Frugal is as frugal does.

I'm somewhat famous for my frugal talents, delayed gratification challenges and jessenomics in general. I think, though, that this is not because I'm naturally very frugal. I don't like spending money on boring things, but who does? I do see money as worldly security, but, well, it's basically better to be secure than insecure, isn't it? And I live in the Eastern Suburbs, where my frugal looks like a real squeeze—but compared to the rest of the world I've got way too many clothes. I don't like getting blinded by the lifestyle around me.

But I also know that new clothes, music and concerts, nice food and craft things as making me happy happy happy!!! I can spend money alright. So the "frugal talents" stuff is what I have cultivated to balance things out. Really frugal people don't make a song and dance about it, they don't "Spend no money on clothes for 6 months" and then make up for it the next 6 months. They just dress like dags and cut their own hair and never go to the movies and eat homebrand cheese.

End of May.

This is me tomorrow (and Bec?), except that I'm not a Norwegian who skied to the South Pole. He finds a cache of supplies and food he buried weeks before, and forgot what was in there until he opened it up. I will find the block of Katoomba chocolate hidden in my undies drawer.

My smart meter has arrived.

Yes, I am excited. I want to find out more about them but all I can find on the internet is that they are terrible things and the government is controlling us and the electricity company is rorting us. Oh well. I think it's fun. I turned it on, and it had trouble finding the network. When it finally found it, our usage was reading as $0.00475 an hour. We turned off the TV and some lights and it dropped to $0.002 something an hour. See how fun this is? I'm going to get a cost per hour of every appliance in the house. Also, I'm surprised how cheap that is.

Cheese without a cracker.

If you have many sorts of cheese but no crackers, this may be a solution. One of the cheeses here is a low-fat cheddar. Boring. Might as well be yellow cardboard. Use a piece of low fat cheddar as a cracker, and put tasty blue cheese on top of it, and voila! A pleasing cheese-on-cracker substitute. Using up tasteless cheese and being resourceful about lack of crackers. Ticks so many jelssie boxes. Thank me later.

On whinging (or not)

I've been whinging lately and it's very unbecoming, especially around those who don't know Jesus. I thought that I should stop, but it made me ask, "What is whinging?"

I think whinging can be when you're frustrated by someone and instead of taking it straight to them, you take it to someone else. Can you express your frustration to a third-party without whinging? Does anyone have thoughts on what is the difference between whinging and venting? Is venting okay?

CPW on new dresses.

I bought 2 dresses on the weekend. That's way out of character for me. I didn't need a dress and I bought 2 of the same dress in different colours. $120 each, as well. But they are SO SWEET and fit really well and I bought a red one and one with penguins. I'm wearing the red dress again today, to get the Cost Per Wear down asap. I have a couple of sticky notes recording CPW of a few things I've bought. An $80 dress I got post Christmas has been worn 4 times in the summer. Not looking good. I think I'd like to aim for maybe $4 per wear in the first year, which means wearing it another 16 times. I'm sure I could wear it in winter, in fact if I buy some more leggings and thermal singlets I could get more wear out of a few of my dresses. Spending money to save money? And If I try for $4 PW for the red dress that means wearing it 30 times. I think there should be an app for this.