Wamego Winter Woolfest

Last Saturday, I got to attend a rare fiber festival in my area, the Wamego Winter Woolfest. I say rare, because it seems like we have a lack of good festivals in Kansas. Or maybe I'm just not hearing about them. This one was pretty hopping when we got there, and they had several classes. I didn't participate in any, because they day was already pretty full, but I did get some random pictures of the event.

I picked up two hanks of Alpaca/silk blend to knit myself a scarf and a hank of hand dyed Merino to knit my friend a pair of socks for her birthday. I rarely splurge on yarn, but I felt that the day and the event called for it. This might be my splurge of at least the first half of the year. 

Goodreads: Furies of Calderon

Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Having read Butcher's Dresden File novels, I decided to give his Codex Alera series a try. My husband is reading them for the second time, and even though I tend to be intimidated by fantasy novels, I gave it a shot.

I loved this first book of the series. It has action that I can follow, romance that isn't over the top, cool magics, likable and unlikable characters. Even the bad guys are sometimes likable, because Butcher rarely makes his characters all dark or all light. And he does it well. In his fashion, there's also a good dose of humor and then some tragedy.

This book seemed a bit more intense than the earlier Dresden Books (I have to catch up on the later ones) and more graphic. I'm not complaining. I like intense and graphic anyway, and in this case, it just enhanced the reading experience.





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Me & My Money - The Intro to a Journey of Cheapness

Let's get started, shall we?

I fight with money. I generally hate it, but that's only when I don't have any. Which is normal for me. I've never been good with money. I have phases that last usually no more than 4 months in which I have it together. I'm budgeted, I'm balanced, I'm worry free. Then something happens and I'm reminded of how I failed to save, failed to track my spending, failed to record something in my checkbook that I should have.

It's been very frustrating and now it's not just my money I have to help manage. After a two and a half year long distance relationship, my boyfriend and I are finally together. Now we're dealing with two of us that have money issues. We're both spenders. Neither of us knows how to budget for ourselves. And now we're in this together, which means we're either going to drag each other further downhill or we're going to work together to be financially free and comfortable.

At the present time, neither of us are working. He's a college student and I just moved here. I'm hoping to have a steady job by the beginning of next week and after this week of classes, his job search efforts will be going in full force. We have one car between us and right now, I'm the only one with a drivers license. Which can be good and bad as far as the price of gas goes and what we're willing to do. At this point, I'm willing to try anything, especially because the only money we currently have is 17 dollars on a Wal-Mart gift card and 25 dollars in cash that I'm trying not to spend until I absolutely have to.

I'm not getting down about it though. Life has a way of working out, so between trying to live cheaply, we're also going to try to make money where we can. Jobs are around the corner. My goal is to live frugally past getting jobs though. I want to have a savings account, I want to be able to pay my bills, and I don't want to have to freak out if the car breaks down or something comes up. I also want to be able to go on dates, do dinner with friends, and take trips throughout the year.

Blogging about it will hopefully keep me on track, which is the main reason I'm doing it. I'm making it public in the hopes of getting input from others and maybe giving some useful hints to others along the way. Here's to the first step in making myself into a self made cheapskate!

M.

This was originally published on "Stretching a Dollar" on May 6, 2008.

I Wasn't Really Meant to Cook....

It was such a joke in our family...I'd never be one to cook a meal. My grandmother cooked large italian dinners and my mom wasn't too bad in the kitchen either. I, however, wasn't much good beyond Ramen noodles and peanut butter toast. I had no idea how to cut up an onion and I'm still not too sure of how to make a good egg.

I even had to call my grandma last weekend to find out how to make a whipped fruit salad.

This never bothered me really. I didn't want to be in the kitchen. I was awkward there and didn't know a wok from a skillet. It was much easier to just hit a drive thru or order a pizza, and when money got tight, frozen dinners and hot pockets were my best friend. There's been a few times I'd cooked or baked something, but I always ended on a stressed note and a lack of motivation to clean up the kitchen.

In May, I moved on the little bit of money I had left and realized that I had to suck it up and learn some skills. Fast food is expensive. I had to be creative and let's face it...how creative can one really be when you're dealing with frozen food and peanut butter and jelly? So I started small, bought a couple cookbooks, surfed a few websites, and broke out the crockpot. It wasn't long before I was cooking on the stovetop and the oven. Believe it or not, I'm actually up to cutting onions.

Though I go through phases where I don't necessarily want to cook, when I am doing it, I love it. I love not having to think of anything but the food and I love the sense of accomplishment I get from a meal well cooked.

Inspired by the masses of cool blogs and recipes I've been finding lately, as well as my new little "hobby" of taking pictures of the food I cook and some that I just eat, I've decided to start my own food blog. Mostly, I want a record of the recipes I try so I can use them at a later date. It's also fun to share with friends and let's face it...I love to blog. So here we go. I don't guarantee something everyday, but there may be days filled with stuff (weekends).

Let's see how this goes...

This was originally published on "Never Meant for the Kitchen" on 12/16/08. I've definitely come a long way since then. One thing that hits me about this post is how I talk about having just talked to my grandmother, who passed away in 2009. 

January Resolutions

It's a brand new year and everyone is making their 2011 resolutions. I don't normally make resolutions, because then I just feel bad when I give them up in February. However, I have decided to do something this year in celebration of the year 2011 (which has yet to actually prove if it's going to be one to celebrate or not).

A few weeks back I was doing weekly goals and updating about them. I fell off that wagon, but cramming a list of things into a week tends to be kind of overwhelming. I decided to take the goal idea and merge it with the concept of resolutions with a monthly resolution list. This isn't to say I can't reuse resolutions, it just breaks the longer term things up into bite size goals that might be easier to achieve.

I've got my list of January Resolutions made already, and most of them are hobby related. Some are time sensitive and some are ones that I will hopefully carry over into the next month. Some are just for fun.

Write DnD game for Tengaicon
Walk 20 days for 30 minutes for the January 2011 Fitness Kickoff Challenge
Finish the first three books in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher
Finish Lego HP
Watch two horror films from my Netflix queue
Track everything spent in the checkbook
Write 4 content  articles
Log 15 hours on ChaCha
Write and schedule blogs on a three times a week basis. I'll be pulling old ones from my old blogs in order to get rid of them this year.
Get going as a consultant for Passion Parties.


I'll also be taking a mid month road trip to help some good friends of mine move from Michigan to Oklahoma, attending a small fiber festival close to hear and enjoying a day of gaming at the above mentioned Tengaicon. 


It's going to be a pretty busy start to the new year. 

Bring it on!

ALF

Goodreads: Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I didn't actually expect to like this book. I'd tried reading some "classics" in my younger years and found them boring, so, always the hedonist, I avoided them. But when I got my new eReader that came preloaded with a bunch of classic stories, I decided to give them a try.

Most already know the story of Jane Eyre: young girl goes to the home of an older man to be governess to his young ward, falls in love with him, finds out about his secret, etc. etc. I won't give the secret just in case there is someone out there who hasn't read it.

What the story comes down to is love, certainly, but also a quest for womanly independence. The writing style is loftier than anything we have now, but the story is good and I found that now that I'm older, I followed it easily as compared to when I was a pre-teen. There were some moments that seemed to drag on, and dialogue tended to be overdramatic, but it was a sign of the times for writing.

Recommended read, definitely!



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Successful Date Night

J and I had a rare date night last night. We don't usually go out and do things in a "date" way, mostly because we're happy just hanging out at home. But we'd been talking about going to see "Tangled" for a couple weeks, so instead of coming home after work and getting lazy, we went out and just DID stuff. Together. Which isn't to say we never do stuff together, but we made last night "official."

So how did it go? Pretty well. We went to Panera Bread, which was a little bit of a disappointment. They didn't have bread bowls for soup and they wouldn't take the gift card I'd gotten from work. The portions were alot smaller than I remembered too. We laughed about how small J's sandwich was, but the truth is, I don't even think you could call it a half sandwich. Maybe more like a quarter sandwich.

We killed time by going to Target to check out their eReader selection. It was nonexistent.

The movie, however, was great. I don't think I've ever been to the movie theater to see a Disney movie. We only watched it in 2D but that was just fine. Most 3D movies anymore say they're 3D, but there are only a handful that are really worth the 3D experience. For once, there were no obnoxious people in the theater, and everyone else seemed to be enjoying the movie as much as we were. After we got home, J read some reviews that seemed to indicate that this movie wasn't as well received as some of them. Which is okay...everyone is entitled to their opinion. My opinion is that some people have really dumb opinions, and not because they did or didn't like it. Some of the reasoning behind why they didn't like it was just idiotic.

But I won't be negative. I loved the movie and will probably buy it on DVD unless it comes on Netflix and then I'll just watch the heck out of it.

Date night: success. Who knows when we'll actually do it again, though.

ALF