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Welcome! Hello! Hooray! Here we go!

It’s blogathon time!

Reminder:

First some terminology: “blog” is a shortened version of “weblog” which is a frequently updated personal website. Most blogs have date stamps on the entries, and consist of links and commentary.

Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.

I’m collecting sponsorships for the BC SPCA, specifically their Paws for a Cause campaign. Not only am I fundraising over the next 24 hours, my pooch and I will be walking with hundreds of other animals and their people on September 13th.

Thank you for supporting us! See you again in 30!

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I’m blogging for 24 hours straight to support the BC SPCA

Pledge through the Blogathon Site
or
Directly through the SPCA Paws for a Cause donation portal.

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m embarking on the madness that is Blogathon 2009 tomorrow.

My charity of choice is the BC SPCA

And this face is Sasha, imploring you to donate.

I start at 6:00am tomorrow, and don’t stop blogging for 24 hours! And then I nap for most of a day, and then I turn 29. If that is not trauma worthy of a donation, I don’t know what is.

If you won’t do it for me, or Sasha, do it for the kittens, or the thousands of other Animals the SPCA works to save and protect.

Of course a few of my posts will be sharing some of the good work the SPCA does. Others will be live-blogging the goings on at the Chill on the Hill event at Whistler. And I’m also taking requests from sponsors for wacky things to photoblog. Leave a comment on that entry with your creative ideas!

Pledge through the Blogathon Site
or
Directly through the SPCA Paws for a Cause donation portal.

Wet noses everywhere thank you.

Because blogging for 24h straight (all to raise money for the BC SPCA! Donate!) isn’t zany enough, I’m going to be doing it from Whistler. Specifically, from the Nestea Chill on the Hill Event.

I’ll be heading up first thing Saturday morning with Tanya to party and play in the sand & snow. And I’m taking requests!*

Since you’re forking out your hard-earned dollars for the cause, I’ll take pictures of myself doing any number of things in Whistler at the event. You want toes in the sand? You got it! Snow angels? Sure! Hugging a random stranger? Heck yes!

Comment with your crazy capers, then click to donate through Blogathon.org or the BC SPCA Paws for a Cause site.

_{*No nudity and nothing illegal. This here’s a family show!}

I’ve outlined our months of budgeting to get rid of consumer debt, the tools we used to manage it all and some of the tricks we learned along the way. The last installment in the official budget series is the all-important “what now?”

While it’s nice not to have the big worries of our outstanding line of credit and unfiled taxes hanging over our heads, we are certainly not completely out of the proverbial financial woods.

We’ve now taken the amount we were putting toward the debt, and have reallocated it into a few different categories, henceforth referred to (and labeled in our spreadsheets) as: Fun, House/Dog/Taxes/Car, and OHSHIT!

Fun is pretty self-explanatory. That’s anything from fancy dinners out, clothing and IKEA trips to major purchases like a new TV to replace our aging tube set, vacations, and sailing lessons.

House/Dog/Taxes/Car is our non-life-altering emergency fund. We’ve figured out how much we need to save each month to pay for annual expenses like car insurance, the dog’s annual vet visit, home insurance, property tax, major car services. We know these things are all coming eventually, and we know approximately when. We’ve also added a bit extra to the savings goals for that account to cover things that are entirely likely to happen someday, like a major car repair, major dog repair, major house repair or insurance deductible.

The OHSHIT! account is for the big ones, and we hope we never have to spend it. Job loss. Limb loss. Life loss. Anything that would result in one or both of us losing our ability to earn income for any period of time. We’re also looking into disability insurance, to cover the gap between work insurance coverage/government assistance programs and our current salaries, so if the unthinkable does happen, we can focus on getting through the ordeal, without also worrying about things like losing the house or being able to buy gas or groceries.

Other than those, we’re continuing to contribute to our RRSPs and opening TFSAs.

When you add it all up, we…. don’t have much more money to spend on day-to-day frivolities than we did while we were paying down debt. I suppose those weekly dinners at Lumiere won’t be a reality after all.

The difference is, we’ll still be able to have and do fun things in the near and distant future (we have lofty dreams of buying a sailboat), without going back into debt for them. And if we’re able to stick to our plan, we should continue to be able to have them, even if other emergencies and the various obstacles life throws our way interfere. And then, whaddya know, we’re living within our means.

Frankly, even though day-to-day life is still pretty modest, it’s way more fun putting money into a bank account with a picture of a sailboat on it, than one with a picture of all the interest we were paying.

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And speaking of money, if you have some burning a hole in your pocket, why not contribute to my efforts at the 2009 Blogathon! I’ll be posting every 30-minutes for 24 hours straight to benefit the BC SPCA!

Of course I can’t suggest you go into debt or compromise your own financial plan to donate, but maybe find a way to forego a couple lattes or a new pair of party shoes and help the animals this month instead!

Do you remember that old movie Heavy Weights? Early Ben Stiller where he is crazy (evil!) fitness guru Tony Perkis who runs a fatcamp for kids?

At one point, the kids and camp counselors stage a coup, lock up crazy Tony, and have an all-night food-fueled orgy of gorging. If you haven’t seen it, or need a reminder, check out the video clip. The carnage starts around the 6-minute mark.

Anyhow, I was not quite so hedonistic, but when I got home last night, poked at my millet and stared at the box of supplements again, I broke. I could not face imposing this horrible cleanse upon myself for another minute.

Even though it was a day and a half early, I nixed the entire stupid wild rose herbal d-tox and went to Wendy’s.

After a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger combo, with a coke natch, some gummy worms and beer, and a bit of running around at Ultimate (which I haven’t had the energy for during the entire stupid cleanse), I felt orders of magnitude better.

And this is not “I did a cleanse and it made me feel better” better, it’s “I finally gave my body some real food and actual calories and let them remain in my person long enough to absorb some energy and nutrients.”

As far as I’m concerned, I will never, ever do a cleanse again, and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone else, either.

Of course the fundamentals of any balanced budget is that you can’t spend more than you make. It’s a no-brainer. It’s also not always easy (possible, yes, easy, no) to make sure that actually happens on a month-to-month basis.

With a large amount of credit available and/or minimum payments you could also make for “just one more month,” putting off really paying down debt, it’s easy to spend more than you make. I know this. I have been there.

Spending Less

We knew to be successful at paying down our debt, we’d have to spend less wherever possible. And this is where we found the power of making the most of stuff we already had.

I don’t know if everyone is like this, but when we really started going through our cupboards & drawers, we had a lot of extra stuff hanging around. Most of it was consumables that we regularly spent a small fortune on.

Our pantry was full of odd dry goods we rarely used and drinks we kept around. These became the makings of many new interesting recipes and cocktails we hadn’t previously thought of.

We also had a freezer full of leftovers and “rainy day” purchases that seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, it’s a rainy day now in budget land. No, it wasn’t always enjoyable or even tasty (the freezer is sometimes where dishes we didn’t really like go to die, because we don’t feel right just throwing them away – until we clean out the freezer months later). But it was frugal.

For the ladies (and the metrosexual men) – I found I had tons of half-used and trial-sized cosmetics and personal care products kicking around under the sinks. Sure, when I felt like I had all the cash in the world to blow on new versions, these seemed like garbage. But when pinching every penny, these kept me lotioned and potioned and pretty for the entire first half of the year.

And of course clothing – a small blip on the radar, but when we cleaned out our drawers and closet we found things we’d forgotten we had, which put off the immediate feeling of needing to purchase more.

So, we are were (!) lazy, forgetful, slobbish and wasteful with all that extra stuff hanging around. But using it up, as an immediate budget-saver, really helped us get through some of the tighter months. And of course, it had the added bonus of getting us cleaning up our act regarding the stuff we horde.

Making More

Neil and I both work full time at fairly demanding jobs. We’re paid respectable wages and certainly weren’t about to get raises in this economy.

But there are so many other ways one can ensure more money comes in.

One of those was to sell off our hockey tickets for the season. We share half-season’s tickets with my family, and so had an allotment of games we had already purchased tickets for. By selling these to friends and acquaintances, we turned a sunk cost into cash, and spun that cash into a few smaller-budget entertainment outings.

Along the previous theme of getting rid of excess stuff, we sold a bunch of books we no longer wanted to a used bookstore. If you have extra things around that someone may want, put in a bit of effort and turn it into cash – you’ll be amazed at how much you can get, and how far you can stretch those few extra dollars.

The other big way we “made more” was to really sort out our accounting and taxes. As I mentioned previously, we were paying way too much in taxes and didn’t have the best grasp of our personal situation. It seems counter-intuitive to hire someone to do a job when you’re trying to save money, but the fees we have paid to our accountant have been more than covered (sometimes 10 times over) by the benefits we have gotten by using him to do our taxes and tax planning, rather than doing it ourselves.

Having someone on your side who can help you navigate the waters and maximize your returns is a very good investment, and if you can cover the initial fees, you will come out ahead. Also, if any locals would like a referral to our accountant, drop me a line.

Really, none of these ways of spending less and making more are rocket science, but it takes both a desire to do whatever it takes and a bit of creativity in approaching your own situation to make it work.

Next up: The final installment in the official budget series; where do we go from here?

Now that we’re debt-free, I wanted to share some of the tools we used on the way there.

Actually, there was just one tool: Google Spreadsheets. In it, we built our budget, and kept track of everything we realized needed keeping track of. The visibility into exactly how much money we expected to be coming in and out at all times, as I’ve mentioned before, was the key to making this successful. More successful than we’d intially planned for in fact, considering the “bonuses” that came our way throughout the process that we were able to take advantage of.

In our Budget spreadsheet, we’ve got 5 tabs going at all times:

1. The overall budget – where all the money should go
2. The monthly ledger – where all the money is going (with lines struck out as things are paid)
3. Last month’s ledger – where the money went (for comparison)
4. Trigger list of possible expenses that might come up in any given month
5. Schedule of all our bills, and when they’re due (annual and monthly)

When it comes to fund allocation, one of the biggest challenges for building a budget (or any financial planning endeavor, really) is figuring out how much to put where. What I really want out of life is to walk up to an expert and say “here is a complete list of my income/assets/liabilities” and have them tell me what to do with it all. Sure, I could learn everything about finance myself, but frankly, I’m not that interested. Unfortunately, I have yet to find that expert. Luckily, for day-to-day expenses, this budget spreadsheet comes very close.

It’s from Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s website, and it helps that her attitude toward financial strategies and planning advice aligns very closely with our own. She breaks down a budget into categories on which you should spend what percentage of your income, making allowances for debt repayment, long-term savings and life in the meantime. It would certainly get tricky when you have more debt than you can pay off with 10% of your net income in 2-3 years, or are locked into paying significantly more than the recommended allotment for housing, transportation and the like – but for the average household, a bit of massaging to suit your individual needs and it should all work out.

The other thing we did was make a monthly ledger with money we knew was coming in (usually just our salaries) and all the expenses we knew were going out. Building the “out” list every month was crucial, and we did it based on a trigger list (borrowed from the GTD methodology) of potential expenses, so we didn’t forget things like celebrations, car repairs, clothes needed, personal care or staples we needed to stock up on.

Neither Neil, nor I are particularly good with writing down every penny we spend. We are occasionally careless, and succumb to impulses, so the strategy that worked best for us in the end was to align our spending based on Gail’s budget spreadsheet, build our monthly ledger to include all the money that had to go out for various bills and expenses, and take out the rest in cash in two lumps at the beginning and middle of every month (which aligns with when we get paid). Facing the dwindling pile each day meant we could always take a $20 for our wallets to grab a coffee or go out for lunch, but each of those impulses very obviously came at the expense of other things. There were many weeks we lived off of whatever was in the freezer and pantry (lots of soup, rice and pasta) because we spent our last $15 on a bottle of wine.

In the end though, it kept us on track with what we were trying to achieve, and I hope reading about our experience helps someone else get to debt-free as well.

Next Installment: how we minimized costs and “made more money” over the past six months.

One of the pet peeves I had while I was looking for cleanse info/reviews was finding people saying “oh hey I’m starting this cleanse” and that was the last thing they had to say about it. For future googlers, I’m halfway through this godforsaken Wild Rose D-Tox cleanse. Here’s how it’s going:

I certainly experienced the fatigue that was listed as a side effect. I crashed hard on Monday afternoon. The upside is that I’ve been sleeping like the dead all week, which feels nice in the mornings. Downside: I still crash at about 8:00pm every day.

I also started off really, REALLY hungry. It took a while to remember that I need to eat some whole grains with just about everything. That means lots of brown rice with all meals. Eight days in, and I’m eating less, and also less hungry. I don’t know if that means I’m getting used to things or just bored and resigned to a smaller diet.

If you’re going to do this cleanse, buy the cookbook. Don’t ask whether it’s worth it, just buy it. Your tastebuds will thank you. It’s also a handy investment if you ever entertain friends who have every food sensitivity known to mankind.

My terrible $10 bathroom scale has told me nothing in terms of weightloss (I suppose that’s what I get for buying a terrible $10 scale), but my pants say that at least a couple pounds are gone.

I have yet to experience any of the “clarity” or “extra energy” or other feel-good benefits that cleanse-takers report. I am trying to look at that in a positive light, and deduce that it’s because I was not particularly toxic to begin with, and am not sensitive to all of the things I’m really missing eating right now.

I am uncharacteristically (yes, even for me) short tempered and generally cranky. I snap like a twig. I’m not otherwise emotional – not weepy or sentimental – just highly annoyed pretty much 24/7, for no good reason (other than a distinct lack of mushroom cheeseburgers).

I haven’t had any other “to be expected” symptoms of “sugar withdrawl” such as headaches, etc.

The pooping is bad, but not as bad as I’d initially expected. It’s unpleasant, and often urgent, but nothing compared to the prep one needs to do for a barium enema or a colonoscopy (says the girl with a family history of IBD), and CERTAINLY nothing compared to food poisoning. So that’s something, I guess.

If you asked me today whether or not I’d ever do this again, the answer is a resounding NO.

I might be a bit slimmer (that’s a big might, and remember, brought on by having liquefied my digestive tract for nearly 2 weeks), but I don’t otherwise feel any notable benefits from doing this so far.

And the negatives (being highly annoyed all the time, making everyone feel awkward by refusing cake/beer/anything except green tea and the blueberries my poor mom went out and got for me at my dad’s birthday, being insanely tired most of the time, did I mention the crankiness? and the pooping?) far outweigh the positives.

I’ll check in again once it’s all done, and once I’ve hopefully regained my usually cheerier outlook.

January, February, March, April, May

Reader’s Digest Version: we’re consumer debt free!

Scroll down to the bottom to enter to win a pair of tickets to see Zinadine Zidane play in an exhibition soccer match in Vancouver on Sunday, July 12!

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We made it!

Part of getting our financial house in order was to get a lot of our taxes in order as well. One of the major contributors to our debt was a huge tax bill from a few years back (a big enough bill that Canada Revenue suggested we pay in installments) that we weren’t expecting at all. It turns out that we’d missed changing our address with one financial institution and weren’t getting tax forms for an RRSP account. Since we tend to “set it and forget it” with retirement savings, we didn’t really notice they were missing. To make matters worse, this is the fund that Neil’s work does RRSP matching to, so we were paying extra taxes, since RRSP matching is a taxable benefit, without getting any deductions.

So we had our accountant file amendments for past years, and the not-insignificant cheque arrived in the mail right at the end of June! It easily covered the remaining balance on our line of credit, and like that, we’re debt free!

It’s really quite amazing the amount of windfalls we’ve seen from just making sure we’re paying attention to our finances. Except, they’re not so much windfalls, as the reclaiming of money we were otherwise throwing away. I’d heard of people who were so careless with their life and finances that they wasted hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on unclaimed taxes & benefits, NSF fees, late charges and the like. I never imagined I’d be one of them.

Oh but I was. We were. And now, we’re not!

Also, having our emergency account going the entire time meant that our plan was never derailed, and windfalls were exactly that – bonuses, instead of a chance to catch up.

I’ll do another post soon to share some of the tips and tools that worked best for us, and where we go from here. But for now, it’s time to celebrate!

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One of the things that helped us get through the belt-tightening of the budget exercise, especially in the early days, was to take advantage of some gift certificates, airmiles points and coupons we had around the house. Entertainment that doesn’t bust the budget is that much more relaxing!

And I’ve got two pairs of tickets to see Zinadine Zidane play an exhibition match with the Vancouver Whitecaps on Sunday, July 12th at 7:00pm.

To enter, comment and let us know why you need some free entertainment this weekend. I’ll randomly draw the winners from all the entries at 5:00pm today and email your congrats. You can pick the tickets up at the game on Sunday.

Good Luck!

I mentioned in my last post that our CSA is keeping me well in veggies for this cleanse I’m doing. I’ve had a lot of questions about the CSA, what is it, where is it, how much does it cost and what do we get – so after picking up our share last night, I took a picture and compared some costs to share… uh… the share.

First off, for those unfamiliar with a CSA, it stands for Community Supported Agriculture. From Wikipedia:

[It] consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.

We pay for an entire season’s worth of produce up front, and

Thus, individuals, families or groups do not pay for x pounds or kilograms of produce, but rather support the budget of the whole farm and receive weekly what is seasonally ripe. This approach eliminates the marketing risks and costs for the producer and an enormous amount of time, often manpower too, and allows producers to focus on quality care of soils, crops, animals, co-workers — and on serving the customers. There is financial stability in this system which allows for thorough planning on the part of the farmer, and emotional investment on the part of the members. (Wikipedia)

Our particular CSA is Kitsilano Farms. And from what you can see, we certainly receive a LOT of produce in a typical week (click to go to the flickr page where there are notes, to see the specifics of what we get):

In terms of value for dollar, the share purchase was $475 for 20 weeks of produce (which turned into 21 weeks because of an early boom of harvest-ready produce). That puts us at $22.62 per week. We’ve always felt like we were getting amazing value for the haul of goods we brought home every week, but just for kicks, I priced out what our share would cost in the grocery store downstairs, the local farmer’s market or from a local grocery delivery. I’ve picked the average prices for everything, here’s how it all adds up:

Spring Onions – $0.89/bunch
Komatsuna – $0.99/bunch
Rhubarb – $1.50/500g
Garlic – $0.85/head
Radishes – 1.50/bunch
3 big heads leaf lettuce – $1.50 each
Beet Greens – $1.99/bunch
Raspberries – $5.99/pint
2 heads Red Romaine – $1.50 each
3 Turnips – $2.25/lb (about 1 lb)

That all adds up to $23.46. It’s not a big savings, but it is a savings over time for the entire growing season. It’s also forcing us to eat a LOT more veggies, since we know a new batch is coming every week, and we’ve already paid for it (no “stopping delivery because we’ve tossed the last two weeks’ worth in the compost” for this).

In fact, we went a bit CSA happy this year, we’ve also signed up for a Grain CSA, and will visit our wheat in a couple weeks, with delivery of our 20kg of whole wheat flour showing up sometime in late summer/early fall (baking anyone?).

We also have plans to join a Wine CSA, and are actively keeping our eyes out for a meat CSA as well if anyone knows of anything going on.

Now we didn’t leap suddenly into farm-sourced eating. We’ve been moving down this road over the past year or so. Thankfully, with the larger influence of food-security related movements, it’s becoming much easier to source things that are being grown in a sustainable way and develop relationships with the producers.

CSA’s aren’t for everyone – it’s a big stretch in mindset and lifestyle to go from planning meals based on what you want (or not planning, and just grabbing things at the last minute) to figuring out from week to week “what can I make out of what these farmers have given me?”. At least, it’s a stretch in North America for the way most of us live. It’s actually just the way of things in much of the rest of the world, and was the same here until the dawn of industrial agriculture.

Despite the shock and awe value of films coming out now like Food, Inc., the writings of Michael Pollan and the fuss over the White House organic food garden, I don’t expect a sea-change in the way many people in the industrialized world get their food. But if I can have a hand in making sure a few more small farmers survive, ensure a biodiversity of crops, and reduce the risk of salmonella in my (and a few others’) spinach as a result, well that’s a pretty exciting thing to me.

As Wendel Berry famously said, “Eating is an Agricultural Act,” and I’m certainly enjoying playing my part.

Today marks day one of my first ever cleanse. I’m doing the Wild Rose Herbal D-Tox.

It didn’t come entirely out of nowhere – a few people I know have done this particular program. Others have done food/alcohol restriction experiments, and yet others are necessarily eating modified diets because of allergies and food sensitivities.

I looked into it, figured it’s only 12 days long, and wondered how I’d feel cutting out refined sugars, most other sugars, flours, dairy and anything fermented. So many people I know have reported feeling many, many times better after modifying their diet to reduce these particular components. For 12 days, what have I got to lose (other than a few dollars and a bunch of toxins)?

The specific herbs in the D-Tox package are designed to help re-set optimal liver performance (biliherb) and the others to “cleanse” the system (cleansaherb, laxaherb and cl extract) – I expect to be having a very literally craptacular time in a couple days!

The diet to go along with it is designed to regulate pH in the body, by separating foods into aklaline forming, acid forming and neutral foods. During the cleanse, one is to eat mostly alkaline and neutral foods (80% plus), a few healthier acid forming foods (>20%) and eliminate other food groups entirely. Those curious about the particulars of the eating requirements can check out the document here.

So far it hasn’t been too painful – caffeine is blessedly allowed, so I’ve had black coffee and green tea today. I can also have butter and/or olive oil on most things. Overall, the day really wasn’t bad in terms of what I could eat or changes from my regular routine.

Breakfast was an egg, fried in a bit of butter, with sauteed red peppers and onions, topped with fresh tomato. This would usually be toast or cereal, if anything, so the egg scramble was a real treat!

Snacks were a few raspberries and some almonds. Almonds are a golden food on this plan for some reason, and I can eat as many as my wee heart desires. I do need to pack better snacks for tomorrow. I can’t rely on the work vending machine for a pick-me-up on the cleanse.

Lunch was pretty typical. I had the usual green salad made from the bounty of our CSA share, dressed with lemon juice and some really great olive oil. I also brought a potato to “bake” in the microwave and doused it with butter and some sea salt. I’d have had chives too, but I forgot them. Again this was actually a bit nicer than my typical meals. I wouldn’t normally bother with the potato, but I was paranoid of the salad not being filling enough and wanted to ensure I had some more bulk.

Dinner was a couple quick peppered fillets of sole, brown rice, and another salad. Dessert will be the rest of the raspberries (the diet does allow domestic fruits, but only one serving of sweet fruits per day).

So far, at the end of the day, I don’t feel all that different.

I’ve felt fuzzy off and on (pretty standard for a Monday). I feel bloated (also not out of the ordinary) and I have yet to poop (story of my life).

I am a little more irritable than usual, but I was irritable yesterday too, and I think it has more to do with the fact that my apartment looks like a laundromat, a campsite, a pet store and a catering school all showed up, partied, barfed their entire contents and left, than with the lack of sugar, flour or dairy.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Have you ever done a cleanse or something similar? How’d it go?

It is slightly less than one month until my 29th birthday!

And while there are a few people out there who think I’ve already crossed the 30-threshold, I assure you I plan on bemoaning the end of my prime and impending 1/3-life-crisis to the fullest for the 365 days preceding the momentous occasion. That leaves me with a mere 28 days left to be jolly and cheerful and youthful. And I plan to make the most of them.

In addition to the typical fun summer birthdays bring, I thought I might take on something more significant than usual on the eve of the last year of my 20′s, and sign up for the birthday edition of the Vancouver Blogathon!

From the official blogathon.org:

Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.

My charity of choice is going to be the BC SPCA, and funds collected will be included as part of my fundraising efforts for the Paws for a Cause walk in September.

So, there you have it. Blogathon, July 25/26 (my last few hours of age 29), Paws for a Cause September 13th (six weeks into the countdown to 30).

If I can’t avoid aging entirely, at least I can channel my angst into something positive!

It’s fairly safe to say that when I resort to memes I am feeling awfully guilty about letting the blog lie dormant, but am somehow incapable of collecting my thoughts into anything that resembles a coherent post.

Also, they’re kindof a guilty pleasure. So it works well on many guilt-fronts. I was raised Catholic, can you tell? Anyhow… on with it.

These are supposed to be answered by me, about Neil. Perhaps he’ll weigh in at some point and let you all know how right or wrong I am.

1. He is sitting in front of the TV. What is on the screen?
Whatever I’m watching. He’d rather not sit in front of the TV, but will sit next to me and do stuff on his laptop if I’m watching.

2. You’re out to eat; what kind of dressing does he get on his salad?
Whatever the house dressing is. Or a balsamic vinaigrette if the house dressing has anything to do with raspberries.

3. What’s one food he doesn’t like?
Raspberries

4. You go out to eat and have a drink. What does he order?
Gin & Tonic to start. Wine or beer with dinner, depending on the dinner.

5. Where did he go to high school?
Rick Hansen Secondary in Abbotsford

6. What size shoe does he wear?
9.5-ish

7. If he was to collect anything, what would it be?
Books

8. What is his favorite type of sandwich?
Something made fresh, on grainy bread, with a ton of crunchy vegetables and lots of mustard. Probably two or three types of mustard.

9. What would this person eat every day if he could?
Sandwiches. And Mustard.

10. What is his favorite cereal?
Something that tastes like cardboard and isn’t too sweet, topped with granola.

11. What would he never wear?
He’s not the type to say “never.”

12. What is his favorite sports team?
The one he’s playing on.

13. Who did he vote for?
The same people I did.

14. Who is his best friend?
I think it’s a tie.

15. What is something you do that he wishes you wouldn’t do?
Insist on falling asleep with the TV on, and leave my purse and its contents strewn about the kitchen table.

16. What is his heritage?
Mostly English.

17. You bake him a cake for his birthday; what kind of cake?
Carrot.

18. Did he play sports in high school?
No. He was a farmboy and did farming things – your mom may have your old basketball trophies, his mom has a “Champion Hogsman, 1995″ plaque.

19. What could he spend hours doing?
Programming, or making music (guitar, piano, singing, whatever).

20. What is one unique talent he has?
Producing a resonant sound in any enclosed space. I suppose it’s not particularly unique, but it sure makes other people in the elevator look at him like he’s a particularly unique individual.

Apologies for the radio silence! I was out of town, and had a draft all queued up and ready to go, but wordpress ate it.

Anyhow, A while back I started writing about a few of the cookbooks that have made a big difference to me, and the way I cook. Turning me from a heater & assembler of pre-packaged food-like-substances to an enthusiastic cook.

First, the Joy of Cooking reminded me what real, from-scratch cooking looks like. Then Jamie’s Dinners got me cooking by taste, instead of strictly measurement and instruction.

Number three in the collection of cookbooks that really helped turn me into an enthusiastic cook is The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schneider.

I’ve tried to get others excited about this book as an amazing tool for working with food, but its lack of photos for any of the recipes is a turn off for a lot of cookbook enthusiasts – especially those who get off on the food porn craze of glossy, sumptuous photos of every dish.

But fear not! The lack of photos will set you free! There is time to worry about presentation later, for now, this book is all about focusing on the flavours.

What Schneider does in this book is take some of her favourite dishes, present them in their original form, then goes through an “Understanding” section, explaining how the ingredients work, finally re-creating them three other ways by swapping out the starch, protein, oil or vegetable to improvise new dishes with whatever’s handy.

For example, one of the “core” recipes is Chicken with Root Vegetables in Fragrant Lemongrass Broth (inspired by the classic French “poulet au pot”). By understanding the components of a flavourful broth, and how chicken turns out after cooking in liquid in a closed casserole, it’s a quick step to Rabbit Rillettes (rabbit’s a very similar meat to chicken), made with Madeira and herbs, and from there to Chicken with Red Wine, Bacon and Mushrooms (the traditional flavours of coq au vin), finally combining some of the flavours between the previous two recipes to create Guinea Hen with Bacon and Madeira.

Before this book I hadn’t thought about the relationships between ingredients and how they come together. After working through a few of the variations and learning how to tweak small things in recipes in meaningful ways, I now almost never have a dish that doesn’t turn out (unless, of course, it involves tempering eggs).

I still don’t create my own recipes, but I do a pretty good job of adapting existing ingredient lists to what I’ve got on hand, make the best use of seasonal ingredients, or insert flavours I prefer. It has, quite literally, changed the way I cook. I couldn’t have done it without slowly building my confidence following recipes to the letter, then focusing on flavour, and finally switching things up on the fly.

But don’t take my word for it – try it yourself. And if you have, comment and let me know what your kitchen-changing cookbooks are!

January. February. March. April.

And May has already come and gone! This was really a banner month for us. One of those months that illustrated how much freedom being responsible with finances delivers.

May is the month in which Neil finds out if the company he works for has met their corporate goals, and what, if anything, the resulting annual bonus will be. As is recommended by pretty much any financial planner, we built our budget around what *is* instead of what might happen, so we hadn’t planned on the bonus, and weren’t depending on receiving it.

Not only that, but because we’ve been careful with where our money goes and have a good grasp on the state of all our accounts, the bonus (when it did come this year–hooray!) didn’t just disappear into paying off some of the balance on a credit account. We know exactly where it went, and feel really good about it!

I’m going to do the numbers a bit differently this month. By outlining exactly what our combination of variable spending and debt repayment is, it’s pretty easy to extrapolate what Neil’s bonus was. The bonuses are tied to salary and performance; I know some of his colleagues read, and sharing that information breaks a few confidentiality requirements he has.

What I can tell you is that by being prepared and on plan with our spending/debt repayment, and having a savings account set up with some ideas of acquiring Big Red, we were able to act on a great deal that came up for a car and pay off a large chunk of that consumer debt, moving our Debt-Free date up to July 31, instead of Sept. 30.

Looking back over the previous months, it becomes pretty obvious that it’s not just “spending less than $X per month” that is key to fiscal solvency (I started off thinking it was just that, with the initial $1000/month goal).

It’s the consistent visibility into the amounts going in and out, knowing what expenses might be coming up, having an emergency account set up for the unexpected things that always manage to sneak in anyhow, and of course after all the necessities have been paid for, ensuring what’s going out is less than what’s coming in (which, of course, starts with keeping records that give one visibility into the amounts going in and out, and cue Elton John “it’s the ciiiiiiiiirrrrrrrcle of liiiiiiiiife…”).

So, at the end of this month we owe $4908 on our line of credit. It will be paid off in 2 months. We acquired a car, and we realized we have just enough in our savings account to pay our property tax bill in July. And it feels really, really good!

I sortof feel like a bit of a smug arse, posting about how awesome we feel we are (and perhaps like I’m inviting a bit of a reality-check karma smackdown). But then, we put a lot of effort into getting ourselves into a good financial place.

It’s funny, because as much as people seem loathe to be really honest about financial trouble, it’s pretty obvious that people are much more comfortable saying “man, I owe so much on my credit card” rather than celebrating being responsible and being out of debt.

So, in the comments, celebrate! Are you being uber-successful with your budget? Are you getting out of debt or there already? Share how you’re doing it and how good it feels.