Here's another $1M calculator...

Freeing up my time...

My newest project is figuring out what it would truly take to retire from my very stressful work in order to free up my time to work on things I really care about! I never thought of the dilemma in this way...normally I always thought just keep slaving away at something mediocre and eventually the money pot of freedom will arrive (sorry ancestors, I know this is nothing close to an accurate metaphor of your experiences). Now I'm thinking much more concretely about this dilemma...how do you collect, just like a food store in your pantry, or a collection of clothes in your closet, enough dollars (in some currency) to finally be free of comitted work obligations not of your choosing?

My first crude calculator (in my head) was a painful realization: if I had started at 20 years old and regularly put away a monthly amount, how much would that have to be to have amassed $1M by 45. It turns out it would have to be a whopping $3333 per month...there were many months since 20 where I didn't even earn 10% of that let alone save that...very sad!

So I began searching for calculators that could estimate how it could be done going forward...

Now that is a little better...at least it is possible...more calculators to come...

Growing Vegetables Teach New Habits: WSJ Op Ed!

I got wind today of this great op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal from one of my favorite new Twitter friends Marion Nestle. It was written by George Ball, CEO of the W. Altee Burpee Company, a company I know very well because as a kid I was one of those who grew a vegetable garden, year after year, in my parents' suburban backyard. What he is saying is right on: If kids get a chance to touch soil and seeds first hand and watch what they sow grow slowly and steadily (and sometimes rather drooply and sometimes explosively) into something they can reap, their attitude toward "real" food might indeed change. Vegetables and fruits, along with the seasons, bugs, dirt, tools, weeds, and sun, wind and rain, are amazing teachers! I learned about bountiful abundance, self-sufficiency, trial and error, incompatability, planning, resourcefulness, patience (when will those tomatoes be ready gosh darn it), and pride in a job well-done.

My kids have helped grow some sort of plant every year of their lives, whether we had a big backyard or moved to a high-rise apartment with a balcony. This year it was 2 garden boxes on the balcony with radishes, sunflowers, and marigolds. Because its Canada (and I'm still thinking on California "you can grow all year round" time), our sunflowers were small and dainty, our radishes barely made it and the marigolds said "Aw forget it!" by the time the first frosty dip in temperature hit us in September. But is was still worth it and the dried out stalks of our sunflowers still poke stoically out of the snow accumulation now that it's January...waiting for the spring freeze and another tiny patch of knowledge!

My Drugstore Addiction: A Modern Wonder of Life's Mundane Problems Solved

I now realize I have a bit of a drugstore fetish...I absolutely love spending what turn out to be hours milling around in Shopper's Drug Mart which is like the Canadian version of Rite Aid! What is it about drugstores? I don't like browsing around in the supermarket but you'd think food and drinks would be much more enticing than shampoo and foot cream!

But low and behold the absolutely magical wonder products that clutter the shelves of a health and beauty aisle are nothing less than thrilling to me...I think it's because unlike products that satisfy a reoccurring urge like thirst and hunger (dang I just spent $300 at the market and I still don't know what to cook for dinner 2 days later!) everything at the drugstore has the real potential to solve a nagging problem of yours once and for all...

Look at this beauty for example: Flexitol Foot Balm

Now if you're a spring chicken and your skin is dewy and smooth this would seem like a ridiculous product...but when you're over 40 and have been chasing down small humanoids more times than you'd like, your feet (along with the rest of your body) take a real beating!

All of sudden you have these snaggly skin shards scratching everything from the back of husband's thigh to your favorite tights (tights...you'd think your feet couldn't possibly be so bad that they could rip up tights, right?).

Well there's a product for that! Foot Balm!

And I can attest that after blowing $100 bucks today at Shopper's, it works!...Along with all the other fabulous, problem solving health aids that I discovered while trolling the displays!! A wonder of capitalism and marketing: the drugstore!

Why Can't Foods (And I) Have It All!?: The New Trend in Creating Better Foods

My kids are particularly picky in what they will and won't eat! They have every food allergy possible and prescribe to the notion that foods shouldn't touch, shouldn't be the wrong color, and hopefully should be cooked by someone wearing a logo...

As a terribly overworked, overwrought mom, I constantly wish that foods had everything you need to keep your family healthy in it...And why can't they? Why can't foods have fiber, calcium, vitamin D, amino acids, everything in something they'll already eat like juice or chips? Even I could benefit from a heck of a lot more fiber than I get in the foods I eat!

An article in December 12th's Globe and Mail highlighted the dilemma of whether granola bars are health food or junk food. In fact, the article states that a peanut butter Nature Valley granola bar has as many calories, grams of fat, and 4 times as much sodium as a Kit Kat bar. Yet, watching a commercial for Nature Valley you'd think that you were eating an extremely healthy food. Unbelievable!

But there is a trend in packaged foods that to me seems like a step in the right direction for manufacturers. Instead of marketing products like soda and candy - high in fructose corn syrup and food coloring - some manufacturers are finding ways to create food products that are made from simple, if healthy ingredients that are similarly tasty for both grown-ups and kids.

A great example that we've found in Canada is a juice box - FruitPlus by Sun-Rype - that my 3 year old loves. It is not only fruit juice - apple, grape, pear, raspberry, orange juice - but also has carrot, celeriac, lettuce, beet, parsley, watercress, and spinach. Now that's a juice! And my 3 year old is known the wiser!

My kids also inhale noodles but I got sick of their eating plain white noodles lunch after lunch with very little nutritional value other than carbs. So I searched for a noodle that offered something more! I found Catelli Smart Pasta that has 8 grams of fiber added! How hard could that be!

My son, the ultra cool preteen, has become quite the soda guzzler over the last few years. And the damage those daily sodas have wrecked on his teeth became apparent at his last dentist's appointment! I vowed that day that fructose corn syrup was banned from our house! That also resulted in a very disappointed young guy! After several weeks of sulking, I thought there must be an alternative to traditional sodas and I found it! It is a combination selzer water and fruit juices sold under the President's Choice label here in Canada, sold in silvery energy drink style cans...perfect for an image conscious young person! No added sugar and fruit juice to boot! Super

I realize that these products are Canadian but I'm sure their counterparts must exist in the U.S. too. More food manufacturers have to think holistically about what ingredients they strip away and add into their products. If a food company could create a whole line of foods that had all of the crucial ingredients that could make kids as healthy as possible while still enticing them with good taste, pretty colors and all the logos they can stand! How hard can that be!!

I Hate My Cooking!...Or Why Can't a Working Mom Cook Fine Dining?

For New Year's Eve (Happy NYE by the way...Welcome 2011) I cooked a sirloin roast with potatoes in butter and garlic with broccoli (and rice for my picky son who will eat french fries but wouldn't allow a quartered potato to pass his lips! Oochhh!!). It turned out nicely although a little more on the chewy side than I would have liked...making roasts are always hit or miss for me...either too dry or too salty or too tough...I can never get a roast to cook exactly how they make it in my favorite spot like Milestones (which is a Canadian chain but that has a "to die for" prime rib roast dip sandwich) or any other restaurant with a well-trained chef behind the stainless steel counter. Why is it that I've been cooking almost everyday since I was a teen, almost 30 years, and I still can't cook all that well! Is it an affliction of being a working woman/mom and that I have never devoted the time or attention to learning the proper techniques of cooking at fine dining level? Or is it that it truly is a God given skill that only males (unfortunately most chefs still are but that must be changing right?) with chef hats are born with? There must be some lucky woman (or man) out there who comes home after a long day at work and dazzles their family with the most sublime dishes that make you happy that you didn't book reservations at the swankiest place in town...but not me unfortunately. I barely manage edible and sometimes I squeak out something pretty good but never superlative...unless...it's something coming off of my barbeque grill...then I really rock the roasted meats and I even manage to avoid creating a cascade of dirty dishes for my husband (who has to load the dishwasher all day) to roll his eyes at when dinner ends! But that discussion is for another day!

What You Didn't Know About Coffee (The Tired, Working Mom's Elixir of Life But What A History!)

The first thing I want to write about this morning is coffee. Why? Because it is the first thing that touches my lips everyday and has for most of my adult life...I call it the elixir of life because with my kids and being a working mom, and the continual lack of sleep it is the one of the few things that actually works as advertised, every time...it gets me awake and energized! But the history of coffee is actually a very interesting one and not at all intuitive...I always thought that the reason we drink coffee is just like other foods our ancestors from eons passed it down to us as a food that wouldn’t poison us or kill us and has some nutritional value. It turns out that this is not actually the case for coffee. In fact, it seems coffee was not discovered by humans but my have been first eaten by goats in Ethiopia. It was only roasted for the first time in the 1400s and the processing of the bean into a palatable drink was quite a complicated and difficult process almost like the process of making the coco bean into chocolate, but that’s for another post).

A 2005 Canadian documentary film, Black Coffee, that I watched on public television a few months back absolutely amazed me. I couldn’t believe that a food that I consumer every single day would have had such a political and social history, have so much impact on our world today and would have caused so much pain and injustice. For example, the land where Haiti now is was planted with coffee plants painstakingly brought over by ship from France to the Carribbean (I always assumed that coffee plants grew naturally where ever they are today) as were the slaves from Africa used to work the plantations. Half of all coffee in the world was grown in Haiti by the end of the 1700s. But when the slave workers revolted against their European plantation owners (a struggle that lasted 12 years and that eventually triumphed over Napoleon’s soldiers, a fateful decision was made by the leaders of the revolution to burn all the plantations and their coffee plants to the ground...every single last one of them...it was in retrospect like killing the golden goose in way. I could imagine the agony and rage of those newly emancipated slaves who wanted, if only, to exact some form of revenge if even on vegetation. But I couldn’t help think while watching this documentary, that if those individuals would have kept at least some of those plantings intact could Haiti today have the basis for an economic crop that is the equivalant of black gold? Of would it have made them more vulnerable to recapture from Europeans who would want to their plantations back? Haiti never recovered its coffee producing ability and in fact suffers from a low level of locally produced commodities that it can sell on the global market. I never knew all of this...

Here a few more facts I bet you didn’t know (I sure didn’t!):
- Coffee is the world's most widely taken legal drug.
- Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.
- Coffee helped foster the slave trade.
- In various times, coffee has been considered both an aphrodisiac and a sex inhibitor.
- 500 billion cups of coffee a years are consumer around the world, half of them at breakfast.
- Revolutions and romances have been sparked over this dark brew.
- Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people; 100 million more depend on it for survival.
- Coffee is a green bean hidden in the red cherry of the coffee tree.
- Only the women of the house can roast the coffee beans in Ethiopia.
- Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Arabia to Turkey and thence to Europe.
- The fertile seeds were smuggled to India, then Holland, then their colony Java.
-When Arabs tried to seize Vienna, a Pole warned the French who repulsed the Arabs, found the bags of coffee left behind, and the first European coffeehouse was opened.
- Coffee was perfected in Italy; even the Pope liked it.
- Cappuccinos name came from its resemblance to the colour and peak of the Capucin monk's cloak
- Espresso came from Neapolitan impatience; they couldn't wait for coffee to be brewed.
- Balzac is reputed to have drunk 40 cups of coffee a day.
- From Italy, coffee spread to Paris.
- The first French café—Le Procope--was opened in 1686 by Italians.
Cafés stimulated not only nervous systems but political and social ferment.
- By 1700, the English were big coffee drinkers.
- The Tatler started as a coffeehouse broadsheet, along with the institution of TIPS for service.
- The French Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.
- One of the French king's mistresses gave a coffee plant to a French lieutenant she'd slept with; on the ocean voyage to Martinique he protected the plant from storms and pirates.
- From the single Martinique plant almost all the coffee in Latin America descends.
- The deregulation of the Brazilian coffee market created extravagant wealth for some, and abject misery for others
- Only 10% of the rainforest in Sao Paolo remains, with coffee-growing the dominant reason
- By 1816 there were 1 ½ million slaves in Brazil, comprising 1/3 of the population, more than half of them working on coffee plantations from dawn to sunset, eating only once a day.
- The coffee crash in Brazil occurred only a few weeks before the 1929 economic crash.
- The scion of the Folger's coffee empire doesn't drink Folger's. He roasts and brews his own.
- The term "cup o' joe" originated in World War II.
- The coffee-break was an advertising ploy to sell more coffee.
Brazilian president Vargas committed suicide over coffee politics.
- Viet Nam became to second-largest producer of coffee and flooded the world with bad coffee, namely the Robusta beans.
- It costs a full day's wages for most coffee farmers to buy a cappuccino.
- Many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.
- In the early 1970s, the founder of the Second Cup coffee empire was a homeless alcoholic.
- Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.

Source: http://www.langfieldentertainment.com/BLACKCOFFEE.htm