Grocerie Cost, Week 3

$13.  And that is including some items that will last for a few weeks, like green tea bags and a bigger bottle of apple cider vinegar.

I think I am getting the hang of this.

Grocherie Costs, Week 2

Since last week I overspent, I had a goal coming into this week of staying below $16.  Well, I stayed below $11.

I bought butter (the biggest cost item), some more black beans, frozen peas, eggs, and my experiment item for the week: apple cider vinegar.

From last weeks haul I still have my lentils uncooked, half a can of tomato sauce, a head of broccoli, about half the bag of black beans, and half the loaf of bread in the freezer.  The menu for my dinners next week will be "asian" fried rice with peas and brocolli and the other night will be my famous spaghetti.  If called upon to make a third dinner, it will be eggs, with oatmeal made with my homegrown peaches that I have frozen.

Looks I am going to be taking the full poverty plunge for lunches, however, and eating lentils and rice for my lunches.

Groceries Goal: Under $21 a Week

Early Retirement Extreme in a nutshell: your biggest expenses are 1) housing 2) transportation and 3) food.  Through some intelligent planning, and adding skills, you can drastically cut these big 3 and watch your savings rate soar above 50% to something like 75%+, or you can take my route and be semi-retired at much earlier age than most would think possible.

I am trying to challenge myself to make all of my meals $1 or less.  This means my meals will be home-cooked and mostly meatless, though eggs are still going to play a major role, and cheeses will will certainly show up.  That makes the weekly benchmark $21.  This week I messed up a bit and spent $26.  I wanted to try out making a vegetable lasagna and black bean burgers from scratch, so my curiosity made me buy more than I am going to use this week.  I'm not completely certain I'll be able to keep next week's purchases down to $16 to make up for the overage, but even if I don't, that still puts all of my eating in the range of one "nice" meal out (paying for my wife as well, and don't forget the tip!)

Internet Fast Completed

It was only a week, but I think it was good enough.  Toward the end of the school year, I was on a loop with the kind of "itch scratching" websites that it seems most people use to run out the clock -- news, reddit, espn, the like.

A guest on a Tim Ferris podcast once said something like "I realized I was getting a bunch of little dopamine hits, but I wasn't learning anything."

Life is better with real projects to work on, my favorite have actions in the real, physical world.  With those projects, however, it is easy to get exhausted, and so then the rest feels better, often with interesting intellectual sidelines to be working on.  Those truly interesting sidelines are not be found in the little bites of popular internet sites, but still in book-length material.

And that's what I got back in touch with during this internet fast:  big projects, good books (ie good art).

Internet Fast

I think I am going to go on a fast from the internet for a week -- at least fast from my computer; I'll look at the weather app on my phone and it might flash the titles of my e-mails when I swipe the phone.

With the school year over, I need to not get into a screen-funk.

Chinese Characters

In the process of writing my own translation of the Tao Te Ching, I have developed a liking for Chinese characters.

I a list of ten thousand things to do, but I get much joy from following my interests.  At the very least, I want to learn some radicals, including stroke order so I can write them, and then the characters found in the Tao Te Ching.  Easy enough if proceed slowly and wisely, step by step.  Some easy radicals:

Por versus Para in Spanish

This is from the youtube channel LightSpeed Spanish.



What a neat way to encode a really tricky distinction.

Update (Dvorak Has Taken Over)

Looking back over the summer, I might not have cooked quite as much I planned (though I have started again in earnest lately), and I might not have done as much work in Spanish either, but some things have gone right. 

This summer saw me work out regularly and now I work out every day.  I have been much better at keeping up with household chores, which doesn't impress others, but does make life better. 

But most of all, Dvorak has ingrained itself to the point that I cannot set down on a qwerty keyboard and touch type.  Instead my instincts, at least on the most common keys, are Dvorak.  On a Qwerty key board, I hunt and peck with my head down looking at the keyboard.  It keeps the two keyboard patterns separate, and encourages me to do more Dvorak, and in fact to improve at Dvorak, because it looks like it is now as easy to go forward in Dvorak as it is to go back to Qwerty.

Looking forward six months, it looks like I can have the house paid off.  That goal opens up work on several others on the list.  If I was hungry enough, I could finish the million word Spanish challenge.

Though I doubt I am hungry enough.  (Update: I wasn't.)

French Parellel Texts, Spanish Texts

After spending some time on Memrise and learning 272 words in French, I felt much more comfortable reading parallel texts in French.  This comfort isn't something I can objectively measure, but the subjective difference is huge, and I think I could measure adherence rates if I were called on to be more scientific.

I own two lovely books that are anthologies of great French writers, with the left side being the original and the right being a translation.

I do not think, to be clear, that I could do the same thing with Turkish or Russian or such after so few words (my head hurts just thinking about it).  French parallel text reading is possible so quickly because of 1.) cognates with English 2.) cognates with Spanish 3.) (the least important) words I have picked up from my flashcard-like study.  Nonetheless, this has been a real confidence boaster.  It makes me think I can read Italian classics one day as well.

Lastly finally giving in to my desire to learn French seems to have re-motivated me in Spanish.  After the workout of a few pages of French, it is nice to be able to move to much more freely through another foreign language.  It shows me how much progress I have made in Spanish.

Mental Math Saga . . . 10 X 20 table

Sorry for the commercial nature of it, but it is good stuff.

I am not sorry for this guy's intensity; we need to stop being so jaded and ironic.  We should love what we love.



Oh, and if you ever had problems with the 8s times table, here's a video for that as well.

The Joy of Missing Dutch Words

I'm really starting to like Dutch again.  When I came back from Nationals, I had over 2,000 words stuck to review on Memrise.  

Recently, I have been trying to whittle it away a bit each day, trying to move down a digit each day.  For example, today I am going to be below 599, and tomorrow's game is to move below 499.  I have an eventual goal of getting everything cleared up before we leave for a vacation -- fully knowing I will have a lot to look through when I come back. 

But that's just the thing -- I have a win/win.  If I remember a word after a break -- score (quite literally, because Memrise plays like a game.)  If I don't remember, then it is an opportunity to make up some silly linkword association. And those are really fun.  And since all of the words are already ones I had to do repetitions on to get through, this creates a euphoric "aha" feeling of something clicking into place.  What can I say? Learning languages is fun.

So instead of feeling bad about what I forgot -- or, what I forgot because of neglect -- this is a joy, made moreso by the faith that I will learn all of the words.

Living Up to the Name of Math-Hacks

Just a great video showing the fun of figuring this stuff out.

Mental Multiplication Tricks

It's been nice being able to go back to memrise.  After going to Nationals and using it as an opportunity for an internet fast, I had a lot of catching up to do.  I have caught up my reviews in French, literary dates, other historical dates,  capitals, number systems, and now the mental multiplication I had started.  I still have to catch up my reviews in Dutch and toki pona, but that is a separate story.

As much fun as it was trying to use the major memory system to try think of bizarre images to remember the facts "on sight" I think I'd rather invest in learning and practicing some mental tricks to do more of the math as computation and leave "sight facts" to the what remains.  So what should be easy to compute?   

Well, 11s for one easy case.  

Here's a grab bag of tricks, which covers 9s, 5, and supposedly any power of 2, but honestly trying to turn 14 X 32 into (14 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2) is a little unwieldy, but the idea is a really good short-cut and allows me to think about using other powers as well.

Also, a wikibook offers the following fun trick: 

Let's say you are multiplying two numbers, just two two-digit numbers for now (though the rules could be adapted for others) which start with the same digit and the sum of their unit digits is 10. For example, 87×83 (sum of unit digits: 7+3=10). You multiply the first digit by one more than itself (8×9 = 72). Then multiply the second digits together (7×3 = 21). Then stick the first answer at the start of the second to get the answer (7221). A simple proof of how this works is given in the Wikipedia article on Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha's Vedic mathematics. If the result from the multiplication of the unit digits is less than 10, simply add a zero in front of the number (i.e., 9 becomes 09). For example, 59×51 is equal to [5×6][9×1] which equals [30][09]. Thus 59×51 = 3009.

Lastly, on this research journey I found out about so-called Vedic Mathematics and the Trachenberg System. 

All can help me as I slowly (around 5 facts a day) work through the 100 X 100 times table.

Unlearning Qwerty

Today is the first day I have tried to type something on a qwerty keyboard and typed it wrong because of how it goes in Dvorak.

I'm unlearning qwerty and on my way to internalizing Dvorak.

Dvorak Is Clicking

Today is the first day where typing in Dvorak is really starting to "click."  This clicking is not intellectual, but physical.

The last systematic error to go was the inversion of "y" and "f."  There are still others that happen, especially when I go quickly (alas like I right now as I am typing these words), but I am starting to feel the belief that I will learn Dvorak up to full proficiency.   Last week typing was a challenge, really a struggle.  Today, on the other hand, typing with Dvorak is merely slow.  I feel comfortable expressing myself with Dvorak.

It's What You Know That Aint So

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Mark Twain.

This sums up my problems in Dvorak.  I have noticed some mistakes that I am making almost systematically

I hit "e" instead of "o" (actually, I make a bizarre "n," then "e," then "o" sequence)
         "f" instead of "y" (this one is because of the location of the key in qwerty )
When going fast, I type "." instead of "e" -- also because of where it is in qwerty.

The key now is not learning, but unlearning.  Typing in exclusively in Dvorak gives me a purpose to learn -- each of these mistakes cost me time.  So often while typing I will repeat a mnemonic a few times after I make a mistake.  For example, my mnemonic for "o" is that it is a ring on my ring finger.  In this manner I hope to rewrite the habit more quickly than bumbling around.

My First Post Written In Dvorick

I'm now going cold-turkey.  I'm doing everything in Dvorick.

Slow-going, but it gives me more motivation to learn.

Finally. . . Learning French

After I got done with my Dutch course on Memrise, I just felt  . . .  itchy to keep learning (the site's addictive, man).  So I started working on French courses.  And I can tell that it is going to be great.

I have a lot more resources for French than Dutch -- not only good, fun courses (ie ones with no typing), but I own more books in French and have a bunch of movies with French dubbing and/or French sub-titles.

I have held back from French for a long time because I didn't want it to interfere with Spanish, but that I've started, I just don't feel like I can, or even should, stop the rush.   I don't see too much interference so far, but the combination of being a native English speaker and knowing a goodly amount of Spanish makes it so I can already read parallel texts of French much, much more comfortably than I can in my current level of Dutch.

If do several thousand (or, I dunno 10-20,000 words) of French on Memrise and read my two parallel text books of French short stories two or three times, and watch some movies in French here and there, I can probably be at a pretty good level in French by the end of the summer.

That and my million word challenge in Spanish might make it two reading languages down and one to go when the school year starts back up.

The Dvorak Countdown

Today being my reverse Sabbath day, I had to see if Dvorak was on my computer already, something I had been avoiding because of a vague dread that somehow all the websites were wrong and my computer somehow uniquely did not have it.  It's not something I stopped and thought about; it just flitting in and then out of my mind, as do so many of blocks that cause us to procrastinate -- many, many are just phantoms of the mind.

Well, it's there.

I have been doing lessons on this site, focusing just on the home row (which accounts for 70% of all the strokes I'll be making in the system).  On the first day of the summer, I am making the switch . . . total cold turkey at that point.  

Cold turkey is going to be necessary because now that I am over the initial feeling of terrible discomfort (something that really only lasted 30 minutes), I am on to a type of intermediate hell where it's not what I'm learning that is the problem, but instead my old habits.  Since I am doing so much of my typing in regular 'ol qwerty, I keep retrenching where the "s" and "d" keys are in qwerty. I can tell that a very large part of my mastery of Dvorak will be un-learning those key keys (and key key combinations).  Also, I will just have practice, practice, practice until the new keys become a matter of muscle memory.  

This step is perhaps the most important in developing compassion.  After all, this step means that intellectually know what you should be doing, but your old habits keep zapping you.  So, let's take the case of a young person trying to be responsible, or even ethical.  Just because they "know better" really isn't enough.  I need to give someone trying at least as long as it takes me to get my key strokes right on this new typing system.  

And probably longer.

Dvorak

I am starting to learn the Dvorak typing system, which is a typing system with the most commonly used keys on the "home row."

I'm not learning it for speed.  I am already a good touch-typist, able to freak kids out by rapidly typing things they say on the screen while scanning the classroom and making eye-contact with the kids.  If you're already good at typing, then the Dvorak method doesn't promise to dramatically increase your typing speed.

I decided to make the Dvorak switch for 3 reasons:

1.) For joint health.  The efficiency of the key placement means your hands move a great deal less over the course of a typing session, and thus over the months and years it can save miles of hand movement.

2.) To go awkward-feeling steps in learning.  This one sounds counter-intuitive, but anything you learn is going to have these steps, so I think everyone should learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable toward greater learning goals.  In my profession as a teacher, it is especially important to experience learning awkwardness so you can have more compassion for your students who are learning.

3.) It give me a knew field of things to learn and play around with.  Such as this video:


So because of Dvorak, I have discovered the engineerguy Youtube channel, which I imagine will serve me well as I try to develop skills with mechanics and building.

This benefit should not be minimized.  One of the reasons to do something like learn is so you can find new sites you never would have been able to find otherwise.  More and more frontiers open, whether it is Dvorak or Dutch, and you never know where it will lead.  And that is a big part of the joy.

Update
I now type in Dvorak and have to search and peck (more or less) whenever I am stuck on a QWERTY keyboard.  But, yeah, I love Dvorak, and probably find it worth investing all the time (and awkwardness) over the summer to learn.