HabitRPG Back to School Tips #2

Continuing with Back-to-school tips for Habit RPG.

Today’s tip is:

Why not get something for all the boring stuff that’s part of modern life.

So you have to empty the dishwasher every day.  Or deal with a bunch of emails so your inbox isn’t overflowing.  Or shower.  Or brush your teeth.  Or even go to work.  Why not make those tasks a daily or a habit, so you can have the satisfaction of checking off your task and getting the reward of gold or possibly an egg or potion drop. 

Sure, there’s satisfaction in getting the job done, but there’s also satisfaction in getting the job done, checking off the task and then using your gold to buy some limited edition gear.  We both know which one of these things is better.

Interested and intrigued?  Join HabitRPG today. It’s free.

Finding efficiencies in food.

One of my goals this summer is to find efficiencies in food.  As such, I have been tracking how much it costs to produce the food I eat.  I’ve discovered that in general, my daily food costs between $7.00 and $11.00 in ingredients.  This is interesting to know and lets me know that there is no way in hell I can keep eating the way I do and reasonably have a monthly food budget of $150.00.  Which I knew, but I didn’t really know, know, if you know what I mean.
So far, the best efficiency I have discovered (which again, I knew, knew, but this really brought it home) is to break down your own chicken. It’s so much cheaper!  Do you want to pay $2.52 per chicken breast* rather than $5.99 per pound?  Buy the whole chicken, divide it up and package.  Voila!  Much cheaper.  
Here’s what I do.  I line the toaster oven roasting pan with aluminum foil and oil that.  I set out a plate, a plastic bag from the produce section, a cutting board and a container for the freezer.  I also make sure the dishwasher is empty and hope the cats are fast asleep.
The plastic bag is for holding the bag that the chicken comes in and the pad that is with the chicken to absorb moisture.
I pop the legs off first and separate the drumstick from the thighbone.  I sort of knew how to do this anyway, but I watched a few YouTube videos to refresh my memory. Drumsticks go into the roasting pan, Thighs go on the plate.  You can debone, but I leave bone in.
I cut off the wings (still a bit tricky) and put them on the roasting pan.  Then I slice into the breast and pull out the wishbone (which is incredibly fun, my favorite part) and cut down the back which gives me the breasts still joined.  The back goes into the container for making stock.  
I cut the breasts down the middle and sometimes debone them, sometimes not.  They go on the plate too.
Then  rinse off the cutting board (and usually shoo away the cats who are bugging me) put it in the dishwasher. I wash my hands and doing my best not to get chicken juice anywhere, wrap the pieces on the plate.  Those go into a plastic bag in the freezer and the plate gets rinsed and put in the dishwasher.
The container with the back goes into the freezer too.  
The drumsticks and wings I cook right away using this recipe.  Most chicken recipes in my world are for thighs or breasts, not drumsticks.  Matt gets the wings (which he loves and I don’t) and I get the drumsticks.  
This is a pretty sweaty process the first few times you do it, but becomes automated after about the third time.  I also enjoy it because I remember watching my mother do this when I was a child and being totally grossed out.  She told me it was cheaper than buying the parts and I remember thinking I would just buy the parts when I grew up.  I’m happy to master the technique instead.
*Just to be clear, I buy meat at New Seasons.  So it’s more expensive than standard supermarket prices. 

HabitRPG Back to School Tips #1

Remember me talking about Habit RPG?  I’m still using it and it’s still helping me accomplish a lot.  Here are five days of “Back to School” tips for how Habit can make your life easier.

Today’s tip is:

Habit helps you automate regular tasks, especially ones that only happen on certain days.

I do my best to keep up with my banking, because keeping track of what I spend helps me not spend money.  But I’ve always been good at putting off this task.  Until I used Habit’s ability to specify dailies (which are daily tasks) on only certain days.

Instead of failing at building the habit of updating my banking every day (because who wants to do that?) I changed my habit to a daily of “banking no more than three days out” and designated the days the task needs to be done as Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  This means that not only do I have some leeway (if it’s Thursday and I updated on Tuesday, I can successfully check off the task) but that the task is done often enough it doesn’t become overwhelming, but not so often I never do it.

Interested and intrigued?  Join HabitRPG today. It’s free.

Walk to work. The sunrise edition.

It has become apparent that if I can keep up these one-per-week walks to work through the school year, it will probably be dark for most of them.  Let’s watch the light change as the sun rises.
This was an amazing amount of cars parked.  I think there were five.

Squash growing up!

Delacata on one side, Butternut on the other.  This was a most impressive parking strip garden, but apparently the owner was not at all thrilled with people helping themselves because s/he had posted a very passive aggressive sign about how much work s/he spends every week and the produce is for “MY FAMILY!!!!”  Signs like that make me want to take stuff too.  But I didn’t.

Pretty black-eyed susans.

Renovation!  Maybe I will be able to find this house again and report on the finished product.

I love how they just cut it off.

Kitten!  Cat, really.  But cute.

Pretty red flowers.

Poem from the Poem Booth.  You can read it here.  

This was a block length (at least) hop scotch grid.

I liked that they attached the slide to the porch steps.

I wanted to see how far the hopscotch went on this side of the block, but had to be getting to work.

Nice stone and hens and chicks.

Sunrise!

This is a house that hangs out on the overhang below Interstate, just at the top of the  hill.  I’m worried it is not long for this world, given that everything looked very overgrown and there seems to not be siding on it anymore.

Here is the parking spot.  

I’m glad to see that someone is finally renovating this building as I have always loved  it.

Later in the day, I found myself behind the satchel brigade.

Three sentence movie reviews: Bernie

This was the second in our Richard Linklater double feature and I still loved it as much as the first time.  I think Jack Black would have made a great musical picture star* if that was still happening in the movie world today.  I think the scene where the guy at the lunch counter explains the different parts of Texas to us is my favorite of the locals.

Cost:  Netflix DVD prince
Where watched: at C & M’s.  M declined to watch this one and actually didn’t watch it.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2012/bernie.html

*As observed by someone, perhaps Richard Linklater.

Three sentence movie reviews: Dazed and Confused.

During a discussion of Boyhood, my friend mentioned she had never watched Dazed and Confused and we made plans to remedy that situation, pronto.  While I had seen this several times in the 90s and early 2000s* it had been a good decade since my last viewing.  This time around I found the soundtrack incredibly intrusive,** but I loved the passage of high school knowledge among the “generations”*** and really enjoyed the amount of detail packed into every frame.****

Cost:  free via Netflix on demand.
Where watched:  at C &M’s with C.  M said he would just watch a little, but ended up staying for the whole thing.  Good thing too, because he was the one who finally pointed out Renee Zellweger to me.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/1993/dazed_and_confused_ver2.html

*I owned it on VHS and lost it when I brought it to my job at Bread and Circus to lend to a friend. He left it on the counter in the Bakery and when he next worked his shift it was gone. Crappy thieving Bread and Circus coworkers.  I paid $5.00 for that previously viewed at Blockbuster.
**does EVERY single scene change need to be introduced by another 70s rock classic?
***Senior to sophomore.
****”Is his belt buckle a bong?” C said to me after the famous scene.  It was.

Morning surprises: Kittens! Mural!

Oh my gosh, two of them, sitting in front of a fence on the way to the Max train.  They froze when they saw me and bolted through the hedge into the cat wonderland that is the former City of Roses Motel.  (Chain link fence all around, flat ground, depressions with copious amounts of weeds growing.) There was one already waiting for them, so there were three!  Three kittens!
Sadly, I suspect they are feral. 

And, blooming on the side of a building, is the beginning of a mural.  That would be the grey thing on the left.  The exposed brick is the historic painted sign for the first indoor car dealership in Oregon.  The building was required to preserve it when they did the renovation.

Three sentence movie reviews: What If?

I’m going to start by saying this is a horrible title, so bad that even after I saw the movie I kept seeing the title and thinking, “What’s that movie about?”*  However, aside from the forgettable title, I greatly enjoyed this movie that let Daniel Radcliffe be his very short self** and did me the great favor of introducing me to Zoe Kazan who was so very good I would like to see her in a multitude of things in the next decade before she ages out of the female actress demographic.  If you enjoy witty banter and can recognize the Toronto skyline,*** this movie is for you.

Cost: free due to gift card.
Where watched:  Lloyd Center 8 (the one in the mall) with maybe 4 other people because it was a sunny and warm August Sunday.

poster from:  http://www.impawards.com/intl/misc/2014/what_if.html

*Not only when I would see it in movie marquees, but even when it was in my own blog roll!  So I knew I’d seen it, but couldn’t quite remember what movie it was.
**First time I’ve ever seen that for a male lead.
***It turns out I cannot recognize the Toronto skyline, so I spent a good 45 minutes driving myself crazy trying to decide in which big city they were living.  When I recounted this trouble to the clerk at Fred Meyer, he said, “Doesn’t Toronto have that unique round building displayed prominently?”  And I had to admit that I did not at all associate that unique building with the Toronto skyline.  But now I do.