Here We Go Again

TOP O' THE MORNING: It's that time of the year again for MPA - Hunger Action Week.  We've been participating in this social awareness experience for FIVE years now. The challenge is to live for one week (Monday-Friday) on a 'food stamps' budget.  For us, that means $21 a day for our family of four.   

Trying to get over a cold, I was last out of the gate this morning. When I came downstairs, I croaked, "I sure hope nobody's had anything to eat yet!" ha ha. 

Since today's St. Patrick's Day, the kid just *had* to have Lucky Charms for breakfast. And not just any Lucky Charms, but LIMITED EDITION ones where all the marshmallows are green clovers. Fortunately, the crap, er, I mean cereal, was on sale big time at Winco last week. 

We checked our receipt and figured out they were 17 cents an ounce. The kids each had 2.25 ounces. CJ always eats his cereal dry. This morning Annabelle proposed going without milk to save money. Sweet of her to offer, but I told her she could have a little milk. 

Of course, if you're going to have something as awful, er, I mean delicious, as Lucky Charms for breakfast, you have to have certified organic milk to balance it out, right? We calculated that a cup of it costs 37 cents, and then poured half that much on her cereal. 

Christian and I split a pot of coffee for breakfast, at 41 cents for the pot of "Seattle's Best." We probably should have gone with the canned stuff to save money!

We had a late morning snack, one "Cutie" apiece.

Earlier, CJ had calculated those to be 20 cents apiece. 

Lunch for the kids was a Winco brand box of mac-and-cheese (can't afford the high falutin' Kraft dinner stuff!). The box of pasta was 33 cents, they used 9 cents worth of milk, and one tablespoon of butter, which we calculated out to cost 6 cents.

All totaled, lunch was 48 cents for the kids. Christian and I were still going on coffee and Cuties, ha ha.

Late afternoon, we each had a stick of pepperoni, which set the family back a dollar.

Dinner, we went with a traditional St. Patrick's day meal. Thankfully, Winco had corned beef on sale for $1.38 a pound last week, so we bought a small ($3.67 total) one of those. We also made baked potatoes (55 cents for the four of us), and carrots - 49 cents worth. The total for dinner was $4.71. Not bad.

The kids each had a soda with dinner, 52 cents for two cans of Shasta diet cola. 

All in all, we did quite well today. The grand total for breakfast, lunch and dinner was $8.86. Go us! That left plenty of room on our $21 budget to enjoy the $5 growler of MacTarnahans, scored as a St. Paddy's day special. And, the kids and Christian all had big bowls of air popped popcorn - 4 ounces of kernels set us back 28 cents for the popcorn, 18 cents for the butter, that's just 46 cents for a delicious dessert. 

Final score: $6.68 under budget. Not bad for a "holiday dinner" day. :)

As a side note, in looking back at the blog to the first year we participated, 2010, we got $22 a day for our family - more money, and groceries cost less five years ago, for sure.

GREEN, GREEN GRASS: Late morning, we headed down to West Seattle. We wanted to pick up a couple things we left at Rick's, and we lugged our lawn mower and weed lopper along, since he owns neither, but his grass isn't waiting on him to get them! 

Annabelle wanted to help, and I was more than happy to let her. (Meanwhile, CJ was busy thinking. It consumed all of his attention.)

The yard looked great when we were done. There's something very satisfying about mowing the lawn, isn't there?

1968: We watched three lectures for our "Music of The Beatles" class. We're on the White Album now, two LPs full of amazing music. Annabelle drew a number of cute ditties in her notes today. Obviously, at one point today, the professor told us when "Hey Jude" went to number one (after a couple of Beatles' singles 'only' cracked the Top 10), it was declared The Beatles had returned.

There was also talk today about The Beatles' trip to India to hang out with the Maharishi. Not sure which Beatle is doing a TM pose here ... 

Truth be told, the entirety of Annabelle's notes are doodling - little drawings all over the page..

The one showing George asking another Beatle to play with him references the fact that on some White Album tracks, The Beatles didn't perform on one anothers' songs, or in some cases, they played on them, but recorded their parts in different studios.  "Cry Baby Cry" and "Piggies" are titles of a couple of George's tunes on the album, and two of Paul's titles are at the bottom.

BIG BANG THEORY: This morning, my Facebook and Twitter feeds were alive with chatter about a BIG scientific announcement. People were predicting it was going to be a monumental discovery having to do with the Big Bang, and at 9 a.m. our time, that turned out to be true. 

I've read a number of articles about it, but what (to me) it seems to boil down to is that there is now direct evidence of gravitational waves rippling through our just born (as in fractions of a second) universe. These waves are proof of cosmic inflation theories (which the kids and I learned about in a wonderful astrobiology course from the University of Edinburgh through Coursera). 

As NASA explained in a press release today, "This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye."

Below is a photo (courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech) of the BICEP2 telescope.

Stationed at the South Pole, it uses novel technology developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It includes an array of devices that "use superconductivity to gather, filter, detect, and amplify polarized light from the cosmic microwave background -- relic radiation left over from the Big Bang that created our universe," per NASA.

One post I saw today featured Stanford Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprising Professor Andrei Linde with results from the BICEP2 experiment. Linde is one of the 'fathers' of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.

BICEP2 showed, for the first time, gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

Stanford has posted it for sharing (under a Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license). 

SPEAKING OF STARS: We're all loving the new "Cosmos" series. Last night was the second installment. The kids were rapt, and still talking about it today. If you haven't yet, check it out! Full episodes can be seen here: http://www.fox.com/watch/183733315515