The dynamics of food budgets...

I am finding that eating on $120 is going to be more of a sacrifice than I had thought. We are already close to using up that amount. We spent $61 at Aldi at the beginning of the month. Then, I bought meat for our red meat Friday (more on that later), and spent $11 on meat and a cantaloupe. Then, I had to stop at Hy Vee for bread and milk, where I spent about $26. So, that's $98 and we are not even to the middle of the month. Plus, my wife has to take her lunch to work, so she basically eats two meals, breakfast and lunch, on her own. So, she is a single unit for about 35 0r 40 meals a month, and we lose a lot of the economy of feeding all four of us at the same time. We are still getting adjusted to Iowa living anyway, so this experiment may have to go on for a few months before we get it right. In the meantime, our conversations are very much about what we do with the money that we don't spend on food for ourselves. Josh is having a great conversation about that st the Eikon Project, so it will be interesting to see where it goes and what kinds of things we discover about the needs of our communities and the places where our excess might be put to better use than serving up over-indulgent meals to us.

I think that the next discipline will be reading scripture, because I need to find a routine with it and I can use the strength and wisdom to attack the rest of the list. Currently, I try to read one page a day, but its hit and miss, so I may need to re-examin that. I am still working on posting the reciepts, and I think that I will have my wife transcribe them for me and put them in a widget at the side of the blog. We'll see.

I will be seeing the housemates in Nashville in about 20 hourts and counting. Man, I can't wait. I love those folks.