My latest job is unlike anything else I have done in my adult life. Instead of being a cog in giant ad agencies where everyone has their place and sometimes I’m asked to lend a hand in another part of the process, we are now all responsible for creating every part of the process. There are no writers or designers or strategists. There is no one dedicated to client service. We are all of these things. We are consultants. We’re whatever the client needs us to be. This is so refreshing and exciting. In the ad world I am usually bored with my work after 3 months and hungry to quit after 6, but now what we do changes so rapidly I’m always learning or doing something new. Continue reading “Writing Cured My Writer’s Block”
I’m surprised by what my brain absorbs and clings onto. I just re-read my original Dietary Musings post. It was two years ago when I looked into a vegan/whole food plant based diet. I planned to record my ailments that the books I was reading claimed would be resolved by eating this way to track my progress. It….didn’t go well :). Cutting all animal products out of my diet made me tired, constantly hungry and didn’t cure anything. I dropped it after less than a month of creating unique recipes that frankly didn’t taste like much of anything at all and went back to my original American diet which includes bouts of low calorie eating combined with overeating at restaurants and binge drinking. 
This January I embarked on an Uber Frugal Month with 
A few financial bloggers that I read regularly have mentioned how in retirement you will most likely accidentally earn money. As an early retiree you’ll have 30+ years of health and energy ahead of you instead of 5 or less. I never quite believed it, but I did just accidentally stumbled onto a side hustle while I am still working, which makes me think they might be onto something. 
Something strange has happened. I was reading through my previous posts to see to help reminisce about the year and what I’ve accomplished and I read my post about “Frugality and Weight Management” and how it seemed they went hand in hand. I started laughing while reading it because I felt so differently now. 
I went on a bit of an information binge the other way. We were stuck inside during what was supposed to be a previously unseen snowstorm that caused our Governor to order the transit system to close. I was working from home, but becoming a little starved for new information. So I started watching a few of the documentaries that I had in my Netflix queue. First I watched Food Inc, then Forks Over Knives and then Vegucated. I had unknowingly picked an almost perfect sequence of documentaries. 
Interestingly I have found that frugality and weight management seem to go hand in hand. My original motivation to decreasing my time spent at restaurants and bars in NYC was because I wanted to stop paying people to serve me: to pour my drinks, cook my food and literally wait on me hand and foot. Instead I’ve sought to do it myself to save money until I am rich enough to pay people to do my bidding as MMM implies. So my partner and I eat and drink at home and we buy and make food and drinks ourselves.