A Budgeting Dilemma

I recently borrowed a book on getting out of debt from the library, and I'm trying to incorporate some of the philosophies into my own life. I have to admit, my debt burden has been weighing on me heavily lately. Things have happened in my life in the last year that would have been much easier to handle if I wasn't so debt-ridden, and it's time for me to take control of the situation and try to start living my life instead of just attempting to survive from one week to the next. However, that does present a few dilemmas for me.

For one thing, the program about which I'm reading suggests donating 10% of your monthly income to charity. I can understand and appreciate this, and I intend to donate some money, but 10% of my monthly income is a lot for me, when over 50% of my income is already going for rent and student loan payments, not to mention my EXTRA student loan payments, food, and utilities, which also take a large chunk of my income. So for the moment, I'm going to donate 2.5% of my income as small monthly payments to four of my favorite groups: Partners in Health, The Central Asia Institute, NPR, and Heifer International. If it does one thing for me, at least it will remind me that no matter how bad things may seem, a lot of people in the world have it a lot worse.

The next issue is where to cut costs. The book suggests all kinds of things that don't really help me - don't go for coffee every day, try keeping a one-car household, cancel your cable TV, etc. For the most part, I don't have a lot of these expenses that are often considered necessities of modern life. One of my splurges has been food - I believe strongly in buying organic, local, and sustainable, and that's not cheap. I'm working on figuring out how to balance saving money and not compromising my belief system, all while eating healthfully. Suggestions would be welcome.

As far as my garden goes, things haven't been great. The heirloom tomatoes look terrible, the pattypan squash is almost dead, and I'm not sure what is up with the cucumbers. At least the corn, green beans, and peppers are doing well.

And that's all for now. I'm off to work a bit in the garden before it gets insanely hot, then coming home for more chores... Hopefully it will be a productive day!

On dieting

Lately I have been trying very hard to lose weight, and instead, I'm losing the battle of the bulge. I've gained a few pounds instead of losing them, and my clothes are getting tighter. I've been exercising a decent amount, mostly training for a bicycle race that's coming up, but I'm also eating with abandon. I'm not sure how to go about breaking the cycle, but I have a few ideas...

For one thing, I eat too much dairy. Dairy makes my stomach upset, and has a lot of calories for how filling it is. I've been eating toasted whole wheat bread with butter for breakfast, and the butter has a whopping 1oo calories per tablespoon. I think that from now on, I will have some hummus on my bread instead, which clocks in at a mere 26 calories per tablespoon, and is more filling to boot. I'm going to make some fresh hummus tonight and give it a whirl tomorrow. Another thing that I've been doing is using balsamic vinegar and red wine vinegar as flavoring. They're both quite low calorie, only 10 calories per tablespoon, and add a lot of flavor.

I also need to try to eat more veggies and more fiber. For this week, I'll be having some leftover pasta salad (unfortunately with cheese), some asparagus and mushrooms in oyster sauce with brown rice (and I know the asparagus is out of season, and I feel completely guilty about it), some grilled veggies one night (with a tomato and cucumber salad), and perhaps towards the end of the week, some black bean soup, risotto, or pasta primavera, depending on what my garden provides me with.

Speaking of my garden, things are progressing well. The corn is huge and is producing ears. The pole beans are going crazy, and also producing. The tomatoes aren't doing quite as well, for some reason, although the peppers are doing great, and the tomatillo is growing like a weed. The plants that i'm having the most trouble with, though, are the squash. For some reason, squash doesn't like to grow in my garden, and i have no idea why. I'm going to have to do some research and figure it out.

Until then, happy eating!

My first summer harvest

I just returned from my garden, victorious! I harvested a purple bell pepper, a yellow banana pepper, a dark green heirloom zucchini (zucchino?), a handful of green beans, two beautiful beets, and four carrots, three of which are perfectly usable, and one which needs a little help, plus one little onion. My plan is to roast the beets, one carrot, and a Japanese sweet potato for dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, and use the rest of the veggies to make a ratatouille to serve over rice for the next few days.

I'm beginning to wish that I had planted more beans, as I really enjoy eating and canning them. I also discovered that there are varieties of purple beans, so next year I may try starting some from seed. It would be very cool to can green and purple dilly beans.

So far, my zucchini haven't been productive at all. I'm hoping that will change, but one of the things I'm learning is that zucchini really don't like the heat that much. They collapse pretty quickly unless they get watered often. I'm determined not to make the same mistake I did last year and let the zucchini plants collapse.

Exciting garden news

I have corn growing on my cornstalks! It's such an exciting thing for me. Ironically, it's the smallest cornstalks that are producing right now, but i have at least three ears of corn coming up. My tomatoes are starting to produce, I have several peppers maturing, some of my beets are absolutely humungous, the green beans are doing great, and I have a small heirloom zucchini. the eggplants, tomatillo, and cucumber are all flowering, as are the melons. It's an exciting time for my garden.

Food plans for the next week (or two)

I've picked enough green beans to make a nice green bean and potato salad, so I bought potatoes at the farmer's market and I'm making enough to last at least two lunches and two dinners. I'm also making some focaccia to go along with it (yum!). Some fresh onion from the garden will round it out. I also picked up some small purple potatoes, so at some point I will eat those with mayonnaise or cottage cheese. I also just found a recipe for a lovely Italian summer soup, with beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots, so that will probably be on the menu for later this week or next week.

At the moment, I'm also making en enormous amount of bread, most of it destined for the freezer. I've discovered the joys of freezing bread. It thaws beautifully, so one night of baking will last me several weeks.

If I run out of options for the next two weeks, I'll make some Eastern European whole pea soup, pasta with tomato sauce (flavored with onions and carrots from the garden!), or tasty bites, one of my favorite last-minute dinners.

Bonsais and mulch

Which have nothing to do with each other.

After a lecture (of sorts) from my garden neighbor, I decided to mulch my garden. Not having any mulching materials readily available, I headed over to my friend Sam's house to pilfer some from the streets. We grabbed some giant leaf bags and started shoveling grass clippings in. At one point, her neighbor came home as we were gathering grass clippings from in front of his house. He looked at us like we were crazy, then started laughing. I doubt he thinks we're crazy, just a bit eccentric. I got two giant leaf bags of clippings, which covered about 2/3 of my garden, which isn't bad. I'm curious to see how much it helps keep the weeds down and the water in. But so far, my garden is doing great!

One of my experiments this year is corn. I bought quite a few corn plants, some organic and some regular. I honestly can't remember which is which, but one group is doing far better than the other group. this is also the first time I've planted herbs other than basil, and they're doing better than expected at the moment. The beets are doing great! I picked a few the other day and roasted them, and they were delish. I'll have to plant more the next time around. I love beets. I pulled all of my shallots and I'm getting ready to hang them in my closet, the only cool, dark, dry place that I house. I also have a few volunteers, which I think are melons left over from last year. I don't actually remember what type of melon they are, but I know I didn't get the same kind this year, so I'm very hopeful they'll turn out to be good.

On a somewhat related side note, I've decided to take up bonsai, although probably not too seriously. Just a bit seriously. We'll see what happens. For now, I have two starters and no tools, so I can't do much other than just keep them alive (which is going well so far).

So if any of you want ideas for birthday gifts for me, bonsai tools and a tomato machine would be awesome!

So much to do in a 3-day weekend

I have undertaken quite a few projects during this 3-day weekend, and one of them in particular is eating up my time faster than I can believe. On my list:

Installing my new portable bike pump on my racing bike and moving my old pump to my commuter bike - Done!
Cleaning out my closet - mostly done
Setting up itunes so i can listen to podcasts at work - done
Setting up my portable hard dive - done
Transfering files from my old computer - taking FOREVER!

My sister Stacey was kind enough to help me clean out and organize my closet, and I took six bags of things to the Salvation Army to donate. That felt great! I also had quite a few bags of garbage and a lot of recycling, but there's still so much more to do. I know I'll have a few more bags for donation, but at the moment, I'm fresh out of bags to put stuff in.

My next project is to transfer everything off of my old computer so that I can give the monitor to my mom and dismantle the old CPU. So far, this hasn't worked as I planned, mostly because the process of transferring files is really quite slow. And it seems that every roommate I've ever had saved stuff on my computer, and I'm now laboriously going through all of it to determine what's good and what's not.

At the moment, Max (aka The Cutest Cat in the World) has resumed his love affair with my laptop and keeps trying to delete this post. Probably time to post it and get back to transferring files. Sigh