods in the grocery store and figuring out what meals might be tasty with this ingredient, or that one.

I love coming back and knowing I've gotten a good deal on something. Take today. a 15 lb bag of russet potatoes was less than $5, which is pretty much the everyday price at the store I shop at. Those potatoes will be added to the chicken broth I got (almost a litre for less than $3, and I could have gotten it for less than $2 if I wanted 50% more sodium in it) along with pieces of leftover chicken and some carrots that were still in the fridge to make a nice soup. I would have gotten turnip, which was on sale for $0.59 a pound, but they didn't have any left.

The potatoes will also go quite nicely with the ham I got to make ham and potato soup with. The ham was $1.99 a pound, and I got about $5 worth. Not much, but plenty to add flavour and substance to the soup.

More potatoes will go nicely with the squash I bought ($0.69 per pound) and the frozen turkey for Yule dinner. Whatever's left will probably go in with the turkey stock I plan to make from the leftover bones and skin once Yule is over.

Clementines have finally made it in stock, which Rachel loves. I got a small crate of those for $5. Not sure how much that crate weighs, to be honest, but $5 isn't a bad deal when you consider the vitamin C we'll be getting from them. And since I found a delicious-sounding recipe for candied citrus peel the other day, I'll use the peels to make a treat for us both, too.

I bought a small sack of organic flour for bread, for $5. The same price could have gotten me more flour, if I'd gone with the ultra-processed stuff that contains I-don't-know-what. it won't go very far, I admit, but it'll last us until the new year starts, and hopefully by then we'll have a little more money and I can buy some more, from the local bulk store. The only reason I didn't go there today for my flour is because I have a limited number of bus trips I can use at the moment. January should change that, though.

And the best part is, even after getting all this (and more), I still came in under budget. $48 under budget, which is impressive when you consider that I left the house with only $160.

I may not be a master of frugal living yet, but I'm working on it.

Hypocrisy, or good judgment?

2009-12-13T06:44:00.000-08:00

People who know me have sometimes asked if it isn't a bit hypocritical to be trying to live a simple life while still playing and enjoying video games. I can see where that impression might come from. To play video games, both the television and the video game system must be on and thus using electricity, and it's not like video games come cheap. When we play video games, we could be doing things just as entertaining, like reading books, which usaes up considerably less energy. So yes, I can easily see where one would get the idea that it's hypocritical to play video games and to say that I'm trying to live simply and frugally.

On the other hand, here's how I justify it. For one thing, Rachel and I are not one of the modern breeds of gamers, the casual gamers, who'll buy the newest video game systems and maybe a few sports or rhythm games and that's all they'll play. We don't buy video games systems unless there are a good number of games for them that we want to play, for one thing. Our most up-to-date system, an XBox 360, was a gift from my father, after he foolishly bought it for a single game that turned out to not be much fun. He gave it to us, knowing we'd use it. The rest of our systems are older ones.

Secondly, we both tend to play role-playing games more than any other kind of game. Most role-playing games offer between 20-40 hours of gameplay. Assuming they cost $70 a game, that comes out to a cost of $1.75 and $3.5 per hour of entertainment. I, for one, have a tendency to try to master games, which usually involves hours of level-building my characters and searching for hidden things and doing everything I can. It's been my experience that this at least double the amount of gameplay time. So that's now between $0.87 and $1.75 per hour of entertainment.

And that's only assuming we play through a game once. It's not unheard of for us to start a 3rd, 4th, 5th playthrough of a game.

And considering we often buy our games second-hand and thus a bit cheaper than breand-new, the cost for an hour of entertainment is now only pennies.

It may not be simple, but it certainly is frugal!

The trick is to know what you like, to know your price limits, and to shop around. Much like finding a good bargain for anything. We don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" by buying the newest systems and games just because they're the newest systems and games.

Learning about tomorrow from yesterday.

2009-12-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of looking into the past to learn how to better live today. One of the things that my friends often hear me say is, "People did it that way 100 years ago and got along just fine." Now in some cases, I'll grant you that isn't true. People used lead-based makeup 100 years ago and I can't in all honesty say that it was good for them. But there are plenty of things that we can learn by looking at what people used to do before they had access to all the fancy trappings of today's society.

Maybe "trappings" isn't even the right word to use anymore. It implies that one is, well, trapped by the luxuries we share. And to be honest, a lot of people are. Some people can't imagine going a day without checking their email, having light blazing in every room of the house, having three TVs on at once. They can't imagine another lifestyle because they haven't known another lifestyle. They are, one could say, trapped. But day by day, more people are learning how to break out of that trap, and learning that there's a whole world out there beyond the computer screen.

Years gone by teach us that people got along quite happily without a lot of modern conveniences. I admit, I'm quite the fan of video games. I enjoy the stories behind a lot of the role-playing games, and can spend hours playing them. I can also spend hours sitting and talking with my roommate as we both work on a cross-stitch embroidery pattern or knitting pattern. Sometimes doing this is far more entertaining for the both of us.

We have a lousy heating system in our apartment. It's common for it to blow freezing air into the apartment in the middle of winter. So when it does, we cover up the vents, put on a sweater, and bury ourselves in comfortable blankets. We've spent entire power-utages under blankets, in complete darkness, just talking. We don't need more than that.

Stoves used to serve double duty in that they not only cooked the food but they heated the house, too. Our stove does that in the winter. The heating system doesn't extend into the kitchen, so having the stove on while we cook delicious food warms up the entire back area of the apartment. And at the end, we get fresh-baked bread to munch on, or a nice chicken-and-vegetable dinner.

People used to use herbs before they'd turn to chemical medicines, and I try to do the same thing. I know that most medicines originally came from plant extracts, and some have argued that taking herbal remedies is no more "natural" than taking an aspirin. I disagree. A lot of modern medicines are synthetic compounds that are only mimicking the original plant extracts. It's a different kind of chemical entirely, even if it does the same thing. I feel much more comfortable using herbal remedies for my ailments than pumping my body full of chemicals that it could probably do better without. I have, in some cases, had better luck with herbals than with modern medicines. I used to suffer terrible migraines, and had been on different kinds of preventatives, and they worked with varying degrees of success. Then I was told about feverfew and a natural migraine preventative, which I tried. It stopped a migraine better than the prescription drugs, and kept them away longer. Mint and chamomile calm nausea better than Gravol, and they don't leave me feel sleepy afterward. Rachel has a digestive disorder that is helped somewhat by prescription medicines, but is helped quicker and more consistantly by an herbal tea, herbs which have long been used to treat the very problems she has.

Old recipes were often designed to make the most of every little thing, and lots of old cookbooks had specific sections for things you could make from leftovers. Today, most leftovers get thrown in the trash? Just had a turkey dinner? The skin and trash go into the garbage, or for some people, the compost. Why not use the skin and bones to make a soup stock instead, and all those little leftover pieces of meat that were too small or fiddly for people to eat can get thrown in there and eaten in the soup.

Most people who have frugal living blogs know well the saying, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." This is something I take to heart. I'm a knitter, and often my yarn comes from sweaters I get at second-hand stores. I unravel them and then reknit them into something else that I want. Good yarn at a fraction of the cost of buying it new. Old pants get cut up and turned into blankets: jeans get made into heavy-duty blankets, velour pants (so comfy!) get turned into soft throws, and sweatpants can even be used in place of quilt batting. There's a way to reuse just about everything, if you're creative enough.

People back then also understood the value of stillness. Human history has been filled with progress, and that means hard work, day-in and day-out. So people appreciated all the more the little times they could stop and enjoy something as simple as a pretty flower, a glorious sunset, or just a moment in the day when they could rest their bodies and relax a little. Nowadays it's always rush rush rush everywhere, do as much as you can in as short a time as possible, and the only time we stop is when we sleep. I can't live like that. I need the beauty of those sunsets, those moments of stillness.

This is the kind of life I lead, and also the kind of life I want to lead more of. I'm not doing too badly at the moment, but there are areas in which I could do better. I'm hoping that having this blog will prod me into paying closer attention to things, to find a way to reuse yet more items around the house, and to remind myself that I need to stop and smell the roses more often. As I say all the time, living simply and frugally doesn't mean going without. I expect the quality of my life to keep increasing as I decrease my spending and my need for spending.

I'm on top of the world!

2009-12-10T13:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks for coming to my blog, and welcome to On Top of the World. This blog is al abbout living simply and frugally in Eastern Canada. This means that my posts could run the gamut from, "Brrr, it's cold in December," to "Brrr, it's cold in April," to, "Brrr, it's getting colder now that it's almost October!"

I tease. Sort of. There's a joke where I live that we have four seasons: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction. So it does get mighty cold up here, and we all know it!

But there's more to life here than the cold, and I aim to explore it. I've spend a good chunk of my life living from paycheque to paycheque, from day to day, and to be perfectly honest, I'm rather tired of that life. It's hectic, stressful, and puts too much emphasis on what I can buy next with the money I just earned. Now that I'm in my mid 20s, I'm really starting to understand that there's much more to life than money and and possessions.

I used to panic a fair bit when I was younger, thinking that I had to "make something of myself" as soon as possible or else my life would be wasted. Well, I've got plenty of years left in me, barring unfortunate circumstances, and it's been lately that I've come to the conclusion that I don't need to go rushing off and doing everything at once. That's a sure way to an early grave. There's a reason that people say we need to take time to smell the roses.

But there's more to simple living than taking time to oneself. Simple living, to me, also means being eco-conscious. What may seem like a small thing to me may actually, in its process, be terribly complicated and harmful to the very planet I live on. So simple living also means buying locally and responsibly, making do when I can and making my own when I can't. It means not spending money where I don't need to.

But it doesn't mean that I need to deprive myself. I may not need to go and buy embroidery floss, for example, but I do need entertainment, and I enjoy crafts so much that buying some supplies is an excusable expense. It's possible to live a rich and full life without spending thousands of dollars doing so, and that's the way I aim to live.

So here's to the joys of living simply, and simply living, on top of the world.