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Thrifty Food Plan, Thermostats, and Lunchboxes

For anyone who has been following this series, Elizabeth’s family has finished one month of the government’s Thrifty Food Plan. (Post one, the one that started it all.)

This conversation inspired me to get a few books on how to save money and shop savvy. There are some things on my budget that won’t budge, but others are completely flexible. Other than yesterday’s trip to the grocery store because I absolutely had to have fresh fruit, I have saved buckets on grocery bills for the two of us by modifying how we cook and eat. My primary problem (as of right now) is time. I don’t have that much time to stand around the kitchen and play Mother of the Year, and so far I’m spending most of my Sunday cooking for the week.

All I need to do now is figure out how to avoid the convenience of E’s lunchbox food and begin to make our own incarnations, and get used to the low-set thermostat and the house being cold. Because goddamn, it’s cold.

Fin: Skully Bag

I finally finished the Skully bag tonight after fighting with it for at least two months, a project undertaken to use up the masses of super-thick wool I had from a previous failed project. This is a picture of the final blocking process – very precise, as you can see.

I basically made a massive Booga bag with an attached strap that can be lengthened or shortened as needed, knitted a large pocket in red for the front, and then made an intarsia pocket using a skull pattern I found on the internet. I felted them all seperately, sewed them together, then very, very lightly felted them as a whole piece.

It’s kind of raggedy-looking, but big enough to carry around books or knitting projects. And it’s done. Done. One more thing to check off on the to-do list.

In other news, I cleaned the hell out of my kitchen tonight after making more chili and a large spinach and mushroom lasagna. Ethan topped it off by making blueberry and banana nut muffins. I don’t want to cook a stitch this week. In my quest for cheap, healthy living I’ve decided to try and cook ahead, using good but inexpensive foods that are easy to reheat throughout the week. I’m freezing the chilis and soups that I make for later. In addition, I found that at the grocery store I can have large, single-serve custom salads made for about three dollars a pop. It sounds expensive, but I never eat the salad stuff I buy separately and it beats paying five to ten dollars for a salad in a campus restaurant.

The most important thing is that this method saves me a whole lot of time. Time is something that is repeatedly brought up with Half Changed World’s government Thrifty Food Plan experiment (Week 3 of the experiment has been posted). If I had more time, things around here would look and feel much different. If anything, I’d occasionally catch a few winks that have nothing to do with the flu.