I'm So Excited!

(Did I earworm you? I've done it to myself several times now, so I'm only half sorry.)

Rafe and Taro are back!!!

I love Rafe and Taro. They are easily in my top 10 of all fictional characters. KD Sarge has published her fifth book in the Dream'verse, and this is the third one that features Rafe and Taro as the central characters. Now that they're settled on BFR and settled in their relationship, it seems like things should be a bit easier, but a mysterious someone who's bent on revenge can complicate the most conventional relationship. And Rafe and Taro don't have one of those.

I've read and reread all four of the previous Dream'verse books, as well as KD's short stories--some available at Turtleduck Press and some through the M/M Romance group on Goodreads. (You must be a member, but that's free and so are the stories.) I've spent decades reading murder mysteries written by a wide variety of authors. You'd think, after all that, that it would be tricky to completely flabbergast me, but KD managed it. Even when I had a Very Bad Feeling™ about Taro going off on his own, I was utterly surprised by what actually happened. I love a mystery that can fool me. :D

Official Blurb:

Buy your copy from Smashwords! (It's also available on Amazon, but Smashwords does handle the .mobi format that the Kindle uses.)

Want to read a few chapters for free to be sure you like it? Click here.

Or...

Are You Feeling Lucky?

Enter to win a free e-copy! Leave a comment telling me you want to be entered. On Sunday, January 4, 2015 (my birthday), I will use a random number generator to choose one lucky commenter. The copy will come via Smashwords, so the available formats are epub, mobi, pdf, rtf, lrf, pdb, txt, and html. Let me know which you prefer.

ETA: Winner chosen! It's the lovely Renee Noelle.

New Glasses! & My Live Below the Line Wrap-Up

            stodge*

                 stäj

                     noun

BRITISHinformal

                     1. food that is heavy, filling, and high in carbohydrates.

                         "she ate her way through a plateful of stodge"

                     2. dull and uninspired material or work.

So very much of my food fit both of those definitions during my 5 days of Living Below the Line. I did end up with a great quantity of food, but it was all bland, boring, and... well, stodge. By the end of the week, it was frequently difficult for me to make myself eat another meal of tasteless food, even if I was hungry. It got to the point where I didn't even feel hungry, although I was certainly exhibiting other symptoms of hunger like slowed thought processes, extreme lethargy, and a hair-trigger temper.

I'm glad I did the challenge. I met my goal** and raised $150 for UNICEF, which isn't a huge amount, but is definitely something. I developed more empathy for people who live on any sort of limited food budget, even if it's not so limited to qualify as the "extreme poverty" that the challenge is designed to emulate. I proved to myself that I actually could complete the challenge, not just think that I could complete it if I tried.

(Thinking is pretty much what I did last year.)

I am definitely going to do the challenge again next year. I've already started working on my shopping list and meal plan. It's going to be rather different. There WILL be spices; that's not negotiable. I need to start fundraising earlier, and possibly more aggressively. Only one third of my donations came from other people. That needs to change, especially if I raise my goal amount. It's not at all likely that I'll be able to work next year either, and $100 is about the limit of what I can scrape out of my already tight budget in a couple of months. Yes, I could just start saving now and donate that money next year, but it's important to me to give to other charities as well. I donate monthly to Feeding America. I support the Yarn Harlot and her family and team when they do the Friends For Life Bike Rally in support of Toronto's branch of People With AIDS. Doctors Without Borders usually gets a chunk of my charity budget. So I'm going to stick to taking no more than two months of my charity budget to help me meet my goal next year.

Living on such a limited budget also gave me a couple of ideas about local giving. There's a group, Addison Switchboard, that helps people who live in my town. They run a food pantry, among other services. I'm going to make a point of eliminating meat for a few days every month. I'll take the money I save from buying beans and the like instead of meat and use it to buy food to donate to them. My other idea is that I will choose the food I buy to donate Very Carefully, because I do want to get the most bang for my buck, but I also don't want anyone who depends on Switchboard for all or part of their food to be stuck eating nothing but stodge. Because that's a really terrible feeling, when surrounded by all the choices that our society and the media make sure that everyone knows about. Maybe nothing but beans, rice, eggs, toast, and potatoes would be easier to take if that was all I'd ever had or known about, but knowing what's out there, being confronted with ads for other food... well, it was really hard to take.

In completely unrelated news, my eyes have finally settled down from their diabetic shenanigans, and I have new glasses! It's SO exciting to be able to see clearly again after over two months of not.

front(ish) view

side view

Just ignore the weird smirk on my face. I absolutely Could. Not. get a decent picture. These are the best of over a dozen.

* definition from Google
** If anyone would still like to donate, you have until June 15. Here's my donation page.

Seventeen Cents

I figured out what to do with that $0.17 I had leftover from my grocery shopping for Live Below the Line.

Lucky that it's on sale this week. I was afraid that tax might bump it up to $0.18, but I got lucky.

Why do I need ramen? For the seasoning packet. My rice-and-kidney-beans-with-minced-garlic dinner on Day 1 was so bland that I had trouble eating all of it. Last night I added water to make soup.

I'm sure you will be shocked to hear that it wasn't a dramatic improvement. However, I am hopeful that adding a third of the Ramen seasoning packet will add enough flavor that I won't have to force myself to finish my dinner tonight, tomorrow, and Friday.

I don't know exactly what I'm eating on Saturday, but I can tell you that it will NOT have rice, beans, whole wheat toast, eggs, potatoes, or garlic in it.

Here's my Day 3 breakfast. It's difficult to crack open 2.4 eggs per day, so I have some days with 2 eggs and some with 3. This is one of my 3 Egg days. Thank goodness for a non-stick frying pan that lives up to its name! (That's American-style Toad in the Hole, in case you can't tell.)

Update on the beans: They're simmering away on the stove. They've been going for a couple hours at this point. I am NOT going to make the same mistake twice. Hopefully they'll be ready soonish.

(Did you miss the bean story? Check out my blog at the LBtL site. While you're there, I'm still looking for sponsors. Any amount will help - it's amazing how quickly little donations can add up. Deen's page is here, although she's already met her goal. Lucky! (Go Deenie! Excellent fundraising!))

Day One

Well, I've made my breakfast. What's that? Almost 11 pm is kind of late for breakfast? Why yes. Yes it is. I meant to have breakfast around 4 pm, like usual, but I had to boil the eggs, and then I wanted them to be cool before I ate them, so I started cooking the (dried) beans for my lunches this week. And then I had to mince all the garlic. And since I'd gone that far, I might as well make my dinners for the week (more dried beans) (and then rice).

So I got a bit of a late start. Luckily it's the first day, so I wasn't hungry at all going in. I think I'm probably going to end up skipping my lunch just because I have to be in bed early tonight. At least almost all of the cooking is done though. That will be a big help going forward. (Tuesday's and Thursday's breakfasts can't be cooked ahead.)

So, here's my Day One Breakfast. Posted a scant 59 minutes before Day Two starts for most people. That bottle is actually full of tap water (hence no label) because I buy 2 bottles of water per year and reuse them to death. And tap water is allowed without having to come out of the $7.50. So.

If you're feeling inclined to sponsor me, you can do so here. Deen's link is here. Thanks for reading/commenting/silently supporting!

Living Below The Line

I've done my shopping. Okay, actually my sister did my shopping. Between my new meds and my blood sugars fluctuating a ton (although on a consistently downward trend overall), my vision is shot. I can't see well enough to drive, or even well enough to reliably find food on grocery store shelves. But my glasses are OVERcorrecting my eyes enough to make things even worse. Supposedly this will settle down in a month or so.

It had better. I can't function like this. Let's ... well, I was going to say "let's not even talk about how close to the monitor I'm leaning to be able to proofread this," but then I got curious. And a ruler. It's tricky to measure the distance to something from your eyes, but it's about 8.25 to 8.5 inches.

ANYWAY, on to the point of this post.

This is all the food I can eat for the next 5 days, while I participate in the Live Below The Line challenge. I got very lucky because eggs and potatoes were on sale, and I still ran out of money before I could get a can of tomato paste.

In case you can't see clearly, this is what I got:
$1.29 - 8 lbs russet potatoes (yep, EIGHT pounds! Great sale!)
$1.19 - 16 oz (18 slices) whole wheat bread
$0.99 - 1 dozen large eggs (another sale)
$1.44 - 1 lb kidney beans
$1.16 - 1 lb pinto beans
$0.86 - 1 lb brown rice
$0.27 - 1 bulb garlic
$0.13 - tax *sigh*
$7.33 - total

So I have $0.17 cents leftover if I decide that I need to figure out the price per gram of salt or pepper (which, along with a few other spices, are the only exception to the Buy The Whole Container rule). There's actually $0.18 in the photo, but that's an oops. I did the original addition yesterday but didn't check the amount until after I'd taken the photo. Apparently my overnight memory isn't as good as I thought.

You can still sponsor me here if you're feeling generous. Deen is also doing the challenge (for her second year). Her page is here. We're both raising money for UNICEF.

I'll be posting photos of my meals on my Twitter, if you're interested in following me there.

Feeling Virtuous

I'm feeling very virtuous tonight.

Obviously that virtuous feeling is fairly easy to come by, if grapes and weights are all it takes. But it's been a long time since I bothered to pay attention to fruit, and even longer since I've exercised.

Of course this isn't some sort of unprompted leaf-turning. I was diagnosed with diabetes last week, and all the advice I've received so far is heavy on fruits, vegetables, and exercise. So I'm trying. Not sure how long I'll be able to maintain the motivation, but there's always hope, right?


Just a reminder that I'm doing Live Below the Line later this month. You can sponsor me here if you'd like. Deen is also doing the challenge, and her page is here.

Have a Smartphone?

I don't. I have a prepaid cell, because at my current rate of pay ($0 per year, not including xmas and birthday gifts), I can't justify spending more than the ~$7.14 per month that I pay now.

HOWEVER, if YOU have a smartphone, have you heard about this app from UNICEF?

I was going to write a post this week about exactly what UNICEF does, since I can't be the only one who doesn't know precisely. In the process of gathering information for that, I found this app. It donates money to UNICEF to provide clean water to kids for every 10 minutes that you don't use your phone. Apparently Giorgio Armani Fragrances really hate it when people are on their phones in restaurants? Or the bus? Or something like that.

Anyway, it sounds like a fairly painless way to do some good. Check it out?

And if you've forgotten why I'm talking about UNICEF, or if you missed my last blog post, I'm raising money for UNICEF doing the Live Below the Line challenge this year. You can sponsor me (or just find out more about it) here. The site accepts donations through the end of May.

(Deenie's page is here. She's much closer to her fundraising goal than I am.)

Grand Plans

Earlier this year, I was thinking about my blog. My poor neglected blog. And I thought that it might be nice to try to get back to knitting more. I've missed knitting and how it soothes me. I figured that if I was knitting, I'd have things to blog about.

That was in early January. How early? Before my birthday (the 4th).

HOWEVER, I now have another reason to get back to blogging. 

This year I am doing the Live Below the Line challenge at the end of April. Check out the link for more detail, but basically I (and thousands of others) commit to spending $1.50 or less on food every day for 5 days. That's $7.50 for 5 days. This number was chosen because of the millions of people who live on less than $1.50 per day for EVERYTHING. I'm just limiting my food budget to that amount.

The Live Below the Line challenge has two purposes: it raises awareness and it raises money for global charities through sponsorship. I've chosen UNICEF as my charity, and if you're feeling generous, you can sponsor me here. I will also be blogging there from now through the end of the challenge (May 2, 2014). I'm going to try to blog about it here as well. And during the challenge itself (April 28 to May 2), I'll be posting pics of my meals to my Twitter account.

(Deenie is also doing the challenge. It's her second year. She's the one who got me into it. Her sponsorship page is here.)

Hopefully the knitting will come.