“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. ” –Charles Dickens (Found here –The Most Important Money Tip_)
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Never has a month lasted so long.  Well, excepting the months I’ve spent waiting for my children to arrive- which, come to think of it, has comprised a sizeable portion of my adult life.  So, maybe a rephrase is in order:  this month has really dragged.  (There, that’s better.)  This morning at breakfast we...
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Today I ran all over town (driver’s ed, confirmation, library) – with time to kill during the activities!–and somehow managed to resist Walmart, Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, and various other establishments that tried to lure me with their siren call  neon signs.  Barely. Ice cream was calling me really loudly…. Due to my empty gas tank,...
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(Updated, below)  Today was pottery day at our house. Mud pottery to be exact. After reading a section from a book about pottery making in Ethiopia, as well as this handy dandy Boy Scout guide: Scoutcraft – Campfire Pottery, we were ready to begin. We have lots of clay soil on our property. I...
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This evening I had a couple minutes of down time, waiting for my kids to get out of youth group.  I grabbed my checkbook, thinking I’d enter recent checks into the register. Short task–two in the past week.  Curious, I counted.  I’ve written six checks so far in September.  Six checks in 17 days. ...
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Another day of canning like crazy.  This morning we did apple butter (6 pints) and applesauce (18 qts). I am going to run out of jars soon, and we haven’t even done grape juice yet . We have now gotten about 7 bushels of apples off our trees.  They are half empty, we estimate.   It is...
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Today we canned like maniacs (39 quarts of tomatoes and 15 quarts of apples). I ran out of canning lids again, and so hubby went to the store to buy them.  It seems my hubby is a little less –um– invested in the whole ’30 Days of Nothing’ thing than I am.  He came back...
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I’m finding myself becoming more aware of scarcity.   For example, this evening while cooking dinner, I used a few less potatoes than I first intended to, because I also wanted a few potatoes left for home fries another day. I chose to supplement with extra zucchini, which, of course, I have in abundance.  I used...
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So today I declared a day of rice. Rice for breakfast with brown sugar and butter.  And apples. Rice for lunch stir-fried with vegetables. And apples. Rice for dinner with spicy chicken veggie stirfry and kimchee. No apples. There was muttering at breakfast, mostly good humored.  There was scurrying and bolting of food at...
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Thanks, y’all, for weighing in on my question earlier today.  (And commenting!! I feel so special!) I am going to continue posting every day on the 30 Days topic.  I’m also going to try to fit in other topics too- in part by rerunning favorite posts out of my early archives that not many people...
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