Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Sept. 21, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions.

This Week's Food Waste

 
 A couple more tomatoes went bad on the counter. This time I can't say that I was surprised by them. I meant to get to them because I knew that they were starting to go bad, but something else always seemed more important.  I eventually did get there and saved several, but not these two.

This Week's True Food Confessions

 We were lucky this week that we got to go to both a cook out and a pig roast. We took cookies and chips to them, so it was an easy weekend. During the week, we had to make some adjustments to our plans, so we had scrambled eggs one night instead of the chicken that we had planned. We had the chicken the next night. But the important part of this story is that we ate at home when the plans changed when it would have been easier to eat out. Score one for us.

But I had the most fun this week making lasagne by working with what was in the house. No ricotta cheese, so I used no-fat cottage cheese and sour cream. Not enough lasagne noodles, so I substituted spaghetti. Also I mixed kale, that we were trying to use up, with spinach and added some ground meat. And I can't remember how many different cheeses I put in using up the end of several packages. The result? It was quite good, if I do say so myself.

We'll see how we do next week, but if we can continue to cook on most days, I will be happy. 

Ponderings of Theodore--The Early Years

or The Young Economist


  Theodore is majoring in economics in college. Looking back, he had an interest in it all along. Here are some thoughts from his younger years.






"I like my jalapenos like the way you pay for the house--in small installments."

"If money becomes less valuable, will Daddy get a larger paycheck?"

"If the government is so much in debt, who do they owe money to?


However, those questions were often interspersed with typical boy ones like, "If you could fill a frog with water, what do you think would be the first part to burst?"

A Second Look--September 19, 2012

It's getting harder to show you things I haven't featured recently because the same few flowers are hanging on during this time between summer and fall.  Nevertheless, you can see the things I found interesting this week during a Second Look.

Blanket Flower

There are still a few butterflies and moths around.

Moonbeam Coreopsis

I saw a lot of webs of various kinds this week. There was a spider associated with this one.

Rozanne geranium

Berries--Poke, Dogwood, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Begonia

Tree Bark Variations: peeling silver maple, beginnings of woodpecker holes, oak tree fungus, and cherry tree growing around tree house board.

Mistakes

or Get Over It Already

My writing helpers otherwise known as my excuses.

Do you ever read something someone has written such as a letter, email, or an article and find mistakes? Then you wonder how someone could make mistakes so obvious and think, "Shouldn't they know better or at least proofread their work better?" Well, I do that all of the time when I read my own blog posts. Unfortunately, I usually find the problems long after I hit publish and it drives me crazy.

However, I'm trying to get over that. I'm trying not to worry about mistakes I may make because that takes away from the pleasure of communicating with all of you. I am trying to accept that I am doing the best I can under the circumstances. Sometimes those circumstances involve constantly removing one cat from in front of the monitor while another is trying to get on my lap. Sometimes I am writing when I'm really tired so I can publish a post the next morning before I go to work. Sometimes Blogger spacing is not working, so I am concentrating on that instead of concentrating on what I am writing. And sometimes I'm confused because it seems all the grammar rules that I thought I once knew have changed.

But wait, there I go again. I'm making excuses for my blog imperfections instead of accepting that good enough is good enough. While I will try to write well when writing for my blog, life is too short to worry about occasional misplaced modifiers and misspelled words. And that is what I'm going to keep telling myself until I really believe it.

Note: Sometimes I have an idea for a post and the words and the pictures just come together effortlessly and flawlessly. Wow, I love that feeling.

School Days-Lumpy

School is back in session, so it's time to start School Days again. 

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 School Days is a reoccurring feature in which I ask people about their early memories of school. Everyone has a story to tell about this and I hope to give them a voice here. 

Here's Today's Story

Lumpy began kindergarten at age five in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He started at the neighborhood public school in 1950.

Tell me some early memories about when you started school.

I don't remember much, but I do have a story from kindergarten to tell. One day one of the boys in the class bit me. For the rest of the day he had to sit under the teacher's desk. That was his dog house because the teacher said that dogs bite, children don't.

Also, I remember that Mrs. Rinders was my teacher's name and we had mats that we laid on the floor in the afternoon for naps. Mine was blue.

What else do you remember?

We moved around while I was in elementary school. After my kindergarten year in Milwaukee, I moved to Grand Rapids. Here I went to first, second, third, fourth, and part of fifth grade. In fifth grade, we left Michigan and moved to California.

Was it hard for you to make those moves?

The hardest move was to California. They seemed to do everything differently such as eating lunch outside every day. In Michigan, I had walked home for lunch. It was hard to leave all of my friends and it took about a year to make good friends again. I was very interested in nature and I gradually found two or three other kids who had the same interests.

Did you have a favorite teacher?

Yes, her name was Miss Peel. In the beginning of fifth grade my teacher had a nervous breakdown so they brought up Miss Peel, the teacher I had had in fourth grade, to be my fifth grade teacher. She was a large, stern woman, but a very good teacher. After she taught me, she went to South Africa to be a missionary. Knowing that I like animals and such, she wrote me letters about all of the new wildlife she was seeing such as the snake that had been in her hut. We kept in touch until she died about ten years ago.

Did she write to all of the kids?

I only know of one other person she wrote to and they stopped writing after about a year. Eventually she got married and ended up living in South Carolina. I still have a table cloth she sent me from Africa for a wedding present. It has hand painted animals on it and we have it hanging up in our house.

Thanks for sharing some of your memories and I hope another time we can learn more about your school days.