Erich T. Wade

Well, for some value of “sandwich post,” anyway.

Kat and I have been, as Kat puts it, “flexing our frugality musclesҸ” lately. Part of this is because we’re looking into buying a house*. Part of this is because we had several startlingly large electric bills in a row. Fuck you too, Arkansas weather.

Luckily it’s been quite nice out for a couple of weeks now, so we can just pop open the windows and the front door, set up a fan, and leave the temperature control off. Since our primary monetary drain over the past few months has been air conditioning, this means that we must turn our attention elsewhere for savings. I’m choosing the pantry, for quality of life reasons.

You see, Summer has this really adorable habit of going back and forth between my desk and the pantry, bringing one or two items over to me each trip. If I sit down for an hour or so, my desk becomes the depository of the entire bottom half of our long-term food storage. Not only does this eventually result in a very cute game in which I try to put things in the pantry faster than she can put them on my desk, it also calls my attention to just how much stuff is in the pantry that never gets used.

This in turn reminds me of a tip I’ve seen featured a couple of times: Base your meals around what’s in your pantry to save more on groceries. This seems like sound advice, but I’ve never gotten around to motivating myself to take a cursory examination of the pantry with meal plans in mind. Luckily, with Summer’s help I’m able to complete a total inventory of the bottom half several times a week – indeed, sometimes twice in one day. So, my tentative goal now is to plan out meals that use relatively little new food from the store and instead empty out the pantry before Summer does. Since I kind of want to blog more frequently than I am right now, this means that you, the reader, receive the high privilege of partaking vicariously in my culinary mistakes. You’re welcome.

With no further ado . . .

Pantry Prettification 001

“Arguably Some Sort of Southwestern Dish”

Today’s victims:

• 1 can of whole kernel corn (~15 oz), drained
• 1 can of stewed sliced tomatoes (~15 oz), drained
• 2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, chopped
• About 1/2 teaspoon of chives? I think? I would have measured if I’d known I’d be blogging about it at the time, but I just eyeballed it.
• About 1/2 pound frozen boneless chicken thigh strips. See note regarding chives.
• Shredded cheddar, to taste.
• Something starchy, to taste. I recommend rice and/or tortillas. Potato chips would be frowned upon. Pocky is a nonstarter and, frankly, I’m disgusted anyone would actually suggest it.

Something resembling directions:

1.  Combine everything but the cheese and the something starchy in a large skillet. Cover.
2. Cook on about medium-high or so for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is no longer illegal to serve.
3. At some point during this time period you should probably prep the starchy stuff.
4. Serve the results on, in, under, or in the general vicinity of the starchy stuff. Sprinkle some cheddar on top if you want to.

Aftermath:

In this case, the starches in question were some instant rice and some tortillas. The instant rice wasn’t nearly as bad as non-instant-rice-advocates have led me to believe.

Summer skipped her morning and afternoon naps in lieu of conking out about an hour before dinner time. Here we see her temporarily awoken to enjoy the vegetables of my labors. Apparently she liked it. As, in fact, did Kat. I actually thought the end result was a bit bland, but I was expecting that anyway due to the whole not-drowning-it-in-salt thing**. Still, it was tasty. I made my wraps with rice inside and decided to add ranch dressing, and the end result was actually rather nice.

Tomorrow I cheat and don’t hardly use anything from the pantry at all, because I’ve been wanting to try the recipe for Greene Beefe Stewe. Eventually my food pictures will look as pretty as that, and my plan for world domination will be complete.

Ҹ EDIT: Kat informs me that “flexing frugality muscles” is a term she obtained from the blog Mr. Money Mustache. It’s pretty neat. You should go check it out.

*It turns that in today’s housing market, we can get a very nice three-bedroom house with a yard in town and pay about $100 less on the mortgage (including taxes and insurance) than we’re paying in rent on our 2-bedroom apartment with a crappy deck that the apartment management keeps promising to fix before I fall through it again. Given that “get a house” is one of our major long-term goals and I’d kind of like Summer to have a yard to run around in before she grows up, this seems like something of a no-brainer.

**I’ve been trying to do things to lower my cholesterol and blood pressure. A couple of years ago Kat and I had to get blood tests done when we applied for life insurance, and my results arrived with a complementary exorcist. I didn’t get the preferred rate.

Not that I have any good reason for being there, but I figured I might as well. For those that don’t know, Formspring is basically a place to ask people questions.

Here, have a link.

Well, Google Plus is now into open beta, and I’m on it. As I’ve noted before, social networks aren’t really my thing, so we’ll see how long this lasts. (I still use Shelfari, but not for the social aspect; I really like tracking what I read, and don’t mind if people know what that is.) Still, if any of my friends end up using Google+ regularly, it’s not a horrible way to keep in touch.

I sat around for a few minutes this morning trying to figure out why it was I felt comfortable joining Google+ when I have such a fervent dislike of Facebook. The best answer I’ve come up with is that Google seems to be doing a way better job of handling privacy. Circles are a pretty good way of handling visibility on your updates. When another site wants to use your Google login, Google asks you first. It’s the little things.

On the other hand, Howard Taylor has a good point here:

I don’t have issues with privacy, or copyright, or rollout practices, or targeted advertising, or any of that. I think the transparent society is coming, and Facebook lets us taste it a decade or so early so we can update our antiquated concepts of privacy and copyright. The coming world is one in which everybody walks around with a camera which is connected to a network that instantly copies anything interesting to a million different places at once.

In short, if you have an issue with Facebook’s privacy policies, you don’t really have an issue with Facebook. You have an issue with the Future. Please don’t yell at me about it. I don’t like pooping in a glass bathroom either. But in the future, all the bathrooms are made of glass.

I’m not really comfortable with the degree to which Facebook shares your data. Fundamentally my issue is that most of the time, when they roll out a new feature, it’s an opt-out process instead of an opt-in process. Pretty much the only time I ever log in is when I see Lifehacker mention some new thing that I have to opt out of if I don’t want to deal with.

Mostly I think it’s just that I have a lot more trust in Google as a company than Facebook. Here, have a profile link.

And it’s at a reasonable hour too, not some silly time like 2 in the morning.

Don’t ask how much tea I’ve had this morning, by the way.  I’m not quite sure.

We’re going to call this day 1 of the sleep schedule rearrangement, since this is the first day it’s really worked out. I haven’t gotten any writing done yet but I don’t really expect to until I get a little more awake in the early morn. There might be some coming later this morning though — I mean heck, I’m writing a blog post, right? I thought about saying something silly like, “I’m going to resurrect the Daily Lynx,” but it seems like nothing can kill my blogging spirit deader than admitting it exists.

. . . crud.

For ironic purposes, please note that this post is being written as 2 in the morning.

A few months ago, my wife got a promotion. This has generally been a good thing — she loves the job she’s doing now, she’s making more money than she was before, etcetera.  There’s just one downside: her schedule starts at 5 in the morning, which has me up (at the latest) at 4:30 to take her to work.* She’s adapted pretty well to this sleep schedule. I haven’t.

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that late, late at night tends to be when I’m most productive. For most of my adult life, staying up until the wee hours of the morning has been the norm for me; I get more done, creatively speaking, after midnight than the entire rest of the day. Add this to the fact that I have trouble getting to sleep until I’m completely exhausted and a morning demeanor that is best described as “grouchy,” and you have one (1) full-fledged night owl. So my first instinct was to try and run a split sleep schedule; I’d wake up long enough to take Kat to work, then go back to sleep for a few hours until Summer got up, thus giving me (a little) time later at night. My aunt tells me that the navy used to do something similar and, furthermore, that they no longer do.  After a few months of trying to make it work, I think I get the gist of why. (Hint: It’s really rough on you.)

So I got to thinking. I’ve done the 4:30 AM thing before — when I lived in Little Rock I was the opening manager twice a week, and before that I worked two summers on the opening shift at Braum’s. I know I *can* go to sleep while it’s light out — heck, I’m really good at it before noon — it’s just not easy. But if I get up at 4 when Kat does, I’ll hopefully be exhausted enough to make it work.  Maybe. Of course, that’s not the main problem with switching completely to her sleep schedule; I never get enough sleep anyway, so who cares which reason I base my insomnia on? If I’m very lucky, this could even work out to a better routine for me in the long run. Not, the main problem is my writing time.

Luckily, it’s a problem with an obvious solution. I hypothesize that the reason late night has historically worked so well for me is because there’s no one awake to bug me. And indeed, this isn’t even the case any more — I often spend time late at night hanging out with friends on Vent, playing WoW or Minecraft or Magic or whatnot. Which is wonderful and great, but they’re also awake during the afternoons, which are an equally fine time to hang out with them. Maybe if I try writing in the mornings, after I take Kat to work, I’ll be less tempted to try a new deck against my archnemesis instead.

In short: For the forseeable future, I’m going to try going to bed around 8, waking up around 4, and writing until my daughter wakes up.  Check back soon for hilarious failure states of this impeccable plan.

*We only have one vehicle, and staying home all day with Summer and no means of transportation just isn’t a good idea.