1. Shopping: We went to Aldi this week and spent $24.64 after a $0.50 discount from returned bottles and a $0.25 Ibotta rebate. I did make a haul for Youtube, but haven't got it edited yet. So you will all have to be satisfied with a picture:

Some meals we had this week were macaroni and cheese, scrambled egg burritos, ham and cheese sandwiches, taco bowls, leftovers and more leftovers. Hubs was gone for three lunches this week so I just had smoothies or eggs for those meals. We also did a fair amount of potlucks and eating out this week. 

2. Garden: harvested bell peppers, cucumbers and herbs from the garden. We might have been eating sweet corn right now, had the raccoons not gotten in and decimated my patch. After this incident we put up a short electric fence around the corn, but one night it got turned off and they got in again. Thankfully there are still a few ears left, but I'm still waiting for them to grow to full size.

As a side note, I also picked some wild elderberries to make cough syrup with.

3. Cooking: this week I canned nine pints of dill pickles and two pints of plums. Our plum tree was badly rotted in the center, and a strong wind blew it over last week. Thankfully the plums were almost ripe, so I picked them and brought them inside to ripen gradually. This week I will probably can or freeze the rest of them. Apart from the canning, I also made cheese and popsicles with leftover smoothie "batter".

4. Collected cans on various walks. 

5. I bought a tank top and pair of bed sheets (needed for a project) at our local thrift store. The shirt was $1.50 (50% off) and the sheets were $6.00. Usually I don't shop at our local thrift store because it's expensive. However, I had JUST purchased a brand new set of sheets at Walmart for $25.00 when the thought occurred to me that I could get away with using thrift store sheets. Even though they weren't half off, the used sheets saved me $19.00. Normally I would never spend $1.50 on a used tank top either, but it was a specialty shirt that I will use heavily for the next couple months. ;)

6. I did a lot of organizing and de-cluttering last week. Isn't it amazing how cleaning will reveal treasures that you didn't know you had? One of the tasks on my to-do list was to clean out my herb collection. I found over 36 medicinal herbs (dried), several tinctures and a salve. Most of these were homegrown, foraged or otherwise made by me for pennies on the dollar. I moved them from a high, hard-to-reach cupboard down to a more easy-to-access one. Some of the older herbs I replaced with new herbs of the same variety. There were enough extras of some herbs to start a separate collection for animal use. My goal for this project was to make the herbs more accessible and usable, which I think was accomplished.

Mixed in with my herbs were a ton of non-medicinal loose-leaf teas that I had forgotten about. Yay! I will really enjoy those this winter, now that I'm aware of their presence. I also found an envelope with cash in it that we had saved for a previous vacation. THAT'S an exciting find.

6. Downloaded some free audio books from Amazon. If you are homeschooling or enjoy classic (out-of-copyright) fiction, you can almost always download the free ebook on Amazon. For those who don't know, you can get a free Kindle app for your phone or device, and then read the book from there instead of buying a Kindle.

Amazon is the parent company of Audible, producer of audio books. I love audio books because they save me a massive amount of time. I can "read" while I'm on my daily walk, doing animal chores, gardening, cleaning or washing dishes. The only problem: even though the Audible app is free, most of their high-quality audio books are VERY expensive- like, $15.00 or more per book. However, if you "buy" a free classic fiction ebook on Amazon, sometimes you can order the audio version between $0.00 and $2.99 as an add-on purchase. 

The books I downloaded to my phone were Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, and The Man Who Knew Too Much by G.K. Chesterton. Both are fiction works. I may or may not listen to the first (after reading the description I realized I had already seen a movie of the story), but I really like Chesterton's non-fiction and am interested to see what his fiction is like. The Man Who Knew Too Much is a collection of eight detective short stories, with a total listening time of six hours. For productivity reasons I favor non-fiction over fiction, but I feel like there is less time wasted with audio books because I can do something with my hands while listening to the story.

Note: obviously if an audio book is not free on Amazon/Audible, you can most likely borrow it for free from your local library. Several weeks ago I figured out how to put CD audio books onto my phone, but it does take a lot more time and you don't get to keep the book.

7. Lastly, I sold three dozen eggs and three bars of soap. This will help a LOT with my hobby farm expenses.

​
YouTube Videos:

I only uploaded two videos this week.

1. Amazon Unboxing (a "haul" of some non-food items I ordered!)
2. How to Make Dill Pickles

The longer I put up Youtube videos, the more I realize what people will actually watch. There is far less interest in DIY or tutorial videos than there is for "here's what I bought" videos.

Because of this strange phenomenon, I've decided to start doing Amazon hauls (infrequent as they are) along with the grocery store and garage sale hauls. Most of my Amazon purchases are well thought out, researched and "slept on"- sometimes for months- before I actually buy. I explain my Amazon rules in the video, as well as my thoughts on Amazon Prime.

For those of you who are interested, I've set up an affiliate links page for my Amazon purchases. If you like the same things that I do, and you're interested in passively supporting my blog/Youtube channel, buy through those links! Another way you can support my work is by purchasing my books and leaving a review on Amazon. I'm not desperate for money, but I AM desperate for reviews! So if you have already purchased/downloaded a book, thank you SO MUCH and I would really appreciate it if you could leave an honest review for other future readers.

Til next time,
​-Bethany

Hi everyone! Today I wanted to let you know that I'm expanding my Youtube channel. I have been working on some improvements over the past few days, and added a few non-grocery-haul videos that you may be interested in.


For All You Visual Folks...

My goal over the summer is to upload as many videos as possible in order to add a visual element to my blog. I'm certainly no TV personality, but some of the concepts I discuss here are just better seen in person than read about. I'm also hoping to expand on concepts and techniques that I talk about in The Housewife's Guide to Frugal Food.

If you are a Youtube viewer and enjoy watching my videos, please don't hesitate to "like" and subscribe to my channel. Thanks!

-Bethany

Audible: Not What I Expected

Last month I signed up for a free Audible trial. I realized how much time it was taking me to read books, and I decided that the $15.00 per month would be worth it, if it bought me more time.

After we got back from our trip to Florida, it was time to select my first paid audio book. I wanted to get the best value for my money, so I made a wish list of titles that were over 20 hours in length. Essentially, I would be paying $0.75 per hour or less to read a book to me. I thought that was worth it.

Then, out of those books, I wrote down all of the books with a regular (actually, discounted for Audible members) price of more than $30.00. Out of these 14 books, I picked out the "top three"- that is, the three books with the most hours AND top dollar value. The best value was David McCullough's Truman, with a price of $66.11 and playback time of 54 hours. Wow! A monetary savings of $51.11, and an hourly reading rate of just $0.28.


Running Into Problems

You would think that choice would be a no-brainer, but I realized later that I didn't actually want to spend 50 hours listening to a story about President Truman. There were FREE podcasts and audiobooks that I would much rather listen to. So, I went back to my list. Still, most of the books were history books. I wondered if I could find books in any other genres to listen to.

Instead of spending another three hours browsing Audible, I went to Amazon and typed in some of my favorite keywords. Then I scrolled down the list of books, looking for those with an Audible edition. I found two, and then went to Audible to read the reviews.

One of the books, as it turns out, had a lot of good reviews, but I didn't think it was what I wanted for $15.00. The other book had a lot of good reviews as well, but many listeners said it would be better to buy the paperback, as it was in more of a workbook format. So I passed on those two books.

I spent probably another hour looking for audio books that I liked. The problem I kept running into was that the price on Audible was less than $15.00. If I was paying $15.00 per month for a subscription, it didn't make sense to buy a $14.00 book. But then again, if I DIDN'T have the subscription, my price for most of those books would go up to $20.00 or more.

So, I went back to the history books on my list. When I started looking up the Audible reviews, there was one last issue. Commenters said, "The book sounds like Siri is reading it" or "This was their worst day in the studio- ever". Finally I found a book that cost more than $15.00, sounded interesting, and had good Audible reviews. I used my credit to buy it. It only had a monetary value of $17.95, and under 20 hours of playback time, so it would not have made my first list. But, oh well.


Not Sure if I Will Continue

My first real Audible subscription purchase didn't live up to my expectations. I wanted to buy books that I were already on my reading list, but most of the paperback books on my shelf are not available in audio format. They are either too old, too niche, or too short to warrant spending my $15.00 credit on.

Instead of spending five hours on the couch reading, I spent over five hours on the computer, trying to find a suitable book to buy. This thing was supposed to SAVE time, not waste it!! For next month's purchase, I have created a few guidelines.

1) It must be something I would enjoy reading.
2) Preferably a book on my shelf right now, that I will not have time to sit down and read.
3) The book must cost more than $15.00 on Audible.

Instead of making a wish list from the high-value books, then, I am going to buy a book already on my bookshelf. I will probably end up paying around $1.00 per hour for someone to read to me, but if I can do a $5.00 per hour activity while listening to an Audible book, I'll still be "earning" $4.00 per hour.

In the long term, I think it would be more frugal to pay for paperback books and listen to FREE audio.


The Good News For Non-Members

The good news for all of you non-members of Audible is that you can find a LOT of cheap or free audio to listen to without paying $15.00 per month. Amazon Prime members have access to Audible's "channels", which often include free audio books as well as podcast-type material. Then there are also free podcasts on Stitcher and iTunes to listen to.

Lastly- and this is a hack I learned before our road trip- you can "buy" a free ebook version of older classic books on Amazon, and get the Audible version for a few dollars. I downloaded David Copperfield (Kindle version) on Amazon for free, and then bought the 36 hour Audible version for $0.95. If I had bought ONLY the Audible version, it would have cost my $15.00 credit, $2.00 with an Audible membership, or $40.00 without an Audible membership. My total cost per hour for David Copperfield, then, was under $0.03 per hour. 

If you are in the market for good, classic fiction (pre-1910's), it's easy to find, and very cheap. Non-fiction audio books are a little harder to be frugal about, but you can still find pre-1910's non-fiction on Audible for cheap, a tiny bit of modern non-fiction on Audible Channels (for Amazon Prime members), and a lot of modern non-fiction audio though free podcasts.

Obviously, if money is tight, then borrowing non-fiction through your local library is going to be the best option. Second, find a cheap used paperback version on Amazon. If the used version is still not cheap, you can still buy it, read the book, and resell it on Amazon if the value hasn't gone down too much. Usually I only buy Kindle books if they 1) are free, 2) aren't available at the library, or 3) if they cost less than $5.00. It's important to remember that Kindle books have no resale value, so you MUST get your money's worth out of reading the book. Lastly, I check if the audio book would be cheaper with the purchase of an ebook. For modern non-fiction, though, usually it is just cheaper to buy the audio book if that is what you want.

Are you an Audible member? How to you chose which books to buy and how do you get the best value?

Good morning everyone! Today I thought I'd share a few things I've learned in the past year giving piano lessons. You can apply the concepts to any music lesson, really.

Why Give Piano Lessons?

For those of you who have children, the reason to give your child piano lessons is quite obvious. To better their future, of course! While music may not be a lucrative career for everyone, it will provide more opportunities  to make friends. It will give your teenagers something to do in their free time. Music can also be used more creatively. When I was 15 or 16, my sister and I got into writing parodies. She would write the words, and I would provide the music. We used parodies for everything from memorizing information to selling 4-H cattle to giving reports in college. Later on, I played in several bands and doors opened in that way. I actually met my husband through a music group I was involved in. !!!

Free pianos are everywhere, if you are willing to move them. This is a good deal, financially speaking, except that acoustic pianos (the kind you don't plug in) will require tuning once a year, more or less, for a cost of $75.00-$150.00 depending on your area. It might be more frugal to buy a $50.00 used keyboard for your beginning students, and maybe upgrade to the real thing if they still show interest in a few years. 

For those of you who don't have children, but still have some musical ability, giving lessons will allow you to pass on your love for music, and make a few bucks on the side. To be honest, giving beginner lessons is quite easy for the money you make. In our area, you could make $20.00-$30.00 per hour giving beginner lessons, without any sort of degree or training. If you don't have a nice piano at home, you can always do lessons at the student's home, using their instrument.

Understand What Motivates Students (and Parents)

When you are giving piano lessons, it's important to realize that you are in the motivation business, not necessarily the teaching business. Of course you will do some teaching sometimes, but the lesson book will do most of the actual teaching. You are there to reinforce the teaching, answer questions, and provide motivation and encouragement for the student. Different aged students require different forms of motivation:

1. Young Beginners (ages 3-8): teaching young beginners will be a slow process. Unless you are working with a prodigy, this is the hardest age group to teach. You will spend the lesson trying to 1) keep their attention, 2) entertain them, and 3) reinforce whatever you taught them last week. I try to keep lessons very short for this age group- 10-20 minutes- because they have a short attention span. If the parent insists on more time, you can fill it up with games or fun things. It is really useless to try and have a five-year-old sight read for 20 minutes straight. 

Most children are coming to lessons because their parent made them or convinced them to. This makes it harder because you have to please the child by making the lesson fun, but you also have to please the parent with decent progress in learning. Sometimes parents don't understand that you can't force a child to learn, but even if your student is not learning as much as Mom would like, she will probably not make him quit (or change teachers) if he enjoys coming to see you every week. So you need to focus on pleasing the child first.

2. Older Beginners (ages 8-13): this age group is easier to teach because they will pick up musical concepts quicker and be more apt to practice. However, like the younger group, their motivation is not necessarily to get better at their instrument. Some good motivators for this group are 1) competition and 2) prizes. Though a 10-year-old may feel good after completing a piece, adding a real tangible reward will help reinforce that feeling of accomplishment.

3. Teenagers: I would say that teenagers are the easiest group of beginner students. They understand rhythm, harmony, melody, and note reading very easy. Oftentimes they have their own motivations for taking the lesson (especially if they are paying for it themselves) which include 1) learning a new skill, 2) being able to play with their peers, or 3) impressing the opposite sex. Number three is a real motivator for boys, especially. A teenager should not really need a prize after finishing the piece, because that will be reward enough in itself. It is a good idea to let teenagers pick their own song. If they need help deciding, suggest a piece from their favorite movie. What is cooler than playing a song that all of your friends can recognize?

Tips & Resources

Below are some things I have been using to help motivate my students, and some things I've done to keep them on track. 

1. Play a new piece every week. Sometimes a student doesn't practice at all and really needs to do the piece two weeks in a row, but try hard to get them on a new piece every week. I can remember as a student being very bored and discouraged playing the same piece week after week. 

If the piece is too big for your student to play well in one week, you can 1) break the piece into lines or pages, or 2) lower your standards of completion. Try to focus on one element of a song (rhythm, correct notes, dynamics, etc.) instead of insisting that everything be perfect. Remember, the five-year-old can't even comprehend what a perfect piece is, let alone perform one.

If you want your students to learn how to sight read well, it is very important that they play a new piece every week, regardless of how well they played it. The point is quantity, not quality. 

2. Have a game at the end of the lesson. There are a million gazillion music games out there for free on the internet. Sometimes I feel cheated because, as a student, I NEVER had games during my lessons. Some of the games I've picked for my students are "the high/low game" (i.e. aural training) where they close their eyes and guess if a note I played is higher or lower than the first; flash cards; matching printed keyboard sections to the piano keys, sight-reading crossword puzzles, and note-matching games. Like I said, there are a million out there. Find an area your student needs to work on, and then find a game that fits.

3. Have a "prize box". This is just a small plastic crate full of odds and ends that I picked up at the Dollar Tree or garage sales. Fake jewelry, stickers, notebooks, candy, or whatever else I think will be interesting to my students. At first, I would randomly have "prize box day" every other month or so. On prize box day, the students got a prize for how many songs they could play me, how many flashcards they could memorize, etc. Now I have a sticker chart, and when they reach a certain amount of stickers, they get a prize. This works better because it keeps them motivated every week (getting to put a sticker on their chart after every task) and still keeps the prize box idea going.

Getting prizes and stickers and a new song every week will help keep your student interested, which is really the most important thing when you are teaching someone under 10 years old. If you are looking to make money, young beginner students are the easiest to get because every parent wants little Johny or Sally to take music lessons. Therefore, knowing how to motivate young children is essential. A slow, but excited learner is better than an overwhelmed learner who quits altogether.

Starting a Music Studio

If you are thinking about giving lessons to earn money, there are some things you need to decide. I am not a "kid person", so I have chosen to keep my student number relatively low. I don't give lessons to kids that I know will misbehave or be difficult. Life is too short to dread giving a music lesson every week, even for $30.00 an hour. So...

1. Select your students carefully. Don't forget that when you select a student, you are also selecting a parent. Your student may be brilliant, but if they are late every week or don't pay, that can become an issue. And the issue is probably with the parent, not the child.

2. Set a price. As a student, I remember paying between $12.00 and $15.00 for a half hour lesson. As a teacher, I would decide a price based on what people are willing to pay and how bad you want the client. I would rather give a $5.00 lesson to a good student than a $15.00 lesson to a bad one.

3. Decide if you host lessons at your home or do house calls. I figure that if someone wants lessons bad enough, they will be able to come to my house. It is less time and gas money for me that way. Plus the students will be less distracted and better behaved. 

4. Invest back into your students. I like to take a portion of my earnings and buy nice things for the prize box and/or make up birthday gifts. If you see a piece of music that you think your student would like, buy that as a gift. $60.00 per month for one or two students is a lot of money. Don't you think $5.00 spent on prizes every month would be worth keeping your clientele? I certainly think so.

Resources:

Most of the information I shared today was gleaned or pilfered from other fantastic resources. Isn't it a beautiful thing that work has been done for you? Here are some ideas:

​Teach Piano Today Podcast
Color In My Piano (fun worksheets and games) colorinmypiano.com/printables/?dl_cat=4
Hoffman Academy (free online piano lessons)

Good luck and happy teaching!
-Bethany

Yesterday I woke up with the worst  eye twitch ever. My right eyelid kept moving around like crazy, and if you've ever had an eye twitch, you know it's almost as annoying as hiccups can be.

I'd had the twitch for about a week, off and on. It's caused by eyestrain; mostly two things: 1) lack of sleep, and 2) too much screen time. I decided that it was time for a screen-free day. That meant no phone, no computer. 

Find More Time in Your Day

What I instantly noticed- like, before 9:00 am- is how much extra time I seemed to have. Every so often I would start walking over to the computer, then I'd turn away and have to do something else. During the morning I fed my goats, cleaned up, read a book and ate breakfast. Then I made a 2-for-1 meal- stroganoff rice for lunch, and a lamb roast, potatoes and carrots in the crock pot for dinner.

After lunch, I looked up at the clock and it was not even 1:00 pm yet. I wondered how many minutes I would have spent at the computer that morning to "look things up", had I opened another tab every time I felt like it. I probably felt this urge at least once every hour, and if I spent a conservative 15 minutes looking up a recipe, looking for podcasts, checking Facebook, checking email.... that is 25% of my morning, gone like that.

Eliminating Interruptions

Another thing my screen-free day allowed me to do was FOCUS. I realized that I've been using the internet and my phone as a kind of "break time"/procrastination after I accomplish each and every task, instead of just moving to the next thing on my to-do list.

During the afternoon, I cleaned up lunch, collected eggs, did the dishes, and read a book. Then I read a different book. And another different book. I looked up and it was only 3:00 pm. So much time left!! I remembered that I wanted to make some puff pastry for the freezer, so I did that. Then I still had time left, so I decided to mop the floor and do some other cleaning. Read some more. Hubs came in early from work because he wanted to do some errands before we went to church music practice. "Will you be ready in 45 minutes?" he asked.

"Sure." I said. "I have dinner ready if you want to eat before we go."

"Perfect!" he said. He had a couple things to do outside, then came in about 10 minutes later and we had a nice, leisurely dinner before heading into town... early.

Books Are Enough
The last thing I realized is how much I appreciate physical books and I need to be reading them more them blogs or pithy little articles shared on Facebook. What I spend much of my time doing on the internet is "looking things up", or researching. However, using Pinterest and Google for research is actually very, very time consuming.

Reading answers to goat questions on forums, for example, is very redundant and you get the same answer about 10 times over, but even though I have my answer I don't have any background information to the questions. It's like getting the answer to a math question without doing the math. If I google "what to do if my goat won't eat", I get a million answers but I haven't done the background research to discover why my goat won't eat. Yesterday I got to read a good portion of The Goatkeeper's Veterinary Book that I ordered. Now I have a better understanding of different problems that can arise (BEFORE they've happened to me!), and I'll be able to answer questions without turning to a screen for help. I feel like a better goat keeper for having read the book, but when I read goat forums I don't feel informed in the same way.

One interesting thing that happened while I was reading: I read a tidbit in one book about Eleanor Roosevelt. "I would like to read more about her life," I thought to myself. Then I remembered that I had in my possession another book with a short biography on each First Lady. After I had finished the chapter in the first book, I found my First Lady book and read about Eleanor Roosevelt there instead of turning to Wikipedia, which no doubt would have led me on several researching rabbit trails and took far more of my time.

For those of you compulsive "looker-uppers" like me, know that for the most part, books are enough. Reading books (as opposed to short, pithy articles) will give you a deeper understanding of a wide ranch of topics, and you will feel more able to deal with circumstances as they arise. 

During the time that I was earning an income, I invested in many high-quality textbook-style reference books, centered around my interests. These will be more than enough to provide a quality learning experience for me, WITHOUT the time-wasting and eye twitch that comes from spending hours on the internet trying to sort the useful from the not-useful. If you are a researcher, invest in yourself by purchasing books or borrowing from the library, and further invest in yourself by giving yourself a Screen-Free Day every once in a while in order to read those books.

Conclusion & My Challenge

Based on my findings from Screen-Free Thursday, I'll be attempting to limit my computer time to 30 minutes a day, or an hour on days that I write. I realize that being an writer, it will be difficult to limit screen time. However, it will be easy to limit internet time, and that I will for sure limit to 30 minutes. This will be more than enough to check social media, use my favorite phone apps and keep up with my two favorite blogs, every week.

To handle my unavoidable Google questions, I'll keep a piece of paper on the table and write down anything that might come up. Then during my computer time, I'll look those things up in an efficient manner, without going on rabbit trails. 
Have you tried having a Screen-Free Day? Could you really use a Screen Free-Day? I challenge you to treat yourself to one!

-Bethany

P.S. Screen time today is 48 minutes so far. Not bad for writing this whole article!

You may be wondering why it is that I just got a library card yesterday. Well, I did have one before... back in the days before I'd discovered the internet. Before I had enough money to buy things on Amazon, before Kindles. In this day and age of bite-sized reading, Facebook, Youtube and the myriad of tutorial websites, the appeal of libraries has diminished for me.

There were other reasons I quit going to the library before we were married, as well. One of the librarians started complaining about how many books I would check out, and I didn't like being told that "[she] was spending all of [her] time on one patron". I knew that there were other people that checked out a lot of books, and maybe I just always saw her on a bad hair day, but I dreaded going in there. About that same time, the library sent out a notice that they would be charging an annual fee for families outside of their township and putting a limit on the number of books that could be checked out. My family started using the small library closer to us. I had less time to read, and more money to buy books that I wanted, so after that I rarely used the library. 

It's Still Worth Going To, Though
​
Even if most of your learning needs are met through other means- and mine are met through blogs, Pinterest, Youtube, and different podcasts- the library still has something to offer. First of all, it's free. So you have nothing to lose by walking in and getting a library card. All it takes is your driver's license.

1. Interloan system: Allows you to borrow from any library in the state. As you can imagine, this gives you access to almost any book out there, in addition to audio books. This feature alone will save me probably $30 per year on buying books that I'm only going to read once or twice anyway. Even though I'm trying to only read books that I have already, inevitably there are a few books every year that I must. read. now. and end up paying for.

2. Fewer books at home: If I use the library, there is no reason to keep classic literature, cookbooks or other widely available one-time reads stored on my shelves at home. This will help get rid of clutter and make life easier for me.

3. Local history resources: Another thing I noticed at the library was a lot of independently published local history books and pamphlets. Although there is some local history on the internet, there's not a whole lot out there. In addition to the books you can check out, the library also has a "historical room" with old yearbooks and other interesting local history tidbits. You can only get in by appointment, but it's still free to look through.

4. Within biking distance: The library is only a 20 minute bike ride from our house. It's right across from the post office as well, so this summer I'll be able to 1) exercise, 2) mail packages, and 3) get books, all for free and all at the same time, possibly within an hour. 

It's that time of year again... I'm committing to read the books I already have, and not buy more! Won't you join me? The rules are 1) no buying books for more than $1 (for those with clutter issues, preferably don't buy any), 2) post a review on Goodreads, and 3) donate or sell the book when you're done. My goal for the past year was to read one book per month.

2015 Results
I'll admit, I didn't adhere strictly to this goal in 2015. I posted eight reviews. I read the eight books plus a few more, which I didn't get around to reviewing. Those reviews will be coming! I also ended up buying about three new (used) books and one Kindle ebook in 2015. So, not a perfect record but I think it was okay.

2016 Books Read
A lot of my reading happens during the winter months. Surprise! This year I've already finished two books, and I'm posting a review for Square Foot Gardening, which I read last year. This book is a MUST MUST READ for anyone who plans to have a garden, ever. It is packed with not only square foot techniques, but also seed starting, fertilizing, composting, and individual plant care techniques and ways to extend the growing season. I just wish I would have read it sooner.

The other two books I read (mostly while on vacation) were Margin by Richard Swenson, and Bananas, by Peter Chapman. 

I received Margin as a Christmas gift, and Bananas was in our condo when we arrived in Panama. I thought about reading it, but didn't until I saw someone reading it on a bus. It must be a good book if some random person was reading it on a bus, right??

Bananas is about, as the title says, how the United Fruit Company changed the world. It was absolutely fascinating! The one tiny piece of information that I could not believe was how bananas were originally marketed and sold. There obviously was no market for bananas in the US because nobody knew what they even were. After a while, the company started "educating" the general public about bananas and marketing them as a health food, even going so far as to tell mothers that bananas could be fed to children as a meat replacement. Does this sound familiar? A bit like soybeans perhaps, or how about all of those fake "milks" on the market today that are supposedly healthier than real milk? Yes, history has relevance because it repeats itself.  

Ranting aside, Bananas was a fascinating book about fruit, politics, marketing and history. I'd give it a 7 on a scale of 1-10. Margin was a good reminder on why we should strive to have a little extra time in the schedule (probably a 6.5), and Square Foot Gardening was absolutely, postitively worth my time and $0.50 of garage sale money to read (9 out of 10). 

How did you do in your reading last year? What are you goals for this year?

Happy reading!
-Bethany

In September I read about Duolingo in a blog post from the Prudent Homemaker. Duolingo is a free language learning program/phone app- almost like a game- that users can learn new languages or brush up on old ones with. I had planned to start studying Spanish again anyway, using the same great book as I had last year. However, I decided to give Duolingo a shot instead.

With its immersion format, levels and prizes, I found Duolingo absolutely addictive. Because I already knew the basic grammar and some vocabulary, I climbed the "language tree" rather quickly. Even practicing concepts that I already knew, I still managed to pick up new vocabulary words and reinforce verb conjugations, articles, etc. 

The rubber met the road when I started learning new verb tenses like present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, the use of the verb haber, modal verbs, things like that. While Duolingo offers very little if any grammatical explanation for these concepts, I "got the idea" pretty quick. I still plan on reading about these concepts before we leave for Central America, just so I can understand them better. But I will have to look elsewhere for information because Duolingo just doesn't have it. This being said, it is a great tool to have and very possible to learn new information and vocabulary with in a fun way.

Time Commitment
In the account settings, you can set a daily progress goal anywhere from "casual" (10 XP per day- takes 5-10 minutes) to "insane" (50 XP per day- takes 20-30 minutes). At first my goal was automatically set at 20 XP per day, but I did more than that because it was so addictive. In October when I stopped gardening and farmers market, I reset the goal to "insane". For the most part I was able to complete the daily goal, sometimes more, except on the weekends. Obviously as I leveled up the lessons took longer, but it was still very doable. I was able to complete the language tree (that is, work through the entire program) in three months. The way Duolingo works is that as time goes by, words or concepts will need to be re-practiced. Even though I technically completed the program, I can still log in and practice new concepts.

How much can you learn with Duolingo?
While Duolingo can teach new concepts, as was my experience, it can't bring you anywhere near fluency. Even after completing the language tree, Duolingo still says I am only 56% fluent. Honestly, I don't think any program or practicing system can bring you anywhere near fluent. Unless you've actually tried to have a REAL conversation in Spanish (not pre-scripted "hi, how are you? My name is Bethany" conversations), you won't understand how little ability you have. I remember asking Hubs (who really can have a Spanish conversation) what the intelligence level is of someone who had taken, say, Spanish I or II in high school. "Well, you could probably talk with a three-year-old." he answered thoughtfully. I thought this was an insult to students who had spent hours and hours completing assignments, but Hubs was being serious.

Last year we were sitting at a coffee shop in Antigua when a five- or six-year-old boy came and asked Hubs for some money. Amused, my husband carried on a short conversation with him. How old are you? Do you have brothers and sisters? Where are your parents? What do you like to do? I understood some of it, like when the boy said his older brother was fat. But I missed the part about his parents working at the coffee shop, and some other things. Though he didn't succeed in getting any money from us, Hubs let him look at the pictures on our phone and offered the little guy some of his cheesecake. 

​From what I can tell, the last book review I posted on Goodreads was in June. Oops! According to my bookshelf reading challenge, I'm supposed to be reading one book (that I already own) every month. While I haven't posted reviews in July, August, September, and October, I've still managed to get some reading in.

However, I must admit that in July I broke down and bought a new book. It was a very unique book that I had 0% chance of finding at a garage sale. I paid $10 for the Kindle ebook, Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker. You can read my review and why I didn't think I got my money's worth over at Goodreads.

In the meantime, I'll restate WHY my bookshelf-only reading challenge is a great idea, and how it is still possible to get a great education with free or cheap books.

Save $120+ Per Year
If you are a voracious reader, you probably spend a lot of money on books. Books are like your candy. When a new one comes out, you just have to have it. After I got my Kindle several years ago, I was spending about $10 a month (that's only ONE book people!) on ebooks alone, not including other used books that I bought on Amazon. It was just so easy to click and buy. It wasn't so easy to finish reading a book before I found more books that I just had to have. It came to the point where collecting books was more my hobby than actually reading them.

Now I'm at the point where I'm starting to chip away at my book collection. My goal this year was to read and then donate or sell one book per month. Out of my 263 real books and 60 Kindle books (yep, I just counted), I've been able to finish and review eight this year. Not a bad start, really. Hopefully before Christmas I'll be able to finish reading and review a couple more. If I read 12 books per year, my collection should last at least 26 years.

The Good News- More Books for Less Money
The good news is that going on a Bookshelf-Only Reading challenge (even for 26 years) is not as hard as you think. Here were my rules:

Rules:
1. No buying books on Amazon or other bookstores (high-value books found for free or very cheap at garage sales may be exceptions). A good rule for garage sale books is to not pay more than $1.
2. Try to read one book every month from your current collection.
3. Post a review on Goodreads.
4. Sell or donate the book so someone else can enjoy it.

Even if you don't shop at bookstores, there are plenty of VERY affordable books at thrift stores and garage sales. In 2015 I bought probably 15 books at garage sales, thrift stores and library book sales. In addition, I was also given some books. I also downloaded at least ten free books on to my Kindle. 

You can see that even if I NEVER buy a book from Amazon (or any bookstore) again, I won't run out of new reading material. At this rate, I'm still more a book collector than a book reader. But simply cutting out bookstores and Amazon purchases has allowed me to spend far less on this habit. It's like a coffee addict who stops going to coffee shops. He's still a coffee addict- just a richer one.

Free Books are Just As Good
After you've read so many books, you'll find out that really, there is nothing new under the sun. In almost every area except technology, information remains the same. Reading a history book from 1890 will provide almost the same story about George Washington as a history book from 1930 or 2005. Most authors and publishers are great at repackaging and marketing information. Cooking techniques, marriage advice, herbal medicine- none of it really changes. And if there is truly something new out there, it is probably available for free on the internet.

What does this mean for us? Simply that any book written in the last century is probably just as good as most written last week. And many books in the public domain (anything pre- 1923) are available online for free.

As part of my "Bookshelf-Only Reading Challenge", I recently finished up John Adams, a biography by David McCullough. (A full review can be found on my Goodreads page.) I was reminded of how powerful a biography is in teaching history, even to old married folks like myself.

Why is a biography more effective than a history textbook? One word: STORY. In a biography, you really get to know a person. You sympathize, rejoice with, cry with and laugh with the characters, which conveniently happened to be real people. You get a feel for that person's character, philosophy of life, and how he or she made decisions.

In reading about John Adams, second President of the United States, I didn't just read about John Adams. That would have been incredibly boring. I also got to know his wife Abigail, children John Quincy, Charles, Thomas and Nabby... his best friends and political enemies. I got to see the old, lazy side of "early to bed, early to rise" Ben Franklin in France. I became more acquainted with the spendthrift side of Thomas Jefferson, who, at the end of the book, died $100,000 in debt. In addition to these "characters" I also got to know Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Samuel Adams, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Marquis Lafayette and his wife, John Paul Jones, and even bad guy King George III to a point where they were no longer just names to me, but real people.

Those things, places and events that had previously been floating around in my mind somewhere under the file "1700s" (John Paul Jones, the French Revolution, the Federalist party) have now been more nicely arranged to where I can understand and better appreciate that which took place. And I can also better appreciate our second President, who I doubt many of us can even name.

A Better Homeschool Curriculum
I have no authority to say what works or what doesn't work as a homeschool mom, but I do have years and years of experience as a student, which I will be happy to share.

I don't remember having any history "curriculum" at all after 7th grade. None, nilch, nada. Instead, I had a ton of great historical fiction, biographies and autobiographies at my disposal (read: library!) and the occasional tourist stop at some place of historical significance. My teacher-mom didn't really appreciate history as much as my dad, but gave us plenty of opportunities to not only read about history see and touch it. For example, as I read about Monticello this month, I could remember the hilltop where it stood, the gardens, slave quarters, and family cemetery out back. I remembered Jefferson's octagon-shaped "cabinet" room with curious scientific instruments and an adjustable desk that he bought on his trip to France (a.k.a international shopping spree). Was I alive in 1800? No, but I did get the opportunity to visit Monticello as a teenager. (No time or money for an in-person visit? Many of these places offer online virtual tours for free.)

And don't think you have to start your third-grader on a mammoth 650-page book about a man that most kids have never heard of. Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books are a great way to introduce biographies. I was only in elementary school when my mom read these to my sister and I, and we were able to see most, if not all of the historical sites after reading the books. Obviously I had little knowledge of history at nine or ten years old and don't remember as much about it as later trips, but it was a fun introduction.

I think it's sad that our schools- public, private, and home schools- cause history to be a boring, unimportant but necessary school subject instead of the fascinating, meaningful story that it is. History is not about memorizing names, dates and places. History is about learning from the past, and if nothing else, it can sure be entertaining!

Maybe this is the inner better-than-thou homeschooler coming out of me, but I can't stand it when people get their centuries mixed up. Or they get World War II mixed up with World War I. We're not talking about presidents here, laws, shoe styles or small minutia like that. We're talking about grown adults, who have sat through many a history class, not knowing the 1820 from 1920. I think there is something messed up about the way we are teaching history. 

So there's my rant, and here's my challenge: if you want to cultivate an appreciation of history in yourself or someone else, throw all your textbooks in the nearest dumpster. There are plenty of good biographies out there to enjoy, and if you're not a reader, there's this great thing called the History Channel, which has many documentary offerings on Netflix. And it doesn't stop there. You can buy historically-dressed dolls and paper dolls, history-themed games like Axis and Allies, go to presidential mansions... it's a slippery slope that gets more fun as you go down. 

Do you enjoy reading biographies? Why or why not?