Resolutions? Or lifestyle?

I sometimes think about the futility of New Years Resolutions. We all take the time to think about things we want to change in our life. Lose weight, exercise more, eat healthier, stop smoking, take more time with the family, etc.

I think I will just not make resolutions. If I decide something needs to change in my life, I just need to change it. Why should I wait until New Years to start? This is especially true for health issues. Every day you put it off is one more day that you are unhealthy.

I have started a different type of change. I am on a quest to spend as little money as possible. I have a goal to buy a small farm in the hills. To be able to do that, we will have to save every penny we can.

So far this goal is going fairly well. I have cut our grocery bill by about one fourth, cut our electric bill by almost a fourth, I have made soap and laundry detergent ( way cheaper), I have only bought bread once in almost 3 months ( making my own bread), and making the meat we have been eating go alot farther. I even have a tiny little garden for a few select high yield veggies like beans and tomatoes. My daughter bought me a canner for Christmas so I can put up my produce. Yet another savings.

My kids have sort of gotten into the spirit of the change. My daughter is really into the saving money thing. My son just likes the home made bread. Neither of them wants to move to a farm. Oh well, we can't have everything.

My husband is all for not spending the money. And he also wants to move to the hills. It took me a really long time to convince him that you just can't feed a family of 4 on $200 a month. He started going to the store with me when my Arthritis got so bad I had trouble lifting some of the packages. Now he knows just how expensive it is to buy groceries. On the plus side, he does like garden fresh veggies and he doesn't mind eating a lot of beans and pasta. Fresh bread is a plus. He loves me so he humors me in my sometimes crazed search for the almighty bargain.

I really want that farm. And there is a lot of work going into getting it. If it takes a lifestyle change to get it, then that is what will happen.

A New Year

Well, it is almost New Years and It sort of makes me think about things. Things I used to take for granted. There is so much in my life that I have been blessed with. A loving husband, a couple of really good kids, a home, good friends, enough healthy food, and all of us have enough money to get by on. It makes me realize that there are thousands of people who don't have those things.

I think about things like that every now and then. I try to donate to the food bank and homeless shelters when I can. I give any change I have to the Salvation Army when I see them braving the weather outside of a store. Then I got to thinking about what these folks do the rest of the year. Why should charity and goodwill only be at Christmas? Don't they need things the rest of the year too? Why should giving only be a last minute tax shelter?

I am sure they will need things all year. I do. I have to make the effort to do more the rest of the year. I may not have much by some standards, but compared to others, I have everything.

Why I hate shopping

I had to take my daughter shopping last night for a Secret Santa thing they do on the Newspaper staff at her school. A small gift every day for a week with a bigger gift ($5) on Friday. The kid she was supposed to buy for has been in the hospital for 2 weeks with histoplasmosis. She doesn't know him that well, and he wasn't there to write down the stuff that he liked/wanted, so she is having to wing it.

So after I drop off my son at scouts, we go to the Mass Merchandiser to try and find something for him. We walk around looking at all of the crap on the shelves, realize that it is all crap, and wind up getting a Pez dispenser and some assorted candy. She will be giving him a can of Pepsi one day as well. We decided that for the Friday gift, I will just make up a candy/cookie tray. Lame, I know, but at least it is heartfelt. For the Monday gift from her Secret Santa, she got a tube of chapstick. Kinda makes you wonder just how seriously these kids take it.

Anyway, there is just nothing out there is in the wide world of shopping that I either want or need. I have what I need already. Looking at the shelves in the stores just depresses me. Over priced, cheaply made, over packaged, and much much over advertised crap.

If someone actually wanted to get me something I would like, get me a side of Beef. That, I could use. Granted, it wouldn't be terribly practical to wrap and put under the tree, but you could always wrap it and put it in the freezer with a note under the tree.

It just seems that merchandisers are trying so hard to get every last dime from consumers, that they over look the need for quality. And the manufacturers that do believe in quality price their stuff so far out of the range of the normal consumer as to be a joke. So again, we are just bombarded with crap and told to like it. Well, I won't do it!

No more cheap, plastic, slave labor, Chinese, mass marketed crap will be bought by me. I will be looking for small businesses that produce American goods from American materials to stock my home. I will not be supporting MegaMart in their efforts to destroy small town America, I will not be supporting the Chinese government in their efforts to infiltrate the United States through our Capitalist greed, I will not bow down to the advertising agencies and spend more than my income for a holiday that is supposed to promote Peace, Love, and the birth of a Holy Child.

This Christmas, I am going to make it about caring, not about money. The few gifts I have to buy will be meaningful instead of pricey. It isn't about how many gifts, or how much they cost, but what that gift will mean to the person who gets it.

I am done with the shopping just because it is Christmas.

I hate Christmas

You know, Christmas really, really sucks. There is nothing quite like knowing that whatever you give someone for Christmas will be exactly what they don't want/like/need. So as a nation, we all flood into the shopping malls and MegaMarts, picking up things only to put them back, in a frantic search for the "perfect" gift.

I have decided that there is no "perfect" gift. Inevitably it will be the wrong color/style/size/ brand, break the first time it is used, or just be something that they cannot possibly use. Last year, I gave my husband a foot massager that he had been eyeballing every time we went into the store. He would rub on it, and exclaim over it, and wish they made it in bed size. I bought the last one in town. I couldn't wait for him to open it. It broke the first day. I was devastated. As a companion to the foot massage, I got him another massager that would fit his office chair that had heat and massage. Very nice for about a week until it too stopped working. It was at that point I decided that I would never buy anything that plugs into a wall as a gift again.

I gave my dad a bat house last year. As weird as it was, he liked it. He then proceeded to build himself about 5 more. It seems that the stranger the gift I give my dad, the more he likes it. At least he is kinda fun to buy for.

My kids, or at least my daughter, stress over what to give as gifts too. They never seem to have enough cash at hand to give the things they want to give. So the gifts always seem a bit lame. I remind them that Christmas isn't about the gifts, it is about the giving. They look at me like I have grown an extra head or something.

This year, my daughter, bless her pea pickin' heart, has decided to do artwork for charity. She has some talent for cartooning so she has been drawing anime' like pictures of her friends for a minimal amount of money. She said that every dime of it will be used to buy necessities for the teen shelter in our town. So far, she has collected $9 and has commissions for about $25 more. Somehow, I think I did good with that kid.

Then, of course, there is the whole Family thing to do. If you want to see just how much I am looking forward to that, see the Thanksgiving post. It will be all that and then some. At least this year we have managed to make a deal with almost all of the family members on both sides to not exchange gifts. Except for the kids. That works for me just fine. There is no reason for all of us to spend money we don't have just so we can swap crap. We had a small problem in that I had already bought a gift for my step-mom. My dad bought it from me to give to her. Problem solved. He got a gift to give her that he didn't have to shop for, and I got to give her something that I know she actually will like, even if it didn't have my name on the "from" tag on the box.

All in all, Christmas just sucks. I would much rather stay home, cook a nice meal for my husband and kids, watch a movie, and relax.

I really hate holidays

I am thankful .......that Thanksgiving is finally over. It is such a nightmare to drive for 3 hours to get to my mother-in-law's house only to be asked to make part of the dinner. Not that I mind cooking. I actually like cooking and I don't mind helping, but not at 10:30pm. After a 3 hour drive.

Then we have the logistics. His mom's, my dad's, my mom's, his brother's. And everyone wants us to spend the entire weekend with them. So no one is happy. Ever.

We try to get everything worked out before leaving the house. What day we are going to be where and at what time. What night we are going to spend with whom. Who we don't tell that we will be in town because we just don't have time to see them.

Then we have the meals themselves. Did the Mother-in-law actually get the turkey done this year or will it still be bloody like it was last year? Was the pan of dressing the same one we had leftover from last year thawed out and rebaked or is it fresh? Is my step-father going to be so drunk again that he starts making inappropriate remarks at the dinner table? Just how many people are going to show up for dinner at Dad's and does anyone actually know who they are?

And the big question...Just how many turkey and dressing meals can you eat before you pass out? The answer to that is 2. At least 2 in the same day. After that the gag reflex kicks in and even the thought of turkey is enough to make you want to run screaming.

My dad said that maybe for Christmas, we will just have pizza.

Sounds good to me.

100 Years ago in Arkansas...

Most of the roads were gravel. You would generally travel by mule. The main social event on any given week was church on Sunday. Although there would be an occasional quilting bee or barn raisin'. The County Fair was the highlight of every September. Everyone entered their canning and handwork and feuds could be started over who's pickles were better.

Work was hard but life was simple. There was never any question on whether or not a child should be taken from his/her parents. There was never the issue of domestic abuse. If a man hit a woman and any of the family ever found out about it, that man would quietly disappear, no questions asked.

You knew what was in your food because you raised it. There wasn't any tainted wheat gluten added to the preformed meat patties, because no one would eat something like that. Meat was only made out of an animal, not a preformed, chub packed, vitamin enriched, breaded, heat and eat meal that is so popular these days. Every woman knew how to cook. Every one. It may not always be gourmet, and it usually wasn't, but it was filling.

Granted, 100 years ago in Arkansas, we were about to be struck down by the flu pandemic followed closely by WWI. But no one protested outside the White House. No one dodged the draft. And the press most certainly didn't spend every waking moment trying to find dirt on the President, the Cabinet, and high ranking military officers.

My husband's family at this time still spoke German in the home. Louis was bilingual, his parents only spoke German, and we have a very nice picture of him in his American WWI uniform displayed proudly on our den wall. He was the last family member, at least on that side of the family, who was the proper age when a war broke out. Although my late father-in-law did enlist in the Coast Guard at the end of WWII. The war was over by the time he got out of basic but 2 of his future wife's brothers were involved in the fighting in Italy. No protesters for that war either.

IMHO, it would seem that our generation has gotten into the habit of whining about what it takes to be free. We all want our liberties, but Heaven help us all if we actually have to do something to protect it.

Going to Hell, and we are letting it

This country, and the principles it was founded on, are going to Hell and the citizens of this fine nation are just blindly letting it happen. We have policed and law suited our way into a virtual police state.

We have regulated all of our small businesses out of existence in favor of mega chains and McFood. It used to be where anyone with a couple of hundred dollars could open a store or a cafe and make a living. Now all of the major corporations have forced regulations thru Congress that make code enforcements, inspections, fees, licenses, and other money grabbing BS mandatory in the name of protecting the pubic. What they really do is limit the amount of competition in the market place and thus protect their own profits.

Our kids can't even be kids anymore. They can't play the games that we played as kids. Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, even Tag is off limits. Heaven forbid if someone's weenie ass kid gets tapped on the thigh. It would be sexual abuse in the grossest sense of the word.

It is bad enough that a child who is upset about getting in trouble with his parents can call SCAN and claim abuse, but the harassment that parents are put thru over it is just insane. A friend of ours had to discipline one of his kids while in a store waiting in the check out line. A lady that they knew was in the same line and saw the screaming child get a single swat to the behind. She felt it was her civic duty to sic the government on them. It took 6 months and a home visit from a child advocate to get it sorted out. But now they are on "the LIST!"

We are letting the government rule our lives. This is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they started this (once) great nation. The government was not designed to regulate our lives, it was designed to ease trade between states and foreign nations, and to enforce the Constitution. It was not meant to regulate, tax, educate our kids, tax our businesses or our paychecks, tell us what we can eat or feed our kids, or where we could build our homes, or what doctor we could go to, or subsidize drug companies, farmers, schools, or people who's job it is to have babies so they can get a bigger welfare checks.

100 years ago, if you didn't work, you didn't eat. You may not have worked a 9 to 5, but you worked growing your own food and hoped you had enough to sell so you could buy the kids an orange at Christmas. You made do with what you had and nothing went to waste. And the government stayed out of your business...unless your crop was moonshine.

Now we are taxed on the amount of money you make every paycheck, you pay sales tax on anything you buy, you pay property tax on any thing you own, you pay tax again on the money you don't spend (savings accounts, CDs, retirement accounts, stock dividends, college funds, etc) and when you die, if there is anything left by that time, a death tax is imposed. If your kids inherit, then they have to pay an inheritance tax. So that money that you worked so hard to get is actually taxed up to six times.

And we have done it to our selves. We voted for the idiots in congress who think that the government should pay for everything. Nice concept but it has to be paid for somehow. That somehow is taxes. And we voted them into office. We gave ourselves over to the government and now they are paying us back for our trust.