Baby steps.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.