L's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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jacob
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Re: L's Journal

Post by jacob »

Instead of a haybox, I just put the pressure cooker in bed with a couple of blankets around it. It helps that it's sealed tight. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. It saves building a haybox. BTW, there are many equivalent solutions. Also see "wonderbag" or "sleeping bag" :-D

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

Thanks, I'll try googling those! I don't have a pressure cooker unfortunately, only a steamer saucepan. But I'm sure I can figure out something that's relatively easy to set up.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

I've decided to keep a log of what I'm buying at the supermarket for a bit, so I can find a good balance between cost and my disability-related lack of energy for cooking properly every day. I went to the supermarket today and I already seem to have saved money due to my realisation that I can still persuade myself to cook with my steamer as long as the veg is all canned and not fresh, which meant I reduced the number of pizzas. I realise that all of the carbs in this list are either pizza, oats for porridge, or biscuits, but the last 3 times I bought bread it went mouldy when I was less than half way through the loaf because it seems that on some level my brain is resistant to eating shop bought bread. Normally I shop at the supermarket once every 10 or 11 days. I always go to ALDI, which is very good for budget prices.

Here is today's shop (food items for myself only because anything else is a different spending category):

4 pints whole milk £1.09
1 can (400g total, 240g once drained) kidney beans £0.30
1 can chopped tomatoes (400g) £0.28
1 can baked beans (420g) £0.22
1 can sweetcorn (340g, 285g once drained) £0.37
1 can pear halves (410g, 240g once drained) £0.69
1 can peach slices (411g, 250g once drained) £0.33
1kg porridge oats £0.75
4 packs custard cream biscuits (300g per pack) £1.12 total
15 frozen fish fingers £1.39
2 ham and pineapple pizzas £2.58 total
1 bbq chicken pizza £1.49
16 medium size sausage rolls £1.98 total
350g fresh celery £0.39
350g fresh cherry tomatoes £0.70

Total: £13.68

This is an excellent number, since previously before having these realisations about canned food I had been at more like £17-£20 on food for myself for the same period. There were a couple of things that I didn't buy because I already have them in stock, but that is why I'm calculating the average. I expect not to need to shop for another 10 days roughly, so if we go for 10 days this gives me a food spend of £1.36 per day or £9.52 per week. If I can keep an average of below £10 I will be very happy indeed, so we'll see how it goes once I factor in the next few shops.

Frita
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Re: L's Journal

Post by Frita »

Kudos on breaking out of your pizza routine! Wow, your Aldi prices are really reasonable. I am a bit envious. ;) It will be interesting in how the eating changes will affect you.

We also can have the moldy bread issue. I usually bag it and freeze. Then I take out just what we need. This works well if baking or buying store bought products. My son really likes bakery croissants, which sometimes go on sale in multiples of six. I wrap them up the same way to add variety in his breakfast options. If I think we’ll eat up sooner but still want to avoid surprise mold, I put in the refrigerator.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

Thanks! I'm going to try and keep tracking it, so I can get the cost more streamlined and the nutrition more balanced. I already have some more ideas for what to do next time - one of my friends said it might be possible to put some pasta in the water in the bottom of the steamer to have with the beans and veg.

The frozen bread is in theory a good idea, but in practice I've found that freezing changes the taste of bread in a way I don't like. But thanks for the suggestion.

ThriftyRob
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Re: L's Journal

Post by ThriftyRob »

Thanks L for an entertaining read. Your experiments with washing your hair in the sink take me back to my childhood when showers weren't fitted in homes. I used to wash my hair in the sink and use a plastic beaker to rinse it (no risk of breakage or damage to the sink). Any piece of Tupperware or an old ice cream tub would do. I'm tempted to change to bucket washing in the shower for the water savings.

You're doing really well in keeping your food costs so low. Have you looked at the option of buying frozen veg instead of tinned? You have more flexibility around portion size and variety and you would avoid all the nasties that are added to tinned food to increase storage time. Also, you could make your own pizza substitutes using sliced baguette or ciabatta or any flat bread topped with chopped tomatoes plus your choice of toppings. Again, you'd probably reduce your E-number intake. Little Gem lettuces are two for less than a pound and are a great way of getting some fresh leafy greens into your diet and they also make a great substitute for bread/wraps when filled with meat/cheese/eggs/tomatoes/etc.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

Thanks! Glad you're enjoying reading.

I do already have some frozen veg that I'd had for a while but hadn't got round to using - I have diced onions, peas, and spinach. I am considering getting more in the future, though.

The thing with fresh vegetables is that due to forgetting to eat them I kept having to throw some of the fresh vegetables away unless I just buy a little at once, which feels very wasteful. So that's one reason why I'm trying to switch to mostly canned and frozen except for one or two things each week. I'm currently expecting to have to throw half a fresh cucumber from the previous shop (11 days before this one) because I ate some of it a couple of days ago and it was already tasting a bit past its best, and I don't love cucumber enough to make myself eat it all at once...

It just goes to show really - even though I theoretically understand the basis of a nutritionally balanced diet, since I did a fair amount of reading on it as a teen, in practice the "ideal" diet of everything freshly prepared is not always achievable. So it's interesting to try and work out a balance that works with my general level of functioning while *also* being balanced in terms of food groups.

I already have an idea that next time I can buy some dried pasta which I can put in the bottom of the steamer pan in the boiling water and it should cook and give me some slightly higher quality carbs. And pasta keeps for years, I've been told.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

I visited my mum this morning to use her printer and mentioned my idea with the pasta, and since I only just went to the supermarket, she gave me 500g pasta for free! So now I can try out my pasta idea much sooner than I thought I was going to be able to. Hopefully I'll be able to get back onto proper long lasting carbs that way instead of eating so many biscuits.

She also gave me half a loaf of rather dense sourdough bread, which she and my dad have rejected for being too dense, but I just ate some and it's perfectly edible. She's been experimenting with making sourdough, and she apparently used 80% spelt flour to 20% regular flour in this one, and she thinks she needs more to make it less flat. Me, I don't care what the bread looks like, I just care if I can eat it.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

Well, as you can see, I've failed to track the food spending here like I said I would - I've been to the shops several times since I posted the breakdown of the one shop. I often seem to end up forgetting to actually track things longer than a few times, so I think I'll give up on the detailed tracking.

However, I HAVE tried out the pasta and frozen veg combo and it's working very well for me! I've been able to reduce pizzas to three times per shop instead of five, and cooked pasta with something or other on all other days, including 2 to 3 types of frozen veg, and either fish fingers or kidney beans for protein. The fact I can throw it all in the pan is really helping.

I have some more big news now, though, that will change the face of my current financial situation. My parents have been having some issues and my mum decided she wanted to move out of my dad's, so I've said she can live with me. I don't think this will drive me up the wall the same way that living with both parents at once did, because a lot of the things I found annoying there were either due to my dad working from home full time, and things I found annoying about my mum there were often things that were caused by her being annoyed at my dad. So I think that living with just one of my parents is a lot more manageable than living with both, and since it's not in my childhood home and we have agreed to split bills 50/50, it also casts us as more equal adults. So I think I will be able to cope pretty well with it.

The main benefit of this, of course, is that if my mum is paying 50% of rent, council tax, bills, my regular expenditure is going to drop by several thousand. So this will mean it's much more manageable for me to be earning enough to cover it, and I should even be able to start saving again once I've finished recovering my income situation from the impact of COVID, even without having to earn more than I've been earning.

Additional benefits include: better food since my mum can cook and bakes bread as a hobby and I'll only have to do my own food some of the time (what exactly we buy each time has yet to be worked out but we're still going to go with the budget supermarkets), better exercise since my mum exercising will remind me to exercise, avoiding loneliness that comes from living alone and mainly having long distance friends, and help remembering what I'm supposed to be doing / managing exec dysfunction that comes from being neuroatypical.

ertyu
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Re: L's Journal

Post by ertyu »

BookLoverL wrote:
Tue Sep 08, 2020 7:56 am
I often seem to end up forgetting to actually track things longer than a few times, so I think I'll give up on the detailed tracking.
this is me. in the end tracking becomes yet another thing to hate myself for not being on top of.

Hope living with your mom works out. It would help both of you. You're right to think that it's likely to be a completely different dynamic without your dad there.

BookLoverL
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Re: L's Journal

Post by BookLoverL »

So far living with my mum is going ok. She is spending a lot more on food than I was and asked me to start contributing to that, so I've set her a hard limit on what I'm willing to pay for food. In general, increases in bills will be more than covered by decreases in rent, though.

On another issue: for a while now I have got INFP on pretty much all MBTI tests I did, and was pretty confident in that identification. But now a friend of mine pointed out some things I did that are making me reconsider the INTP classification that I got when I was a teenager a time or two, which I thought had been due to my overidentification with the persona I had of "the Smart One". So now I'm not sure - I'm trying to read over some websites about it but I can suddenly (probably due to the strong Ne that I definitely have) can see my behaviour in both INFP and INTP lights. xD So any reminders of what the differences are between those two might be useful.

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Re: L's Journal

Post by jacob »

The difference from my (INTj) perspective is that the INFP is "the mystic" whereas the INTP is "the skeptic". Both are looking to maximize internal consistence. However, the INTP is looking for proof and exceptions to some analytical framework whereas the INFP is forever looking to be aligned with what they feel aka the pursuit authenticity. I'd say that both are looking for "the one answer" to this inherent motivation. They're not comfortable with T or F ambiguity insofar thoughts are inconsistent with what they should be (according to their current framework). Another way of phrasing this is that the main purpose in life is "verification and validation" of their understanding of the world which can be either based on logic (INTP) or feelings (INFP).

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Re: L's Journal

Post by Alphaville »

as an intp i’m always testing assumptions, which means that my understanding of the world is systematically being invalidated on a daily basis. thus, said understanding is always partial, and only what remains after the test.

however, from a different personality type (big five) i score very high on openness, which means that i‘m willing to entertain any new ideas and i’m not heavy on “identity”—i’m always revising my picture of the world.

do these 2 match?

e.g. i am open to use myers-briggs, amd accept it as a partial truth, but i also know that it doesn’t cover every scenario, and i know that other typing systems have a greater base of evidence, but i also am aware that science is partial and an ongoing enterprise and new models are being proposed amd tested, especially in the social sciences which are not so reducible to logic and mathematical formulas. so i’m willing to use it, in addition to other models, but not as a matter of faith. :mrgreen:

t/f are supposed to be decision-making mechanisms yes? analysis vs “gut.”

i used to be more f when younger/pre-therapy btw.

ertyu
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Re: L's Journal

Post by ertyu »

iirc Jung thought the goal of personal development was to move more "towards the middle" - for the I's to work on the E, for the Fs to work on the T, etc.

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Re: L's Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

As an INFP, I've always been drawn to creative writing (of the self-expressive sort), and I'm constantly daydreaming--e.g., the better a novel the harder time I have finishing it, because the presentation of interesting ideas causes my own mind to wander off the page. Also, for someone who is supposed to be an introvert, I get as much energy talking for hours with 1 or 2 like-minded friends as I do from going for a hike in the woods by myself. In my career as an attorney, I enjoy the writing and the one-on-one client interaction (and also the one-on-one interaction with opposing counsel), but I HATE keeping up with deadlines and strategizing how to out-maneuver the other side. I also hate the high stress, but I also need the stress to get me to stop daydreaming and to focus on the task at hand; and I enjoy when I'm in the zone and hyper focused on completing a task, to the exclusion of everything else, for hours and sometimes even days at a time.
Last edited by Hristo Botev on Wed Oct 28, 2020 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: L's Journal

Post by daylen »

Just glanced at your post history and came up with a few questions to narrow it down.

1. Do you often fantasize or deliberate about how an event should have gone differently or how the future should turn out? Both Fi and Ti users do this, but the difference is that Fi-users almost always include themselves in these calculations (interested calculus) whereas Ti-users almost always detach from themselves (disinterested calculus).

2. When learning a technical skill, like coding or mathematics, are you more likely to confuse the order of operations or to become confused by substitutions? For instance, are you more likely to execute A -> C -> B then realize that you were supposed to do A -> B -> C, or are you more likely to replace A with B in the equation B - C = D and then claim that A does not equal D + C? The former is an ordinal mistake and the latter is a nominal mistake. Te is good at ordinal tasks, and Ti is good at nominal tasks. An INFP with Te in the fourth slot would go about learning math ordinarily but it would probably be taxing on attention/energy. An INTP would be continuously making substitutions (what if x was y...or let bananas = turkeys).

3. To insure that you do use Ne-Si in these respective positions (second and third slot), we can look at your relationship with Se. Would you describe yourself as clumsy or aloof in physical activities? Generally, Si can become good at a task in which the environment does not vary much (e.g. home cooking, golf, gymnastics, etc.) but it is not as effective when the environment is continuously shifting (e.g. busy restaurant, team sports, etc.). Se in the 7th slot is essentially blind (unconscious the majority of the time). This also tends to result in lots of projects being started and almost none ever being finished, although you may find yourself periodically re-visiting or re-starting the same project over the span of years.

Putting all this together, how would you work your way though these three questions? Are you instinctively parsing them into a tree-like structure of possibilities and contemplating how other people you know would align with these possibilities? ..or are you taking them bit by bit and relating to your personal history or general mannerisms?
Last edited by daylen on Wed Oct 28, 2020 2:48 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Re: L's Journal

Post by Alphaville »

ertyu wrote:
Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:51 pm
iirc Jung thought the goal of personal development was to move more "towards the middle" - for the I's to work on the E, for the Fs to work on the T, etc.
oh! since you mentioned jung (a mystic), there’s a type of evidence-based therapy called dialectical behavior therapy, which proposes for patients the achievement of a “wise mind” that combines feeling with clear thinking, looking for a middle.

eg see: https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com/ ... wise-mind/ (this is for patients, not a textbook or scientific paper)

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Re: L's Journal

Post by daylen »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:43 pm
e.g. i am open to use myers-briggs, amd accept it as a partial truth, but i also know that it doesn’t cover every scenario, and i know that other typing systems have a greater base of evidence, but i also am aware that science is partial and an ongoing enterprise and new models are being proposed amd tested, especially in the social sciences which are not so reducible to logic and mathematical formulas. so i’m willing to use it, in addition to other models, but not as a matter of faith. :mrgreen:
Models within the neo-jungian sphere are associated with a completely different methodology than evidence-based, statistical models. Scientific validity relies on external replication (i.e. experiments) and philosophical/logical validity relies on internal replication (i.e. introspection). The former being associated with the big-five and the latter with neo-jungian models (i.e. Te vs. Ti if you want to look at it that way). The big-five factors are statistically(*) derived from actual questions asked of willing participants. Any such answers to these questions are like micro-experiments, the results of which may present correlations with other such experiments/measures (i.e. success, IQ, income, etc.). This only tells you what is likely to appear with what (i.e. externally), but this process cannot tell you anything about how to interpret such results (i.e. internally). The neo-jungian sphere starts from a completely different premise, being that humans can better understand themselves by making [mental] substitutions in the objects of their own experience. Yet this is precisely what conflicts with scientific investigation, because a substitution made on the basis of internal replication cannot be externally replicated (at least not without deconstructing the agent/human into a discrete set of replicators/genes and thus loosing track of the emergent "human" level).

Thus each method is indeed partial and generally incommensurable; each serving a different agenda yet both focusing on the same level of analysis (i.e. the human mind). Within the big-five, an agent might be "open" and this may correlate with some other external factors, but the questions of what "openness" means to an agent and why an agent is "open" are deliberated upon by neo-jungian philosophy. Answering why such external correlations exist must be done at an entirely different level of analysis (e.g. cells, species, organizations, cities, planets, etc.). Causation from one of these levels requires a combination of ordinal (i.e. practice) and nominal (i.e. theory) processing.

(*) That is, through an ordinal process that does not make nominal substitutions, except of agents themselves scoring in the same percentile on the derived factors.

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Re: L's Journal

Post by Alphaville »

i followed most of it but
daylen wrote:
Wed Oct 28, 2020 5:18 pm
substitutions in the objects of their own experience. [...]substitution made on the basis of internal replication
what are substitutions? do you mean by this... the reduction of particular experiences to dual categories? or something else?

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Re: L's Journal

Post by daylen »

Two or more agents see an object and refer to it by some label (i.e. first substitution). Later an agent refers to that reference by some label (i.e. second substitution). And so forth (AKA attentional orders).

The basis of that process on internal replication is yet another substitution I am making (so that a causal link might be established from the species level).

What tends to happen as substitutions are made is that a pattern emerges ignoring what particular labels point to (creating a window into the universal grammar innate to humans).

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