Yes, I'm still here

Writing more than 140 characters has become the challenge of my life lately.  When I'm not able to max out that count, thoughts go to here: http://twitter.com/nicoletankovich Come listen to me there.

My personal history of 9/11 isn't about planes or deaths or ideals.  It's about friends.  I was blessed to have friends (sisters) that processed the days events as we watched them live on TV.  A friend (my roommate) that admonished me to leave campus when they evacuated us (for no reason really, we were in AKRON). Another friend that insisted I come home with her.  Friends I watched leap into action, eager to find some way to help, even in Ohio.

I don't have any other events to which to compare it.  My parents had JFK's shooting, grandparents had Pearl Harbor, still others had even more varied and less public events.  All I know is my generation continues to define itself as adults by 9/11.

We feel old when we realize there are people alive today that were not then.  We feel old when we remember others younger than us remember it only as children do - spurts and fits and confused patches of information, stitched together into a quilt of something important that happened that wasn't quite personal.

Some of our peers were driven to volunteer.  Others collected supplies for search and clean up teams.  Some of us lost loved ones or have a co-worker that missed a train or had something else happen to keep them at a distance.

September 11, 2001 was terrifying for many reasons.  For people like me, who were only tangentially connected to them, the events of that day caused a pause in an otherwise busy and all-too-introspective life.  I realized we were part of something larger -- of a country, of a world, and that not everyone liked us or our way of life.  It made all of that very real and very scary.

I don't have a soapbox today.  Just go hug your kids a little tighter and pause to appreciate your life as it is today.  And know that it could all change in an instant - so love it while you have it.

Someone tried to out on

Someone tried to put on his own pants... Got them on, just not quite right.

Cutting the Food Budget – Possible Strategies

A couple days ago, I asked all my FB friends for strategies to cut our food budget. Here's the list I got. My friends are geniuses. And also, THANK YOU... 



PLAN AHEAD:

• shop sales/ plan meals around sale items
• shop at Aldi
• Plan your meals, including snacks and lunches
• Buy at on sale en masse and stockpile things like:

• Facial tissue
• Toilet tissue
• Hair care products
• Body wash
• Feminine products – tampons, pads
• Contact solution (use FSA card)
• Canned food
• Dishwasher detergent

Make it or grow it

• Plant a garden
• Make your own bread
• can or freeze sale produce to use bounty later
• make your own yogurt
• dried apples

Buy in bulk when possible

• meat – Mosley’s or Carfagna’s boxes
• grains (rice, quinoa, flour)
• cereal (oatmeal, “Cheerios”, etc.)
• raisins
• milk
• cheese

Limit shopping

• “Allowance” - $20/week you can use on anything you want, including lunches out. Once
• it’s gone, it’s gone.
• Eat out only2x/month.
• Don’t shop – use your pantry!
• Buy the cheapest store brand/generic you can find for most things.
• For items you won’t buy store brand, use coupons and buy on sale.

Reduce your consumption:

• Don't buy cleaning supplies (rely on vinegar, lemon, baking soda, etc. instead of manufactured stuff)
• Pre-portion snacks, especially bulk items, to reduce waste
• Avoid items like:
• frozen foods (frozen veggies allowed, but only plain)
• soft drinks
• paper products
• processed food

You can also download it here:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwSGlRSfWRiSQThScjVsanlzeGM

Project Me

I am now inspired by this - the Happiness Project.

The idea of committing to something like that for a year is DAUNTING to say the least.  But it is one day at a time that you accomplish it.

So here is my goal - everyday, do something to cultivate MYSELF.  Since I had a child and since I got married, I've been buried in the everyday, the survival.  Now I am realizing how much I miss myself, I miss not being consumed by the mundane.  I miss being able to lift my head up from Life just long enough to see small pieces of beauty in the stuff I pass everyday.

Join me won't you?  What will you do to cultivate yourself this year?

Wordless Weekend:

Old grammer police shot: Really?  "Foul's"?  And is it not really a "day" or is it a "DAY!"?

Wordless Weekends: best toy ever

Thankful for

My family.
Wine.
Cranberries.
Being well off enough to have all if the above on Thanksgiving.

Gobble gobble!

Happy Turkey Day!

pretty things...

necklace via Mightygoods

100 Books--Are you above the BBC's predictions?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. It's always fun to prove them wrong.
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an X after those you have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (The entire thing!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dicken X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, Witch and the Wordrobe CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistr
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Wordless Weekend: here comes trouble...

... and "Danger" is my middle name.

Wordless Weekends: aviator

funny friday

Lazy day... Albert made Daddy into a tent.

Thrifty Thursday

Dollar tree bath mitts / hand puppets

Wordy Wednesday

Tempting Tuesday

Dinner with a view

Albert slept for 7 hours last night!

This week is kicking my butt. I am glad I have the chance to sleep while I can!

Wordless Weekend: missing spring

Wordless Weekends: Nebraska sun...

irony is...

• waking up WAY before your alarm clock... on the weekend
• working overtime the week before vacation, so that you can go on vacation
• parenting in the opposite way that you thought you would