Tag Archives: learning

Lost Bread

Just Life, , ,

So these pictures and this experience is over a year old, but I just found the pictures on my computer and remembered that I had meant to post about this.

Last summer while we were in Dallas, somehow we had a loaf of French bread that went stale before we could eat it. Such a pity, too, because Josh and I love a good loaf of French bread. But then I remembered that Josh told me French toast actually comes from the poor class of people back in the day in France, when they would have bread that was too hard to eat but they were too poor to buy more, so they saved their bread by soaking it in egg to re-soften it and then cooking it, and it was called pain perdu (which translates to “lost bread”). I decided to see if I could recover our lost bread by making authentic French toast, and it worked! Yay! So now you know what you can do with stale bread, besides just feed it to ducks. :)

I Hate Rit Dye

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It all started with Halloween and then lasted for several months after that, but let’s just say I haven’t had the best experience with Rit dye. How do traces of it still pop up in my laundry, completely unexpected? For instance, I have no idea how that one stubborn cleaning rag escaped my original Rit dye purge, or where it’s been hiding out in my house for the past four months, completely undetected. And when did the Rit dye choose to strike again? Of course, when I was washing the new (white) dish towels that Josh bought me for Christmas – the dish towels he bought me to replace the ones I ruined last October. Rit dye, you and I will never be friends.

Happy (late) Halloween!

Holidays, , , , , ,

Josh and I were Waldo and Wenda for Halloween, from the Where’s Waldo? books. We made/assembled our costumes, and I think they turned out really well:

My work had a Halloween/food drive/flu shot party that we went to, and it was a lot of fun. People liked our costumes, and we got some funny comments like, “Don’t lose each other, you might not find each other again!” My favorite was one lady who said to Josh, “Now, I don’t see your cane and your cup, so I must have to go and find it…” I had totally forgotten about having to search for Waldo’s cane and cup! Anyone else remember that?

Anyway, the holiday was way fun, but making our shirts involved my first experience with Rit dye, and…well, let’s just say it might be my last. ;-) I tried to follow instructions from a friend and what Josh and I found online, but maybe we didn’t do things quite right because after we washed our shirts after Halloween they looked like this:

(On the plus side, it’s a pretty cute pink jammy shirt though, right?) Ruining the shirts aside, we now also have 3 purple dish cloths (instead of blue ones), 2 salmon-colored towels (instead of gold ones), two now-pink white undershirts (thank goodness we wore cheap ones), a pink ironing board cover, and a pile of pink rags. I promise I’m not as dumb as I sound…it’s just that some Rit dye ended up some places I wasn’t expecting. Oh, adventures in laundry. Sometimes I feel like I’m still finding traces of the stubborn dye around the house…so, yes, I’ll probably stay away from scarlet Rit dye from now on. ;-)

The Challenge

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THE CHALLENGE: We came, we saw, we conquered. Okay, so our challenge was maybe not quite so daring and dangerous, but it was tough at times, and worth it. What was it? To not spend any money on discretionary items in the month of May.

It started as we were talking one night in April about money and budgeting and life. We have a budget that we stick to pretty well, and we’re pretty happy with our spending and saving habits. Still, we were starting to wonder if we were distinguishing enough between needs and wants and if there’s any room for improvement. So the challenge was Josh’s idea. Why not go a whole month and focus just on our needs? Then afterwards we could evaluate the difference it made and see where we might want to change.

So it was a good experience. Yes, hard at times. No fast food, no eating out, nothing “extra”, not even any candy or ice cream during weekly shopping trips (wait…okay, maybe we got one quart of ice cream). We were very careful to spend money only on things we had to. And it was a very good experience and taught us a lot.

First, we learned that it really is important to evaluate our spending decisions. In May, whenever we looked at something extra we wanted to buy, the answer was just “no”, so it was easy. The Challenge made it easy to tell the difference between wants and needs because we had already decided. Now we can try to make our future budgeting decisions wiser by saying “no” more often.

And second, The Challenge put us in a mindset – the “oh yeah, we’re not rich yet” mindset. We’ve been very blessed lately, it’s true, but we’re still young and saving up for so many important events in the future. It was nice (and good) to remind ourselves, “wait, we’re still college students.” I think that’s something we’ll remember now as we make decisions on what to buy.

And there’s been the benefits, too – saving extra money, coming in way under budget, knowing that we’ve been smart.

So now May has come and gone, and (though we’re excited we can eat out occasionally again), I think we’re a little wiser for it. We’re going to try to make that “oh yeah, we’re not rich yet” mindset more of the standard, and spending extra money more the exception.

What do you do to make sure you live within your means? Do you have any tips about budgeting or spending decisions?