Day 35-

Well, I hate to say this but I think this frugality experiment, although it has been fun, has not brought about the great insight I had hoped for.  Don't get me wrong.  I have enjoyed the money saving, and the extra exercise, and the whole concept of a spending freeze but it just seems too easy.  Maybe thats OK.  Maybe I should have been reading some books like "Nifty Thrifty" or "Frugality for Dummies".  I don't know.  Maybe I should have started out by giving all the food in my pantry away and trying to then do the $2/day.  So far I have only spent about $14 on food for myself.  I didn't really even have to do that.  Maybe its OK to fail.  Or maybe the lessons are to be found in unmet expectations.

When I was a junior in high school, I entered the Middle Tennessee Science and Engineering Fair at Vanderbilt University.  It was a traumatic time for me.  We started working on it in the Fall and were to turn it in come Spring.  If we placed, we got a 100 for the semester.  It was a special project for me because my dad and I were working on it together.  Of course he was just helping me but I was reveling in it.  Well, that March,...I think...its all a blur... he suddenly passed away.  He had broken his leg and a blood clot formed and went to his lungs I believe.  Well anyways....one of the ways I dealt with the grief was focusing on this project that he and I had been working on.  My hypothesis was that if you were able to increase the surface temperature between two smooth surfaced metals you would be able to increase the conductivity between them........interesting eh?...... well to make a long story short......the experiment failed.  Instead of trying to justify....and rationalize....I just turned in my failure explaining why I thought it didn't work.

I don't know if you guys have ever been to high school science fair before, but have you ever noticed how everyone's experiment seems to work out.  If we had that kind of success rate in the adult scientific community we would already be teleporting ourselves to Mars where we would be sharing our innovations with alien races who have been obviously lagging behind technologically.   I mean I think I was the only experiment in the physics section that had failed.  But you know what?  I got first place.  Thats right.  Success in failure.  I guess the judges were OK with me failing.

I think God might just be OK with my failures too. (As long as I don't do it on purpose)

After all I have learned some things.......just in the last few days

1. Squirrels don't have much meat (and they have tough skin)
2. Five year old Cream of Wheat is still tasty if you put enough sugar on it.
3. I'm pretty sure Seneca's crack house is on the East 3rd St.  (Bike Riding discovery)

So maybe this experiment will be a success after all.....in its own weird way.