Making the pantry user friendly

As the sun sets earlier each day on our gardens here in the Northern Hemisphere, the harvest and winter prep is getting to a fever pitch.

The spiders are stocking up too!

This time of year, our roles can change a little. My husband is busy buttoning up the portion of the new roof that needed finishing before our fall rains arrive for good, while I am cleaning the gutters. Most of the time we stick to generalized male/female duties. I do the cooking, he does the manly tasks, such as water system maintenance, chainsaw duties, etc., and our daughter helps either one of us with any task. We are all like ships passing in the night now. But we all have to eat, or snack.

I have devised a few ways to make our bulk foodstuffs a little easier to use when someone is pinch hitting in the kitchen:

Over the years while scouring garage and estate sales, I have accumulated extra measuring cup sets and I now have enough to keep these in with my staples like flours, rice and sugar. Our farmhouse is old, and shy on storage. My whole wheat flour is in the basement milk refrigerator, my white flour and sugar are in the dry pantry off the kitchen. Having a measuring cup in the jar helps a novice cook concentrate on cooking instead of wasting time by forgetting to take the measuring cup from one location to another.

I buy in bulk, and keep most of our staples in buckets and replenish one gallon jars for the dry pantry. Inside the jar lids, I have written the instructions for cooking or taped the recipe from the original packaging. This makes it convenient for someone who doesn't always cook and has the ratio of water to rice in their head.

The fruit room in our basement is where our home canned goods are stored, and while it seems easy to navigate to me, it isn't always so with other members of my family. My hubby makes a beeline straight in the door and grabs what is in front of him, which is canned nectarines. He won't look to either side and hunt for a different fruit. So to keep peace in our marriage I have just devoted one portion of a shelf in the "beeline" to every kind of fruit that I have canned. I can keep it replenished and he gets to choose what he wants to snack on. And further on that tack, I have a pie safe type of cabinet that I call my Christmas cabinet for home canned goods that are for gifts. Still micro-managing, but from a distance. My gift jars stay intact and out of sight, and they are conveniently located for me when I need a gift.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head - what quick tips do you have that are favorites?

My big mistake - my first attempt at self-insurance

By Eilleen
Consumption Rebellion

Hello everyone,

Readers of my personal blog will know that I am currently on a drive to re-building my nest egg. See, I once had a very healthy nest egg until about 3 months ago...and then I lost 90% of that nest egg.

I lost it as a result of a frugal mistake - a very poor attempt at self-insurance...

Have you ever wondered if it was worth insuring? I have. Especially car insurance.

As a bit of a background - here in Australia, we have compulsory third party insurance. This insurance covers any costs incurred by a person who may have been injured or died as a result of my negligent driving. While this insurance is good, it does NOT cover damage to vehicles. For that I would need additional cover - for many Australians this additional cover takes the form of "comprehensive insurance". This would cover damage to vehicles, tow truck etc etc.

Now, I've been on the road for 16 years now and I've never had to claim against my comprehensive insurance. For 16 years, I drove and paid for comprehensive car insurance and wondered...what if I just put money aside instead of paying insurance?

Then in recent months, with so much going on in my personal and work life, I just let it...lapse. I set aside the money for comprehensive car insurance in my "nest egg" account and forgot all about it, fully expecting that nothing would happen (as nothing happened in 16 years).

And of course, it did. Three months ago, I hit another car. It was dark and raining heavily. Three cars ahead of us, one of the cars suddenly braked (not sure why). I was behind another car and didn't really see it happening. All I know is that suddenly the car in front of me touched his brakes then swerved wildly on to the large median strip in the middle of the road. I panicked and hit my brakes *hard*. Bad move. This just 'caused my car to lock up in the wet weather and I slid out of control and into another car.


No one was injured - thank goodness. However, the damage to my car (above) was over $3,000. The damage to the other car (which I was fully liable for) was about same.

Now if I recalculated my car insurance. If I had continued to pay car insurance - to date, I would have paid the insurance company $8,000. So *if* I had not paid the insurance company, and saved the money I would have $8,000 in the bank. But of course, I don't. I only stopped paying car insurance this year...

So what were my mistakes (aside from the driving mistake of hitting brakes hard in wet weather)?

I did not think through my venture into self-insuring. I just approached self-insurance from a "savings" point of view and did not think about the risks involved with it. Darren from Green Change commented on my post about the accident and succinctly gave me the direction I needed to have in approaching self-insurance:

"insure against the things that can wipe you out financially"

While my first attempt at self-insuring did not exactly wipe me out - it did take out 90% of my nest egg. I was lucky - it could've been much much worse. I shudder to think what could have happened had I not had the nest egg to begin with. I shudder to think what could have happened had I hit a luxury car.

So what am I doing now?

With Darren's advice in mind, I've now thought through my approach to self-insuring my car.

• I have chosen to take out third-party property damage insurance rather than comprehensive insurance. My car is a very common model - parts are easy to get, as well as quite reasonable in costs. I can afford to repair my car BUT its another story with others' car/s or property. Third party property damage covers the cost of any property damage I may cause to others as a result of my negligent driving.

• I decided to lower my insurance premium by increasing my minimum claim threshold (known as 'excess' here in Australia) to $1,000 instead of $500. Given my savings patterns, its almost certain that I would be able to pay $1,000 towards my claim in the event of an accident.

• I have decided to take advance driving lessons. While this doesn't lower my insurance premium in any way, it does (at least in my mind) lessen the chances of me making the same driving mistake again.
  

So those are my lessons for self-insuring. I have now also reviewed my house and contents insurance. I have increased the insured amount for the house but lowered the amount for contents. I have realised that I can repair or source second-hand most household items myself. I have also raised my excess for that too.

In response to my changes in insurance, I have also increased the amount I put aside for my savings.

In short, I am now partially self-insuring. I am insured for things that can wipe me out financially but not for things I can repair, easily replace or even just do without.

As for my nest egg? Well, I'm also slowly re-building that. To date, I have recouped 25% of the original amount. I have more plans for rebuilding my nest egg but that's a story for another day.

How about you? Do you self-insure? What is your approach to self-insurance?

Moving Forward When Times Are Tough

by Gavin, from The Greening of Gavin.

Some days I have no inspiration or get up and go, but never from a lack of enthusiasm!  Today is one of those days.

When you embark on a lofty life goal such as mine, it is quite intense during the day. Juggling a full time job, coming home to a wonderful family, but then catching up on Sustainable Living group responsibilities and then spreading the green word via this blog and my personal blog, The Greening of Gavin, and then garden maintenance on weekends. It certainly makes for a very busy week, but I wouldn't miss all that action for the world.


However, when you come down with an illness or cronic injury that you just can't budge, it shakes your routine, beliefs/behaviours and sometimes your world. Deadlines get missed, promises get broken, and inevitablbly projects get delayed. I have one of those cronic injuries, that doesn't seem to want to go away, and I get very frustrated when I have a relapse, as I am now. One of my chief values is congruence, doing and delivering what I say I am going to do, but with this injury, I have had to learn to reassess timelines and promises.


With a 48% reduction in income, limited physical capability, and struggling to pay our mortgage, it really puts preasure, and self doubt within me when I don't or can't provide, or get all obligations, let alone my green projects started or even completed. Life just gets hectic and you have to slow right down and recover. Everyone has these days, and I certainly realise I am not Robinson Crusoe when it comes to ill health.

The only thing that keeps me strong is my family, my personal values and belief set, and the realisation that all the carbon reducing behaviours that we already have in place do not get thrown out the window just because I am in pain or imobile.  Back in the old days, it could become all too hard and pointless. I remember that this would be the first thing to go if I was sick before I had my green epiphany. Waste would accumulate, too lazy to recycle, too tired to turn off the lights when leaving the room, or too tired or complacent to actually do much at all except lay infront of the telly and veg out and put it all in the too hard basket!

Now, I have been living with this back injury for 2 and a bit years, and the circumstances of how it happened are quite ironic and somewhat humourus, but know that I am not alone in the world and there are people with greater and worse afflictions, so this post is not a call for sympanthy or sorrow on my behalf.

It is simply a message to remind me and all of us that when you feel low, or don't think that you can keep up with the change towards a simple life or whatever your life goal is, think again and think hard. The end game is worth all the effort if you really, really believe in that goal. Don't let anything get in your way, because if you let an established habit slip, then it is just as hard to get back to where you started again.  The old saying 'two steps forward, one step back' comes to mind. However, if the citizens of the world don't make the changes we are seeking, then nobody else will. Governments are already struggling to get concensus on climate change targets, and most Corporations will not give a hoot until Governments act.  It is truely up to the people of the world to change it for the better.

So, when feeling low or in pain, as I am now, I always try to remember of all the great things I have achieved so far on our journey towards a more sustainable lifestyle, and that things will always get better. All I have to do is take baby steps each, and every day, and put one foot in front of the other. That is all anyone could possibly ask of themselves or their fellow global citizens!

Lets all take those baby steps together in the right direction.  Big things will happen, I just know they will!

Making Time To Do Nothing

By Notes From The Frugal Trenches


I planned this post before I read the wonderful post yesterday by Bel about Burnout. It is a post I could really relate to. When I left the corporate world I had so many ideas, so many plans and oh so many lists. I wanted to learn to knit, sew, crochet, grow my own fruits & veggies, have flowers perfect for giving away, learn how to make jam & preserves, and bread too. I could just see myself being an amazing cake maker, flower arranger and seamstress. I look back now and see just how much expectation I was putting on myself and what a recipe for disaster it was going to be, of course at the time I couldn't see it. None of the veggies I tried to grow this year worked, neither did the strawberries. My knitting is moving along at a snail's pace, we won't discuss my sewing abilities or crochet skills.

The truth was, I was transferring the busyness of a corporate career into busyness at home. I was measuring success by how many new skills I learned and how bountiful my growing abilities were. Hardly simple and hardly joyous. It took one failed crop to make me realize that I was supposed to be learning to live a new, simpler, quieter more joyous life, not a life measured by the number of skills I had. I knew there had to be a better way, a more balanced way, a more wholesome way.

So I stopped, instead of daily and weekly lists of achievements I must accomplish, I created a vision of experiences I'd like to have and either realistic time frames or no time frames at all. I'd like to crochet a blanket for someone who is homeless or a child in an orphanage, not become an expert in crochet. I'd like to grow some fruit and make a fruit salad with fruit from my garden, not be inundated with more apples that I know what to do with in year one of my new journey - although I hold out hope for year 5 or 10 ;0). Simple changes & less pressure have made all the difference, I've gone back to seeing a simple life as a joyous one, not something I'm failing miserably at.

Over the past two weeks on my personal blog I've been blogging about reclaiming simple Sundays. There are no rules, just an acknowledgement that for most of us each day is filled with tasks we "need" to accomplish and lists of things to do. The point of reclaiming one day each week to do simple activities is to find joy, to make time for nothing in particular, to step away from errands, away from shops, away from stress and just be alone or together, making time for the joy found in nothing.

I've already found with just two days dedicated to nothing more than long walks, or a spot or knitting, perhaps some prayer or quiet reflection that there is a great deal to be said for nothing, and that nothing is perhaps filled with the most important somethings.

Do you practice setting time aside each week for quiet reflection, peaceful activities and rest?