Author: Snoskred

Things I Did Not Buy May

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Nothing over $40 at W.Lane was interesting to me. I’d been in there a couple of weeks ago and I saw a peacock themed tunic. I was not able to find it on the website sadly. I choose to take that as a sign I should not buy it – and I took a photo the next time I was there. Finally I did find it on the website in case you want it.

Now that I have the photo I realise I don’t love it as much as I thought. I love the blue and green parts but not so much the olive and brown parts. This leads me to think once the Year Of Buying Nothing is over, I might try a policy of photograph and consider before purchasing.

While looking through the website, I did find this which looked quite nice. Unfortunately in the store there was not one in my size and the one that was closest to my size had a pull in it. Another message from the universe to me? :) They do have this in a range of colours.

I saw a lady walk past wearing this while getting my nails done, it was very tempting to me. You can’t see on the website but there are gold zips on the sides. It seems like they may have sold out of the green one now.

I love a good ombre. This ombre top from Rockmans was somewhat tempting.

At the local cheap shop I was shocked to find this piece of merchandise. I had never heard of the Milwaukee Bucks however I grabbed a shot and sent it to Sephyroth. I like their colours, I love a hoodie with pockets in that exact spot especially at this time of year and $9.95 was quite tempting. I did not buy it because #yobn but let me make it very clear, I would have. This is exactly the kind of impulse purchase my challenge is saving me from.

In the same cheap shop, this lovely display of candle holders was tempting to me. Prices started around $9.99. But I chose not to buy.

These candle lanterns were more pricy starting around $44.95 and very beautiful. Exactly the kind of thing that would have tempted me last year. But not this year.

On a visit to Berry I saw these crystals and thought $14.99 was quite reasonable, but declined a trip to the magical forest at this time. Next year. :)

Things I Did Not Buy

Lava Chaos

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

You are probably aware that Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii has been erupting once again – though you may not be anywhere near as fascinated by it as we are in this house. On our visit to the Big Island in 2013 we visited Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and visited Halemaʻumaʻu Crater.

I also stood on lava while on this island, and that was a story in itself.

There was a live feed of lava on Youtube for a while.. you can still view those live feeds though they are no longer live.

I’ve been keeping an eye on a few different Facebook groups like Puna lava updates. Some of the footage there has been incredible.

Some bright spark took some pieces of lava from this present eruption and was selling them on Ebay. There is a large superstition around Pele’s Curse – Pele’s Curse is the belief that anything natively Hawaiian, such as sand, rock, or pumice, will effect bad luck on whoever takes it away from Hawaii. In 2017, over 1200 lava rocks were returned to Haleakala National Park which is located on the island of Maui.

I did not take the sparkly lava rock home with me for a different reason – we have a life rule. Take only photographs, leave only footprints. But even so, on the way home from Hawaii I gained a life threatening illness – on the plane I developed a deep vein thrombosis and two weeks later that landed in my lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism which tried to kill me.

It was not until I told The Other Half the story of this bright spark trying to sell the rocks that I realised – perhaps my DVT and pulmonary embolism were a curse from even just standing on the lava and touching it. That blew my mind a little bit.

Would I want to undo it, given the chance to go back in time? I think probably not. That moment of holding the lava rock, then turning it over to expose a sparkly interior was incredible. I will never forget it and I can go back there in my mind anytime that I like. But I am very thankful I did not bring it home with me.

In the midst of all of this, I saw these bracelets for sale on a local buy and sell group. There is no way I could ever wear one. :) That concept scares me deeply. Perhaps I am quite superstitious about this kind of thing.

I am sad to see so many people losing their homes. I am angry that people were ever allowed to build there in the first place. The volcano is active and has been for many years. It is not a safe place to live and insurance is far too costly for many of the people who do live there, so many of them have lost everything they have been working to build for many years.

You can view live cameras of Kīlauea Volcano here. There is a live stream of the caldera here. If you want to keep an eye on the map seen at the top of this post, you can view it here, it is updated regularly.

Hawaii

Currently TV

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

Loving – Safe on Netflix. Michael C Hall with an English accent was weird to begin with but I got used to it. This show is twisty and turny and I have no idea what is going on much of the time plus I find the hair of his main co-star to be incredibly improbable, but the locations are gorgeous and everything else is great, so I’m enjoying this. Unusually Netflix were only releasing two episodes at a time – however all 8 episodes are now available on Netflix.

With the release of the last two episodes, everything was revealed and to be honest I wasn’t the biggest fan of how they wrapped the storylines up. However as they sometimes say – it is not the destination, it is the journey. I did enjoy the getting there. After 7 years of seeing Michael C Hall as Dexter, it was lovely to see him in such a different role – and really just great to see him again. Thanks to the accent I was not waiting for him to resume that serial killer role.

Liking – Picnic At Hanging Rock 2018 certainly made the most of the beautiful Werribee Mansion, at least the exterior of it. The show itself I was a bit meh on, a little too screamy and I don’t think we needed any nudity, that felt a little exploitative to me. The costumes were gorgeous and it certainly was a great ad for Australia. Don’t worry, you won’t vanish without a trace. ;)

Cringing – at the footage in Evil Genius. This is a documentary on Netflix that I stumbled on when I discovered only two episodes of Safe had been released. The Other Half was making lunch in the kitchen and he ended up watching the four episodes with me in two quick binge watch sessions across two days. Beware, there is graphic real footage in this documentary, and at least two *real* dead bodies shown, including real footage of one of them being killed.

Savouring – Like a delicious double cream brie, Billions season 3 is yet another feast of incredible acting. If you were to ask me to pick a favourite character I would not be able to, I love them all, even the odd one or two I love to hate to love. They have now cast in John Malkovich as a Russian oligarch. Things can only get more interesting from here.

Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti are amazing to watch but my special delight is Maggie Siff as Wendy Rhodes. A special shout out to Jeffrey DeMunn for literally putting it ALL out there this season. This show involves quite a bit of macho mine is bigger than yours dick swinging but usually not quite that literally!

Enjoying – Howards End is a beautiful costume drama, the story of which I was unfamiliar with. More gorgeous locations and costumes, I consumed this 4 part drama very quickly.

Reading & Watching – A series of crime novels written by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. C.B. Strike is now airing on Showcase on Foxtel. One of the main characters is played by my favourite Holliday Grainger. The books are great.

The TV show is not quite as great – they have compressed way too much story into too little airtime. The books are long and detailed and crackle with electricity. The show is a little too explain-ey detective-y for my liking because it has cut so much of the story out. The golden rule of this kind of show should be show, don’t tell. I do enjoy Holliday in it.

Listening – to the Westworld soundtrack and watching season two. I am enjoying seeing the new worlds but particularly loved seeing Shogun World. These violent delights indeed.

Constable Gary Hales holding the “cock of justice”.

Marvelling – at how brilliantly things are fictionally portrayed sometimes. You could throw the cast of The Bill into any of the episodes of 24 Hours In Police Custody and not only would they fit right in with all the slang and the words they use, but the real police stations look exactly like The Bill set and would work on almost any British police drama show. The one big difference I can find – there is a lot more stuff in the rooms in reality. Mostly folders.

This show is so fascinating and most of the episodes are available on youtube. Here are quite a few of them on a playlist. Just as a bonus here is a link to the most recent one with the cock of justice. I love this detective, well I love them all I won’t lie.

Binging – The Sinner on Netflix. What a rollercoaster ride that was! I also loved Ozark and The Alienist not quite so much but the costumes were great.

Wondering – if they truly did kill off a main character on Animal Kingdom. I was watching the tag on twitter as the episode aired and was not very happy with what I was reading but I thought they might have left a loophole – when I watched the episode I am pretty confident this character is sadly no longer with us. I didn’t even finish the episode, I was so Not Thrilled. The levels of my Not Thrilled-ness are raised even higher when I see who they have added to the cast this season. I have never been a fan of Denis Leary. With so much television to watch, nobody has time to watch people they adore be killed off while people they do not like are added!

Waiting – For Better Call Saul which now has an airdate of August 6th, Mr Robot, Bosch.

Skipping – Homeland. No Quinn, no me!

television shows

Year Of Buying Nothing Update #5

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Another successful no-buy month. I was sure it would be a buy month as the weather turned very cold and I did not seem to have enough warm clothes but then I did a cupboard cleanout and found some extra things. I also found that my Ghanda round the house jumpers were nowhere near as “ratty” as I thought they were, and they really do not need replacing.

Keeping the tally – Our record thus far – January, February, April, May = nothing bought. March = something bought. One out of 5 = a buy month. Can I make it 1 out of 6? We will see.

No Spend Days

I have not been keeping a tally of meeting goals for no spend days and it occurs to me this is where my struggle is the hardest. I did not have a January goal. I have only met my goal in one month which was February. Though the April fail was due to an automatic payment and not something I could control – if we did not count that payment I did meet the goal that month.

For May my goal was four no spend days and I had 7 spend days. Epic fail, though one of those days I will not begrudge as it was an experience spend (May 10th for Gruen). The final spend there I got paid back for right away and it was an epic WIN actually – after 5 months of trying I finally managed to get my parents to buy new mobile phones.

We ran out of milk in our first fortnight this month, which caused an unexpected Aldi spend on the 17th. I have upped our milk buy for each fortnight. We are now up to 6 litres of milk each – mine is soy, the other half drinks A2. In the cooler months we like to have a cup of tea before bedtime and this is where the extra milk is going.

What the heck was I doing at Woolworths, I hear you ask. Didn’t I break up with them years ago? They had the Nivea oil I wanted for $7.50 instead of $16.45 I would pay at Coles, so I bought that and saved $8.95, and they stock another item I was sent in the next Black Box which I wanted to buy in other flavours. More about that when I review the box.

We bought some material to make up new door curtains from Spotlight, and have since blocked off the spare room door. We also got some weather strip at Bunnings (on The Other Half’s card so not seen here) to stop drafts from particular doors.

No Spend Goals For June

I would like to manage 5 spend days in June. I know I can do it! Now is the time to focus in on this goal because I have the grocery spending under control.

Grocery Spending

May grocery budget = $620

Coles – $88.70
Aldi – $468.71
Woolworths – $16.50
Bulk items $15.97
Total grocery spend – $589.88
Grocery cost of $19.02/day.

That is $30.12 under budget for the month. Potatoes were the bulk items.

Grocery Spending Goals For June

Grocery spend = $600
Bulk Items Budget = $120

I have set a bulk items budget for June. If Coles has the chicken mini roasts on special we plan to stock up. If they had them for $12 each, we might buy 8-10 of them and freeze them. This would save us $3 per roaster – if we bought 10 we would save $30 in total.

The truth I am beginning to see – bulk meat should probably have a separate budget because we do not eat all the meats in that same month. We have chicken still in the freezer from our bulk spends in January and February.

When we bulk buy chicken we prepare it in three different ways – breast steaks, breast pieces, and chicken kievs. If we are doing kievs, that time we might only prepare kievs and pieces. If we have enough kievs we might only prepare steaks and pieces. If we have enough kievs and steaks as we did the last purchase, we only made pieces.

At the end of our first 6 months I may be better able to estimate a good yearly bulk meat budget by looking at what we have spent so far and adding on an amount for the items we already had in the freezer. It might be better to track that separately from the grocery spend.

May Thoughts


Lurker Cat lurks in the background

We did some bulk buying this month – I bought 2kg of mushrooms on special which put 7 packets in the freezer, we bought two smoked hams from Aldi and sliced them up and froze 8 packets. The small hams you can get from there are incredibly tasty if you have a way of slicing them and they are great value at $12.99 a kilo. We have a meat slicer.

2018yobn

The Label Maker

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I bought Mother a gift voucher to have her nails done for Mothers Day. She wasn’t sure about it – she thinks she is not a person who has their nails done. I used to think that, before I learned I am actually someone who likes to have their nails done.

With Mother it takes 5-10 years to convince her I am right about anything. Then she tries the thing I suggested, and raves about it constantly forever. I can give endless examples of this. My current favourite is putting a screen door on the house. I suggested it when they first bought the house which is over 10 years ago. They finally put a screen door on last year and now all you hear is how awesome it is.

I gave her the voucher and said think about it, if you don’t want to have them done you can give the voucher back and I will use it. The next time I saw her I asked if she had decided and she wanted to give the voucher back to me. Well now what present should I get you?

She told me about a reed diffuser which was given to her for Christmas that she really liked but she had no idea where to get it. I had been given the same one, so I did some googling and found it at Bed, Bath & Table. We do not have one of these stores nearby.

The Other Half was to go to Shellharbour (120km/75miles or so round trip) that next weekend to get potatoes. I was staying home, because he planned to drop in on his best friend who lives up that way and do man cave things. The conversation went like this –

Me : Could you pick up a present for Mother at Shellharbour.

Him : How about we go together on Sunday instead and you can get it.

Me : That would not fit in with my planned no-spend days.

Him : Well, your no spend days are going to be screwed up anyway because of Tuesday (Gruen filming). So suck it up.

Me : Why don’t YOU put your big man pants on and suck it up? Surely you can purchase an item from a store, it will be no different to buying the potatoes.

Him : Won’t I have to spend my money?

Me : I’ll transfer the amount across to you.

Him : How will I know what to buy?

Me : I have one right here, why don’t I put it on your desk so you can look at it?

Him : You have one right here, unopened? Why are we going to buy another one then?

Me : blank stare, total silence, pause, much laughter.

WHY INDEED. Why had this concept not even occurred to me? Was I so anti regifting that I could not even comprehend this?

I was given the exact same one by the same person, but we are still using the Tahitian Lime reed diffusers we got from Costco, so our gift has been sitting on the shelf waiting for those to run out. So I have an unopened one which I will now re-gift, *and* I have a nail voucher which I already bought, which means my next nail visit was a no-spend day. I am now officially a re-gifter.

If you are unfamiliar with the term regifter, here is a quick one minute rundown of the Seinfeld episode. Featuring a young and much less wrinkled Bryan Cranston.

I love how Elaine says the word, just the level of anger and spite there, it kills me every time. Elaine is my favourite Seinfeld character. Mother was very happy with her reed diffuser, and I saved $39.95.

Bonus gift, now Mother knows where she can buy them in the future. I fully expect she will go on a reed diffuser spree next time she is near that shop. Mother is like me, she likes to stock up on things she loves, especially when they are not easily purchased nearby.

Now if only she could become like me in knowing I am always right and trusting me when I say things. :) Hasn’t she learned by now, after my many stellar years of always being right?

family, Manicures

The Grocery Spending Spreadsheet

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

This is month 5 of The Year Of Buying Nothing. Inspired by An Exacting Life, I’ve now been tracking our grocery spending via spreadsheet for four months. It is past time to give you an update. I wrote about it initially here.

Line Items

Each item we purchase gets a line. Aldi gives each of their items a 4-6 digit number which appears on the receipt, that makes life SO easy for us. We’ve had to make up our own numbers for the Coles items. After 4 months of shopping, I can now say how many lines we buy from each of these stores. It is far less than I imagined it would be, especially from Coles.

It is important to note that this number is constantly changing – each shop may add up to 10 new items at Aldi or 3-4 at Coles. Also we keep note of identical items and the price we paid for those. When an item is the same brand just a different size, that gets a new line, eg Manning Valley eggs account for 3 Coles line items because they are available in 3 different sizes (600g, 700g, 800g) at 3 different prices.

Line Items Coles = 55

Of the 55 items we buy from Coles, 9 of these are non-food eg patty pans, deodorant when it was on super special, or baking paper in a size we cannot buy at Aldi.

I can now state that 16 of the items are “junk” foods. When I say that I specifically mean highly processed bad foods that we really should not eat like “twisties” and “french fries”. Some of those are items I personally do not eat, like Cinnamon Doughnuts. The Other Half likes those, it is his fortnightly treat, some of them go to work with him the days after we shop which gives me a couple of days to bake his cinnamon muffins or his from-scratch low sodium biscuits.

2 of the line items from Coles are potatoes when they were cheaper at Coles. 4 of the line items from Coles are tea or coffee related. 2 of the line items are chicken treats – yoghurt and mealworms. 3 of the line items are Manning Valley eggs.

Line Items Aldi = 143

Of the 143 items, 18 are non food eg deodorant, shampoo, toilet roll, tissues, even reed diffusers. Aldi make a fantastic reed diffuser FYI – we love the coconut and mango one, it smells amazing.

Only 14 of the 143 items are things I would consider to be “junk” foods.

32 of the line items are fresh fruits and vegetables.

18 items are dairy eg cheese, butter, cream. 8 of the items are meat/chicken/fish.

How Does It Work?

Each week before we shop, I create the new pages for that shopping trip. Each shop at each store gets a page in the spreadsheet.

It is fairly simple – you have to copy the blank spreadsheet page and give it a new name. But I have from time to time messed it up and left it on move instead of copy. Lesson has been learned, I am very strict about selecting copy now!

Once we have done the shopping, I sit down with the receipt and enter in all the item numbers first, when I hit enter it pulls the description from the lookup sheet then goes to the next line so I can put in the next item number.

Once all the items have been entered, I move across and add in the prices, then the quantities. Most of the time the quantity will be 1, but in cases where it is $ per kg, I enter the amount purchased and the spreadsheet does the maths for me.

When I’m done listing the items we purchased, I add in the CC surcharge in and make sure the total amount matches the receipt. I have the Coles Mastercard and thus anything I spend earns me flybuys points. It does add up over the course of the year, so that is the main card I use now.

The Coles spreadsheet is slightly different – as I do not get charged a surcharge for credit card there, we have added a field where I can minus the $10 flybuys discount we use from time to time. This will allow me to track when we do this and how much it saves us over the course of the year.

How Does This Spreadsheet Help Me?

I am more familiar with the pricing of items overall thanks to this spreadsheet. That is mainly because I am the one entering all the data. We were out at dinner recently and someone was talking about an item and I was able to name what we last paid for it off the top of my head.

I can spot mistakes easily and go back for a refund, as I did in month three – “Aldi had weighed our one lot of sweet potatoes twice, and charged us twice for them. We only bought one lot of sweet potatoes. I am not normally someone who asks for a refund but it was nearly $10, so I took the receipt in and explained what happened. They gave me a refund.”

That event taught me to stand in a particular spot and watch as we check out, so I can spot any mis-keys and prevent us buying 2.5kg of red capsicum when I purposely chose green because it was cheaper, or accidental double ups like above.

We are far more conscious about how much we buy and how much we use. We have a good idea of the base number of items we need each fortnight so that we do not run out of essentials like milk or toilet paper.

There is less food wastage than ever before in our kitchen. Part of that is due to freezing more items – in particular mushrooms.

We are better able to purchase items on special and bulk process and freeze them. Last fortnight I bought 2kg of mushrooms on special at $3.99, part cooked them and froze 7 packets, which will give me 7 weeks of pizza mushrooms. If they are on special again in the meantime, I will buy more and process them. In the meantime I can enjoy not having to buy them for $4.99.

This spreadsheet has been extremely useful for us and I cannot imagine we would stop doing this.

What Next?

The Spreadsheet Maestro has already begun creating useful ways to look at the data we are collecting. At the end of the year we will have a lot of data to play with and it will be interesting to see exactly where our grocery shopping dollar goes.

Aldi keep adding more products to their range meaning we have less to buy at Coles – just recently they added lactose free yoghurt. It would be fantastic to be able to do all our shopping in one place, however I think the reality will always be as it is now, most of the shop at Aldi with just a few items from Coles.

If you would like a copy of the spreadsheet with all the Aldi line items let me know in the comments and I will email it to you. I will take out all the Coles data and also all our shops.

2018yobn, spreadsheets