I am now well stocked in my favorite brand diced tomatoes, Muir Glen. They are pretty expensive (over $3 a can) but they go on sale to half-price (!) in the fall, so I took full advantage of that recently and should have enough organic, sodium-free diced tomatoes for the entire winter's worth of soups and stews. I use 2 cans per pot of soup with a whole lot of veggies.

Generally speaking, my diet is as low sugar, low salt and low sat fat as possible, and it's very hard to eat in America without consuming some degree of processed foods where much of that sugar, salt and fat can be found. I used to buy dried beans for my soups and stews but it was too time-consuming to soak the beans overnight and then cook them. The Muir Glen brand also uses BPA-free linings in their canned products.

I am also very happy with my Biroux water filtration system, which is said to filter out all kinds of unwanted stuff, including BPA, microplastics, heavy metals, and more. The water does taste subtly different; I'd mentoned that to a customer service rep, who asked me if I could describe what it tasted like, and I could not. I found myself puzzling over that for weeks afterwards, and decided that it just tastes like nothing, which I guess is what water is supposed to taste like. Perhaps in the past I tasted flouride or minerals, although Biroux is supposed to retain beneficial minerals while stripping away contaminants.

Biroux sells a nice countertop stand for their water filtrations system (i bought the small one shown) but I saved a few bucks and just used a plant stand.

The 2025 vegetable garden is wrapping up. All I have left are my snow peas, but here's the tally of everything else I harvested. Note that I planted for one person using 3 4 x 8' raised beds.

Cherry tomatoes: 490
Lost a few to exploratory chipmunk bites.
Yellow squash: 31
Cucumber: 21 (wiped out early by powdering mildew)
Zucchini: 16 (also pulled early due to cucumber beetle and powdery mildew)
Medium-sized tomatoes: 8
Stringbeans: 3 lbs
Snow peas: 40.5 oz (2.5 lbs)
Plenty of red lettuce but not counted

Next year I may skip the stringbeans and return to eggplant.

This morning I woke up and, looking out the bathroom window, I saw a wooly caterpillar in a large, ground-level water bath I put out for the animals. Fearing it had drowned or was drowning, I ran downstairs and outside, to remember with some relief that I had dumped the water yesterday after seeing mosquito larvae swimming around. The wooly caterpillar was just wedged beside a small river rock in there. I let it be and now, with the warming sun, I noticed the caterpillar crawling around the rim of the bath, maybe doing its morning calisthenics. So all is well.

Since I'm so fond of photography, I've been thinking of doing the Photo a Day Challenge starting on Jan 1. Although it's harder to find things to photograph during winter. It would be fun to compile a year's worth of photos which would likely be rather mundane but also accurately reflect my life. 

I've now achieved my credit card goal to earn $100 credit. Now I can go back to a different card to charge up entertainment purchases, which include restaurants, where I can get a refund on any entertainment-related charges with credits I already earned on a travel rewards card. I think I have a year to do that.

I asked the man who has been mowing my lawn for the past 5 years or so if he could please not leave divots on the lawn, and also that I've noticed my lawn size has shrunk over the years becus he skirts the edges, allowing weeds to fill in. I figured he would just raise the blade. Instead, he suggested I find someone else to do it because, he said, my ground is uneven, and as for the shrinking lawn, he said I needed to have it mowed every week instead of every other week.

I was not expecting him to suggest I go elsewhere, but I really wasn't happy with how he mowed my lawn and it had taken me a while to finally decide to talk to him about it. So I just said okay, but would you mind just finishing out mowing for the year. He never responded, nor did he return to mow, which now has put me in a jam to find someone new rather quickly becus the grass just keeps growing.

So I pulled out my battery walk-behind mower to touch up a few areas where the grass was getting high, but I've had this recurring problem with one of the wheels coming off, and that's what happened as I mowed sideways across a steepish hill. There is this little metal gasket that holds the wheel on the axle, and when that extra weight is applied to the wheel, especially on  the downward end of a hill, it tends to push it off the axle.

It's a real pain in the butt to put on a new gasket; you're supposed to tap it on with a hammer, but as it's supposed to be snug, it's hard to get on at all. My handyman helped me with it just about a month ago.

Yeah, I could run down to the hardware store again to get more of those gaskets, but I hate having to deal with and would likely need my handyman to help me with it and I dislike throwing more $$ at it since it will likely contine to be a problem. 

I decided to buy a new mower at the same time I'm looking for a new mower to do the lawn. I like having a mower myself as a backup, as my current mower man sometimes misses an area or doesn't do narrow walkways of lawn area between pachysandra beds, for example, becus he has a much larger/wider ride-on-top mower.  If the weather's not too hot, I sometimes enjoy mowing, but it's too much lawn to have to do all the time.

Anyway, I didn't want to delay too long as it will take time to ship, and then assemble, and who knows if I get a new mower man in a timely manner. I tried texting 4 that were recommended my my town's Facebook page and only 1 responded.

So I purchased a Greenworks mower. The price was pretty good as I got it directly from Greenworks and they were having a clearance sale (out the door price including the battery and charger was $334). It is NOT self-propelled and I'm hoping that's not a problem. I made a point to check the weight of my old Black & Decker battery mower vs what I bought. The B&D was heavy, at 76 lbs and I don't think it was self-propelled. it was just 19" across. It also was just 24 volt.

The new Greenworks mower is just 65 lbs, or 11 lbs lighter than the B&D, so hoping it will be noticeably easier to push, even without the self-propelled technology. It's also 22" across, so it will cut a wider area, which is good.  And it's a 60 volt mower, which means it has a lot more power to get thru high grass than the B&D, and that was often a problem where I would be mowing and would hear the mower start to slow down and threaten to stall out in thick grass, or just when the battery was wearing down. 

When I was shopping online, I hadn't noticed that what I was looking at was not self-propelled until after I made the purchase. Hmm. I considered cancelling the purchase while I still could, but didn't. The self-propelled feature does add to the price. 

The Greenworks mower is good for mowing up to a half-acre on one charge. I have 1.5 acres, but much of that is woodsy area; the lawn, I would guess, takes up about an acre, but I can't physically handle mowing, at least with the B&D, for more than about 40 minutes anyway. The new mower should take 110 minutes to recharge while my current mower takes so many hours you could never consider doing more than 1 mow in a day.

I'm not sure how long I've had the Black & Decker; it's been a while. At least 10 years. I know i replaced the battery once. So maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised by the improved performance of a newer mower, not just a new gasket holding a wheel on the old mower.

In just a few days my friend will be dropping off his senior dog for an extended 2.5 week stay while they visit Berlin and Prague. It's going to be a big adjustment adjusting my schedule to revolve around 4 daily outdoor visits/pee walks plus meals, of course.  Partly becus the first one is pretty early and before her breakfast, at around 6-7 am, and the last one is around 10 pm, when I am usually in for the night. I don't really want to walk her in my yard becus this is Wildlife Central and I have plenty of ticks around, which I'd rather not get on me or in the house.  I plan to walk her at a place with paved walking trails and mowed soccer fields and so on, but that's a 5-minute car ride. 

I was doing well avoiding poison ivy rash until early August. I vaguely remember something barely brushing up against my forearm, and I remember even better scrubbing the area with Dawn dish soap, which I'd read was just as effective as specially formulated products like Tec-nu in preventing the rash. But it didn't work. I also have it on the top of one foot, which really puzzles me since I always wear socks and boots. Anyway, neither spot looks like it's spreading at all.

I heard back from my agent on auto and home insurance. As I was anticipating, no one can really beat my current insurer. I get a lot of discounts with them, the biggest being roughly $230 for having driven around with a tracker for 6 months several years ago to earn a permanent discount that transferred to my new car. I was also able to save $112 on the auto by increasing the deductible, which I'd thought was already high, but that must've been a different policy. (I wouldn't mind driving with the tracker again in an effort to earn a higher discount, but I think I already asked about that at some  point and they said no.) They gave me the same option with the home (increase my deductible), but i decided the savings I would achieve there wasn't worth the risk of having to pony up $5k if a tree falls on my house. With the ever-increasing ferocity of these storms, it doesn't sound like a remote possibiity.

So if you're curious, I'm paying $916 on the homeowners and $900-something on the car. Both those prices seem sky high to me but I know as soon as I say that others will tell me they're paying substantially more. 

We're on day 1 of another heat wave here in New England...the 4th? I went to Stop & Shop and Aldi's this morning, then sat in on a meeting of one of my groups that I volunteer with, then went to the gym but could only eke out 15 minutes on the treadmill.

The End

I've had a few more grocery price surprises. Today, I managed to get out, drive the 15 minutes or so it takes to get to BJs, and get home by a little after 9 am. Trying to beat the heat, which will reach 95 degrees today.

The "surprise" is discovering that Stop & Shop charges MORE than Whole Foods for organic oranges. Oranges are heavily sprayed, so I like to buy organic.  They are currently $5.99 for a 4 lb bag at Whole Foods and $6.99 for a 3 lb bag at Stop & Shop.

Here's another example: 1 lb of baby bok choy is just $2.79 (organic) at Whole Foods, but costs $6.99 for 1 lb (not organic) at Stop & Shop. That's a crazy difference!

At my BJs trip this morning, I noticed they LOWERED some prices since last time I shopped. I know this is routine as summer approaches and fresh produce becomes "in season," but it was the Wellesley Farm brand of Greek yogurt that also dropped.

The masonry crew finished the basement walls yesterday. I was SO glad when they left. Even though they were in the basement, I could clearly hear them talking (in Spanish) from my 2nd floor office, with various noises, etc. What really upset me was that in the process of cleaning up, one of them chose to use a gas-powered blower on my driveway. They did create a lot of dust with the cement mixing out there, but they cleared the whole driveway. I had 2 small parsley plants out there with baby black swallowtail caterpillars. The caterpillars were literally blown away and I'm sure died. The other thing was, they cleared a whole lot of groundcovers that were growing along the edges of the driveway, against my stone walls, plus some beautiful ground phlox that took many years to grow into a large clump. I liked the way they softened the look of the stone walls and paver driveway. All blown away. Very upsetting.

Continuing the tradition of contractors always causing some kind of damage or work for me, this crew splattered concrete on my brand new hot water heater, the oil furnace, my water tank, my kayak and even the pump for the water tank, plus copper piping. There was dust everywhere. Concrete smeared on my outdoor faucet handles, one of which is now hard to turn, I think becus concrete dust got inside the mechanism. 

I spent a lot of time wiping a lot of concrete and dust off stuff, but I'm not done.

Now that I am cat-less, I would really like to make the basement as clean and dust-free as possible, partly to protect the new hot water heater, which has a filter at the top that i clean every month, but also just to be cleaner. I need to think about how best to reduce the dust. I think a household vacuum with hepa filters would still be ruined by vacuuming up fine dust. (I learned that once and had to have the vacuum repaired.) I do have a shop vac but is that going to blow the dust around? I think it would. I guess wiping with damp rags would be best; i don't even own a mop, but maybe I'll get one at $ store. 

Remaining projects for 2025: I ran a load of wash at the "normal" spin cycle setting and it still seemed to be vibrating too much on its new stand. The clothes were still extremely wrung out of water, though, which is good. Next I want to run a load on the "low" spin cycle to see if that noticeably reduces the vibrations. If not, I'll ask the handyman to return and help me slip a half-inch foam yoga mat i no longer use under the washing machine. I may also call Samsung and ask for suggestions. I mean, I love the new stand the handymay built for me, and I want to be able to use it!

Also need to call an appliance guy about a possible leak with my dishwasher, which i haven't used for over a year.

Then there are my father's projects. I have to bring him back out to the  notary at library again to redo notarization on his letter cus bank said i left off a "0" that appeared on his statement with a space after it, so I didn't think it was part of his account number. Notary has not called me back yet. He was on vacation, but i think that was just last week.

The talking watch i got my father a year or two ago is talking very faintly now. It needs a new battery. Rather than me fiddling with it and just getting frustrated, I want to bring it to a jeweler, who will charge $15 to do it, although i have purchased the battery for it.

I made a reservation for myself next week for a guided walking tour of Historic Heugonot Street in New Paltz, over an hour's drive for me. I've passed through that area and the homes are beautiful. The area was originally founded in 1894 by descendants of the first settlers. The tour includes going inside 5 or 6 of the houses, settled by French/Dutch, I believe, and also a 1717 French church and cemetery. It should be interesting.

There are a lot of things of interest to me within a 2-hour drive that I have never gotten around to seeing, so I plan to start making "fun" daytrip stuff more of a priority. There's more to life than grocery shopping and home projects.

I hope you all had a nice Mother's Day. I had an old friend come up for lunch and we spent a nice couple of hours. After he left, I set about to repair a kitchen cabinet where the trim that covered the gap in the middle of 2 corner cabinets had broken off. I happened to have a handy clamp that I found outside on a street sign that one of the utility companies must have left, so I used it here, along with some rubber brands to hold it in place while the gorilla glue dries.

I also was mowing the lawn until I had a recurring wheel issue occur.

But onto the focus of my post: Groceries are consistently one of my biggest expenses. In fact, last year, it was my #2 expense after property taxes, at $4,700, and I'm shopping for one.

It seems like for years now I've have a goal of lowering my grocery expenses but haven't made measurable progress. So for the past couple of months, I've been working on another Grocery Price List, where I track costs for individual items I buy regularly, at about a half dozen stores I frequent.

I thought I knew that in general, Aldi's had the best prices. HOWEVER, after analyzing the prices of 58 food items, I was surprised to see that BJs edged out Aldi's with 16 best prices while Aldi's had just 13. I've had a half-price membership at BJs for about 5 years now but only shop there once a month or so, but now I see from my spreadsheet I created that they actually have the best prices among BJs, Aldi's, Whole Foods, Stop & Shop, Trader Joes and Big Y for:

Bananas, organic raisins, mushrooms, avocado, fresh carrots, frozen berries, organic pears, prunes, gold kiwi, pink grapefruit, raisins, frozen turkey meatblls, red onions, organic celery, organic corn and kiwi.

While Aldi's had the best prices for:

Mango, yogurt, soymilk, Dave's bread, cantaloupe, organic blakberries, frozen peas, frozen broccoli, butternut squash, organi grape tomatoes, organic mini cucumbers, kefir and pineapple.

I eat a plant-based diet but supplement with eggs (2x weekly), small portions of meat or wild salmon, and I avoid processed foods, so I mostly shop the fresh produce section.

Whole Foods has the best price for organic canned, sodium-free beans, at 99 each. I also will continue to buy the 2 lb bags of wild sockeye salmon there. Stop & Shop seems to have the best price on dried split peas and their Nature's Promise organic soymilk has a great price at $2.99 a half gallon although I don't like the sugar in it, but will no longer pay inflated $5 for Silk brand, which is unsweetened.

Tracking all these prices is time-consuming, especially since prices DO fluctuate, and also, some stores are sneaky (like Trader Joe's and S&S) where they sell you an odd amount, like 12 oz instead of 16, or they sell by the piece of fruit, instead of by the pound. That's ok, then I just calculate what the "per ounce" price is instead of "per pound."

So I'm going to try to go to BJs more regularly, much as I complain about the drive (16 min) and their overly sensitive self-scanners. Their gas prices, the lowest around, is also another incentive. I also noticed that while S&S has quietly increased prices on a few items I'd recorded just a month or so ago, the other stores have not.

Also, I have to say in the past when I bought fresh bagged fruit like oranges, there could be smushed ones, but today i bought a bag of their organic Cosmic Crisp apples with a coupon and they are delicious! Super crunchy!

I let my BJs membership lapse this past fall because it's hard to justify paying the $60 membership as a single person. Then I got something from them in the mail offering me an annual membership for $25, which is what I paid the last 2 years. So I went for it. Just a day or two later, I got a postcard from them offering an even sweeter deal: a $20 membership and $20 back after spendng $60.

It was too late for the better deal, but I decided to nicely ask them if they would still honor it. She gave me the $5 back for the difference in the membership cost but said she couldn't (easily) arrange it so I could get the $20 back after spending $60, but I was stil happy to get something. It never hurts to ask! Note to self: Hold out a bit longer next year before accepting the first discounted membership deal!

I bit the bullet and spent $375 on a second backup key for my Toyota and it is now safely stored with my important documents. Knowing my proclivity for misplacing stuff, the odds of me getting through the next 10 years without losing my one and only key are not good! I have, however, decided to go back to an old habit I had been happy to do without: carrying a purse around with me. It's less likely I'll leave something somewhere, like cell phone, keys or Toyota key (which is kept separate in a Farriday pouch), if I can just throw everything in my purse.

My first car payment will be early February, and that's when I plan to "turbocharge" the car loan repayments with a single additional $5,000 payment in 2025 and then continue paying about $400 a month for the year. So next month will be yet another very tight month, money-wise.  The 2nd $5,000 payment will be made early in 2026, and by doing this, I'll have the car paid off in 2 years, not 5, saving myself a lot of interest.

I very much enjoy driving the car. I like the Sirius XM alot, but don't want to pay $10 a month for it. I am getting used to dealing with blind spots with my side mirrors, though truth be told I haven't driven much on the highway where this would be most important.  But what I'm saying is that I don't think it'll be necessary that I spend $1,000 on the after-market blind spot assist installation.

I plan to at least start my taxes tomorrow. I do them myself. I am still missing tax forms from 2 entities, but I'll see if I can work up the point where I need those numbers. And I should get them any day now.

I did also recently renew my McAfee computer virus protection. If I had been lazy and just clicked on the renew button that kept popping up on my computer, I would have paid $70 for a year's coverage for my computer and smart phone. But by opening a new window and going to the McAfee site, I paid just $42 for it. I hate when companies penalize existing cutomers.

I treated myself (rarely do this) to a yummy sandwich at the general store today coming home from running an errand. I remember one thing I always told myself I would do "when I retired" was buy myself a fresh bouquet of flowers whenever I was at Trader Joe's. I haven't done that yet, partly because when I was there last week it was below freezing and I was afraid that could prematurely zap any flowers I bought in the walk from store to car. As soon as temps rise, though, I will be buying myself flowers!

Oh, wow, I see everyone is posting their net worth. Since the market is doing so well, I may as well post mine, which has risen to $1.6 million (including the house). Nice. This figure does not include my monthly-for-life annuity payments or Social Security, which I won't claim for another 4 or 5 years.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. I must confess to a bit of a spending spree starting, I guess, in November. Here's what I've purchased so far that "feels" wierd just becus I've had a lifelong frugal mentality:

* Replaced my office chair, something I got 4 years worth of use out of after rescuing it from the dump! I also went outside my comfort zone and got the new chair in turquoise to match much of the art in my office.  

* Replaced 2 kitchen chairs, which also had been acquired secondhand and were a little banged up. I brought them to the dump and a man grabbed them, which made me happy. The new ones are mid-century modern (love, love) and have a lower profile, which I think works better in my small kitchen.

* New wool blanket

On their way: An organic cotton guaze blanket for summer, a metal 3 in 1 bird feeder (compartments for 2 types of seed plus suet) to replace an old wood one that's missing one panel so seed tends to fall out) and a Kandinsky t-shirt for the gym.

I discovered a fun FB group devoted to people who feed and shelter wild opossums. It led me to start leaving food out, though since they are nocturnal, you wouldn't be able to see them without leaving a light on and rechecking throughout the night, or having a wildlife camera, which is the next thing I want to buy myself.  We'd had a light snowfall, so I could in fact confirm that an opposum stopped by.

Conveniently, I'd caught a mouse in one of my basement traps, so instead of tossing it in a certain spot in the pachysandra I knew I wouldn't be venturing into, I deposited said dead mouse near my other food offerings and the heated water.  It gobbled up the sliced overripe banana and took off with the mouse but left the organic dates and whole wheat pasta.

Opossums are said to reduce local tick populations since they kill them when they groom themselves. They will also kill mice. Two good things, in my book, and also small snakes. While I like snakes, I don't like them in my basement, and they seem drawn to the warmth of my foundation in winter. (Ever notice how the snow melts surrounding your house before anything else?) 

I have documented no fewer than FOUR snakeskins shed in my basement.  I've done a lot of mouse-proofing under the lowest row of shingles, and that seems to have reduced mice getting in. I hope it does same with the snakes. I need to go around again since I caught that last mouse just yesterday after going mouse-free for a week or so.

I never got around to posting pix of the beautiful bobcats I saw here in my yard 3 or 4 weeks ago. Since they don't spend time together except to mate, I am guessing these 2 are mother and offspring. I watched them flush a rabbit out of the brush with ease and teamwork. Felt bad for the rabbit, but... This was a very rare and special sighting, and definitely a highlight of my 30 years here, as I have never seen 2 together, and I was able to take photographs for about 30 minutes before they disappeared.