Today at my house

I had a lot of things to do in the kitchen today, including

making bottled tea for Mr. GV.

Making Three Sisters Stew from Vegan on the Cheap.

Cooking up a pot of pinto beans--some for the stew and the rest in the fridge for making chili.

Taking these (cumin seeds)

putting them in here,

and making this---fresh cumin powder.

Taking a bag of frozen vegetable scraps--stems from greens, onion ends, mushroom stems, and bits of leftover herbs,

adding some bay and peppercorns,

and making vegetable broth.

There were other things done today, but not photographed, including:

*cooking rice

*cooking udon noodles (for leftover peanut sauce and steamed veggies)

*cutting up a browned banana and aging mango, to be put into the freezer for smoothies

*scraping off the 3rd side of stained, white caulk from around the kitchen sink and replacing it with clear silicone caulk

*culling a whole bunch of magazines

*laundry

*vacuuming

Today was a chilly, overcast day, and it was a good day to stay inside and do some homemaking!

Outta my house, outta my life

I mentioned previously that I love magazines. But they had started to mount up around here lately, so I needed to turn my reading from books (did I mention I love those too?) back to magazines.


This is part of what I took to the Friends of the Library bookstore last week. I added a few more magazines after I took the picture. The two books were ones that the used bookstore did not want. All together, I donated those two books plus 40 magazines---38 were mine alone, 1 belonged to my dad, and 1 to my husband. (The husband's magazines are another topic entirely---he has a large stack that he has been given in the last few years, but he doesn't really care for magazines all that much. He much prefers books. But he feels compelled to hang onto those magazines and pretend that he is going to read them some day. We are currently negotiating this topic, but have been at a stalemate for a while now. lol )

At any rate, I've got probably 25 more magazines to go through, and then I will be completely caught up. Most are going to the library, with the exception of "Body and Soul", which is going to my sister, and "Reminisce", which is going to my great-aunt Louise, who will pass them on to her son, who will pass them on to someone else to read. Win-win-win, that one.

Magazine mania

I admit it---I love magazines. It's neither environmentally friendly nor frugal. I fully own up to that. But the fact remains, it's a vice of mine. Right now I receive:

VegNews
Vegetarian Times (free)
Organic Gardening (free)
E! (in place of another magazine that went out of business--Plenty, maybe?)
Entertainment Weekly (extremely cheap 2 year renewal)
Mother Earth News (cheap automatic renewal)
Body and Soul (free)
Reminisce
Reminisce Extra--I was born in the wrong era, I tell ya. Love the 40's and 50's.

My mother-in-law usually gives me a few magazines at Christmas, just random issues of a few different subscriptions, so there's that too. And my mom gives me her weekly copy of my hometown newspaper.

But I do my best to decrease the environmental aspects of my magazine-loving self:

-When I'm finished, I give them to my mom or sisters if they want them. Those they return, plus the ones they don't want go to the Friends of the Library bookstore, where they bring in a quarter each, and benefit the library.

-I very rarely clip an article/recipe, instead choosing to type the information into my computer, so that I can leave the magazine intact and donate it.

-If there's an article I really want to read in a pop culture magazine (People, for example) I trot myself down to the library and read it for free.

-I have always been a fan of Archie comics, ever since I was a little girl. While they aren't magazines, per se, they're still made of paper and ink, and are expensive considering how quick a read they are. For years I rarely bought them, but recently discovered I can buy them much cheaper and paper-free through the app store for my Ipod Touch.

-I stopped getting our local daily paper delivered when they started offering a pdf version online. Love that!

-My husband was inundated by free professional magazines at work. Trust me, nobody but those in his field wants to read those, and frankly my husband rarely cracked them open. I went online and got them all to stop sending, except one. Still working on that one.

How about anyone else? Can't get enough of a good magazine or think of them as clutter and don't want them in your house?