A little bit of cleaning and organizing does a body good...

You know the movie "The Birds"?

You have to peer closely to see the masses of birds in that ginormous tree, but the sounds you hear are their exchanging neighborhood gossip!

Wild!

For one who has whacky blood sugar crashes, oft due to responses to food magnified/skewed by dysautonomia, I found this article to be great news.  The point:  left over pasta is healthier for you because the heated starches become resistant to breakdown into simple sugars, resulting in less calories.   In the study, the blood sugar spike/glucose response was 50% less in reheated left overs!!  How cool is that?!  So, that means, for me, my freezer food cooking is both healthier and safer when it comes to the pasta dishes that I make!

Speaking of freezer cooking, Wednesday I finally divided up the chicken I bought on Tuesday.  No matter that the packaging is marked "boneless skinless" chicken, I still have trimming to do.  Yesterday, whilst I was working on that, and matching smaller breasts with large ones so that my divisions came out more equal, I got the rather brilliant idea of putting four in one bag, since it takes four breasts to make the Chipotle Chicken Chili.  You see, whilst I will reuse ziploc bags that have had scrapes or bread or anything that is not raw meat in them, I do not reuse raw meat bags.  This saved me two quart bags and took up one of the old pizza gallon bags I had in there (yes, I mark up my bags).

The other idea I had was to go ahead and make more of the chicken for Lemon Chicken Gyros with Tzatziki and Feta, since I had put the last container of that in the refrigerator to thaw for my meal today and I had all this not-yet-frozen chicken meat in front of me.  For the first time, I made a double batch, and even stretched it from 8 servings to 9.  Of course, that will make my gyro dough balls not match up to my lemon chicken servings.  The best part about making the chicken was that I used oregano and thyme from my raised herb bed!

Since I was tired after "processing" my packages of chicken, the lemon chicken marinaded for about four hours.  I always let it marinade the minimum of one hour, but letting it go longer sure is tasty!  When I ate my gyro today, I was giddy at the thought of my freezer having all those servings back in it.  I do so enjoy the thought of balance in there.

My next lowest meal options are black bean soup and pulled pork for tacos.  That is okay about the latter, because ... well, I forgot I had bought the pork for this last month and bought it again this much.  Of course, I do have a most firmly held belief that one simply cannot have pulled pork tacos too often.

My contraband item this month was Honey Nut Chex.  Whilst I truly do savor chowing down on the stuff, as a monthly contraband item, it is rather disappointing in that the box is gone in the blink of an eye.

Last night, I had a bowl of Malt o'Meal for the first time in eons.  I had forgotten how much I love the stuff.  Oh, how I loathe that kind of forgetting.  I heard someone mention it the other day and promptly added it to my grocery list.  As with Cream of Wheat, I always make it with half milk/half water.  And lots and lots and lots of butter and brown sugar, of course.  I don't get why folk think it is strange that I like Malt o'Meal.

Or peanut butter on carrot sticks, for that matter.

I had the Malt O'Meal to warm me up in order to spend some time on the airing porch.  Amos believes he should have had a bowl, too!

Anyway, budget wise, I did fairly well, even with the need for further milk and cucumbers later in the month.  I spent $125 on groceries and household.  That $25 below my lowest-ridiculous-target number and $50 my barely manageable, still rather low target number.  I did have my first inkling of what it is like to be beyond the donut hole.  Celebrex dropped from $220 to $23!  Now, before the donut hole it was $90.  Then $220.  Now, $23.  What the pharmacist could not tell me is if the Erythromycin was affected by being out of the donut hole since it was just under $2 different.  I think that ringing up the erythromycin tipped me past the donut hole and the price change was just market fluctuation.  If that is the case, picking up prescriptions next month might be a cause for much celebration.

The other drug that was affected was the larin.  It is $18 cheaper in the donut hole, so I have been picking it up as soon as possible in order to, hopefully, end up ahead two packets worth (42 days) going into next year.  Beyond the donut hole, the larin dropped another $15.50!!

What does that mean Myrtle math wise?  By the end of December, I will be able to replace my broken glasses ... almost.

The hard part is that I really, really, really want to understand what my medication costs will be next year.  I know roughly what they are before the donut hole.  I know what they are in the donut hole.  But I think I will not know what they are beyond the donut hole until I pick them up again November 27th and see if the Erythromycin is affected at all.  But, whist I do know that, with the Erythromycin, I will hit the donut hole faster next year, and thus greatly increase my monthly medication cost more quickly, I will also get beyond the donut hole sooner.  Not really understanding how the math works, even though I receive monthly reports, I think that I will hit the donut hole in April and get beyond it in August.  I wish there was a way to know what the yearly medication cost will be and then just average it out.  Right now, I have no clue what to set aside as a monthly savings, come January, for when I am in the donut hole.

Have I mentioned that I loathe math??

Today, I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up in the garage.  Even though Firewood Man is not finished, I organized all of the remaining construction materials.  I put away the wood that is still usable and the largest remaining piece of lattice.  I went through everything in the garage, to re-evaluate if I still need it.  And I swept the walls and the floor.

One of the things I cleaned and organized is this cabinet.  The locker portions are metal and the drawers wooden, with all sorts of dividers in them.  I used the large locker to put the left over soil, peat, and compost manure bags from when I filled the raised herb bed.  It also has a smaller cubical inside where I put the partial bag of ice melt.  I used the upper left small locker to store some shelves that I found in the basement utility closet and think might one day be of use.  [After all, Marie used one of my pieces of shelving to organize a workspace in her apartment last spring.]  I used the upper right locker to store the tarp I had to buy in Alexandria for something and have never found a home for since (it was too expensive to just discard).  And I used the lower left locker to store the partial bag of lawn fertilizer.  Since Firewood Man tends my yard, I no longer need it.  But none of my neighbors have wanted it and I, again, don't want to just throw it away.  Does lawn fertilizer expire???

[Yes, that is a plunger that you see against the wall.  I found a total of eight plungers when I moved into the house.  I kept one for each floor of the house and put an extra in the garage just in case.  The rest went to early visitors.]

[I know that is a large pile of lawn refuse bags to have left with winter just around the corner, but the burning bushes still need to be seriously pruned once they are naked.]

I couldn't finish cleaning and organizing the middle part of the workbench area because I did not want to step on the un-cut piece of lattice.  That is $30 I get back from Lowe's once Firewood Man returns it for me!

At the tippy-top of the photos, you can see the uncut 2x2s and the 1x4 that are left over from projects.  Although I do not have any other work left on my house that could possibly use them, you might notice that the wood scraps holding them up and the ones holding up all the screen door sections above the work bench are hung crooked.  Firewood Man doesn't know it yet, but I would like him to use the last of the wood to knock down those haphazard "shelf" supports and put up fresh ones.

I am of two minds about those two GREEN chairs for outdoor events.  I never go any place anymore, so if someone could use them, I think they should be passed on to a new owner.  But maybe someday someone might take me somewhere, to some festival or something, and I would need a seat.  Plus, they are GREEN, after all.  I will not discuss just how many times I've put them in my car to take to the donation center—even driven them to the donation center—only to take them back out a while later.

This might not look like visual rest, but believe me ... it most certainly is!  The brown bin, the contents of the trash can, and all those boxes Tim is going to take away once he is done (i.e., his truck bed is no longer filled with 1,001 tools and saws he needs to work here).  The very minute the handrail on the stairs is finished, those bags of mulch are going around the porch to cover up the bare earth (mud when wet).  That bundle of wood are the balusters that Tim is no longer able to avoid making the angled cuts for the stair railing!!  So, all of that, now arranged very neatly, will soon be gone, gone, gone!

Anyone need any bricks??  Those were left behind here and I cannot find a home for them.  SIGH.  I don't plan on keeping all those little scraps of wood painted the house red forever, but I do plan on keeping them until next spring or so until we are absolutely sure they are not needed for anything.

In case I never mentioned it, those boxes holding the kindling for my fires that Firewood Man spent a long, long, long time splitting down for me, are WWII ammunition boxes.  That still surprises me.

Anyway, I can envision the balusters, the mulch, the construction debris, and the boxes all gone, so this is an organized space to me.  All the scraps we are keeping for the moment are tucked between studs in two locations and none of the scrap wood that has been atop the extension ladder since Firewood Man built the closet in the basement living space has been relocated to a more appropriate location (mentioned above).

How is that for close parking??  If you know me at all, you will be in awe of what a miracle it was that I did not knock over the sawhorses and all the wood.

The pile on the workbench at the back wall and the last deck board on the sawhorses are returns to Menard's.  I sure am thankful for anything we get to return and reduce the cost of this easy-project-turned-save-the-back-of-Myrtle's-house endeavor.

One of the things that I had hung on a garage wall and forgot about when I moved here was the external auto CD player with a cassette speaker interface and motion-stabilizing platform from my previous car.  Magnavox.  Great quality.  I never knew what to do with it, because I loathe throwing away perfectly usable technology.  However, who in the world would want such an ancient device?  It turns out, I would!  Actually, I very much wanted the very lightweight headset I found in the case.

Light weight.
Headset not earbuds that constantly fall out of my ears.
Lightweight headset that bows away from the sensitive nerves on either side of my head.

Oh, my!  What a find!

I decided to put the auto CD for cassette players contraption in the donation bag I started when I spent two days dusting upstairs a while ago and went through all the closets again.  Maybe ... just maybe ... someone might could use it.  And I went inside and listened to a TV show without any pain and yet able to hear all the sounds!  I was also happy to have my vehicle back in the garage, instead of outside where all sorts of bits of no-longer-growing things are falling and sticking to it.

It still needs a bath though.
As does Amos.
Almost.