purplerabbits

I keep track of a bunch of stuff in my life, for largely neurodivergent reasons - things like whether I bath or clean my teeth, do housework or werk or art or craft, and whether I see another human being that day. Some days though don't have any of those tick marks, so I think I "didn't do anything." This is what I do on those days. I don't do all of them all the time, but I nearly always do some of them and they are not nothing.

This list is not complete

• Reading. I am nearly always reading a book that's new to me. Mostly relatively easy fiction - golden age detective fiction, children's fantasy books or some science fiction or fantasy. I mostly read on the Kindle, which means giving Amazon more money than I'd like but it is more accessible.
• Watching Youtube - I do this so much that it's worth it to have a paid account. I watch people doing crazy Zelda challenges or coming up with detailed geek lore, solving puzzles, making miniatures, ASMR videos, nerdy documentary stuff like Tom Scott, frugal or outdoor living, walking and camping and of course kitten rescues.
• Playing games on my phone. Sometimes this can be a grind that I wish I could escape from, but I am usually doing something else at the same time, and it can be genuinely enjoyable.  
• Imagining one of my many ongoing stories. Sometimes I will write some of them down, but far more often I am world building or just living in the story in my head. World building can include dives into all sorts of trivia, and making lists of things, because lists.
• Watching and solving variant sudoku, mostly from Cracking the Cryptic - https://www.youtube.com/@CrackingTheCryptic - sometimes I just solve the easier ones myself, but often I solve along - by doing what I can, watching the video for a hint and then carrying on.
• Make and maintain mostly strictly unnecessary lists and accounts and records of all sorts of things in my life.
• Jigsaw puzzles on https://www.jigsawplanet.com/ - You can pick kinds of puzzles, different shapes of pieces and whether the pieces are rotatable or not, and you can vary the number of pieces on every picture. I generally do natural scenes at 300 pieces, but with the pieces the right way up cos I'm terrible at rotating things in my head.
• Telling my cat what a wonderful bean she is.
• Doing quizzes on https://www.jetpunk.com/ - I frequently redo the same ones, like capitals and countries and flags of the world, chemical elements, monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. Hello, I am an autist and I like lists and knowing things. This flags of the world quiz is also good. https://world-geography-games.com/en/flags_world.html
• Doing my basic maintenance things - taking meds, getting dressed enough to open the door, eating a food, feeding the best bean.
• I do word puzzles too. I play Boggle at https://wordshake.com/boggle - it's slightly annoying because it's dictionary is a bit off, but it's easy to do just a bit of.
• Sometimes I do the guardian cryptic crossword, but not so often these days. I might like to do more, but I need to overcome my shame at "cheating" (true of some of the other puzzles as well). Rationally I don't believe you can cheat when you're playing anything alone.
• Watch TV - I usually only do this in the evening. I am currently watching Murdoch mysteries and Loudermilk and Pottery Throwdown and Salvage Hunters and Death in Paradise and Poker Face and Our Flag Means Death. Sometimes I have a very low tolerance for even mild peril and watch children's things and nature and Money for Nothing.
• Stepping into my garden for even  just a few seconds, so breath oxygen and see that things are alive.

In my head it’s still the start of term around about now. I am 56 rapidly closing in on 57 and don’t even have the excuse of ever being a teacher, but whatever. Now is a good time (in my head) to start courses, get all my pencils sharpened and jolly well sort things out.

I also get noticeably less happy and active in the winter, to the extent that this start of term energy rarely even lasts up to half term in mid October.

So what should I do with my start of term energy? I don’t want to sign up for too much and then hate myself for not finishing it, but I do want something to do as the nights close in and the heating goes on while I am still lucky enough to be able to afford it.

I have a few options, I mean I have a ton of options if you include my overloaded craft cupboard and the overflow area around it, but I have to discount a lot of that as set dressing. However I have signed up for a couple of things, and have the option of more.

Expressive Therapeutic Art is a weekly class I signed up for and paid for, so I am jolly well going. I have no idea what it will be like, but it sounded less scary than an introductory art class given that I famously cannot draw. It’s at Southbridge, where the pottery is, so I know I can get there OK and go and get a posh coffee afterwards.

Art for Anxiety is a group that meets one afternoon a month. I enjoyed the first few a lot, but am getting a bit less out of it now. It is in Leith, which is an expensive taxi ride away, but the class itself is free, and if I loved it more money wouldn’t be an issue. (Also it gets me to a part of town I don’t see every day.) If I run out of energy for this, or the group stops I can still carry on with the class at Southbridge.

The Pottery User Group is, against all expectation, still staggering along. If I pay my dues I can once again make small things (5-20cm) and wait patiently for them to be fired. I do not feel at all inspired about this, but I am reluctant to let it go completely because if I let my membership lapse someone else will be accepted from the waiting list and I might never get the chance again. I haven't paid up yet, and need to decide soon. The fee is small and I feel I really Should do it, but should I?

And then there’s OpenLearn (https://www.open.edu/openlearn/). There are a whole lot of courses on there I like the look of, from sociolinguistics to anthropology to Golden Age detective fiction. Most of them are for a few weeks but say they take 3-5 hours a week. They would cost me £100 a course or I could just join at £20 a month and get access to loads of them. I can certainly afford to do that but it might make me feel bad when I inevitably don’t get “my money’s worth.”

If I do all of this, plus my job and volunteering, it will definitely be too much. Pottery could just be depressing, Art for Anxiety could be superfluous now I have another art course, Open Learn courses are like actual studying and could be hard.

What would you do?

I am extremely unlikely to complete the month on under £30. Firstly because I slipped badly and had a takeaway on a particularly bad day, but also because I have already spent £28 and I only have two bananas and zero cereal bars left, and the milk expires on the 29th, assuming I don't finish it before then. Of course I could have other things for breakfast - I have some tinned and frozen fruit which will help, and I also have some instant lattes, but I am usually super dependant on milk and bananas, and I can't afford both, or anything else.

During the month so far I have become very aware that food prices at the "cheaper" end are even worse than I thought, even when I thought I was being pessimistic. And my capacity to cook the stuff in my store cupboards is lower tan I thought, because my self-image hasn't caught up with my disability.

I have got this far only through a combination of super easy free food from Shrub (Pret sandwiches ftw!), leftover work food, and my carer chopping stuff up for me for a more traditional cook once a week. When I do cook a "recipe" it will be something like a stir fry with a packet sauce,so I've barely touched he spices for years but still feel bad about getting rid of them because Reasons.

I have succeeded in using some thing from the freezer, and have thrown away a few more, like some very freezer burned veggies. I have used some cupboard things, like cheese sauce, corned beef, tinned cod roe and some ambient desserts, and I have a better picture overall of what I will ever use and what I would maybe be better donating to a food bank.

I will persist for a bit longer, maybe even to the end of the month, but I'm not going to shame myself over the odd takeaway or for going a couple of quid over...

I've coped OK with four and a bit days of no food shopping, partly because I got free coffee and a Pret salad when volunteering yesterday and picked up some tatties scones which I ate last night and this morning, but today I used the last of the milk and had to shop. Well I could have used the frozen milk, but that would have meant remembering to defrost it in time? How long does it take to thaw four pints of milk? Longer than I can cope without a coffee for sure...

So I went to the local Co-op because my knee is bad and I couldn't face the slightly longer trip to Lidl just to save 20p. The bargain bins were uninspiring, to say the least, and everywhere was chocolate and fancy Easter meals for people who eat fancy Easter meals because apparently that's a Thing. I resisted all those things with difficulty and bought a half gallon of semi-skimmed milk for £1.85 and 10 mixed weight eggs for £1.65. I wanted the eggs to go with chips for tea, and 10 of the bargain ones worked out 5p cheaper than 6 regular medium eggs. I spent noticeably more on animals than on myself, because Selkie has expensive tastes and I needed fat balls for the bird feeder. I also bought a rosemary plant for £3.50 from the super expensive but glorious Italian grocers, but even on a non-challenge day I find their food prices too much. I am not counting the rosemary as food because it's for the garden and not big enough to eat yet :-)

So £3.50 gone out of £30 leaves £26.50. I have chips and egg for tea with frozen spinach bites, and my posh-er Easter weekend food looks like being Chinese dumpling Night one night and Tapas night another, but I'm not sure about tomorrow. The fresh veg is mostly all gone, but I still have apples and bananas, 2 onions and a couple of honestly quite far gone carrots. I used my freezer burgers last night but still have both king scallops and some posh chicken in there. I may make another friends locked post with a full list of food eaten and available, or I may keep it private for now since I doubt it will be of much interest to anyone...

Usually I only need to run the dishwasher once a week, on Wednesdays so Kim can put stuff away on Thursdays, but I am running it now because I did some actual cooking...

Day 1 food
Banana, 1,
Coffees, many
Mushrooms, about 150g fried and mixed into Bisto instant cheese sauce which was BB last November and was actually nom, served with
Toast, 2 slices, followed by
Hot Cross Bun, toasted and buttered
Stir fry made with carrots, mushrooms, pepper and tofu and a far too sweet ready hoisin sauce
Some nice wine I have had since probably pre Brexit.

Day 2 food
Banana and coffees, obviously
More mushrooms and instant cheese sauce on toast, this time with garlic flavour provided by rather old dried ramsoms I got in Flying Tiger in the Before Times.
Another Hot Cross Bun
Toast and marmalade, which is an absolute staple for me
One carrot, eaten raw when I thought maybe I should eat a vegetable.

Tomorrow I *may* tackle the carrot mountain with more actual cooking, but I may also look at freezing them, as soon I can can take anything at all out of the freezer...

Before I even think about using stuff from the freezer I have to look at the fridge. Just now I tidied it up and made some lists, while drying out the vegetable drawer and cutting a few dodgy bits off of sad veg. There's not a lot of protein in the fridge except a pack of paneer and most of a pack of low fat cheddar type cheese, but alongside an embarrassment of condiments I do have plenty of butter and jam, which will help me use the toastable bread and three toastable hot cross buns from Shrub.
Also:
A nearly full tube of tomato puree
10 cherry tomatoes that are old enough they'll need to be fried
2 medium spuds from Shrub which will probably turn into chips with Freezer Thing
2 parsnips, possibly ditto - since I have an airfryer roasted veg is easy...
2 onions
(Not even any garlic, damn)
700g wonky carrots - this is what's left after I already used what I needed, but I bought the 1Kg bag because at 39p it was literally cheaper than two loose carrots
500g slightly sad mushrooms - from Shrub who had loads yesterday. They should last a few days now I have them out of the sweaty plastic box and onto paper
5 apples

And outside the fridge I have 6 bananas, not counting the one I ate for breakfast.

I don't have a lot of ideas of how to use the carrots and mushrooms, but surely one or other of them would go with paneer and sad freezer spinach in a curry?

After the fresh veg is gone, or gone off, I still have sadly dried up freezer spinach, frozen edamame, sweetcorn, and four individual portions of microwaveable veg which I bought to make myself eat more veg (spoiler, it didn't work.)

And then in the food cupboards I have tinned tomatoes, various beans (but no lentils, weirdly), pasta sauces, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, tomato juice and orange juice, more corn, tinned grapefruit, peach slices, various veggie soups, roasted peppers in vinegar, some other pickles and sun dried tomatoes and artichokes and olives. Yeah, maybe tapas night will be a thing.

But first I need to use up those mushrooms...

The amount of food in my flat, and especially in my freezer, is getting out of hand. Yesterday my carer Kim helped me reorganise the freezer so I could fit some spare milk in there, but we could only do it by unboxing some things and using the teeny drawer meant for ice cube trays to store dumplings. The cupboards are not a lot better, I have rice from before Covid and at least some tins from before Brexit. Meanwhile I, an autist with what you might call food issues, am living on milk and toast, and my breakfast banana is often my one portion of fruit or veg for the day.

Also food is getting super expensive.

So I am setting myself a challenge which, unlike my £1 a day food challenge from the Before Times, should be achievable at modern prices. For the month of April I aim to only spend up to £1 a day on food. BUT I am allowed all the food I already have in whatever combinations I can stomach.

The Rules

• I have £30 to last the month. This will have to cover milk, bananas, and other fresh fruit or veg, so it's not going to be enough for much more.
• I allowed to accept free food and drinks as long as I'm not getting them just because of this challenge. So for example I can have the free coffee I get for volunteering at Shrub, but I can't get someone to give me chocolate because I can't afford it with my £30.
• Also from the Shrub I am allowed to get things like bread and spuds from the food sharing. I am only allowed to take things that there's a lot of left over, so I won't be taking from people who need it more than me, and I must donate the recommended amount for any food although that money won't count towards the £30.
• I will try to go to actual shops for food, but if I have to do a food delivery order I may need to order more stuff to make up the amount. I am allowed to buy household supplies, cat food etc, which will help with this, but in case I need to I can order some other store cupboard food ONLY if I have already used up and enjoyed the food it's replacing.
• I will try to document the highlights of what I end up eating here and on Facebook, but I won't tie myself to doing every single thing.

I have set up a link for people to donate to Give Directly, but please only do this if you can afford to.

https://fundraisers.givedirectly.org/campaigns/fv26ccc6cdeb7054c10af0b82efa7a6be11

So what do you think? Is this easy or hard? Let me know and wish me luck!