Jane Lately #59

AMAZON MUSIC FINALLY GOT “BLACK MAMBA” BY AESPA!!!!

It seems they’re adding Aespa’s songs slowly.

1. It’s weird to have money leftover after paying bills and buying groceries.

I used to be lucky if I had $50 left after paying bills, I made that little.

I’ve some debt to pay off, but I also want to put some cash into savings and furnishing my second apartment.~

There’s a lot of discussion about understaffed businesses closing early, shutting down and/or lacking in what they offer in Greenville, and the top thing no one seems to understand is just how difficult it is to actually make a living in this economy — most of the people gaslighting workers as “lazy” are old, white and financially stable.

I digress. I have a whole post I could write about that…and will, when I can properly articulate it.

2. I’m relying on freezer meals.

By freezer meals, I mean that I meal prepped most of them. Few are purchased premade these days. It’s a low spoons/neurodivergency thing, but it also saves money and leads to less boredom.

I subscribed to MyFreezEasy for $10, $5 Meal Plan for $5 to shake things up, but I unsubscribed from the $5 Meal Plan because most of the recipes were hit or miss for me, and the freezer sub provides more value for me.

Prepping a bunch of meals in one go into a freezer bag, putting one bag into the fridge to thaw overnight, dumping it into the CrockPot on LOW, and coming home to dinner that basically cooked itself.

Easiest way to cook meat ever.

After work, I just wanna come home, eat, binge fiction, maybe get on my laptop, bathe, brush my teeth and fall into bed.

I could make dinner and not do dishes, or I could do the dishes and order in — that’s what it came down to. However, ordering takeout every night gets old fast and wastes a lot more money than freezer meal plans do.

That said, I definitely don’t follow MyFreezEasy entirely because I’m a single person, and those recipes make 4 servings each — so there is a lot of adaptation, and then I plan dishes to make with leftovers (e.g. freezer meal beef stew → stew & cornbread-topped pie). They can also be frozen after cooked, which makes for easy lunches; I just have to thaw one in the fridge to heat over the stove when I come home for lunch.

3. I’ve been wanting to start a newsletter for real since last year, but I LOATHE ALL THE OPTIONS.

Sooo I don’t know what route I’m going to take. I sincerely wish there was a WordPress plugin that would allow me to fully manage a newsletter via my WordPress dashboard, each newsletter being written like a new post or something.

It’s a pain to have to reupload photos from posts, for example, into a newsletter service. I want something more in-house, less pay-for-these-premium-features-that-you-can’t-customize-specifically-how-you-want-to.

I could probably make one myself, but the timing is awful right now because I have a lot going on.