I'm afraid the boys are going to have to do their share of belt-tightening during the current stage of joblessness.

I'd been feeding them Fancy Feast with a small amount of dry food for Luther because he relishes it. The cheapest Fancy Feast is at Wal-Mart, generally .50 a can, though sometimes .47 a can during rollbacks. They usually eat 5 cans a day (just 3 oz. each). Which amounts to $2.50 a day for the 2 of them.

Doesn't sound like much, but $2.50 a day x 30 days = $75 a month!

So I've started buying Friskies, which is, I believe, .50 a can, but at 5.5 oz, it's nearly double the size of Fancy Feast. So just a simple switch to Friskies canned comes to $1.50 a day, or $45 a month, a 40% savings.

I know I could save even more by feeding even more dry food, but I really feel it leads to health problems down the road, and besides, Waldo doesn't have many teeth left.

I will let Luther eat more dry food if he wishes, but it will never be more than half his daily intake.

In other news...
I'm bone tired, having chiseled hard-packed snow at the foot of my driveway and then carrying it away for 90 minutes. I think my car will now just barely fit through. The driveway resembles the luge you see in the Olympics. Now, it's snowing again.

A friendly neighborhood cop driving by while i was snow shoveling stopped to chat. (I recognized him becus i had knocked on his door during my census work last summer. He told me my neighbor's yellow barn at the corner of my street collapsed under the weight of all the snow and ice. Too bad....

I wanted to go to the landfill today, but i'm worried that while i can exit the driveway (down hill) i may not be able to get back up it. So maybe i'll wait til tomorrow.

I'm making a white bean and spinach soup for lunch. Still in the name of using up stuff sitting around instead of shopping more.

I am getting pretty close to cancelling my cable again. If they do what they did last time (lower the price), that will be great and i'll keep it, but i want to be prepared to follow through with cancelling if they don't offer to lower it again. After lowering it last time, that lower price lasted all of 3 months and then they had a rate increase and my monthly bill increased by $4 again.

I think i can catch all my favorite shows on hulu. I was also reading good things about Roku, but i wish i had some help setting it up. Roku lets you stream all sorts of video on your TV, but you need more than the basic speed DSL in order for it to work, and, ideally, a Netflix subscription. Roku lets you do away with waiting for discs to arrive in the mail and you simply browse the netflix offerings on your TV and watch whenever you want.

i want to check and see how much intermediate speed DSL would cost me becus my priority is really saving money first, and then finding a cable TV alternative.