This and that

This fall, I decided I had too much food stored in the house, a gave myself a challenge to buy no more than $10 per week in groceries. This worked, in so far as I spent about $6/week for new food. And I ate up half my pantry, but the freezer was still packed. The problem being, of course, that I am only one, somewhat small, person, and I can't eat that much. I took a break during Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now it's back on the budget bandwagon for me. I'll report back in March, or whenever I give up.
---------

The bathroom installation proceeds slowly but steadily. My father is an amazing general contractor. He's always thinking ahead four steps. At first, this drove me a bit crazy, because I thought, "We don't have to worry about that part yet!" but now I realize that he talks through the process repeatedly, and thereby improves his plans each time. This trip alone we changed several decisions, and I had the opportunity to learn that Home Depot will, in fact, accept a returned toilet even if its packaging has been opened. I forsee that I'll be standing in return lines throughout the year, and have now organized my many receipts into a project binder. It's kind of fun to go old school - I haven't used a three-hole punch in about a decade.
The picture shows my father cutting out my stack pipe. This vents the air in your drains into the great outdoors so that your drains whisk away the liquids quietly. When my house was built, 70 years ago, these pipes were made of cast iron, so cutting it up (twice, because it was too heavy and long to remove in one piece) was a huge ordeal. But it's gone and replaced with PVC, with a location to hook in the new bathroom drain now.
-----
I signed up for a MOOC Spanish course. Not only is this useful for my language skills, but I also have a professional interest in MOOCs. They are all the rage in academia right now - will they destroy universities as we know them? Will they every make a dime in profit? It'll be interesting to experience it from the student perspective, and I'll do my best to make sure that I'm not part of the average 85% of enrollees that drop out before finishing.