Another No Spend Month

We're doing it again folks!

Trying to go the month of July spending $150 or so on food and not buy any superfluous items. Last year when we did this we were able to save enough to make our $1,000 emergency fund. That sure came in handy when last winter we spent $800 on tires for my car! We were lucky to not have to go into debt then, and quickly built the savings back up.

This year the goal is to kick most of the rest of our credit card debt. We use an Alaska Airlines Visa for our every day purchases and pay it off at the end of every week, but we still have some hanging around another credit card from way back in the college days.

My cycle was work during the school year, travel in the summer, rack up the debt, pay it off while working the following school year.

Then I graduated and traveled and then had real expenses like toothpaste and oil changes.

Its fluctuated a little bit, but from that time on I've basically had the same amount of debt...and once we got married it was "our" debt. We were almost out when we moved, then got a dog, then our dog (4 days after we got it) got hit by a car and we racked up a lot of costs.

Last summer I read about Dave Ramsey's philosophy of being debt-free and having an emergency plan, and in conjunction read about Rachel's "No Spend Month" on Small Notebook , and we decided to take the plunge.

We got our savings, and have been chipping away at the debt. We even moved to a place with significantly less rent to contribute more.

Hopefully by the end of this month we will be much much closer...and Lord willin' and the crik don't rise we'll be out of debt by late August!

We signed up for a CSA last month and have more than enough vegetables from that, so we may be eating a lot of vegetarian meals!

Two nights ago I made a very green stir fry. Zucchini, snow peas, garlic spears and some mixed greens...it tasted ok but definitely wasn't the best thing I've ever whipped up!

Last year I wrote an article on Frugal Fine Dining - check it out for the way that we stretch our grocery budget!

On our list of things to use this week are a can of clams, arepa flour and a can of garbanzo beans...wish me luck!!!

Challenge Days 12,13, Ode to Le Creuset and Krochet Kids

Ah Monday. The 25th of January.

According to Time Magazine and a researcher from Cardiff University the third Monday of January is supposed to be the saddest day of the year. You combine the dreary weather, debt from overspending during the holidays, failed New Year's resolutions and the fact that its a Monday and you've got one heck of a depressing day!

Le sigh.

Luckily it was a lovely sunny day for the most part yesterday, we'd been saving for Christmas since July and I didn't really make any New Year's resolutions to break so I'm doin' dandy!

That being it said it was still chilly so I wrapped up in my comfiest big sweater and headed off to work. Here's Day 12, ladies and gents.



I'm quickly beginning to realize that my number of work or dress pants/skirts far exceeds the number of jeans or casual pants I have. Leftover from days at a dressier office, they've sat in my closet on the forgotten side for a couple years now. Doing this challenge has helped remind me that there's always a place for good quality clothing in a person's wardrobe.

That being said I knew I had to face a skirt again head on. It is, though, one of the cutest skirts ever to have been made. Smooth front with just a bit of a gather in the back and seaming in all the right places...I would have taken a picture of my rear but I think that would be going a bit too far now.

So here's Day 13

I'm not exactly sure what's going on with my face. I think I was attempting to look cute and fell short. And you can't really even see the skirt, but what the hay. Whatcha see is whatcha get.

That night I met Matt at mall for dinner and for him to get fitted for his tux. I beat him there and decided to swing by Marshall's to see if by chance they had any Le Creuset cookware on a crazy deal.

Remember me telling you about having to "Crowd my mushrooms" and not having enough room in my pot to do enough chicken for the Julia Child recipe? (That was Days 7&8 btw) Well when I get my mind set on something...like a larger enamel covered cast iron pan...I kinda get tunnel vision. Thanks to my lovely readers who remember to click on a Google ad every now and then on my blog or hub I had a check from Google and I knew that's what I wanted to use it for.

Now if you don't know what a Le Creuset pan is, let me explain a bit. Its the creme de la creme of cookware. The Queen of the Culinary Kitchen. Goddess of gourmet. Maybe I'm getting a little carried away, though.

In its most basic form, it is enamel coated cast iron cookware. That comes in beautiful colors. Not all of it is cast iron...some is stoneware some is enamel coated steel...but what they are all known for is their high caliber of quality. One Le Creuset Dutch oven will last longer than you will.

We got our first Le Creuset item for our wedding. It was an adorable red tea kettle--the enamel coated steel kind. Two and a half years of sitting constantly on our stove top and being battered by grease and whatknot and its still as durable and cute as ever.

The next member to our family was a little blue 3.5Qt Dutch oven. This is actually Matt's Dutch oven. We both started to really get into cooking about a year ago and this was a birthday present for him. He wanted to make sure it was known that it was his, so he chose the blue color since everything else in our kitchen was red.

Hi baby. Mama loves it.

This is probably our most used piece of cooking equipment, just the right size for a stew or soup for two people. For the first six months we didn't have a space for it because it went from the stove to the fridge to the sink to the stove. But it is not, I say, not big enough to do a decent size batch of browning or searing.

I toyed around with a substitute. After all, a medium size Dutch oven costs well over $200 no matter how you dice it, and I only had about $100 to play with. I looked at Mario Batali brand, Rachel Ray, even some really cheap knock offs. I even went out and bought a Lodge enamel coated Dutch oven. But as soon as I got home and took it out of the box...I knew.

There would be no substitute.

The Lodge 6 Qt one may have been large and in charge, but the whole thing curved down until the actual flat bottom of the thing was no larger than my smaller pot. It was like a bowl...and if you remember...I didn't want to crowd my mushrooms. Plus after reading some reviews I found out that after a year or so the enamel starts coming off.

I heard someone say once, "I'm too poor to buy cheap," and I think this is a great example.

So I put it back in the box, re-seasoned my non-enamel coated Dutch oven (which still makes great stuff but is way more of a hassle to use and you can't let food sit in it), and waited.

When I got to Marshall's on the aforementioned night, I walked to the back and saw one, sad, lonely braiser in the Dijon color sitting there without its knob surrounded by cheap imitations. I grabbed it and clutched it, praying it was withing my budget. I turned it over...$130. A bit over...but it was missing its knob, I could at least ask for a discount for that...

After a comical game of ring around the Marshall's with one deadbeat employee, a clueless cashier and a harried manager, the price was marked down to...you guessed it...$100. Just a hair under what my check from Google was for!

I met up with Matt at the mall and we headed to That Kitchen Store where I showed him what kind of pot I got (it was $200 at that store!) and we got a replacement knob for $10!

At home I screwed the knob on, sat it on the stove and just stared at it.

I felt like a real chef. The kettle had whetted my appetite, the mini Dutch oven had been my training wheels but this, this was big girl stuff. Tons of surface area on this baby! I gazed at the trio of rainbow cookware on my stove...and sighed.

I pet it, called it my precious, and went to bed.

Sorry you had to read through my Ode to Le Creuset to get to this part, but here's the charity spotlight for the day.

Krochet Kids International



Their mission states: Employing this generation through the creation of products, and educating the next through their sale. Krochet Kids international works in developing nations to empower impoverished communities to rise above poverty.

Their history is actually pretty cute...three high school boys from Spokane, WA who crocheted hats to save up for their Senior Prom...you can read about it, and see their awesome frilly shirted Easter egg colored tuxes HERE


Their turn towards a non-profit began with a trip to Northern Uganda in 2007 (hey, same time as me!) where they realized their hobby could be used to help empower women to learn to crochet hats that would be sold in the US for a profit.

With the recent earthquake in Haiti they've focused efforts there. As stated on their website:

Here is our humble effort toward reaching out in LOVE to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. Our staff will be crocheting a premium line of hats that will each be sold for $100. All money raised through the sale of these limited hats will be matched by the individuals in this organization to make a great impact. Join with us, get a sweet hat, and double your donation to the earthquake victims.

To buy a hat, click HERE

I plan on doing this and I'll post pics of the hat as soon as I get it! Thanks for the info Stephanie! And the rest of you let me know of any other great nonprofits you may have heard of!

A Cup, not a Carafe...

So thanks to Mark’s succinct words referring to my last morning cup—documentary—I’ve decided to try to shorten these up a bit. You might actually get through it without having to refill your cup of coffee! It is called “Morning Cup,” after all, not “Morning Carafe.”

Update: Mark was only teasing and I know that! I was going to try to make it shorter anyways...

Winter finally seems to be in retreat here in the northwest. The temperatures are slowly creeping up during the day (though last week it was 34˚ when I left for work!), and I’ve actually sat outside on the balcony in…shorts! Last Saturday Matt and I decided to head down to Pike Place Market for the first time since January. After deciding to drive downtown, we managed to find ourselves in the entry of the most expensive parking lot in the city. Just as we were about to reverse out way out of there, a car pulled in behind and we couldn’t just pull in and turn around without paying the initial $8. So we decided to park there and chalk it up to experience…but be back in time to pay the lower fee before we jumped to the next price bracket.

Now thorough experts of the market—or so we thought ourselves—we breezed past the craft stalls and the fish-tossing place and delved into some of the more ethnic stores there. I found masarepa flour in a Mexican grocery store to make arepas with.

Arepas are a cornbread/sandwich food stuffed with meat or cheese that we ate almost every day in Venezuela. The one time I’ve tried to make them before was with flour I bought in Venezuela. When I cooked the arepas Ammah and I discovered that there had been some sort of eggs in the flour and the heat had caused the eggs to hatch. We didn’t see them, however, until we began to dig our forks into them and noticed black specs. Ammah did her best to keep eating and not say anything, but when they began playing leap frog on her plate she had to give up. So twelve years later I’m ready to try making arepas again!

We wandered in the Asian store and bought some oyster sauce, looked at pickled ginger and coconut vinegar and other unusual items. Next we drifted into DeLaurenti’s Italian goods store. I felt like I was back in a shop in Florence—the smells, the brands, everything was so authentically Italian it made me want to shout “Viva Italia!”

Next we headed across the street to the waterfront piers and walked past the arcade with the wooden carved miners and sailors flouting fresh fish and chips, and made our way to “Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.” Curious indeed. We paid 5 cents to watch an vintage slides

how of Charlie Chaplin, gawked at the mummies in the back and got a bit squeamish over the two-headed cat fetus and piglets/fetus/thing. Definitely a place to bring all you future tourists.

Sunday we took Roy for his first trip to the dog park. This place is called Marymoor and is enormous—640 acres! Every time I would ask someone, though, “Is it fenced?” I’d get the same response. “Oh it’s soooo big it doesn’t need to be!”

They haven’t met Roy.

Having it be “soooo big” means Matt just got to run soooo far to catch our former stray. Oh sure he’d pause and glance back when we called his name, but there were dogs and dogs and dogs to meet and acres and acres to run! Why stay with Mom and Dad? We even tried containing him in an area—Matt and I on one side and our friends John and Carrie on the other. Roy blitzed over a Rottweiler and through John and Carrie’s defense line in 2.5 and was nothing more than a brown streak on the horizon.

Needless to say he had fun, and we learned our dog wouldn’t maul sausage-sized mutts. The picture of the three dogs is a tri-way game of tug of war with one stick, and if you look at Roy's nose you can see the swipe of slobber from other dogs giving their greetings. But we think we’ll stick to the smaller, fenced parks until he learns to come on command a bit better!

Today was a warm, beautiful day outside. I decided to keep up this new found explorer in Roy and take him to Discovery Park. Not an off-leash dog park, but a reserve of forests and meadows and bluffs overlooking the sound. Breath-taking. Actually what was breath-taking was Roy pulling my arm off for four miles. Now before I disparage him let me rave about him a little. The past few weeks he has gone from sled-mushing dog to barely pulling dog that ends up being a loose-leash dog by the end of the walk. Seriously, he’s so good we can hold onto the leash with a finger and he’s glued to our side.

Not so much today. I think he walked better the day we brought him home from the shelter! I swear it was like I didn’t exist. He was on sensory overload with the smell of the trees and the sound of the wind and the dirt trails! Ironically the times we’d be on a paved part of the trail he was back to good-walker-Roy. But once his paws hit that dirt he became “Roy the Wild Stray Dog” and took off. At first I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep it up holding him back for the whole hike! We keep him on a short leash, and attempt to keep his head level with our legs to show we’re the leader. Ha. Ha. Ha.

The farther we hiked the more I thought, “It’s ok, once he gets this energy out he’ll behave.” That dog drug my butt 3.5 miles and only for the last half a mile did he bring it down a notch! I was worried I’d collapse his windpipe a couple times as I yanked and tugged on his choke chain. Well he is still breathing and my arm is attached, although both are probably going to be sore tomorrow. By the way, if you look close (or click on it to see full size) at the picture of the sound, a little past halfway to the left is Rainier--much clearer than my cell phone could take a picture of!

Wrapping things up (see? Isn’t this shorter?), just wanted to give a little plug for my articles I’ve started writing again on hubpages.com. Not only do I get to put my intelligent discourse out there for the public to read and comment on, but I’ve got an account with Google and for every ad that’s clicked on one of my pages I get paid! Not much, it’s true, but so far I’ve accumulated $59.64!

 If I ever reach the magic $100 mark when they cut me my first check, I think I’m going to start putting it away for a plane ticket home! My favorite one I published recently is “How to Have a Country Heart in a City Life.” So if you feel like it read one of my “hubs” and don’t forget to click on a Google ad or two! If you want to read more, click on my hubpages name “Solorya” and it’ll take you to the home page.

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Have-a-Country-Heart-in-a-City-Life

That’s all for now! Enjoy spring!