Hungary (southern plains, specifically, but it's a small enough country that it doesn't matter. My city is the one that gets an average of 2000 of sunlight a year, the highest in the country.). I noticed a while ago when strawberry prices stopped going down and started going up that strawberry season must be ending, but I didn't attach a date to this noticing in my mind, so when next year rolls around, I still won't know. (Though I remember they never went below 665 HUF/kg (about $3. I would've bought if they went down to 565. This information may or may not be useful next year due to inflation)

Just checked Freecycle. There are three in the country, but none in this city. Deliapro (southern classified ads) has people selling stuff used. currently, someone's selling a gigantic one (230 litres) for about $75, someone else says they're selling various kitchen appliances for $40 and up. i dont want a large one. I wouldnt have space for it anyway. But I could fit a 30-60L one somewhere. I live in a 1.5 room apartment, and the kitchen is tiny, but there is a space in the pantry where I could fit a small freezer.

The fridge I have is a bar fridge. There is a freezer compartment, but the door broke, so I fixed it with duct tape (which means I can't open it). Before the door broke, it would fill with snow on a weekly basis and was tiny anyway (it would fit one frozen pizza.) so I gave up on it and just use the fridge.

i've started crocheting semirecently. i actually started with "smoke less" in my mind. my first project is a hyperbolic möbius strip (directions: chain as many as you want, sc to end of chain, repeat for a few rows, crochet it together into a möbius strip, then continue sc increasing one every three stitches). perfect for mastering single crochet stich. Maybe I'll do the next with double crochet stitches to work on those. im slow at it and not very good yet, but that is because i am a newbie.

and i do have a ring to play with. i'll try to use it more. :)

This is true, but I've also read studies that within 24 hours of quitting smoking, there are already noticable health benefits and lowered risks of problems, which continue to get better the longer the time has elapsed. I'm not arguing that smoking between the ages of 15-18 & 20-27, as I have done, will have no effect, but if I quit while I'm still young -- I probably have a few years left where one way or the other won't matter too much -- then by the time I reach an age where heart disease, lung disease, cancer, stroke, etc. are more likely dangers for me, my lungs will have had a decade or so to recover and hopefully that will be enough. I've gotten a few grey hairs already, and a few wrinkles, so I know that the time to quit will be soon, but I don't know if I'm ready to do it just yet. The last time I quit (for an entire year, cold turkey), it was because I got tired of the way I smelled and didn't want to smell like that anymore. I only started up again because I had friends who smoked (who have since moved away). I think if I can get into that headspace again, where I really don't want to smoke and am tired of it, then I will be able to quit easily, whereas if I'm just doing it because of knowledge of health risks in the distant future -- that's not immediate enough to make it easy.

As far as pregnancy goes, I think that as long as I quit at least a year before I'm planning to get pregnant, the fetus will be okay. My grandmother was encouraged by her doctor to smoke during pregnancy to calm her nerves. (This was in the early 1960,s I believe, and I'm fairly certain the effects of smoking were known to doctors at that time, but i dont know) The kid was born weak and sickly with all sorts of allergies that none of his siblings shared. He survived, and it could have been much worse than allergies, but it was still a bad thing.

the fridge isn't mine -- came with the apartment. and it's a communist era fridge (complete with Russian labeled dials), so it probably dates back to before the wall came down. i have it on medium setting and will look at acquiring a thermoter to see if that means <5°C like it should or, something ridiculous like 10°C (i think i'd notice if it was warmer than that. it feels cold to me.)

I think the beans in question are just old beans. I add salt to taste at the end.

I love indian food amd I like lentils and beans. And lentils are supposed to be quicker to cook (I have some really old lentils. I should get newer ones. They aren't expensive.) The trick seems to be getting them soft but not mush. I used to cook indian more often, but I always made too much. It's amazing how much food one carrot, one onion, one tomato, and some lentils turns into.

I have some spices -- one year for my birthday, I told my mother to get me spices. And small quantities of spies are available quite cheaply - packets containing only a few grams can last me over a year, since I'm only using a pinch of one, a pinch of another. I have most of the common european spices (salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, rosemary, thyme, oregano, dill, basil, sage, etc.) and also I have some curry and garam masala, ground and whole cardamom (which I never knew what to do with). i have chili powder as well, which i add in small quantities to various things for health reasons -- i dont like very spicy, but i dont mind it a little.)

I live in Hungary, and I've been trying to shop less European, because if I don't have emergency supplies on hand and I can't leave the house, then I'm stuck. I try to keep foods on hand that won't spoil to use as emergency foods (some days I have a migraine and don't make it outside), but on the days I can go out, I should be a good European and visit the market across the street in the mornings where there's fresh seaonal produce from surrounding villages, and the bakery just down the street where I can buy 1/2 kg of bread for 115 forints (about $0.57). Lately, though, I haven't been making it outside very often and so I eat into my supplies until I have to buy more.

woah, that is so totally cool. Expensive -- more than a month's rent and utilities combined, but seriously cool.

Also, they sell them in my country -- even in my city, and the webpage says they have a promotion thing where you can borrow it for a night and then take it back the next day for free -- under the idea that a person would be sold on the idea and wouldnt want to go back to their old vacuum cleaner. So, basically, I could get my carpet cleaned for free, and then give it back. If the thing would clean it thoroughly (and I'd be willing to babysit it for a night if it needed to be emptied frequently), it's possible that it could get enough of the ingrained dirt out that i could make reasonable progress with regular vacuuming.

hm, that's interesting. That doesn't seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one.

The symptoms I have are really weird... not like what I've seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there's something 'stuck' in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there's nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it's a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled "alkaline foods" to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it's reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there's a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like "lemon" as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.

We don't have Craigslist in Hungary, but we have a newspaper for classified ads that posts the ads online as well. I could search that to see if anyone's advertising something. My landlady has a steam cleaner and has said I can borrow it sometime.

I always take off my shoes at the door, but the cats get hairballs (I give them special treats to cut down on hairballs, which seems to help, but not 100%), and accidents happen, so some sort of shampoo might work.

I wrote a small program in PHP/MYSQL for keeping track of my migraines. You list what you ate that day, what (and how much) you drank, how much you slept and between what hours, pain levels, other complaints, and a few other things. It keeps track of your menstrual cycle as well (if you're doing it every day, there's a checkbox to check on the first day of the cycle). It then lets you sort by any of those criteria so that you can look back over the data and try to make sense of it. It's not hosted online anywhere (i was never done tinkering with it, and i never added anything like a login form or support for multiple users, so you have to have a server with php and mysql set up on your computer to run it. I kept track of it for a while, but then started forgetting more and more and I had no idea how to analyse the data I'd amassed (and probably would've needed more data anyway). Also, I wasn't sure if I was asking the right questions (or enough of the right questions). A big source of my migraines was the bad mattress I was sleeping on, which wasn't even in that data. Getting a new mattress earlier this year helped a lot, but things have started to get bad again (though now at least, I know I'm sleeping well on a good mattress).

i think if i ate eggs once every 3 days ( to keep from getting tired of them. i tire easily of eggs) I could get through a carton (10 eggs) with time to spare before they expire.

milk: i've mostly switched to powdered milk (which i wont drink, but can use in cooking and it doesnt go bad). When I want drink milk, I've started to buy a half litre of it that I will drink as soon as I get home. The problem with UHT is that once I open it, I have to drink the whole litre in a couple days. I need to figure out what's wrong with my fridge. I was more using milk as an example of something that I can't buy and use in the way normal people do because it spoils quicker than it should.

meat: i do like those, and a little can go a long way. There's a store here (Aldi) that sells 300g Nürnburger Rostbratwurst for ~€3. 300 grams can last me quite a while. -- These don't seem to go bad in the fridge actually, as long as I use them in a week. I keep them in the original package which I don't open very far and also wrap that in plastic. I can buy a small amount of minced meat for 1€ and make a stir fry with it that serves one person, but I don't do this very often.

pasta - yeah, I live off of pasta.

Ungarn :) I live south of Budapest, so food is cheaper here than it is there. The price of tobacco is set at a national level, however. A box of cigarettes costs 560 forints, about €2. However, I have found it is cheaper to buy tobacco directly. A 40g packet of tobacco also costs €2 and will make 50 cigarettes. A box of 200 empty cigarette tubes costs €1. So, the price of 200 cigarettes made by hand is €9. The device that puts the tobacco in the tubes costed €5 and has lasted me over a year so far. It paid for itself very quickly. I smoke about a pack a day, so €0.90. 1 kg of bread costs €1. 10 eggs is a little more than €1. At Aldi I can buy a can of Gulyás soup for €1, but it is €3-4 in stores close to me.

i'll look around. it sounds like a nice way of cooking.