My Month So Far

I'm in the process of creating new cover art for many of my books.

Then I decided to edit and expand the shorter novels to what they were before they were print published several years ago.

The outcome is that I keep finding more things I "should" do to each of my published books—like format the print editions which I've intended to do for a very long time.

So, I'm in the office after a summer of mostly being away. I'm working hard and even have a new book outlined which I'll write as soon as I get the other 3 through a final edit and uploaded to publish.

If you are a subscriber to my newsletter, I LOVE READING, be patient. I know I missed sending one in October. I'll make up for that this month so don't be surprised if you get 2 this month and maybe 2 next month with a lot of free book and sale offers.

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

The more I do; the more I find I should do. It's a double-edged sword.

Love to read? Sign up for my free Newsletter, I LOVE READING. Once a month, you'll receive exclusive content and news about giveaways, bargains, and new releases.

Honoring Veterans Today

In grateful appreciation, I thank you for your service.

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

“The soldier's heart, the soldier's spirit, the soldier's soul, are everything.” —George Marshall 

Saturday Share - Save Big Bucks on Food, Part 2

Good morning! I have my coffee so grab yours and let's get into Part 2 of Save Money on Food Budget.

Last month, I wrote a long post for Saturday Share: Save Big Bucks on Food, Part 1. It had to be Part 1 because it was so long!

I may have said everything I needed to say, but I thought I'd recap the 2 Rules and give you some resources to help you out.

https://slingwords.blogspot.com/2024/10/saturday-share-save-big-bucks-on-food-part-1.html

BASICS OF SAVING MONEY ON FOOD

(1) Change how you think about putting a meal on the table.

Many people pick up dinner on the way home from work. I understand the thinking. "I'm tired. I don't feel like cooking. This is easy." Rethink the so-called "convenience" foods of stopping at a fast food drive-thru, a deli counter, ordering for pickup, or eating out at a sit-down restuarant.

Instead, go straight home and prepare a simple and delicious meal where you control the ingredients. It's entirely doable if you take time to plan ahead. This method initially requires you to Think, Commit, Plan, Prep, and Follow Through.

Think about the time involved to stop and pick up food when you could go straight home after a long tiring day. Make a commitment to do things differently. 

A rotisserie chicken gives more than 1 meal.

Take a weekend or even a week to get set up for cooking at home. Make menus, buy ingredients, etc. and prep a week's worth of salads, side dishes, or whatever in advance. 

Then you just pull a container out of the fridge and you're ready to finish it up. Read Part 1 for details. 

(2) Embrace some or all of these genius food management strategies mentioned in Part 1 and those below.

Cooking is an art form, but it's an art form anyone can learn. To learn or to gain inspiration for delicious, cost-friendly meals that are easy to make, try some of my favorite YouTube Channels

COOKING WITH YOUTUBE

1. Epicurious with professional chef and culinary instructor Frank Proto. In my opinion, he's a rockstar in the kitchen. He's at the high end of the cooking scale. He can teach you how to make restaurant quality food. Try his Best Spaghetti and Meatballs You'll Ever Make.

2. Allrecipes with Nicole. She's my favorite. The mission of Allrecipes is: "...to help cooks of all interests and skill sets discover, and share in, the thrill of home cooking.

Try Nicole's 3 Meals from a Rotisserie Chicken. While there, subscribe and go to the channel. You can find her recipes by looking for her smiling face.

3. Julie Pacheco is one of the slow-cooker-queens on YouTube. She has nearly a million subscribers. She creates family friendly meals using a slow-cooker which makes putting dinner on the table a matter of throwing things in the Crock Pot in the morning, turning it on, and coming home to dinner ready to eat. Her most recent video as of my writing this is 5 Cheap and Easy 5-Ingredient Dinners.

4. Eating on a Dime is Carrie, a mother of 8 kids, whose mission statement is: "From crock pot recipes to freezer meals and one pot dinners, I am on a mission to help other families eat well on a budget without spending their entire life in the kitchen." That's what we're looking for, right? 

Her latest video is Easy Keilbasa and Potato Soup. 

I think this is enough to get you started. Get excited about cooking, serving better food than you get elsewhere, and saving money while doing it.

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

I'm a home cook and proud of it. Of course, my family is now spoiled. They'd actually rather eat at home than at a restaurant because I've taught them how to handle the question of, "What's for dinner?" with style and grace while saving money. You can do it too. Good luck. 

Love to read? Sign up for my free Newsletter, I LOVE READING. Once a month, you'll receive exclusive content and news about giveaways, bargains, and new releases.

Review - Gotcha, So 80s and So Delightful

Have you ever seen the 1985 comedy, Gotcha!? If you're looking for a funny, laugh-out-loud movie, you must watch Gotcha!.

My daughter and I were talking about this movie a couple of weeks ago. She laughingly recalled it as an "old" movie she watched in high school—and loved it. As we talked, she looked it up on Amazon and ordered it.

Sadly, it's streamed in some countries but apparently not in the U.S.A. according to my online search. However, you can purchase it from Amazon in BluRay and DVD.

We had a watch party one Saturday afternoon, and it was a blast. The movie is still fun and funny. Yes, it's a double-barrel blast from the past. 

First you have the music—Gotcha Where I Want You by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Relax and Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat, and other 80s hits.

Second, you have the starring role with a baby-faced Anthony Edwards, long before he was Dr. Mark Greene on TV's hit, ER, and before he was Goose, Maverick's sidekick in Top Gun. not to mention Linda Fiorentino in her sultry prime.

In Gotcha!, Edwards offered a full head of blond hair and an irrepressible performance as Jonathan Moore, a college kid who just wanted to get laid. Enter Sasha, beautifully portrayed by Fiorentino as a CIA agent looking for a naive asset.

The scene at the Parisian restaurant where Jonathan orders a drink is priceless.

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

Forget all the doom and gloom and today's movies that make little sense and have even less entertainment value. Add Gotcha! to your home video library. You won't be disappointed.

Joan participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, affiliate advertising designed to help websites earn advertising fees by linking to products on Amazon. If you click an Amazon link in her post, she may receive a small commision at no extra cost to you.

Love to read? Sign up for my free Newsletter, I LOVE READING. Once a month, you'll receive exclusive content and news about giveaways, bargains, and new releases.

Wise Quote for This Week

No matter who you voted for, I bet we agree on one thing—just glad that it's finally over.

I'm following the advice that some anonymous wise person once said: "To celebrate the end of this, I'm going to do absolutely nothing for the next 24 hours. And it's going to be glorious."

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

I'll admit I went beyond 24 hours, but I'll be back to work tomorrow.

Annual Daylight Savings Rant

Are you already running behind this morning? If so, you're just one of millions because the dreaded autumnal time change took place at 2AM this morning.

Personally, I hate DST and wish they'd go back to regular time. In today's world, there's really no reason to have it in today's world.

Although people blame credit Benjamin Franklin for the idea of daylight saving time, he was only joking when he wrote  the editor of the Journal of Paris and said it would get people out of bed earlier thus decreasing the use of candles and lamp oil.

THEY ALL CREATED DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

Apparently, New Zealand entomologist George Hudson in 1895 came up with what we know as daylight saving time, or DST. He thought a 2-hour time shift would offer more after-work hours of sun which would give him more daylight to hunt for insects in the summer. His idea was to move clocks ahead two hours in March and shift back two hours in October.

In 1905, British builder William Willett came up with his own complicated plan that changed time by 20 minutes every Sunday in April and then then moved them back every Sunday in September. Needless to say, that wasn't adopted.

It wasn't until 1916 in World War I when a DST plan was activated, and that was by the German Empire that set clocks ahead one hour to use less power for lighting and to save fuel for the war effort.

Other countries followed suit. When the war ended, they returned to standard time.

In 1918, the United States introduced a bill to create a seasonal time shift, but it lasted only 7 months until the bill was repealed. 

Then World War II began, and DST was brought back,  called War Time by then President Franklin Roosevelt. DST lasted until September 1945.

The idea of saving daylight was so popular that it was made permanent in the U.S. by the Uniform Time Act of 1966 with DST to begin the last Sunday in April and end the last Sunday in October. Through the years, DST has started earlier and ended later every few years.

DST AFFECTS HEALTH

It sounds weird that a seemingly simple time change of an hour can affect human health, but there are statistics and studies that bears this out. 

The risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular incidents increases on the day of the time change and in the days following. 

One study found a 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday after the switch to DST.

DST can worsen existing mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and seasonal affective disorder and cause mood disturbances. It also can cause sleep deprivation, increase the risk of digestive diseases like colitis.

The time change increases the risk of fatal car accidents by 6% in the week after the time change. For those whose jobs involve physical labor, workplace injuries also increase.

All of this happens because the time change disrupts the body's internal clock, or circadian rhythm. 

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

The only thing that might help is to change your bedtime, take a nap in the afternoon, and get exposed to more light. Also, hope DST becomes so unpopular nationwide that they end this assualt on the circadian rhythm.

Love to read? Sign up for my free Newsletter, I LOVE READING. Once a month, you'll receive exclusive content and news about giveaways, bargains, and new releases.

A Writer's Confession - Back to 1, 3, 5

I'll be honest. Much of September and October were non-events. It seems as if every new day brought a new distraction that required my time and attention.

I was away from the office days at a stretch to deal with everything from medical problems for one of my kids to feral hogs running free and tearing up the ground around our country home.

The only things I really accomplished were redesigning several book covers, moving all of my novels back to Kindle Unlimited, and learning as much as possible about Facebook ads which I plan to implement since I'm back in the office.

SOMETIMES LETTING GO IS THE BEST PLAN

With 5 novels completed in the last 18 months, I still have none of them finalized for publishing. Time seemed to slip away like sand sifting through my fingers at the beach. I finally realized my problem to a great extend is linear thinking and acting. It's as if I can't move forward if I have something that needs to be completed.

That incomplete thing hanging over me like a vulture was the book I wrote that was to be Book 2 of a planned series that began with Old Enough to Know Better—a book and characters I loved. I made an executive decision to set that unpublished manuscript aside because I finally admitted to myself that the reason I kept procrastinating on that final edit was that I'd lost my enthusiasm for the series.  

I may come back to it in the future, but I decided to remove the series concept from Old Enough to Know Better and just call it a stand alone for now. Letting go of that unpublished manuscript took away the pressure and guilt I felt about it.

Ironically, I heard that old Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler, yesterday on a YouTube video. 

When he sang about knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em, I had to laugh because that's exactly what I'd done with that unpublished novel.

PLAN FOR PROGRESS

I realized the first thing I needed to do was get back to basics in order to move forward. I returned to my 1, 3, 5 Plan that I'd been following since 2020. I've blogged about this way of achieving your highest priority items before. Here are the past posts if you'd like to check them out, followed by a quick summary of this simple method.

Simplify with 1, 3, 5 List Method

79 Days of Using 1, 3, 5 List

Update on 1, 3, 5 List Method for Achievement

3 Rules of 1-3-5 List Method

#1. Write down 1 big awesome task.

This is your priority item. This is what you say you really want to do, but you don't seem to be making any progress on it.

You know what it is even though you may think you have 5-10 priority items to accomplish today. Be honest. What's the most important thing you need to do to achieve your most important goal which is the one that will yield the greatest rewards when completed.

#2. Write down 3 medium tasks that should be done before the day is over.

#3. Write down 5 little things that should be done IF you can get to them, but the world won't come to an end if you don't get them done.

Then, when you finish your workday, make tomorrow's 1-3-5 list. That way when you get to your desk tomorrow, you know exactly what needs to be done first.

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

Sometimes you must take a step backward and maybe let something go before you can move forward.

Joan participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, affiliate advertising designed to help websites earn advertising fees by linking to products on Amazon. If you click an Amazon link in her post, she may receive a small commision at no extra cost to you.

Love to read? Sign up for my free Newsletter, I LOVE READING. Once a month, you'll receive exclusive content and news about giveaways, bargains, and new releases.