Ordinary Time

I spent a bit of time writing out a response to someone about ways to keep grocery costs low. The extremely short version?  Don't shop at expensive stores Don't buy prepackaged food Stick to ingredients  Make a plan and shop with a list Use meat sparingly  Don't waste the food you buy I can still feed nine people for a little under $200 week with this plan. It is doable and no one goes hungry. In thinking about it all, I realized tonight's dinner was a perfect example.  I had bought a lot of food for the holidays (definitely going over my $200/week budget.) I also admit to overestimating what we needed, though half the family being sick probably played into that. As a result, I had a refrigerator full of random vegetables that were going to rot if I didn't do something with them. Yesterday we had green chicken curry which took care of the two bags of green beans and tonight we had millet grain bowls. I love a good grain bowl because they just need little bits of var...

Compared to previous years, this one was a little slim. I just didn't feel like reading for much of the year. I'm not sure why; some years are like that. So the stats first and then I'll list the books. As usual, here are my designations listed after each book: F = Fiction NF = Non-fiction M = Mystery RA = Read out loud L = Listened to * = I particularly recommend  There will be far fewer recommended books this year. Maybe there is a correlation between really good books and my desire to read. Who knows. 61 books read     13 non-fiction     28 fiction     20 mystery 16 books not finished 2 books read out loud 9 books listened to 1. That Bullet that Missed - Richard Osman (M)(342 p.) 2. The Last Devil to Die - Richard Osman (M)(353 p.) 3. The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty (F)(477 p.)* 4. The Collector - Daniel Silva (F)(399 p.) 5. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch (F)(340 p.) 6. Babel - R. F. Kuang ((F)(544 p.)* 7. The Domestic Revolution...

I'll be honest, dread about the coming new year is a more accurate description of my feelings about 2025 than typically is associated with a New Year's celebration. This has more of a feeling of strapping into a scary roller coaster that isn't going to stop. I didn't enjoy the years of 2016 - 2020 for the whole wake each morning and wonder what fresh new hell was going to greet us-thing. I don't kid myself that this time around is going to be any better. The pessimist inside of me is thinking that in comparison, those other four years are going to seem like a trip to Disneyland.  But I am also not going to let any future dictators steal the joy that surrounds me. We had a low key party, the best part of which was getting to share it with the P. Family parents. Some of our older children were going to be going to the P. Family's house for New Year's, then crashing there so as to not have to drive home late at night. So we decided to invite the parents here an...