By Knowing the Proven & Tested Remidies used by other People to Add the Value in Life...
Labels: Crossroads, Handling, Life’s, Thoughts
posted by Shani Dwan at
10:07 PM
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Each day is filled with .
Playing “catch” with a soccer ball with my son in the back yard in the cool fall air, both of us bundled up and kicking a ball back and forth.
Smelling freshly-made scrambled eggs with tarragon and salt and pepper on top.
Listening to a thought-provoking program on the radio.
Going on a long mid-afternoon walk in the park and admiring the fall colors.
Having a “who can blink last” contest with my daughter where we both keep smiling at each other to try to convince the other to blink.
Sitting in my favorite chair with an interesting book from the library on my lap.
Holding my wife’s hand for a little while as we begin to drift off to sleep.
It’s easy to look back on our lives and think about the “big” moments, when we got some item that we’d wanted for a long time or went on that great vacation.
In the end, though, it’s these that make the day in and day out rhythm of life bearable. It’s the people around you. It’s the tiny pleasures that make the ordinary wonderful.
These moments are always there, but it’s easy to miss them when we’re preoccupied with our overflowing to-do lists and our worries and our desires. We keep seeking something better when we’ve already got it really good to begin with.
Instead of striving to have this great life that you imagine that you might be able to have if you just squeeze in one more activity or spend one more extra hour at work, instead look at all of the wonderful things you already have. They’re found in the that fill your days.
When you start seeing how much life already has to give you, it begins to feel unnecessary to chase more and more and more. Instead, you begin to want less and less and less, and the financial independence you’re seeking becomes much easier to achieve.
It’s all about those , in the end. They’re more than enough, if you allow them to be.
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posted by Shani Dwan at
2:07 PM
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Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.
As we slip deeper and deeper into fall, our family is starting to eat more cold weather food – thicker soups and chowders and so on. Hand in hand with this is our ongoing effort to slowly clear out the recesses of our pantry and our freezer by using items that have been in there for a while and largely forgotten.
The result of this is our own homebrewed “Wisconsin farmhouse chowder,” which takes several different ideas from recipes we’ve heard and things we’ve tried in the northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin area. It’s simple to make and I hope you enjoy it.
What You Need
The ingredient list is pretty straightforward. You’ll need:
- 3 1/2 cups of milk, separated into 1 1/2 cups and 2 cups
- 2 medium potatoes, cubed
- 3 or 4 shiitake mushrooms, chopped (morels would also work if you have a source for getting them)
- A bag of flash-frozen mixed vegetables -or- one cup each of corn kernels, diced carrots, and chopped broccoli
- Dashes of a few spices, including thyme, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and salt
- Half of a cup of peas (frozen or fresh, whatever works best for you)
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
posted by Shani Dwan at
6:07 AM
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Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.
1. Walt Whitman on living
If you manage to do these things, you’ll live a very great life.
This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people
Labels: Inspiration, Pieces
posted by Shani Dwan at
10:07 PM
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I mentioned a while back that I had some big plans in place for 2012 with regards to some projects for The Simple Dollar. I thought I’d share part of these plans with you today.
One of my big goals for 2012 is to find a publisher for my fantasy novel. The novel is mostly written at this point and I’m pretty happy with it. I intend to pass the completed document along to some friends this winter for a round of editing, then start pursuing the process of getting it published.
Obviously, one big point of leverage I could use with getting it published is the presence of The Simple Dollar. I could mention it on here and some of the readers would buy the book, simply because my long-time readers know I’ve been working on this novel off and on for almost as long as I’ve been working on The Simple Dollar (some have already publicly pledged to do so, thank you). I also know that a lot of my readers are fans of fantasy novels, too.
At the same time, I also know that there are at least some of my readers who have considered writing a novel but discarded the idea because they don’t have their foot in the door at a publisher. They don’t have any reason to get the attention of a publisher other than their finished book (or partially finished book) and it feels like an insurmountable obstacle to them.
I know I felt that way for a long time. I’ve written two complete novels earlier in my life and dreamed of getting them published. All I ever got from them were rejection letters.
My experience with writing two additional books and having them published since then (365 Ways to Live Cheap and The Simple Dollar) has shown me that if you can demonstrate that you have an interested audience, publishers will most definitely listen. My experience with The Simple Dollar has shown me that anyone can build an audience if they take the time to do it.
Are you seeing where I’m going with this yet?
In the next month or so, I’m going to start trying to build an audience for this book online completely from scratch. I won’t mention it on The Simple Dollar until I’ve either given up on the project or I’ve secured a book deal completely independent of The Simple Dollar. Obviously, I’ll use a pseudonym so that searches for “Trent Hamm” won’t find it.
If this works – and I believe that it will – I’ll actually offer up a guide for doing this, because the techniques I intend to use won’t be all that different than what I did with The Simple Dollar and they’ll work for pretty much anything you want to do. It will be a recipe for building your own side business on a shoestring budget, no matter what that business is.
Obviously, this is going to take some time. How am I going to come up with that time? To put it simply, I’ve already been writing posts for 2012 so that next year, my writing load for The Simple Dollar will be lower and I can use that saved time for this project.
Will this work? Will this fail? I don’t know, but I do know it’ll be interesting to find out. If it does, it’s going to be the source for a lot of valuable information to share here.
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posted by Shani Dwan at
2:07 PM
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