Waffle

It's half past nine on Saturday evening, and I haven't even started on the Feral update that's due on Monday. The odds of there being an update on Monday are not zero, but they are slim.

Yesterday after work, I made a conscious decision to tackle my to-do list in the order of easiest-to-hardest rather than starting with the most urgent or most important thing. This strategy has worked well in the past (except in situations where the most important thing is critical, which completing a Feral update is not). It eliminates the distraction of having little nagging tasks at the back of my head, and assures that the doable tasks actually get done even if the harder tasks end up taking more time than expected. So on Friday evening I took out the trash, did grocery shopping, washed dishes, and so on; I got the household chores out of the way so I'd have more time to work on the comics-related stuff in the morning.

Then I went to bed early, with the alarm still set to my regular workday wake-up time of seven AM. When the alarm went off, I turned it off and slept until noon.

Oops.

I guess I needed the sleep, but it did eliminate all the time savings I made by doing my chores the evening before. Still, I went on as planned:

My first task was setting up a load of voting incentives (Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics and get rewarded with a behind-the scenes look at preliminary sketches for ROCR and related comics) and blog posts to remind readers to vote, all scheduled in advance. They are buffered until April 28, so I won't have to do any more until then. This took more time than planned; in all, I spent over five hours on the process. I will need to bring that amount down in the future.

My second task was a little more involved: I wanted to prepare a single episode of the old storyline The Corby Tribe for republication on the Drunk Duck mirror. To do that, I needed to reassemble the images and add two columns of text in a PNG file, and to do that properly, that is in a way that would allow me to reuse the result later, I needed to work with the DTP program I have, Scribus. This turned out to be less than intuitive (and wasn't helped by Scribus's Dutch localization, which like many open-source projects is of very poor quality). Also, it turned out that the master image needed a lot of extra work, so this, too, took several hours. I've got the hang of the basics now, though, and I expect that the next attempt will take less than half an hour.

The thing I've uploaded to Drunk Duck looks like this:

Image-ized version of the first episode of The Corby Tribe. Click for full view

By the time I was done with those things, with cooking dinner and the occasional break into the equasion, it was well into the evening and too late to get started on Feral. I may still do the work tomorrow, and maybe go back to pencil-only for a while. That's a fast process and one that I could do outdoors if the weather is nice enough.

I am, however, very concerned about my ability to get Feral updates done on a weekly schedule. It looks to me like the weekly schedule is dependent on me not having any other things to do during the weekend, and not oversleeping. If I had not lost five hours to oversleeping, I would have had five hours more today to work on it and would have been mostly done with the art. But i don't like cutting the schedule even further, and not having an update on Monday would leave me with 10 days worth of voter incentives without giving my audience anything to come back for that would entice them to vote. Bit of a waste, that.

I may need to make an unpleasant decision about Feral soon.

Some miscellaneous things:
First off: there will not be a new comic next week. My 37th birthday is tomorrow, and my present to myself is a day off the treadmill. No deadlines, no accomplishment targets. I may or may not do any work, but I'm releasing myself from all obligations for just one weekend in my life.

Driving class is going well, though it doesn't always feel like it. My instructor is sending me into more difficult areas to navigate and is finally letting me pay attention to traffic. As a result, it feels like I'm stagnating, because the more difficult things I'm doing don't go smoothly. I find some of it hair-raising, in fact and come home from the class all tired and sweaty. Give me a stretch of road I'm familiar with, though, and I do notice a difference.
I do now believe I should have done this much earlier. Not so much because learning ability declines with age (it does, but not by as much as people think; indeed, the biggest factor that causes adults to learn more slowly than young people is that adults typically aren't immersed in a learning environment), but because it's much more difficult for me to find the time and schedule the classes than it would have been 18 years ago. The cancellation rate on my classes is about 50%, because I can only make it outside ordinary work hours, and those hours happen to be difficult for my instructor to make.

Grocery expenses today: €21,10. Not bad, especially keeping in mind that I was able to buy for the pantry: various dried bean/lentil products will keep me fed for months, and I did the shopping while hungry (I had no breakfast foods in the house, which meant I had shop before breakfast) which is normally a big no-no. The general frugal advice is not to go grocery shopping while hungry. I overcame this problem by sticking to the periphery of the supermarket as advised by Michael Pollan and giving myself very little shopping time. Compared to the farmer's market, the selection of fresh produce was poor, but I got enough of what I needed for this week's meal plan (cauliflower korma, spaghetti bolognese and dal curry, each for multiple days) and probably will have to go back only once to buy odds and ends.

I got an € 609 tax refund, which is less than I expected. But I'll also be getting part of the nationalised part of my health insurance premiums back, which could well make up most of the total. If you actually look at your tax form, the actual income taxes in the Netherlands are pretty low in the lowest bracket or "box". Most of what you pay is for health insurance, which is a separate bill (and is topped up by a part that you pay to private insurers. Yep, it's a complex and expensive system, but as compromises between private and socialised medicine go, it could be worse). I'll be spending the refund on rebuilding my financial buffer, which has suffered a bit from my plane ticket and the cost of driving lessons. On the personal finance front, I'm also untangling the final issues with the rent of the studio, which I will be leaving on October 21. And I'm thinking of having another go at budgeting. I tried that in February, but I don't think I was ready for it at the time. Now, though, I've realised that my plans for the future will make it essential to save a lot more money than I do. Also, I have become aware of how much anxiety about money stresses me out. I have never had any significant debts, but I have no significant assets either, which means that it doesn't take much to cause my buffer to run out. Time for me to start dealing more intelligently with money.

I spent €60 at the market this afternoon, plus €17 at my local organic butcher's, and €6 at the market yesterday during my lunch break (when there were different stalls including an organic bread stall that I didn't discover until after I'd bought bread. I'd have spent much more if my lunch break had been longer) . It's safe to say that my food budget has exploded this week.

I'm not going through an itemized list this time, but I do want to mention that some of these expenses were one-offs. The biggest extra expense was tortilla chips plus four kinds of dip to go with them; the plan is for me to reverse-engineer and then improve on the dip I like the best (which is probably going to be the chilli), so that's €8-10 that I'll only spend once. I also bought enough cheese to last for three weeks, plus fresh cilantro, which I usually do without.
I've located milk! But I didn't buy any as it was €1.30 for half a liter. Locally produced and organic, so probably very good, but the price was one I'd expect in a cafetaria, not in retail. I can technically afford to pay € 2.60 a liter for milk, but only if I still save money overall, which I'm not doing.

Going back to the original purposes of the experiment, I ended up buying a lot of things that weren't whole food staples but prepared foods: melba toast, the dips, chocolate nuts, the tortilla chips which by Michael Pollan's definition are edible, foodlike substances. So the experiment's purpose was defeated entirely and I might as well get those things from the supermarket again. On the plus side, shopping at the market is a lot more fun - you're outdoors, there are bargains to be had and new products to try, and the smells from some of those stalls is just divine. Goat cheese in particular taunts and tempts me whenever I pass it, as do Moritz's olives, sun-dried tomatos and feta.

Experiment over! It would have been fun and interesting to do this for a couple of months; describing your shopping in great detail is the sort of thing that's dull if you do it once, but becomes more interesting if you keep it up until patterns become visible. But the pattern that's showing up already is that I spend more and don't stick to the experiment's purpose, so to protect my wallet, I'm cutting it off here. I'll be splitting my purchases between the outdoors market and the supermarket like a sane person.

Well, my experiment in staying away from the supermarket ended quickly. As predicted, the need for durable baked goods (or rather the need to have breakfast and lunch after the middle of the week) was what pulled me back in. Worse, I was so strapped for time I had to use an Albert Heijn supermarket, and it turns out their assortiment of durable baked products sucks as hard as their bread. And now for the boring minutiae: I did end up buying:

Half a loaf of organic whole-grain bread - on the off chance that their organic bread might be more palatable than their regular bread.
1 kg muesli, Euroshopper brand, non-crunchy.
3 tins of tomatos for use in pasta
1/2 kg bag of fusilli pasta
1/2 kg bag of whole grain rice
1 liter of organic non-skim milk, because I fear not the fat.

Total expense: €7.50.

Yes, I'm picky about bread. I blame my parents who raised me on fresh, whole-grain bread that they sliced themselves into thick, rough slices. Actually, I wasn't that keen on that particular kind of bread because it tended to lose its flavour after being frozen. But because they cared about bread, I learned to. Bread has to be non-mushy, have plenty of roughage and should have a smell to make you more hungry.
As for the whole milk, I only recently switched back to it after two decades of drinking semi-skimmed. It's tastier and the vitamin A and D in milk are fat-soluble. Considering how much oil I use in cooking, the difference in fat percentage between non-skim and semi-skim is trivial. Fat is tasty.