HJ Waxing Moon

This actually started out as a comment on OffBeat Home's 7 ways to eat healthier food on a budget. There we were discussing make-ahead soups, freezing & reheating for work lunches. Someone asked how you'd freeze them, in individual containers or larger ones. This is my response: While certainly not private, that's a surprisingly personal question. How you choose to do it will have a lot to do with your budget, values, and routines. For space and best quality as far as freezer-burn goes, the best bet is going to be ziplock bags. Get the good kind with a double lock (NOT the ones with the zip-tabs), fill with the amount of *cooled* soup you want (one serving, two, four, whatever) up to about 3/4 of the bag while it's sitting on its bottom, and zip, getting as much air out as possible. Lay in a stack in the freezer and it takes up the least amount of space. However, this means thawing in the fridge overnight before transferring to a dish for transporting & reh...

Young House Love posed the question about things we skip (or skimp) to save money. I started to comment but then it got reeeeallly long so I thought I would put it up here and make a shorter list in my comment. Now, my title talks about morals because some of these choices for reusable things instead of  disposable are environmentally motivated as well as financially. As I've mentioned before, Mr. Moon responds to financial motivation more than anything, but over the last three years we BOTH have come around to being more willing to do things primarily for the Bigger Picture benefits outside our own small lives. Gardening is one of those things we have tried to do for something bigger than ourselves, with only meager success. Subscription TV:  I haven't paid for it in 9 years, Mr. Moon and his roommates had done away with it years before I met them. I watch seasons of TV shows when they come out on DVD, have Blockbuster and now more recently Netflix, so for $16 a month I ...

Pulled together Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, and a little from my emergency fund to replace my dying (dead) computer. Managed to get it working just long enough to migrate the data to the new one, but it keeps randomly shutting down on me and not wanting to restart. Poor laptop, it served me well. It seems there are times of the year that incur extra expenses. Winter holidays are notorious for their gift-giving traditions, the new year has incidentals like new planners and the expenses for starting any new habits and hobbies that come with the new year's resolutions. Sometimes it seems like these expenses should even up throughout the year, but they just never seem to. Like car insurance, I find it much easier to break the larger known expenses into smaller amounts that can be saved for throughout the year. Things like planners, though, are small enough they can come out of the "incidentals" fund for just such an occasion. I like to wait until January to pick up p...

As you may recall, I've been growing scallions in a vase in my kitchen. A few times, I've had to take a couple minutes and clean out the vase, soaking the rocks in vinegar water, and pulling soggy outer layers of onions off the stalks. I could probably avoid doing this as often if I remembered to change the water more frequently... Then one day I went to clean out the vase and found this: A bunch of these little root structures looking like they'd broken off the bottom of the stalks, but when I sorted through, each stalk still had roots at the bottom! Though you may be able to see here, some stalks had brighter-white, new roots. Exactly as many had new roots as I had stalk-less root structures, in fact. I have no idea what this means. But the experiment continues!

One of my favorite blogs is Young House Love . Recently, Sherri & John from YHL instituted a project they call, "Dude, Get On That Already!" It's a feature of those projects that you keep meaning to get to, but just never quite do... For us, since moving in, it was the bathroom. I got it started, and little pieces were coming together here or there but... let's just say, Musical Boxes was a regular game in that room for the last month or so. I wasn't partial to the Americana decor Mum had in there, but I would have been alright if it had stayed. However, in order to help us feel more at home and welcomed, Mum insisted I make it my own. So I did! Once upon a time I had a Celestial themed bathroom and loved it, but I never really completed it. Still, when I needed a new shower curtain last year and found a Celestial one at Value Village, I couldn't pass it up! Same with this Sun basket. I had no idea how we would use it, but I knew it would look great. And h...

I grew up in a house with paper towels, disposable napkins, disinfectant cleaners that were different for every project and every room, paper plates for busy weeks/camping/picnics, and lungs that burned for most of my childhood and early adult years. Last year, Mr. Moon and I didn't buy a single roll of paper towel, didn't use disposable napkins in our home, and gave away most of our cleansers to Freecyclers and roommates as they moved. Our last move, the only cleaning products we took with us was a box of borax and a bottle of vinegar (though to be fair, we were out of baking soda and needed to pick up more). How did we do it? Cloth Napkins: I had snagged a few from various restaurants through the years, and I picked up a few more at thrift stores because they matched my kitchen. With the kitchen on one floor and the TV room where we ate most of our dinners on another, we had a basket of cloth napkins in both locations for any time we needed them. Typically, we would use a na...