Shopping Day, Other $30 Challenges, Rules, Prayer Aspect

Well the big day is here-- the eve of "Day One"-- time to do the majority of the shopping... about to head out this afternoon. I was able to go ahead and grab my Chinatown purchases yesterday. I found locally-produced eggs for $0.99/dozen at Hong Kong Food Market! I also went ahead and purchased the carrots and cabbage at Dynasty, which still had the least expensive costs on those two items by a long shot. I've made a few more adjustments to the Google Spreadsheet if you want to check it out. Major adjustment: When I had checked the oatmeal price at Walmart, they had the 42 oz. box in the wrong place, so I misread the price. Talk about a bummer. I was really basing a lot of my budget around the fact that I was going to get 42 oz. for $1.74. So I had to switch to generic which is still $2.74, and had to drop a few packs of ramen and do some other tweaking. But it's really OK because I decided that ramen was probably not something I'd want to weigh down my diet with anyway, for health concerns. 

Other $30 challenges out there. A few of you have brought to my attention other $30 challenges out there, or $1/day challenges. For the record, I was aware of one sociology experiment done in this context, but have been intrigued to learn of other "challenge" type sites out there. Thanks for pointing those out, Lance and Howard. This guy tried to buy his food each day instead of one bulk run, putting a different twist on the idea. On his site he links to a handful of other similar blogs of people giving it a try for various reasons. There was also a couple who took their twist on the $30 "diet" challenge together, which I had heard of (and subsequently received inspiration from) but did not know the extent of their fame. From the links my friend Lance sent me, I learned that they were featured in the New York Times, and that they've even gotten a book deal out of their little experiment. Crazy!

Rules of the Challenge. For the curious, I thought I would lay down some ground rules. Although the real heart of my particular challenge is to save money and donate it to the Peace Gospel Orphanage in India, there is still an aspect to my challenge involving fasting to foster a stronger heart of compassion for the poor. My thought is that as I have to make the hard choices of what to eat with such little resources, I will be forced to think of what the destitute have to face on a constant basis. Thus in my particular challenge, I will not be accepting any food people may want to offer me. In short, what I buy with my $30 is all that I will eat during this 30 day period. 

Prayer. As with any fast, there is also an aspect of prayer involved in my challenge. Thus each day I will be choosing a specific prayer focus related to our work with Peace Gospel International. My hope is that I'll be able to make a post per day during the 30 days. Each day I will post the prayer concern so that you might share with me in that prayer focus. 

Further comments on the sample menu in my March 21 post. After consulting with my wife on this (I'm not much of a cook), she gave me some ideas that will allow me to find a little more variety in working with the ingredients I'll have. So, the sample menu will indeed be just that, a sample of what may be. I'm a bit relieved at this honestly, as I really was not looking forward to eating the same exact thing every day for 30 days. I'll try to spare you of every detail, but I will try to post some record of what I'm actually doing with the ingredients as I go along through the 30 days.

Ok, well I'm off to the shopping, and then tomorrow starts the big "Day One."