Linkety links

Hey, did anyone catch moi over on My Year Without Spending? I'm a star, darling! What a great boost to the self esteem, thanks Angela!

Also, I am selling my condo. Have a look, you never know, one of my blog followers might have a hankering to move to the sunny Okanagan :D

Selling our home ourselves fits with our family theme. We DIY with nearly everything.

Have a great weekend, friends!

Frugality Update

Or, "What I have been doing with myself" could be an alternate title to this post.

I am trying to get my place to this level of banal sterility for the purpose of marketing. You see, the buyer needs to be able to picture their own belongings in the space...yep, that's what I have been up to, frugally moving, without actually moving...yet. Of course, time is my friend here, the more time you have the less money things cost. Over the past few weeks I have been collecting boxes a few at a time, for free of course, (who would pay for cardboard, I wonder, when it is ubiquitous if you know where to look?) and steadily weeding out the useless from the useful and donating the rest. Though this task has been daunting at times, repeating a certain question over and over in my head seems to help. The question is : "Are you willing to pay money to keep this item?" Same goes for buying stuff at this point. I know I will have to pack, ship, move and store this stuff, so is it really worth consuming anything right now? Nope, it ain't. It is really putting my non consumer attitude to the maximum and my recreational shopping to a bare minimum, which is a good thing. I will need that cash for the eventual move!

Here are some other random, frugal things I have been doing;

-making soup stock from grocery store chicken carcasses

-making chicken salad and casseroles from aforementioned chickens

-trying to buy as little new food as possible before the old food is used up. Chicken anyone?

-freezing things before they go bad in tiny little labeled containers

-REMEMBERING MY REUSABLE SHOPPING BAGS (OK, trying to remember)

-saving regular amounts of money, automatically!

-bringing in refundable containers for spending cash, (BOGO 25 cent DQ blizzards, yum!)

-taking the time to recycle properly

-turning my swagbucks into amazon cash.

Let's talk about snot.

No, not really. Well...sort of. Let's talk about how to deal with snot.

A while back, I became acutely and severly ill with the H1N1 flu. It was not pleasant. In fact, I was the most ill I have been in about 15 years, when I had strep throat as a teenager. Ugh. This illness kept me in bed, (and away from my blog! horrors!) for approximately two weeks. Not wanting to infect others, I tried to keep myself isolated as I had been told to do by the friendly doctor on the Health hotline during the outbreak. He sounded really cute, Australian, I think. I imagined he was like that hot guy on House, you know, Cameron's man...Anyhooo...While in my fever induced fantasies of hot Australian doctors, I actually gleaned some good advice from the guy. He asked me if I had a neti pot. For those of you who don't know, like I didn't, a neti pot is a teapot like device used for nasal irrigation. Huh. Who knew? Since I was deathly ill and dreaming of Australian hotties and I had no idea what he was talking about, he let me in on a little secret, which I will now pass on to you, my sensational seventeen: You don't need a neti pot. All you do is mix 1/4 tsp regular old table salt into 1 cup of regular old tepid water ( I use water from the tea kettle, cooled) and snort it up your nose. It will not hurt and you will be astounded as to what gets cleaned out of there. Congestion? Snort it. Allergies? Snort it. Runny nose? Snort it. Winter dryness? Air conditioning? You guessed it, snort it! All kinds of snot will blow out of there. It doesn't hurt, it's drug free and you can do it 1000 times a day if you like, as opposed to decongestants which you could overdose on, not to mention dry out your mucousal lining. Ever since learning about this uber-frugal health tip from my faceless, possibly Australian doctor/hero, I have been breathing easier. I thought I would pass these pearls on to you. Have a great day. Breathe easy!

Family, food and fun

Whoa. Time flies. Wasn't it just Easter? Sigh. I have been so busy! Like, not enough hours in the day busy. The sun comes up and I have a million things to do. It goes down and...same thing, million things to do. Have had more changes going on in my family, never a dull moment around here. I splurged and got my hair professionally cut and coloured with my girlfriend last week. It felt great to use my fun money for this boost of self esteem. I have had many compliments on it and what a great way to spend time with your BFF. New hair is just huge, what can I say?
I am in the midst of a mass reorganization of my stuff, and I have donated bags and bags and boxes and boxes to the thrift store. I feel twenty pounds lighter every time I get rid of something outgrown/outdated/useless/boring and make room for something new and exciting. Once I am finished the overhaul of the clutter, I will start my enormous spring clean. I have made myself a deadline of the end of April. If you don't see too many blog posts in the coming days and weeks, you'll know why. I will be slaving over a dirty kitchen floor.

OH! I ordered my copy of The Tightwad Gazette! Squee! Free!! with my swagbucks giftcards at amazon!! YAY!
I can't wait until it arrives.
Did I mention... I LOVE FREEBIES?

Ahnahnsisi

This post features a great artist that I have the pleasure and fortune of knowing. His name is Ahnahnsisi. He is a Woodland artist, this is the name of his style of native artwork, but I think there are many other forces at work here as well. The way in which this man became a painter and sculptor is perhaps the strangest tale of all I have known and I will do my best to convey it to you, my faithful seventeen followers. About ten, no twelve, years ago, I was a young, broken-hearted woman who had moved to the city of Vancouver, British Columbia to find that elusive thing we call Self. I thought that Self must be hiding there, because it was such a cool city. Therefore, being so cool, my Self must be there somewhere. I searched in laundromats, coffee houses, parks, bars and nightclubs. I even searched in college for a year or so. While I was doing all this searching, I happened to land myself upon the available couch of my cousin Sherrie, a woman who deserves her very own blog entry, or perhaps an entire novel, so I will delve no further into her for the moment. Sherrie happened to be married to this guy, this half-Ojibwa, half-Scottish combination of hilarity and street smarts, whom I have known since I was ten, as Cousin Donnie. They weren't always married, they have a child, a girl child, Jake. Yes, a girl named Jake. Oh man, these posts are going to get out of control. Let's stick with Donnie. No, Ahnahnsisi. Back to him...

When I got to the city, famished and exhausted, he took me to get me something to eat. He picked me up (with little Jakey, who was wearing a tiara) at the bus station in a taxi, which I thought was very charming. I noticed he said, "Happy New Year," to everyone he met. He always asked receptionists how they were doing before he stated his business. Whether they were cabbies or lawyers, everyone got the same treatment. Most people, including myself, were very pleasantly surprised by this. In the ever increasingly cynical world in which we live, here was a smiling man who was wishing happiness and prosperity to everyone he met. Donnie showed me the ropes in that city. This is a falafel. That guy sells drugs. That guy sells ass. Yes, she's a hooker. Yes, a real one. This is an Americano, the lifeblood. That way to cheap breakfast. This way to cheap beer. I soaked it all in. Being a small town girl, he was giving me pearls and I knew it. I remember him taking me to the student union bar at UBC so I could check out cute guys with potential futures.

He was studying to be a lawyer, about to take the LSATs if I do recall, and then it happened: Donnie got hit by a bus. He said he was on his bike, parked, standing next to the bus stop and the driver came up fast to the stop and knocked him clear off his bike. He sustained quite a traumatic head injury, of which he is still suffering the consequences today.

All I remember is everything changing after that. I got a roommate and moved out of the apartment building and some other crazy things happened and life went on in another direction. I sometimes wonder if it truly is all random or if things really do happen for a reason. All I know is the next time I saw Donnie, he wasn't the same guy anymore. You might say he was Ahnahnsisi now. It was a few years later and he hardly knew me. Oh sure, he knew of me, had heard stories and seen some photos, but all of my fun memories with him were mine and mine alone now. It was almost as if I had made it all up in my head. It took me some time to accept this.

I think he gradually got some things back. He did become a lawyer. He is and always was an amazingly intelligent man. And now he paints these amazing works of art.

I say; The bus knocked the paintings out of him.

But what the hell do I know?

Fabulous Freebies

Last Friday, I called in to my local radio station and I won The Impossible Question! The question was: 40% of us would rather have painful surgery that do ...this... four times a week." I had been sitting on the phone all week, throwing it out to the Universe that, "I won the Impossible Question,"(that LOA stuff really does work) yet it was still a bit of a shock when I was the first caller through and got the answer right! I won a multitude of freebies, free sandwiches, two free lunches, an oil change, free hot cross buns (which I must go get today, note to self) and a couple other things that I can't really recall right now. It was such a juicy bonus! I have already taken a friend for free lunch and eaten a free sandwich. Life is good! Off to see the fam this weekend, so excited for that. Must recede from the world of Internet for a few days. It will probably do me a world of good, if you bloggers know what I mean. Ciao and Happy Easter!

PS, If you can, answer The Impossible Question for yourself in the comments section!