Spending Fast, not fast enough!

Oh my, I cannot wait to share with you what has been going on this month with our "Month long fast". Today is January 28th. We have 3 more days to go.  Our month long spending fast began as we were seeing so many people that we visit, that really have nothing. We decided to see what it would be like to do without, and we needed to make it long enough that it wouldn't be comfortable. It began easy enough. I thought we made adequate preparations for not visiting the store each week. I'm sure Walmart thinks the Mormon couple must have left town. This is what we are down to.

Ron finished the last bit of his favorite jam, which we cannot find in Dodge City, Kansas (surprise)

 

I ate the last piece of bread for toast today, which may or may not have had a tiny bit of mold on it (I stopped looking closely at our food after about the middle of the month.

We are down to the last 1/3 cup of milk which has soured so badly that I made hot cocoa with it this morning just to mask the taste...Ron ate it on his cold cereal (he has more of a cast iron stomach than I do)
We have one egg, which we are both insisting the other gets to eat, and we used the last tablespoon of sour cream in our left-over taco soup, just to jazz it up a bit...only to figure out that it was NOT sour cream, but old left-over blintz filling that was put into a recycled sour cream container.
It was one of our goals to not let anything go to waste, so we've literally used the last drop of everything.
The only things we have spent money on this month is gas (we use a LOT of gas because our ward is spread out so far and wide) and medicine...for some reason, I've needed more than my fair share this month : P
It has been an exercise in frugality and self control, but also in seeing what it's like to do without. There are many people here who really don't have the means to run to the store when they are low on milk, or need jam & peanut butter. I have never known what it's like to be in need of anything. Even if I've run out of eggs on a Sunday, I know I can run over to our friends the Gessel's and borrow some. A lot of these people don't know their neighbors, or are too afraid to ask for something as simple as borrowing an egg for fear they will be found out that they are not "legal". Many of these folks fly under the radar, and as a result do without basic needs. If we have learned one thing from this, it is how truly blessed we are.