Pesky beasties, snow and the usual snafus

First, I caught a cold that kept me coughing and sniffling for the better part of two weeks. I had a holiday planned for already around my b-day, part of which we intended to spend at MIL's, and the remainder at home, recuperating. What happened instead was the return of snow and cold, so bad that all airports were closed down, and the road forecast was so bad we decided to wait the worst out before driving home. The cold bugs, in the meantime, seem to have migrated to the colleague I work together with, and he's home sick for the whole week, after which- you guessed it- it's his turn to go on holiday for another two weeks. Saying I'm pissed doesn't quite describe it.
On the bright side of things, my parents are giving me a brand-new refrigerator for my birthday. I picked a model that has an especially big drawer for storing vegetables, and optimum energy use levels. Quite expensive, but from the reduction in energy use alone, it will probably pay for itself within seven to eight years. Besides, the old one has been making funny noises for awhile, so it's probably as well I'll be rid of it, before it starts a fire or something. The new one will probably be delivered next week.
What with the weekend being spent at home, I have started to make room in the kitchen for removing the old one and setting up the new one in its place.
Which, once again, led to several items being evicted from the premises. A fruit basket that had its feet so close together that it kept toppling over when I tried to use it, and a plastic microwave dish I had originally thought I'd use at the office went to the trash, as well as some bottles I had kept for their decorative value. The magnetic pinboard, i.e. the fridge door, was cleared of the magnets and paper attached to it. Part of it went to the freezer door, and several freezer magnets have gone into a drawer, pending a decision on whether I will use them again or not. One five-liter stockpot has gone to the cellar, as well as several empty flower pots.
What keeps surprising me is that at virtually every occasion where I have to do some rearranging I come up with a bunch of stuff to declutter, too. Then again, we still own plenty of stuff so it should be a given that not all of it is a necessity.
I'm actually looking forward to having that new fridge. That crisper drawer means I can, perhaps, buy more non-frozen veggies, which I mostly avoided because the old fridge had little room for them and our kitchen is too warm to store them outside of the fridge. So, any fresh veggies I bought have been for immediate consumption only. As we grocery-shop biweekly at most, that probably was not optimal for getting my nutritients in.
On quite another vein, that fridge replaces something I already own which I need daily, and which is on the point of breaking down. It reduces my energy bill and my carbon footprint, and the old one will be taken away and recycled, too.
So, it is the perfect minimalist gift. No extra clutter and good for the environment and my wallet.

Now if the fresh veggies that go into it were helping me to get back on the weight loss track again...


Julia

Shopping the gaps

The changing of the seasons, for me, meant, for the longest time, shopping.
First, making a tour of every clothes and shoe selling establishment in town to find out what the most recent must-haves were, then the acquisition of at least five big plastic totes full of garments.
At home, then, the attempt to squeeze those into the overflowing closets along with last year´s bounty, and that of the years before that. As it was, most of those clothes never even got worn because they had been pushed to the back of the closet, wedged in with way too many of their brethren.
And still I had that experience of standing in front of said overflowing closets uttering the immortal words "I have nothing to wear".
As I have been decluttering those garments that had become decidedly too big with recondensing myself, the first gaps appeared on the clothes racks. Now I haven´t finished recondensing yet, so any garment I´d buy right now would probably not fit me at goal weight, anyway. And that meant that those gaps were not filled back up by new acquisitions.
Guess what, I didn´t have to go bare. I didn´t even have to raise the frequency with which I´m doing laundry. The clothes I own today are completely sufficient for my needs, even though there are maybe half as many as I used to have. And by now, most of them get to see regular wear, too.
By now, I have successfully recondensed the greater part of my extra baggage, and come down to clothes sizes in the normal range. There´s  a high probability that the clothes I have would mostly still be wearable down to goal or at least close to it. So, this year, there was no shopping expedition (excepting one summer blazer I got on sale). Instead, I shopped my closet.
By now, I´ve grown so used to those gaps between garments on the rack that I don´t even have the feeling of missing something any more. Partly, that may be due to the fact that my body, by now, isn´t that fat any more. I feel better in it, and the frantic search for garments that would somehow camouflage my obesity is a thing of the past.
Besides, what with my limbs no longer squeezed against each other by the rolls of fat that had developed with weight gain, I have noticed that it takes me much longer to wear out a garment, so my existing stack will last me even longer.
For the time when I reach goal, my intention is to keep the number of garments small, replacing clothes as necessary but not piling them on the way I used to.
Not only will that save me from spending a substantial slice of my income on clothes I won´t even wear, or wear too rarely to justify their price, it´s eco-friendly, too.
And for the first time, there´s no need for pangs of conscience because I´d been wasting my time, my money, and my closet space on items I did not need or use.


Julia

The case for ebooks

As I mentioned before, I have to ride by train quite often.
And I am what they call a bookworm.
As our local library is, er, rather badly stocked, that used to mean buying the books I wanted to read. WHich in turn meant an ever-growing accumulation of dead tree with words on it in my living-room.
Now, some books for me are definite keepers. They get read and re-read, cherished, and kept.
Unfortunately, even if I´m careful, there´s just so much life in a pocketbook edition. The paper yellows, and at some point, the binding comes apart. Many books aren´t even sold in hardcover, and those which are sell for prohibitively high prices. It´s not unusual for a hardcover to fetch four to five times what the pocket edition might cost. So, buying the hardcover is absolutely restricted to perennial known favorites.
My book collection, therefore, is mostly pocket editions. The only way to keep these without cluttering up the look of my living room is behind closed doors, and I have just so many closed compartments in my IKEA shelf.
The answer to that is culling. Ever so often, I remove the books I no longer read, the ones that are outdated, and the ones that have become too dingy to openly display. Still, there are plenty of open shelves with books in them, making the room appear untidy. Not the leather-backed, gold-lettered books that are as decorative as they are entertaining. Just the usual cheaply-bound motley stuff.
Enter the ebook.
What kept me from embracing those earlier was that I believed you had to buy an ebook-reader to be able to enjoy them. At the prices they demand for these, I haven´t yet been ready to splurge on one. But now they (internationally operating internet book dealer whose name I won´t mention) have an application for your ordinary windows based PC that allows you to read their electronic goods, and that app´s for free!
What´s more, a lot of classic books can also be downloaded for free. Add to that the regular specials where you can buy an ebook for a steeply discounted price for a short period of time, and the fact that the ebook edition of almost any book is cheaper than the paper one, plus if I were to ever buy the ebook reader of that company my downloaded books will follow me there, too.
I´m in luuuuurve!
Plus, as those books take up no more physical space than the netbook I read them on (which is preexisting), my reading habit no longer contributes to the clutter in our living room.
I am, actually, successively acquiring the electronic editions of my favorite books- perhaps my library will be almost exclusively digital someday. And my bookcases a lot emptier. After all, as long as I d not invite visitors that I could make an impression on with overflowing bookshelves, what good are they?
I used to equate possession of books with being cultured. Owning books on many topics meant I was a person of many interests. Having a big library of the classics meant I had a good education.
In the age of digital media, that reasoning no longer cuts it. Even the textbooks of information I need on the job are available online.
The wall-high bookshelves, therefore, will probably be no longer necessary one day.
And that will be the day I am a step closer to a minimalist living rooom.


Julia

Boxing k.o.

In case you wonder, I haven´t taken up pugilistics. But a fight I did have over the weekend, namely with a stack of big rolling plastic containers that are supposed to go under beds to store stuff.
What with my decluttering project going on for several years now (and still not finished), most of these boxes had become redundant and relegated to the cellar, pending a decision on their fate.
Now, whenever I moved in the past, I had been preferring to use plastic containers over cardboard boxes. The ones from the last move are still in our cellar, stacked on top of and into each other. Most are also empty. The under-the-bed boxes had joined the lot because I thought I might use them if ever I were to move again.
This weekend, we had decided to do a bit of cellar decluttering, and those boxes were the first thing that came to mind. I don´t ever intend to stuff boxes of clutter under my beds again- bad feng shui, and besides they just collect dust and make the place harder to clean. So what about using them when moving- a box that is as wide as a bed and just two hands wide in depth might hold some items, but in all honesty these would be a b**ch to carry when loaded.
So what were they good for- absolutely nothing, except add to the clutter in the basement.
Which is why they went to the local recycling pickup place, along with a whole heap of reusable shopping bags that had accumulated over time, as in "I need just one more bag to carry this weekend´s shopping" or "drat, forgot to bring my bag, now how do I carry these heavy glass bottles home?". Whenever I have too many of those bags, I put them in the cellar to await the next recycling run.
The result of Saturday´s activities is by no means a tidy basement. But I did gain a lot of space back, which might just make going through the non-empty containers down there a bit easier.

Every bit helps.


Julia

Waste to waist to wait

For all too long, that´s what my grocery shopping went like:
Go to the closest supermarket, grab one of their oversized shopping carts, and fill it to the point of overflowing with all those delicious-looking things they had for sale.Then haul it to my car, squeezing in the four to five bags of merchandise such a cart amounted to, drive it home and drag it up the stairs to my flat. Then try to squeeze all of it into my fridge.
Most of the time, that meant removing at least one trash bag full of expired items first.
At the time, I thought that was the way things were if I wanted my pantry to be well-stocked all the time.
Well-stocked, to me, meant having any item I might wish to eat in the house all the time. So, I took home ten different kinds of cheese, because I couldn´t know which one I´d want to eat the next day, could I? Or three different loaves of bread, or five kinds of yoghourt, or six different packs of sausages.
All of these, of course, are highly perishable items, with a shelf life of sometimes less than a week. Having all of them in my fridge at once meant I could either eat them before they went bad, or I´d have to throw away what I couldn´t eat in time.
So I ate as much of them as I could and threw away the remaining packages as soon as they expired.

Just how dumb can you get? I regularly spent way too much money to buy too much food, ate too much "to keep it from going to waste" and still ended up having to throw away too much of it.
The force driving that insanity was fear. I was afraid that I might want to eat a certain food and find myself out of it. I imagined that I would, in that case, completely binge on whatever else I had on hand. The overstuffed fridge meant security. It also meant that I could make my eating decisions at the spur of a moment, eating whatever I happened to have a yen for.
It also meant I got fatter and fatter abusing my body as a bipedal waste bin gobbling down foods about to expire.

When I started out  on my weight loss journey two years ago, the first thing I decided on was a grocery shopping ban. I found out that I could live off what I already had in my fridge for several weeks before I had to go shopping again. With reducing the size of the portions I ate came the realization that I can really fit everything we need to eat in a week into just one of those reusable shopping bags.
I had to give up the idea of having everything always available for that, of course. Now, I have to decide when in front of the cheese shelf whether I want to eat gouda or emmental cheese that week, or in front of the yoghourt shelf whether I want greek or strawberry that week.
Guess what, I did not binge the first time I had a yen for camembert cheese, but only gouda in the fridge.
I just ate a piece of gouda, and - stopped eating. The world didn´t end.
And the next time I went grocery shopping, I was free to decide whether this week´s cheese selection would be camembert or something else. As far as I remember, it was something else.

It does not matter whether I have a special food on hand or not, as long as I have enough to eat.
It does not matter if the fridge appears half-empty, as long as what´s in there is enough to feed us until the next grocery shopping day.
I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. Absurdly so. But arriving at them has meant cutting down on our grocery bills, by more than half, and cutting down on food waste, too.
What my obsession with being stocked up fully with all my favourite foods has cost the environment before I saw the light, I cannot know. What I do know is that now I buy only as much food as will be consumed, and the amount of things we have to throw out because they have spoiled has gone down to almost zero.

And I feel a lot better for it. When I am not thinking about how much food and money I wasted over the years before I realized what I was doing wrong, that is, because then I could kick myself for being stupid.


Julia

Gee-raniums!

The last weeks have been extremely busy, what with DMIL´s birthday and the Great Spring Cleaning at her place, which this year meant also getting rid of some of her patio plants that had frozen to death in this winter´s late-coming deep frost period. As they had been living in their respective containers for several years, that meant having to disassemble them- and their roots-and getting our hands pricked in the process by the dried-out juniper plant- as usually, we´d been looking in vain for the gardening gloves we just knew DMIL had, only to find them when putting away the saw we had used on the plants... Anyway, in spite of all resistance, that juniper is now gone, as well as a bunch of overaged planting containers.
Speaking of those, this weekend, at our place, was Geranium Day. I´ve put the balcony boxes back up, and this year I planted them with red upright geraniums which hopefully will, if they get a bit bigger, provide excellent cover from the nosy neighbours on the opposite side of the back yard.  The herb garden I didn´t replace yet, as they had only a few scraggly-looking lavender bushes at the garden store. But even with the pots I´d put the herbs in still stacked underneath the balcony table, just having the boxes planted and the one surviving oleander bush from last year plus a new cherry laurel plant outside again, ready to bloom, feels good. Now if the weather were to get better again...
As for the plants I tried to get through the winter inside, only one lavender bush, one rosemary, and one of the oleander bushes have survived hibernation. The cherry laurel and the boxwood plant I should better have taken inside, as they, too, did succumb to the extreme cold in January and had to be discarded. Which, for future winters, means I have to take any plant inside which I want to keep for the next year, and it also means limiting myself to no more plants than what I can put into the staircase to hibernate- those potted herbs did not take too well to our cozy heated flat. 

On the weight loss front, being at DMIL´s for almost two weeks did, of course, play havoc on my efforts. As DMIL won´t eat many of the things I´d cook for ourselves, I had to stick to traditional German cooking, and because she is such a finicky eater I had to eat of what was served, too, so as to not have her stop eating just because I did. Which meant a gain of four pounds which hasn´t come off again yet. But at least I stayed below the limit of morbid obesity.

So, it´s back to business as usual again. I´ll see how long it takes to repair the damages...


Julia

Flakey view

Last winter, we were smothered in snow for over four months. This year, the white stuff did take its time arriving, as we are having the first heavy snowfall of the year right now. In February, no less. And it seems as if Father Frost were determined to drop the whole year´s stockpile on us at once. As long as we don´t have to use the car, that´s fine with me, but I sure hope they´ll have the roads cleared by the next time we have to drive to visit MIL Until then, I enjoy looking at the flaky white stuff falling down gently in front of my window.
As we have been, without using the car, pretty much housebound  these days, I have had ample time to putter around in the kitchen.
Guess what, there was one more thing I decided to get rid of, namely, an electric knife that had been taking up the better part of one of my kitchen drawers. When I bought that thing, I intended it for cutting up roasts, the kicker being that the serrated edges on the knife were tearing up rather than cutting the meat, and besides, what it did, unfortunately, cut a lot faster than the meat was the surface of my cutting board. So, I stopped using it pretty fast, but I did what happens all too often when something I bought doesn´t work out the way I thought- I put it away into that drawer, where it stayed through several moves, unused.
Last year, I splurged on a set of really good Henckel´s chef´s knives, among them a carving knife that cuts through even a stubborn roast as if it were butter. The likelihood that I would ever use that blunt electric knife again has, therefore, dropped to something below zero, so, I finally decided I had better uses for the space it occupied. It´s currently in the recycling basket for electronics, awaiting the next trip to the recycling center.
The lesson in that? It´s not always better to have an electronic gadget for preparing ingredients. If a gadget doesn´t work properly, it´s absolutely permissible to dump it at once instead of carrying it- and the guilt about having wasted money on it- around for the next twenty years. Provided, of course, you get rid of it in an environmentally friendly way. And it sometimes pays to pay for quality. I´ve had several cheap knife sets over the years, but the ones I have now will probably be used for the entire rest of my culinary career.
On the same note, I´ve had several sets of cheap pots that broke down rather fast, losing their handles or getting warped bottoms. The oldest of the more expensive professional-quality stainless steel ones I bought after having that happen once too often have been with me for some twenty years now, and show no sign of the hard use I have subjected them to, apart of course some scratches and discolorations- it happens even when you are careful.

But, they still work, and hopefully will continue to do so for years to come.
If I were to calculate the cost-per-use factor for the cheap stuff versus the high-quality stuff, it would almost certainly be a lot higher for the cheap stuff, apart the fact that working with good-quality equipment in the kitchen also saves a lot of time and hassle over using cheap pots and knives.
It has, of course, taken me several years (and some lucky finds at special sales or special discount offers) to replace my cheapo stuff in the kitchen, but it´s definitely been worth it.
And by not going around replacing everything at once, I could work those things into our budget without creating any undue waves.
Today, I have the equipment I need for preparing us nutritious food- which also saves us plenty of medical copays because the better nourished our bodies are, the less they get sick.
And the price of dinner in a restaurant compared to having the exact same meal prepared at home is, even at the cheaper eateries, at least three times as high, plus, you can´t control what they put into your food in a restaurant.
So, I´m thankful to my Grandma who taught me how to cook. It´s healthy, and it´s frugal. What more can you wish for? And yes, even if I say so myself, it tastes as good or better than what you´d get in a restaurant. Just ask DH :).


Julia

Deep cold

Tonight, the temperatures hit a long-time low of eighteen degrees centigrade below zero. If you take into account the wind chill factor , it feels rather like 25 degrees below.
So, there´s the worry about our car battery dying from the cold- the parking lot we have is in an open-sided structure, so, the inside is as cold as it´s outside. Luckily, I don´t think we´ll need the car this weekend, unless something of a professional nature were to creep up. Weekend shopping will, for this weekend, be done by tram, which is quite feasible because our fridge is, happily, well-stocked.
Having to carry all of my purchases at once will, moreover, help me to stick to the essentials, so, it´s also frugal.
Speaking of frugality, in December I got a nice fat refund from the energy provider we use. Too fat to be true, I thought and had the calculation rechecked. Turned out there had been a mixup of gas meters, so, they had erroneously billed me the gas use of another flat that had stood empty half of the year.  So, almost half the refund had to be returned.... What vexes me is that the mistake only became evident because of that big fat zero for the second half of the year´s use. Had the other flat not stood empty, I might have gone on paying somebody else´s gas bill indefinitely and never been the wiser for it.
The lesson from that is that you can´t just rely on your utility bills being correct. Find out the numbers of the meters connected to your flat, and watch how much you´re using.
Having a central heating system for just our flat  was, for me, an important criterion when I was looking for a new flat, because that way, I decide when the heating gets turned on or off, and how high the temperature is set. No haggling with my landlord over heating costs, either. And definitely no paying for any other tenants who believe that the way to regulate room temperature is to heat the place all the way up and then leave the windows wide open.
Having your own closed-circuit heating system with a thermostat that can be set to automatically lower temperatures during the daytime when there´s nobody at home, and at bedtime, can save a lot of money there. As can lowering said thermostat by just one or two degrees. The drop in heating cost is several percent for every degree centigrade less, and besides, we could always wear a sweater or vest if it gets too cold.
After all, the epitome of wasting energy, as defined by some prankster, is "heating up your room in wintertime until it´s as warm as it was during the summer when we complained about the heat and switched the A/C on".
I´d rather wear season-appropriate clothes and save on the cost of heating and air condition.
Come to think of it, even a hundred years ago it would have been sheer luxury to have a room in winter that had temperatures above zero at all. Our grandparents all have stories of windows coated with a layer of ice from the inside, or water pipes frozen up, or washing from a bucket where you had to break the ice first.
Our forebears dealt with that by dressing warmer. Heating up your rooms to the point where you can sit around with just a t-shirt even though it´s freezing outside, to them, would have seemed preposterous.
So, while I dislike shivering as much as anybody else, I still believe that central heating, too, is a commodity that should be used but not overused.
The environment and my purse both agree.


Julia

Portion size, cleanly

It´s not only food where you have to watch your portion sizes.
I found that out recently when taking the time to read the instructions on a bottle of liquid laundry detergent.
So, these bottles have caps which double as a measuring cup, too. And for the longest time, I had assumed that the size of a cap full was the recommended amount to pour into my washing machine.
Guess what- the instructions (printed very small, with an illustration I could only decipher with the help of a magnifying glass) mentioned something about a "line" up to which you were supposed to fill the cap to get one portion of detergent. So, I went looking for that line- and discovered it, after some seeking, about a third of the way up from the bottom on the cap´s inside.
And I had kept wondering why those bottles were running empty all the time! Knowing now that I was using triple the recommended amount, that particular miracle got its scientific explanation...
So, the next time, I used that line as a reference point. And while I was at it, I also looked for a similar marker on my fabric softener´s bottle cap, which in that case meant having to fill the cap less than halfway.
From the results, there was no difference.
The same principle applies to shampoo, shower bath, or dishwashing liquid. Most of the time, half the amount you are used to pouring from the bottle would do the job as well. Actually, using as little as possible may save you hard cash in more than one way, for example by using a lot less water to rinse the shampoo out of your hair.
Some brands try to discourage that kind of frugality by making their product very liquid and the openings on the bottle very large in diameter, making it near impossible to pour a small amount.
In that case, I refill the product into a bottle with a pump on it that gives single portions.
Total savings on cleanliness from watching portion sizes? About fífty to sixty percent. Plus, less impact on the environment. Win-win for everyone -except the people who sell those products...


Julia