simple living

I have been spending a lot of time reading the "down to earth" blog lately and I have gotten some really great ideas for how I can simplify our life; improve our finances; reduce our consumption and generally live life the way WE want to, not the way the world thinks we should.

One idea that has been discussed is the idea of not spending. Not spending doesn't mean being miserly or stingy or going on a zero budget—it simply means we buy what we need and no more. It also incorporates the idea of planning ahead to make sure we have what we need to get through a week until the next shopping day.

Last Saturday I had an all day Deaf Mentor training meeting. We were out of bread and didn't have a whole lot of leftovers for the family to have for lunch. I was really tempted to just tell Steven to run to the store to get a loaf of bread, or to go to McDonalds or something for lunch. But I remembered how much bread costs at the store (around $3 for a loaf) and we had agreed to cut down on the eating out. I had a bit of time before I needed to leave for the meeting (I love living only 3 miles from the Deaf Center) so I dug out my bread machine and threw in the ingredients to make bread. It took me maybe 7 minutes total to do it all and I even had a minute to clean up. We had plenty of sandwich stuff in the fridge—the only thing we needed was the bread. I was really proud of myself for resisting the temptation to take the easy way out and buying something that we really didn't need to buy.
A few days ago, I looked at my menu and gathered all the food from the big freezer outside that I would need to finish out the week. My biggest challenge to following my menu is defrosting meat. It's so stupid but a lot of times I just think, "I don't want to run out to the freezer". So I got everything I needed and put the meat items in the meat drawer. Saturday I made sure to take out the ground beef that I was going to use for dinner. I got home at 4:30 p.m. and again was tempted to put off doing the ground beef shepherd's pie dinner I had planned for that night and go out. But I reminded myself again of my goals to eat out less, use what we have, be a better steward of our money and live simply. So I enlisted Steven's help and we got dinner on the table in an hour.