Frugal in the Fruitlands

June is the month in which Frugal in the Fruitlands came into its own, I feel. In addition to the new domain name, I put far more attention this month into writing posts and bringing new readers to the site. To those new readers, welcome! It only took me a year to get this awesome. </sarcasm>

The most popular posts from this month were:

• Four Strategies That Are Frugal Only If Your Time is Worth Nothing. This is me being controversial.
• 30 Goals at Age 16. I was surprised how popular this one was. I guess everybody likes lists!
• Four Expensive Garden Mistakes I’ve Already Made, So You Don’t Have To. I do seem to like the number four…
• Lise’s Six Word Memoir. And six.
• Let’s Not Forget Depression Is a Dirty Word.

“Budget Your Booze,” my homebrewing series (part one, part two) didn’t get much love, alas, but I’ll mention it’s still there, in all its beery goodness.

I’d also like to thank June’s biggest referrer, Tipnut.com, who directed 164 readers to last year’s Building a Garage Sale Route With Google Maps.

As for my goals…. urk.
Goal #1: to exercise for 12 days consecutively. Nope. Six was my longest span; and I fell out of the exercise routine entirely at the end of the month.
Goal #2: to spend less than $100 on dining out. Also no. Lots of outings with friends this month.
Goal #3: To spend a half hour each day working on this blog. Well, I definitely didn’t spend a half hour each day, but I do feel like I moved it ahead, so I’ll consider it a success.

So my goal for July is going to be really simple: work on the LARP I’m writing daily. I don’t care if I do five minutes or an hour – I just need to keep it at the top of my mind so it will really be in top shape before Intercon I.

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This is part two of a multi-part series on homebrewing. Part one is here.

Today we’re going to talk a little bit more about the hardware and software of the brewing equation, to borrow Alton Brown’s terminology. We’ll talk about how the ingredients in your basic homebrew combine to create different flavors; we’ll explore the stages of the brewing process, and we’ll tell you why cleanliness is so important in brewing. If you wonder who this mysterious “we,” is, by the way, it includes my husband, who helped to edit this blog series.

1. Understand the ingredients. One thing I didn’t understand before Matt began brewing was the ingredients. Sure, I knew hops and barley and yeast were in there, but I didn’t understand what they did.

Barley – in the form of malt (barley that’s been dampened and allowed to sprout) – is a fermentable sugar, and it’s the first ingredient in beer. It’s what the yeast eats. It also effects the darkness/thickness/chewiness of the brew. Guinness “drinks like a meal” because it’s heavy on the malt. Typically the homebrewer buys this ingredient in one of two ready-to-brew forms: cans of malt extract syrup, or dried, powdered malt extract. It is labeled by the level of color it will add (light, amber, dark). Homebrewers often also crush some whole malted barley to add flavor. It is also possible to extract one’s own malt syrup from barley, but increases the cost and equipment significantly.

Hops are a bittering agent that also adds floral notes. They’re irrelevant to the actual chemical process of converting starches to alcohol, but they were traditionally used a preservative, and have become integral to the taste we associate with beer. For example, India Pale Ale (IPA), one of the hoppiest brews out there, is named after the type of pale, hop-fortified brews that Victorian England would send to its troops in India – the hops were used to prevent spoilage on the long journey. Some connoisseurs of homebrewing love hoppy brews, but I am not such a fan.

Different types of hops have differing bitterness, or “alpha” levels. In some brew pubs you’ll notice that beers are listed with an “IBU” number beside them. This is the bitterness of the beer as measured in “International Bittering Units.” (Lower = less bitter). Keep in mind that you’ll notice hoppiness more in a lighter (less malty) ale.

Yeast eats the sugars and poop out alcohol and CO2. Different types of yeast, over the years, have been adapted for different types of brews. The homebrewer will often be using some type of ale yeast, which is a top-fermenting yeast. Lager yeast, a bottom-fermenting yeast, can also be used, but that won’t make the necessarily make the brew a lager – lagers are made in cool (refrigerated) conditions where they can age slowly. Not all homebrewers can replicate that.

Liquid pitchable yeast, purchased in a vial from a homebrew supply, is the best bet for the beginning brewer – dry yeast can be problematic.

Don’t forget water. Alton Brown recommends using distilled water; we use our own well water for our beer, with good results so far. If you have city water, you probably want to use bottled water of some sort.

You can use other ingredients, too – fruits, spices, different types of fermentable and unfermentable sugars, water conditioners, etc – but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Once again, I’ll refer you to Charlie Papazian’s amazing book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

2. Understand the process. The first step in brewing beer is sterilizing everything – see “Keep It Clean” below. Once that less exciting bit is over, the first step is the wort (pronounced “wert”). The wort is basically a soup of all your brewing ingredients but the yeast – your canned mash, your crushed malt, your hops, and any other flavoring agents. Once it’s boiled for a while, you will add it to the fermenter – usually a large bucket with an air lock – and cool it to 90 degrees before adding your yeast.

The brew stays in primary fermentation for about a week before it’s moved to a secondary fermenter – usually a glass carboy with an airlock. Throughout these first two stages, I guarantee you’ll be watching that airlock like a protective babymama to make sure it keeps bubbling – a sign that your yeast is alive and working. It stays here another 10 days to two weeks before you move to the bottling stage.

It is also possible to do a single-stage fermentation, moving directly from wort to carboy to bottling (cut out the plastic bucket phase, as a carboy has superior airtightness).

At this stage your beer will be flat. Before you bottle it, you will need to introduce a new source of fermentable sugar to produce CO2, i.e. carbonation. If you don’t measure carefully, it will produce too much CO2, which is the leading cause of exploding beer bottles. You can reuse your own spent beer bottles for this step, but you will need to buy new caps and a hand tool to cap the bottles. Usually a beer will sit in the bottling stage for about 10-14 days, or as long as you can stand to go without tasting it.

3. Keep it clean. One of the most important, and yet most mundane aspects of brewing is dealing with the fact that you want SOME organisms to live in your brew, but not others. Yeast? Good. Other living things? Bad. Rest assured that no pathogens will grow in beer, but you can develop infestations of bacteria or competing yeast that will ruin a batch. This is why it’s important to sterilize everything that comes in contact with the beer (or at least everything that comes in contact with the beer after the boiling of the wort). Bleach solution is the best for sterlizing big items, like the the fermenters or bottles; vodka is usually recommended for small things like bottle caps.

You also need fermentation locks on your brew when it’s in primary and secondary fermentation. This allows CO2 from the fermenting sugars to escape, but a water barrier keeps air from getting in. Making sure that the fermenting containers are no larger than needed – thus reducing the amount of air in the container – also helps to keep unwanted critters under control.

All together now, I think I’ve outlined the basics of homebrewing – enough, I hope, that you’ll be able to decide if this DIY opportunity fits into your frugal lifestyle or not. In a follow-up article I’ll share some recipes for successful beers we have brewed and price them out accordingly.

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I want to bring your attention to this thought-provoking article on Unclutterer, Depression-era mindset and clutter. While not in the frugality niche, per se, it struck a chord with me because it made me realize how disturbing I find the glamorization of Depression-era thinking in the frugality blogosphere.

“Frugality bloggers glamorize the Great Depression! Surely you don’t mean that!” But, come on, it’s everywhere. From articles that ask us to consider if a recession might really be a good thing, to Dollar Stretcher articles that talk about cutting the bad spots off half-rotten fruit because goddammit, our grandparents only got a single orange for Christmas, to that old saw, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”… it’s clear that frugality bloggers believe that there is great wisdom in the mindset of people brought up in great poverty.

Let’s look at the other side of the equation, as Unclutterer has done. I’m sure it’s not a 1 to 1 correlation universally, but there’s a strong connection between that kind of thinking and hoarding. The down side of growing up with not a lot is that suddenly your mind switches into famine mode; everything that passes through your hands must be kept for the hard times ahead. “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Within reason, nothing. However, it is often coupled with an ingenuity that might lead such a person to refill ketchup bottles with ketchup packets from fast food restaurants or save butter wrappers to grease pans. Stuff builds up, because everything is potentially useful; in the end, this Depression-era hoarder ends up drowning in their own stuff, bereft at the thought of letting any of it go.

If you think I’m exaggerating any of this, imagine me, eight years old, spending my after-school hours and summers with my grandmother, born in 1925. She lives with my aunt in a tiny house that couldn’t even be generously called a “ranch.” It’s a single floor, cobbled together from spare lumber. There are two bedrooms and one bath off a central kitchen and living area; and a screened porch.

It’s a tiny space, and yet every spare inch is filled to capacity with: old newspapers, old TV Guides, my mother’s childhood toys, my childhood toys, clothes my grandmother bought at garage sales and never wore, clothes and other personal items my grandmother received as gifts and never used, and on and on.

Some of my unhappiest moments of that time revolved around my aunt’s attempts to clean. She did her best to keep the place manageable – she worked as a house cleaner, after all – but any time she tried to throw out, say, a stack of old and unread newspaper, my grandmother would yell and scream and cry and be totally lost. I still remember the blank look in her eyes when my aunt tried to do this.

I think the culmination of my grandmother’s hoarding behavior was that one day, I walked into her bedroom to discover that she had been saving the used urine test strips she used to manage her diabetes.

After my grandmother’s death, my mother spent months cleaning up all this crap, finding, among this, young children’s toys that my grandmother had bought as gifts to me but had never given me. My mother’s insight on this would be to point out an estate sale she once attended, where everything a deceased woman had owned – literally, everything – was thrown on the lawn to be sold. Dresser drawers had been upended, and the woman’s old ratty underwear were scattered in the breeze.

This is why I reject this kind of Depression-era thinking, even while being a frugality blogger. I think it leads down the road to hoarding; to a life remembered by crap no one else wants to clean up.

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I’ve Paid For This Twice Already’s one-year anniversary made me look back and go, “Hey… I’ve been blogging a year, too!”

Since there are a lot of new readers, I’d like to draw your attention to the first two articles I wrote, on June 18th and 19th, 2007:

• Economics of the Car Wash. I have a hose now, so this might be a little bit more economical, especially if I weren’t picky about soap. But I maintain that six months out of the year washing my car myself is unfeasible.
• Frugality and Opportunity Cost. File this one under Economics 101 with Django (also see my last post). I’m really surprised at the amount of wisdom in this post, although it is, of course, based on the assumption that we can all be making money every waking hour, which is not necessarily true. This is why passive income is so powerful.

I apologize that my post frequency has dropped abruptly in the past week. I’ve been very busy with class, work, and other commitments. Plus I’ve been working hard on the blog’s back-end (thanks to Chad on that one!) to make sure that all the old electric-monk.net/lise links work. I’ve got tons of posts planned, however, so it’s just a matter of writing and/or polishing them. The second article in my homebrewing series should be up soon, too.

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My friend Django brightened my day with this point about my weighty mortgage:

The other thing I was going to console you with is that, with the markets in the state they’re in, your financial position is actually perfect. [You're] heavily leveraged, i.e. a debt-to-net-worth ratio of close to 1.

The most likely result of a market crash is inflation as the fed pumps ever-more money into the economy… ditto tax relief, etc. In any inflationary situation, the ideal place to be is in debt up to your eyeballs, with the money from that invested in real assets (i.e. not credit card debt), since, as inflation pushes up prices and salaries, the amount of debt relative to income goes down. In the worst-case scenario (China dumps US currency, runs on the dollar, hyper-inflation) your debt becomes meaningless and you get a free house.

Conversely, in that worst-case scenario, the place you DONT want to be is holding bonds, pensions, or other fixed-income instruments (or just dollars) – because if a loaf of bread now costs $10,000, your pension isn’t worth very much.

This is what happened to Germany in the 30s (which they engineered deliberately, to get out of their debts to England and France) or Russia accidentally in the 90s, after they lost most of the countries money to a pyramid scheme.

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I participated in two carnivals this week:

Four Strategies That Are Frugal Only If Your Time Is Worth Nothing appeared in Festival of Frugality #129, hosted at Money Ning. My article was slightly controversial and almost opposite the “try a little harder” theme for the week, but I got some valuable comments on it nonetheless. Some other articles I liked from this week’s festival were:

• Why You Should Focus On Spending Less Over Earning More at SavingAdvice.com. While you can’t underestimate the power of extra income, I like that Shannon mentions on one of the most compelling reason to focus on spending less: unless we learn to control our spending first, it will just keep pace with our income, leaving us no more available cash at the end of the month.
• Where To Buy Cheap Spices at FeedtheFam.com. Spices are an integral part of cooking delicious, healthy food, and shouldn’t be neglected due to cost. Indian groceries are my favorite places to buy spices in just the right quantities, but Gretchen suggests some other alternatives that are new to me.
• Repurposing Items for the Garden at Frugal Pursuit. As a gardener myself, I definitely will be putting some of these to use – especially the first, since my town won’t recycle milk jugs and I have a thirsty apple tree.

Four Expensive Garden Mistakes I’ve Already Made, So You Don’t Have To appeared in Carnival of Money Stories #63 at Bible Money Matters. Some other stories that caught my eye were:

• Build A Business Before You Go Solo at The Digerati Life. As someone who aspires to be self-employed, I know there’s a learning process to go through before I’m ready for that. For one, if I just up and quit my job today, I suspect I’d have a hard time adapting to having more time on my hands – and would end up spending it all watching Judge Judy instead of building a business.
• 10 Surprising Implications of the Global Rise in Food Prices at CurrencyTrading.net. This is a dense article, but a must-read for PF bloggers. We have a responsibility to understand economics as well as personal finance.

Also, we now are available at www.frugalfruitlands.net! You should be able to use links that begin with both “www.frugalfruitlands.net” and “www.electric-monk.net/lise” to access the site from now on. There should be no change in how RSS feeds or permalinks are handled – please let me know if you experience any problems.

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At age 16 I was on exchange in France. Ironically, I was perfectly miserable and waiting for my life to begin. In addition to scrawling Alanis Morrissette lyrics on every scrap of paper I could find, I at one point made a list of 30 life goals for myself.

Without further ado, my goals at age 16:

1. Hike the Appalachian Trail
   
2. Learn how to sail and crew around the world
3. Visit Morocco
4. Learn Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Irish Gaelic, Japanese, Hindi, Chinese, and Portuguese.
   
5. Learn the ancient languages Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Persian, etc.
6. Become a woods guide.
   
7. Visit Alaska
8. Learn how to ride and own horses
9. Learn to fence
10. Learn to play the piano and violin
11. Visit India and study in an ashram
12. Have a collection of medieval weapons
13. Finish and publish A Dangerous Age (the novel I was writing at the time)
14. Write songs for a band
15. Play flute in an orchestra
16. Work for TSR and/or White Wolf (heh, I’m showing my age there)
17. Meet Anne Rice (wtf?????)
18. Write and/or direct a film
19. Act in a film
20. Learn how to windsurf (better than J.C.) (J.C. == Boy With Whom I Was Obsessed At the Time)
21. Learn to ski
22. Meet Terry Goodkind
23. (There is no goal number 23. I would venture it should be “learn to count”)
24. Join the Peace Corps
25. Start an Interact/Rotaract club in Plattsburgh
26. Live in Montreal
27. Get accepted to the University of Pennsylvania
28. Be in a Highlander movie (or episode of the TV series) (Alas, I think this one must go terminally unfulfilled)
29. Return to France and teach English
30. Join the organization that organises all those work-study programs (name forgotten) and spend some more time abroad
31. Get my black belt in taekwondo (this, in part with no. 9, 19, 12, and 8, should, I hope, lead to no. 28)

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In the midst of rising food and gasoline prices, you may not have noticed, but the price of beer has increased, too.

Why? It turns out there’s a worldwide hops shortage: A decade-long oversupply of hops that had forced farmers to abandon the crop is finally gone and harvests were down this year. In the United States, where one-fourth of the world’s hops are grown, acreage fell 30 percent between 1995 and 2006. Additionally, Barley and wheat prices have skyrocketed as more farmers plant corn to meet increasing demand for ethanol, while others plant feed crops to replace acres lost to corn. To add insult to injury, A fire at a warehouse in Washington’s Yakima Valley in 2006 destroyed surplus from past years’ [hop] harvests (source: Boston Globe)

While bigger American breweries are minimally affected (in part because they can negotiate for better prices), your local microbrewery or brewpub is probably struggling to keep prices down while meeting demand for beers that have more flavor than a postage stamp. Unfortunately, this means they have to pass the price on to you.

This is a perfect time, then, to cut out the middle man and brew your own beer! This article stresses that the rising cost of hops to the homebrewer is negligible, as most homebrewers stick to brewing five gallons at a time. (Hops are, however, being rationed to homebrewers).

Matt has put up two brews in the past month – a hefeweizen (wheat beer) and honey lime ale – at a cost of about $40-50 per five gallons, or about 48 bottles of beer. He has been brewing since 2005, and we’ve had some successes (a spiced Christmas ale was one of my favorites) and some failures (an attempt at a mocha stout).

I did not really appreciate beer before he started brewing – in part because I didn’t know how to pick beers that I enjoyed. Matt has done most of the work, but this has been a learning process for both of us.

In this knowledge, I pass on some tips for homebrewing to you, the aspiring (?) homebrewer. Even if you don’t intend to brew, this will teach you what you need to know to pick a beer you won’t regret spending money on. In the first part of this two-part series, I’ll address how to get started in homebrewing as well as how to assess the costs.

1. Find a good reference. Matt’s interest in homebrewing started with his hero, Alton Brown, host of Food Network’s Good Eats. The episode “Amber Waves” lays out the basic process of making your own beer. Beyond this, Charlie Papazian’s book The Complete Joy of Homebrewing is viewed in the hobby as one of the best books on homebrewing, and I can vouch for Papazian’s blend of wisdom and goofy humor.

2. Understand the costs. There is a startup cost in making beer, as there is special equipment involved – fermentation locks, carboys, hydrometers, and lots of other things you’ve probably never heard of. Here we recommend buying a kit. The brewing supply store we use, Beer & Wine Hobby in Woburn, MA, sells several different levels of kits. Depending on what you want to make, one may be better than the other. Many of them come with The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, as well, which is how we got our copy.

This is where you determine whether or not brewing fits within your budget or your definition of frugality. For us, it does, simply because the quality of the beer we produce is comparable with a high-priced microbrewed product, and because we’ve made enough batches that we’ve surpassed the marginal cost of the startup materials. Also, we’re foodies, and making high-quality food and beverages is a hobby to us. Our figure of $40-50 includes more expensive ingredients, including honey and limes – you can probably make a brew for as little as $20, once you have all the equipment. Considering a case of Sam Adams costs around $20, that’s a true bargain.

As with any hobby, there are ways to keep costs down:

• The simplest way to reduce costs is to ask all your friends for their used beer bottles. Washed and sterilized, they are just as good as buying new bottles from the brewing supply store. We recommend not using hard cider or lemonade bottles with twist-off tops, as they don’t seal in CO2 in the bottling stage, leaving you with flat beer.
• You can replace a specialist brewing thermometer with a candy thermometer.
• Some people’s interests in a hobby is fleeting. Have any of your friends been part-time brewers who might be willing to part with their old equipment? Reader tip (h/t dirkcjelli): You could also probably put out a request on your local Freecycle circle to get the equipment for free, since there are bound to be plenty of people who’ve tried it, had poor luck, and given up.
• Country Wisdom and Know-How has a section on making your own homebrew equipment.
• Once you’re a little bit more experienced, you can try culturing your own yeast for a nice savings. We’re inexperienced with this process, but for an overview, see Yeast Culturing Practices for Small-Scale Brewers.

3. Try before you buy. If you’re not sure brewing is right for you, try out a do-it-yourself brewery. (Incredibrew is one near me, in Nashua, NH). These types of places allow you to pick the ingredients for your brew (or at least a recipe), but leave out the hard part of clean-up and babysitting. This will allow you to decide if the taste is worth the cost.

In part two we’ll give an overview of the ingredients and the process involved in making your own beer.

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In the open-source software community, it is often said that “Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.”

In the frugality blogosphere, in our hurry to convey Ten Great Tips for Trimming the Cost of Toilet Paper, we tend to forget the price of our our own life energy in any equation of savings. We also forget the opportunity cost of spending two hours trying to save a few pennies.

Here are some of the biggest offenders in the time-money tradeoff:

1. Clipping coupons. I’ll admit it – I do use coupons myself. I belong to MyPoints, and I can “clip” online coupons through them and get rewarded with points. I don’t spend a lot more effort than that on it, though; I probably use about three or four coupons a month.

The biggest problem with coupons is a) the amount of time it takes to coordinate the coupons one has with the items one actually needs, an b) the tendency to move items into the “need” category that shouldn’t be there as a result. We all like to think we’re smarter than that, but the notion that we’re getting a bargain can be pretty powerful. A Harvard Business School study shows that the redemption of a $10-off coupon increases an individual’s spending and that, furthermore, the increase in spending stimulated by the redemption of a $10-off coupon is focused on groceries that customers would not purchase in the absence of such a coupon.

Basically I look at coupons as just another advertising ploy to get us to buy. Proceed with caution.

2. Re-using sandwich/storage baggies. I keep telling myself I should pick up this habit. But inevitably the dirty baggies pile up next to the sink and the cats get to them and leave tiny teethmarks on the corners, forcing me to throw them out.

Eventually I realized this: I hate dishes enough. It is just not worth my time, considering the only money I’m saving is a) the cost of a new box of bags, or b) the space they take up in my trash. (We have a “pay as you throw” garbage system in Lunenburg).

I know, I know. Amy Dacycyn of The Tightwad Gazette said this was cost-effective – she can’t possibly be wrong, can she? But I, unlike Ms. Dacycyn, work a full-time job at a location which is not my home – the value of my time, as measured by the value of my pay, is probably worth more than hers. Plus, I always thought her estimate of how long it took to get a plastic baggie clean was way too low.

If you value reducing your trash production for environmental reasons, a better long-term solution is to buy a quality set of reusable plastic containers. You don’t even need to buy them new; I see these at garage sales all the time.

3. Cutting corners on food. It’s a conundrum that the food that’s healthiest for us is most expensive, but food needs to be a priority spending category. Packing your diet full of processed products only means you won’t be around long enough to figure out those ten great tips for saving on toilet paper.

Keep in mind, too, in paying the premium for quality, sustainably harvested food, what you’re getting is not only better taste and nutrition – you’re contributing to a living wage for small farmers everywhere. Given the worldwide food shortages going on right now (caused in part by an emphasis on certain subsidized crops over others), you are quite literally putting your money where your mouth is when you do this. Spending more now on quality foods means that you’ll actually have these foods when times get even tougher.

That said, there are ways to save money on your food bill. Don’t dine out every night, shop around the outside of the store, stick to unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and look for generic versions of healthy or organic foods. Hannaford, for example, has a great line of its own organic foods, and my local one has recently started offering foods from a local farm.

It is also important to consider the quality of the food you feed your pets. A more expensive food may cost more in the short term, but you’ll be reducing your bottom line on vet bills, grooming bills, and the cost of litter. I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a pet food snob, but the lowest quality food I would consider feeding is Iams or Science Diet, and I would highly encourage all pet owners to educate themselves on feline/canine nutrition and seek out the highest quality food they can afford.

4. Make your own X. It pains me to say this, because I am the biggest DIY geek in the tri-state area, but in our modern society, it is almost never cost effective to make your own. I’d be dishonest if I said that the money and work I’ve put into, say, my garden, is cheaper than what it would cost me to buy a season’s worth of vegetables. Even Trent of The Simple Dollar, maker of his own detergent, admits that it would cost less to buy his detergent at a bulk discount store.

Caveat: there is one big exception to this DIY rule; namely, cooking for yourself (based on the fact that restaurant meals are incredibly inflated relative to the cost of food).

Savings aside, part of the reason I so often do-it-myself is because I want a product just so, and the effort of finding it that way may, in fact, be more time-consuming. My husband and I are foodies, and we’re attempting to grow our own vegetables because biting into a vegetable that’s still warm from the sun can’t easily be replicated.

This ties into another pleasure of DIY: the amount of satisfaction you get from doing something with one’s own hands. In a world so divorced from physical labor, this is priceless.

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As you’ll recall, I set three goals for myself this month:

• 11 days consecutive exercise
• 30 minutes of blog work per day (hint: reading other people’s blogs does not count as blog work!)
• Restaurant budget under $100

Exercise: I skipped out on exercise on the 4th and 6th, thus voiding my 11 consecutive days. On the 4th I had an impromptu after-work visit from a friend, which kept me busy until almost bedtime, and on the 6th I spent most of my evening compiling a garage sale map (there were a LOT of garage sales this weekend). However, the rest of the month stretches ahead of me, and I’m encouraged by the fact that I seem to have lost some weight.

Blog work. I’ve been seriously on and off with this one – I think I only managed 4 out of the 7 days of last week. I’ve started a lot of blog posts, but haven’t finished polishing them. For example, I started writing an article (or series of articles) on homebrewing, which aren’t quite ready yet. In some sense this was a bad month to start, because I’m taking an intensive summer class. A better goal would have been to devote myself to that! Still, I’m pretty pleased with the work I’ve been doing. I’m overwhelmed with ideas for upcoming posts; I just need to actually get them written and posted.

Restaurant budget: I’m at $40/$100 for the month, which is a little bit ahead of where I should be, but I’m still on track. I just need to keep reminding myself that restaurants in my area really aren’t that good.

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