Finding Time in No Buying Month

Onions and Leeks from our garden

Ten days down and going strong in No Buying Month.  While there are still a full three weeks to go in September, I’m feeling good and doing really well at Not Buying.  I haven’t caved in to any coffees at work, and the weekend was delightfully free of consumption. 

Amanda and I were talking on Saturday night about how we feel like the first week of Not Buying had gone, and both of us agreed that we feel inspired.  There’s something incredibly liberating about No Buying Month; that early feeling of freedom from impulse to buy that I described last week hasn’t faded.  In fact, it has kind of settled in and feels like a normal, valuable, easy way to be.  Amanda has actually decided that she will Not Buy every-other month.  I am thinking about instituting that myself.

Despite having no plans last weekend, the days were very full.  Drew and I are both on 9-5 schedules, now that he’s in physiotherapy school, so we spent most of Sunday cooking.  I harvested the onions and leeks we’d been growing on our roof, and pickled some green beans with jalapenos from our pepper plants.  I love spicy beans in Caesars.  I also made some cocktail onions (for Gibsons! Yum!) with the tiny onions that accompanied the big ones from our garden.  Last night I made creamy leek and mushroom soup with our harvest, and it’s delicious.  I find cooking to be relaxing and incredibly rewarding, and now that I have few plans during the week in an attempt to Not Buy, I’m finally going to have time to bake bread and make strawberry jam. 

As an added bonus to this experiment, even though Amanda and I said ‘entertainment spending’ was OK, I’m doing my best to keep my weeknights open to Not Buy and to get myself in the habit of not booking up crazy weeks all the time.  It’s easy for me to let my schedule get out of control by agreeing to meet up with people I like, to do things I like to do.  It’s not bad, but it’s tiring, and I don’t end up having any nights at home with nothing to do, when I could just read a novel, paint, or cook.  Any home-night is necessarily full of chores that I haven’t done at other times.  

Not Buying is helping me pull balance into my schedule, and I love that.  It's a return to my first months in Toronto, when I rarely had any plans at night.  But, instead of wishing that I had things to do, now I'm looking forward to the quiet.