Of bars and dollars

Kate and I are both working out more, so I made a batch of Alton Brown’s protein bars to have around. They’re actually pretty good! I worked mostly with what I had in the house and used almond butter instead of peanut butter and crystallized ginger instead of apricots; next time I think I’ll use peanut butter.

We got lots of crap done yesterday: I cleaned out and reorganized the fridge and then mopped the kitchen floor, much to the cats’ consternation (“You can’t move the watering bowl! THINK OF THE FENG SHUI, MAN!"), while Kate climbed Mt Laundry and folded a thousand of my t-shirts while watching “Dancing with the Stars.”

Then we took a couple of hours to go over our finances with an eye towards merging our disparate spending habits, resources, paychecks, debts, and emotional-baggage-around-money. This is a process we’ve been working on and talking about for a while now, and is proving both simpler and more complicated than it first appeared. It’s very easy to say that we’re just going to throw everything into the communal pot, pull a little for each of us to use as mad money, pay every bill, debt, and expense not considered personal-frittering from the communal pot, and be done with it. Once we start doing it, I suspect it’ll be pretty easy, after a little iteration to get the amounts right. But the gearing up for it… that’s got some emotional ramifications that need clarifying, first.

Then we reheated a buncha leftovers (primarily Thai Winter Squash and Tofu Stew) and watched the documentary “Born into Brothels .” Seeing the roads and hearing the sounds of India brought back memories of my trip there, though Bangalore is a far, far cry from the red light districts of Calcutta. A really well-done and involving movie.