stockpile of snacks – we didn’t take them all with us

Woke to a glorious morning and a bike ride! It had been WAY too long – like months and months (apart from the Tokyo bike tour).

It is a testament to my newly discovered riding confidence that when Don asked if I would rather deal with cars on the road or pedestrians on the shared path, I chose the road (pedestrians are terrifyingly unpredictable).

We headed down to the bridge at Dolls Point, had a quick snack, turned around and came back. We were all “I am king of the world” after riding down because it was so effortless. It was only after we turned and were riding into a strong headwind that we realised we’d had a little assistance on the first leg.

Despite our Extreme (moderate) Fruaglity, I’m going to have to get myself a pair of summer riding pants – mine are thick and have a fleece-style lining. I almost cooked and the weather was nowhere near hot.

Completely exhausted afterward and had a nap with the kitties for a few hours. Quite the perfect day actually!

We were up early this morning and carted another car boot full of decluttering to the charity shop. This one was full of folly and difficult decisions – so liberating to cast it all off.

Then there was grocery shopping, pub lunch with Don, ironing, mending and cooking a quite fabulous (if I do say so myself) slow roast lamb – the cast iron casserole makes all the difference.

Quite a satisfying day. 

Bike ride scheduled for tomorrow. It has been way too long.

I follow quite a lot of design blogs because, well, I’m a wanker.

Sometimes these blogs have words along with the pretty pictures. These words are not entirely dissimilar to dreadful, turgid artist’s statements – but generally much, much worse.

This morning I encountered quite the best narrative I’ve seen for a while. From design milk:

“The core of fuseproject’s design refresh resonates with the element of tension: a dichotomy between users’ increasingly public online lives versus a securely private one. This dichotomy is manifested in a bisected rectangular block drive divided into thematic halves: a angled and textured foundation below, with a clean surface top. The Lifeline, as fuseprojects and Western Digital call this metaphorical dividing center, operates to symbolize where the social and private meet.”

Yep, you know that’s exactly what went through my mind when I first saw these external hard drives:

Absolutely dripping with manifested dichotomic tension.

from the australia post catalogue

I spent more than this on my lunch yesterday (in the interests of full disclosure $12.50 for a wrap).

I guess this is the definition of a burner phone … except that you have to hand over your full deets to activate it.

We’ve had this radio (purists would probably call it a tuner) for several years now.

Tonight we were moving it to another shelf in the tv unit (vacated by the now disassembled tv computer) and Don suggested we consider adding it to the Ruthless Decluttering stockpile.

I love the design and it has served us very well, but we worked out that it has been at least 18 months since we turned it on – the vast majority of our radio listening is done in Panzo (the car).

Time for it to find a new home where it can be much more useful and productive.

This whole approach is very freeing!

hello ladies!

So I took that good look at the 50before50 list and  chose the five things that I’m hoping to knock over before the end of November. In keeping with the frugal theme, none of these will cost me a cent.

✚ Watch 3 of the movies on #46
✚ #19: Back Arch, like this (I can get to position C-D against a wall – albeit very inelegantly):

✚ #16: Learn to complete a cryptic crossword. Must re-commence the for dummies books (possibly from the start)
✚ #8: Make (or at least start) that patchwork quilt
✚ #43: one of those 5 hikes

And I’m giving myself to almost the end of November to change items on the list – after that I holding myself to all of them.

rollercoaster: toyko dome

This week I intend to take a look at that 50before50 list and prioritise 5 items to Action before the end of November.

I’m finding the sheer volume of things on that list a bit of a barrier to starting anything. Of course I could complete some of these things by throwing money at them – but our Extreme (okay, moderate) Frugality Project has put those things on hold for the next little bit. This should add just that little bit of extra challenge to the process.

I’m thinking that such a large and diverse project was possibly not quite as easy as I thought it might be!

Well thankfully I managed to remember most of what I did today, but sadly it wasn’t terribly remarkable. 

There was a 3km run, a bunch of cooking, more ruthless decluttering (there finally might be an end in sight!), some garage tidying and then I sat about for quite some time futzing around with external hard drives and the computer attached to the television (which is being retired – more decluttering!). 

This week is going to be quite hellishly busy, but will be polished off on Friday with a boozy lunch with DishyExBoss. I have vowed to be much more sensible than I was at the last outing – which seems like a lifetime ago!

ouch

I have no idea how I spent most of today. There was a 5km run, grocery shopping and cooking dinner – apart from that it is all a bit of a mysterious mystery.

I hope to be more attentive tomorrow.

Woke up to the smell of smoke and it continued throughout the day.

Even at SML it seeped through the crevices in the windows our high rise and delivered us scratchy throats and coughs and watery eyes.

Even now at 10:00pm it is still wafting through ThePalace(OfLove).

Let’s hope this mitigates the bushfires over summer.