Sunday, December 11, 2011
Week 40 - JAB Away
Well, girls, if you can believe it, we are entering into the final three months of this project! week 40 is upon us, and it's another JAB week, so let us know. How goes life on your end?
Friday, December 9, 2011
Christina loves used book shops
Welp, my internet's not working again! After nearly a month of wonderful, unlimited internet, it has suddenly stopped working for no reason. Sigh. The wait begins again to see when it will be fixed. But I will be home in America in 6 days, so nothing can get me down!
Carlyn asks where I must avoid going if I don't want to spend money. My answer: used book shops! There's something about used book shops over regular book shops that just make me want to buy ALL the books! This even happens in foreign used book shops as evidence by my Dutch copy of Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter en de Steen der Wijzen) which I cannot read and probably will never be able to. I think this is justified because it's Harry Potter and I think it's a nice little collection to have difference copies of Sorcerer's Stone. Hey, I stopped myself before I also got Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix in Dutch! But I digress. I just love used book shops: the smell of old books on the shelves, the teetering shelves groaning under pounds and pounds of books, the feeling that the shelves are going to collapse on you, everything. I also like used books because other people have read and (hopefully mostly) loved them. They have past lives; someone else has held them, brought them to work, taken them on vacation, etc. To me, used books are so much more appealing than new books. My love for used books plus their lowered price tag means I need to steer clear of used book shops if I shouldn't be spending money.
I'll be heading back to American for Christmas on the 15th, I can't wait!
Carlyn asks where I must avoid going if I don't want to spend money. My answer: used book shops! There's something about used book shops over regular book shops that just make me want to buy ALL the books! This even happens in foreign used book shops as evidence by my Dutch copy of Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter en de Steen der Wijzen) which I cannot read and probably will never be able to. I think this is justified because it's Harry Potter and I think it's a nice little collection to have difference copies of Sorcerer's Stone. Hey, I stopped myself before I also got Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix in Dutch! But I digress. I just love used book shops: the smell of old books on the shelves, the teetering shelves groaning under pounds and pounds of books, the feeling that the shelves are going to collapse on you, everything. I also like used books because other people have read and (hopefully mostly) loved them. They have past lives; someone else has held them, brought them to work, taken them on vacation, etc. To me, used books are so much more appealing than new books. My love for used books plus their lowered price tag means I need to steer clear of used book shops if I shouldn't be spending money.
I'll be heading back to American for Christmas on the 15th, I can't wait!
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Wednesday is a crafter and grocery connoisseur
Christina: There is a lot to be said for Liz Lemon. She is awesome.
Cassie: Good luck with the props! And the next 25 books ; )
Alexandra: I love the word “turophile.” Props for being one and knowing it!
As for my wallet and me, we spend too much of ourselves at various places. Like Cassie, I am an absolute sucker for office supply stores and Hobby Lobby. Oh, Hobby Lobby… That place has everything. Am I making jewelry for an upcoming wedding? Oh, look! Beads are on sale! I will buy ALL THE BEADS. Am I foraying into horticulture via baby spider plants from my girlfriend’s mother’s gigantic plant? Oh, look! Fun-colored flower pots! I will buy ALL THE FLOWER POTS. Has Meghan made the mistake of introducing me to Sculpey polymer clay, the most fun art thing ever? Oh, look! Every color and tool imaginable! I will buy ALL THE SCULPEY. I could go on. Believe me. Right now, I am working on a wedding commission for which I will earn about $100. I have spent over $200 in supplies already (though I get to keep the supplies I don’t use, which should help me actually make a profit).
And groceries. Oh boy, groceries. I cook for only myself (while the cat eats Senior Cat Cat Food [which I find hilarious—Old Man Cat Food oughta be a brand name]), and I don’t cook terribly often, but I somehow find a way to spent over $100 every time I go grocery shopping. This last trip, a good half of that was taken up with stocking up on the supply of cards (birthday, thank-you, encouragement, congratulations) I keep on hand to send when momentous occasions happen and three bottles (again, to stock up) of face moisturizer. I do perhaps more than my fair share of stocking up on things when I have the money, and this tends to get me in slightly large grocery bills.
The place where I do most of my impulse shopping is online. I’m a year-round Christmas shopper (I’ve been mostly done since August), and find myself in the clearance section of many a cool online store before I can blink twice. My Half.com wish list is filled with dozens of 75¢ books that I didn’t let myself buy just yet, for instance, and I’ve been known to spend $50 just on interesting-looking books from the bargain bin. In fact, after I post this, I think I’m going to do a little shopping before hitting the (text)books and going to bed.
I think this is about the longest post I’ve had in a while! Hope everyone and your loved ones are doing well.
Cassie: Good luck with the props! And the next 25 books ; )
Alexandra: I love the word “turophile.” Props for being one and knowing it!
As for my wallet and me, we spend too much of ourselves at various places. Like Cassie, I am an absolute sucker for office supply stores and Hobby Lobby. Oh, Hobby Lobby… That place has everything. Am I making jewelry for an upcoming wedding? Oh, look! Beads are on sale! I will buy ALL THE BEADS. Am I foraying into horticulture via baby spider plants from my girlfriend’s mother’s gigantic plant? Oh, look! Fun-colored flower pots! I will buy ALL THE FLOWER POTS. Has Meghan made the mistake of introducing me to Sculpey polymer clay, the most fun art thing ever? Oh, look! Every color and tool imaginable! I will buy ALL THE SCULPEY. I could go on. Believe me. Right now, I am working on a wedding commission for which I will earn about $100. I have spent over $200 in supplies already (though I get to keep the supplies I don’t use, which should help me actually make a profit).
And groceries. Oh boy, groceries. I cook for only myself (while the cat eats Senior Cat Cat Food [which I find hilarious—Old Man Cat Food oughta be a brand name]), and I don’t cook terribly often, but I somehow find a way to spent over $100 every time I go grocery shopping. This last trip, a good half of that was taken up with stocking up on the supply of cards (birthday, thank-you, encouragement, congratulations) I keep on hand to send when momentous occasions happen and three bottles (again, to stock up) of face moisturizer. I do perhaps more than my fair share of stocking up on things when I have the money, and this tends to get me in slightly large grocery bills.
The place where I do most of my impulse shopping is online. I’m a year-round Christmas shopper (I’ve been mostly done since August), and find myself in the clearance section of many a cool online store before I can blink twice. My Half.com wish list is filled with dozens of 75¢ books that I didn’t let myself buy just yet, for instance, and I’ve been known to spend $50 just on interesting-looking books from the bargain bin. In fact, after I post this, I think I’m going to do a little shopping before hitting the (text)books and going to bed.
I think this is about the longest post I’ve had in a while! Hope everyone and your loved ones are doing well.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Tuesday is a Turophile
I don't have a problem when it comes to shopping, for the most part. Mostly, I don't buy things from shops at all. Books are far too overpriced at most stores - Barnes and Nobles, or Chapters as it is now that I live in Canada, is particularly bad. They'll charge you $30 for a hardcover book the size of Twilight or so. You can get that for $10 less on Amazon. Same with games and movies and the sort. It's all much cheaper online, with a selection far broader. I don't need to hold a book to know I want it, a synopsis, a few pages of an excerpt, that's enough for me.
I don't particularly care for clothes shopping. Oh, I like clothes, and if I'm in a shop that carries my size (that is, if I'm in Lane Bryant), I will undoubtedly pick out a new bra and a pair of jeans. But I can usually keep myself to the bargain bin if I'm on a budget. This lovely shop downtown has a $5 and under section with some very nice sweaters. I don't feel the need to get anything *expensive* from a clothing store, so I don't feel very obliged to avoid them.
My sin is food, as the quip about my pants size might imply. But, more specifically, it is cheese. On a budget, my grocery shopping is generally limited to bread, cheddar, pasta, sauce, mozza, parmesan, a box of chicken breast, rice, and restocking the herbs, broths, milk, eggs, butter, oil, and root vegetables (the ones that last a while). I can live with about $100/week, which has never been outside of our budget. I get creative with the basics: if we can't afford pizza, I am completely capable of making pizza dough with the flour and water we undoubtedly have.
Cheese, though, that's my Achilles' heel. Can't really do without it. And I don't mean the aforementioned cheddar, mozza, parmesan. That's the basics - I can make eighty meals with those, no harm in it, really. No, my sin is a shop called Benton Brothers. A cheese shop. Local BC blues, Cheddar and Stilton from the places that can claim the name (incidentally, Stilton cannot actually be named 'Stilton' if it was made in the town of Stilton, where it got its name), the finest from Quebec and France. If I am so much as in Vancouver, I cannot avoid the temptation to pick up cheese.
And it is expensive. Don't doubt me when I say that I can spend $100 on a single night's worth of cheese and crackers - and I don't drink wine, my friends, that's just the cheese. 8-Year Cheddar, from Silo, that costs about $10 for a block as thick as your thumb and as wide and tall as your palm. Think about how genuinely little cheese that is. For comparison, you can get some Cracker Barrel cheddar about as thick as two thumbs and about three times as wide for the same price. Bleu d'Auvergne, a sinfully sweet blue from France, can't go without $15 worth of that. There's always the temptation to grab a bit of buffalo mozzarella for a nice proper Italian dish. The Stilton, the finer goat cheeses, my mum-in-law always appreciates us bringing home some Brie; it's hard not to spend a week's pay check at this store.
Hell, we got a cheese platter for our wedding.
I don't particularly care for clothes shopping. Oh, I like clothes, and if I'm in a shop that carries my size (that is, if I'm in Lane Bryant), I will undoubtedly pick out a new bra and a pair of jeans. But I can usually keep myself to the bargain bin if I'm on a budget. This lovely shop downtown has a $5 and under section with some very nice sweaters. I don't feel the need to get anything *expensive* from a clothing store, so I don't feel very obliged to avoid them.
My sin is food, as the quip about my pants size might imply. But, more specifically, it is cheese. On a budget, my grocery shopping is generally limited to bread, cheddar, pasta, sauce, mozza, parmesan, a box of chicken breast, rice, and restocking the herbs, broths, milk, eggs, butter, oil, and root vegetables (the ones that last a while). I can live with about $100/week, which has never been outside of our budget. I get creative with the basics: if we can't afford pizza, I am completely capable of making pizza dough with the flour and water we undoubtedly have.
Cheese, though, that's my Achilles' heel. Can't really do without it. And I don't mean the aforementioned cheddar, mozza, parmesan. That's the basics - I can make eighty meals with those, no harm in it, really. No, my sin is a shop called Benton Brothers. A cheese shop. Local BC blues, Cheddar and Stilton from the places that can claim the name (incidentally, Stilton cannot actually be named 'Stilton' if it was made in the town of Stilton, where it got its name), the finest from Quebec and France. If I am so much as in Vancouver, I cannot avoid the temptation to pick up cheese.
And it is expensive. Don't doubt me when I say that I can spend $100 on a single night's worth of cheese and crackers - and I don't drink wine, my friends, that's just the cheese. 8-Year Cheddar, from Silo, that costs about $10 for a block as thick as your thumb and as wide and tall as your palm. Think about how genuinely little cheese that is. For comparison, you can get some Cracker Barrel cheddar about as thick as two thumbs and about three times as wide for the same price. Bleu d'Auvergne, a sinfully sweet blue from France, can't go without $15 worth of that. There's always the temptation to grab a bit of buffalo mozzarella for a nice proper Italian dish. The Stilton, the finer goat cheeses, my mum-in-law always appreciates us bringing home some Brie; it's hard not to spend a week's pay check at this store.
Hell, we got a cheese platter for our wedding.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Monday loves books . . . and office supplies . . . and craft things . . .
Hello, girls! It's Monday!
Short blog from me this week -- my students perform on Saturday, and I'm up to my ears in waiting craft projects also known as all the props I have to construct in the next five days. I've found I develop a strange need to explain myself to the cashier at Ben Franklin's when I hit this point in show mode. I don't want her to make her own conclusions about the fake bird, bag of stones, plastic vegetables, three pieces of foam core, and black masking tape. You know how it is.
But that leads nicely into this week's topic. Where do I avoid going when I'm poor because I know I'll spend money? Places like Ben Franklin's. Or Michael's. Or Hobby Lobby. Craft stores are my undoing. Because fabric paint's only 99 cents a tube and scrapbook paper's only 59 cents a page and stickers are only $1.49 a sheet, and before you know it, I've spent $50.
The same can be said of office supply stores. You've all seen the pictures of my Neville Notebook. My planner is just as colorful. When Sharpie came out with their eight color highlighter set, I thought I was made. I soon discovered that eight isn't nearly enough, so when the 10-color set came out the next year, I bought that, too, despite having eight colors in common. I just needed the extra two, you know? I do all my longhand writing in spiral notebooks or college-ruled composition books (which are ridiculously hard to find, by the way), I'm insanely picky about my pencils, and I'm in love with black Pilot .07 ballpoint pens. And yes, hello, my nerd is showing.
But my real undoing when I am poor? Bookstores. If I had all the money in the world or no self-discipline, I could drop two hundred dollars in a bookstore without even thinking about it. I mean, my relatively small two-bedroom apartment? One of those bedrooms is our library. Three bookcases. All full. 85% my books, 15% the boyfriend's, best estimate, and I think I'm being generous. There are just so many books that I want!
Speaking of which, I hit my year goal of 125 books a few days ago. Chase then said, "You could get to 150 before the end of the year if you worked at it." To which I said, "Challenge accepted, sir."
So we'll see how that goes.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got eight more tombstones to make.
. . . yeah, don't ask.
Short blog from me this week -- my students perform on Saturday, and I'm up to my ears in waiting craft projects also known as all the props I have to construct in the next five days. I've found I develop a strange need to explain myself to the cashier at Ben Franklin's when I hit this point in show mode. I don't want her to make her own conclusions about the fake bird, bag of stones, plastic vegetables, three pieces of foam core, and black masking tape. You know how it is.
But that leads nicely into this week's topic. Where do I avoid going when I'm poor because I know I'll spend money? Places like Ben Franklin's. Or Michael's. Or Hobby Lobby. Craft stores are my undoing. Because fabric paint's only 99 cents a tube and scrapbook paper's only 59 cents a page and stickers are only $1.49 a sheet, and before you know it, I've spent $50.
The same can be said of office supply stores. You've all seen the pictures of my Neville Notebook. My planner is just as colorful. When Sharpie came out with their eight color highlighter set, I thought I was made. I soon discovered that eight isn't nearly enough, so when the 10-color set came out the next year, I bought that, too, despite having eight colors in common. I just needed the extra two, you know? I do all my longhand writing in spiral notebooks or college-ruled composition books (which are ridiculously hard to find, by the way), I'm insanely picky about my pencils, and I'm in love with black Pilot .07 ballpoint pens. And yes, hello, my nerd is showing.
But my real undoing when I am poor? Bookstores. If I had all the money in the world or no self-discipline, I could drop two hundred dollars in a bookstore without even thinking about it. I mean, my relatively small two-bedroom apartment? One of those bedrooms is our library. Three bookcases. All full. 85% my books, 15% the boyfriend's, best estimate, and I think I'm being generous. There are just so many books that I want!
Speaking of which, I hit my year goal of 125 books a few days ago. Chase then said, "You could get to 150 before the end of the year if you worked at it." To which I said, "Challenge accepted, sir."
So we'll see how that goes.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got eight more tombstones to make.
. . . yeah, don't ask.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Week 39:The Black Hole of $$$
From Carlyn:
Week 39 Theme: Where do you avoid going when you are poor because you know you'll spend money?
Week 39 Theme: Where do you avoid going when you are poor because you know you'll spend money?
Friday, December 2, 2011
Heroes, and not the tv show
I very nearly forgot that it was Friday and I had to post, but then I saw that Lex had uploaded her sarcaschicks video and I realized it was Friday! It's a sad statement on how big a part of my life youtube is that this is how I (apparently) now gauge the days of the week. .... yupp, it really is. Moving on....
Congratulations on winning NaNoWriMo Cassie!!
Who are my heroes? I have always been horrible at answering this question. I don't know if I really have heroes. I have people I look up to, are those technically heroes? Perhaps. Okay, the people I look up to! Like Cassie, I hated this question when I was younger because I never knew how to answer it. And I still don't, apparently. Looking back, I loved my fourth grade teacher Mr. Schmittle. He was awesome. I think I can count him as a hero from my childhood. I also loved my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Thompson. In hindsight I think she was one of my heroes back them, judging from how happy I would be to see her even when I wasn't in kindergarten anymore. A few years out of elementary school, in seventh grade, is when I discovered Harry Potter and, as cliché as it is, J.K. Rowling has been a hero of mine ever since. I look up to her for her intelligence, kindness, imagination, and natural elegance. She just has a wonderful presence to her. Throughout most of college I would have most likely said that Tina Fey was one of my heroes as well. I identified so much, and still do to an extent, with Liz Lemon and her. Looking back, however, I don't know how wise it is to emulate Liz Lemon because that manifests itself mainly through lots and lots of eating and watching tv. That's really why I identified with her though- those are two of my favorite activities... *hangs head*
These days I still count J.K. Rowling as one of my heroes. As I thought about this question I also realized that I have some personal heroes as well. I don't want to name any names, but I believe that I can count some close family friends as heroes of mine. They are so kind and welcome to me and everyone they meet really. They are really like extended family to me and I admire how welcoming and kind they are.
Well, I think I've exhausted my list of heroes. I'm surprised I came up with that many actually! I used to have so much trouble with it.
Okay, that's it for Friday- see you all next week!
Congratulations on winning NaNoWriMo Cassie!!
Who are my heroes? I have always been horrible at answering this question. I don't know if I really have heroes. I have people I look up to, are those technically heroes? Perhaps. Okay, the people I look up to! Like Cassie, I hated this question when I was younger because I never knew how to answer it. And I still don't, apparently. Looking back, I loved my fourth grade teacher Mr. Schmittle. He was awesome. I think I can count him as a hero from my childhood. I also loved my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Thompson. In hindsight I think she was one of my heroes back them, judging from how happy I would be to see her even when I wasn't in kindergarten anymore. A few years out of elementary school, in seventh grade, is when I discovered Harry Potter and, as cliché as it is, J.K. Rowling has been a hero of mine ever since. I look up to her for her intelligence, kindness, imagination, and natural elegance. She just has a wonderful presence to her. Throughout most of college I would have most likely said that Tina Fey was one of my heroes as well. I identified so much, and still do to an extent, with Liz Lemon and her. Looking back, however, I don't know how wise it is to emulate Liz Lemon because that manifests itself mainly through lots and lots of eating and watching tv. That's really why I identified with her though- those are two of my favorite activities... *hangs head*
These days I still count J.K. Rowling as one of my heroes. As I thought about this question I also realized that I have some personal heroes as well. I don't want to name any names, but I believe that I can count some close family friends as heroes of mine. They are so kind and welcome to me and everyone they meet really. They are really like extended family to me and I admire how welcoming and kind they are.
Well, I think I've exhausted my list of heroes. I'm surprised I came up with that many actually! I used to have so much trouble with it.
Okay, that's it for Friday- see you all next week!
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