We have also installed it as a TV in the bedroom. Normally I don’t like having a TV in the bedroom, but this configuration works too well to pass up. Projecting onto the slanted portion of our bedroom ceiling&mash;we have a steep A roof—we get a good picture of around 80-90 inches, which beats our TV by a decent margin. The picture sharpness doesn’t match up, but it performs well enough to enjoy thoroughly.

We paid a total of USD 434 + CAD 105 or around CAD 540 for the projector, shipping, and import fees. We bought it directly from the manufacturer iSival Instruments.

We had some difficulty connecting it to my MacBook Air: the computer wouldn’t detect the projector as a display without re-booting. Fortunately, a little testing revealed the solution:

1. Connect the adapter (DisplayPort to DVI in my case) to the cable (DVI to HDMI in my case)
2. Connect the adapter/cable to the projector, then
3. Connect the cable to the MacBook Air.

This sequence works for both DVI/HDMI and VGA connections. I plan to purchase a DisplayPort/HDMI adapter in order to get direct HDMI output to the projector.

A portable TV capable of 1080P for less than CAD 600. Not bad, and an easy value to compute. Even at 8 minutes of life energy per dollar (approximately $30k/year salary), the entire setup costs you 80 hours of pre-tax energy, and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy the projector for more than two weeks.

If you have now caught the bug of living remotely, then let us share with you a few tips to help your experiment have a better chance to succeed.

• Find out how to move money from any account to any other account without walking into a branch. This could require more work than you think. In Canada, learn how to use Interac Email Money Transfers.
• Automate all bill payments. We have set up preauthorized payment to a credit card for as many vendors as we can, with preauthorized debit from a chequing account for the rest. We pay bills from a line of credit account in order to avoid overdraft fees. This means maintaining a credit balance in a line of credit account, but considering that chequing accounts offer virtually no interest, this costs us a few dollars per year.
• Go paperless at home and at the office. Scan all incoming mail and file it electronically. Buy either a graphics tablet or an older tablet PC so that you can sign documents without printing them. Subscribe to a fax-to-email service, like myfax.com. I found a Motion Computing M1400 on e-bay for USD 250 and spent CAD 200 upgrading it. Sarah owns a Nokia N810 internet tablet device and an entourage eDGe, both of which fit the bill.
• Avoid having to use the phone while roaming. Especially in Canada, roaming costs remain high. In Mexico, using the phone would have cost us CAD 3/minute. Subscribe to a voicemail-to-email service and don’t answer your phone. Train people to SMS you when they need to talk to you, so that you can call them back over the internet. Direct most communication to email and don’t answer too quickly, or people will expect that level of service all the time. Set a vacation autoresponder on your email account and don’t answer email for 3 weeks. Direct people to SMS you if your failure to respond costs you a significant amount of money. (I put CAD 1000 in my autoresponder. Your number will vary.) Consider directing people to call a Skype Online Number or Grasshopper number instead.
• Outsource any day-to-day business operations that have to happen back home to a trustee. We have a property manager in Dauphin MB who takes care of our rental properties and our housesitter scans all incoming mail and emails it to us a few times per week.
• Write a comprehensive document about how to live in your house so that other people can do it. We have specific instructions like “please minimize electricity use, because it costs more here” and “check the basement twice per week for water” and “here’s how you reboot our router”. If you have any gadgets that require specialized knowledge, then explain how to use them. If you do things differently from others, then don’t assume others will know how to live in your house. In particular, if your house does things that you’ve got used to, but that might trouble someone else, mention it. Put Post-It notes around the house to remind people about any tricky things.
• Find a maintenance man in your area. Let him mow your lawn or do some light maintenance while you’re at home. If you trust him, then make him the point man when things go wrong with the house. Find someone who feels very comfortable communicating by email and doesn’t expect to speak on the phone.
• Hire a general contractor to do some work on your house while you’re there. It can be something small, but it has to be a big enough job to give you confidence that he will do good work when you’re not there.
• Learn how to buy anything and send it back home. This can range from having household goods delivered from a local grocery store or online drug store to making arrangements with your local pet supply shop to keep your credit card on file and deliver cat litter to your house in response to an email. Remember that delivery fees cost less than flying home.
• Only use delivery services that allow anyone to receive and, if necessary, pick up packages. Canada Post wouldn’t let our housesitter pick up a package on our behalf, but UPS or DHL would.
• Consider a service like myus.com as a clearing house for incoming packages so that you can route them to wherever you are in the world.
• Let your bank know that someone will be depositing cash on your behalf, or arrange to have deposits sent in by mail. While ING Direct, for example, routinely accepts deposits by mail, they also routinely impose standing clearing periods that your local bank would likely waive for you. If you have someone local to deposit your cheques, and your bank gets to know that someone, then you’ll find you have access to your money sooner.
• Make sure someone cleans your house on a regular basis. This not only keeps the place clean, but ensures that someone runs water through the pipes and even helps fulfil your insurance policy’s requirements for not leaving the property vacant for more than 48 or 72 hours in a row.

We could probably identify more, but we think we provides a great start.

This experiment in living remotely has meant that a whole new class of opportunities has opened up to us. For example, if a lucrative contract to work for six months in Europe, we can take it without hesitation. We don’t have to worry about bad timing or having too many constraints to stop us from going. Once we have a housesitter in place, we can go.

How much would your life improve if you could take advantage of opportunities like that?

A little roof problem damages the ceiling

Our housesitter sent us this photo of our second-storey ceiling crumbling as a result of a roof leak. Fortunately, this didn’t present a serious problem, but a few emails back and forth sufficed to fix the problem. Our housesitter coordinated with our handyman to diagnose the severity of the problem, and concluded it wasn’t serious. We asked the contractor who worked on our roof to coordinate with our housesitter to fix the underlying roof problem, and he did so free of charge, since his previous roof work created the problem. Finally, our housesitter told us that the roof no longer leaks, and relayed from the contractor that we needn’t bother fixing the ceiling hole until we decide to renovate the entire ceiling. All this required no more than about 15 minutes of our time and energy. For a small problem like this, we didn’t have to worry much, but what about a more serious problem?

Making our basement more flood-resistant

Fortunately—in a strange way—the Universe tested us on this, too. Not long after we left, our basement flooded quite vigorously. We had 30-40 cm of water in the basement as a result of an old sump pump, highly saturated ground, and thawing snow. Once again, we managed to coordinate everything from the road: our handyman coordinated with a plumber to install a new sump pump, confirm that they drained the basement effectively, and even raised our basement appliances 20 cm off the floor to avoid damage from any similar flooding in the future. All this required less than an hour of our time, and while it put a little more stress on us, our housesitter sent us photos of the work to satisfy us that the plumber had done the job well. Even something as annoying as a disintegrating mailbox only required a few emails and 10 minutes of our time to resolve. We managed to do this with a combination of email, Skype, headphones, a trustworthy housesitter, a good handyman and local contractors. I think that as long as none of our important records suffer from flooding, leaks, or other damage, that virtually nothing that could happen at home would prompt us to return. We do still need to spend several hours finding housesitters, but the more people we engage, the easier time we have of finding the next one. Sarah still feels considerable stress finding housesitters, but the Universe has so far always found a way to send us someone we can trust.

When we returned home and could inspect the damage for ourselves, we found no further problems with the leaky ceiling on the second floor, a sump pump that actually works well, a dry basement floor, and a general appreciation for coming home to a house in slightly better repair than when we left it.

Diaspar Software Services, Mexico office

We’ve written before about our impressions of Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Work Week. In this book, Ferriss extols the virtues of first eliminating as much administrative work as possible, then automating the rest. For example, I have eliminated a majority of email communication by training others not to expect quick responses from me. Only the most expensive-to-ignore emails get through, and this system has given me significant peace of mind. We have automated almost all our bill payments. We have outsourced managing our rental properties. I estimate that we spend less than two hours per month on recurring administrative issues, and we can do better. For example, we have too many bank accounts, including chequing, savings, and credit. This requires moving money around each month. This summer, we will eliminate as much of the confusion as we can. I bring up elimination and automation because these two activities make it easier for us to live away from home. We have outsourced much of our administrative work to housesitters, handymen, book-keepers and accountants, but we needed to know whether we’d outsourced and automated enough to move ourselves off all critical paths. What could possibly happen at home that would require our physical presence? It turns out that we managed to handle a number of things remotely, with a combination of the internet, a tablet PC, Skype, headphones, a scanner, and MXN 10 per page for printing costs at the nearby internet cafe.

• We filed an annual return of information for our company by fax.
• We filed both corporate and personal tax returns.
• We collected significant revenue from clients by wire transfer and direct deposit.
• We invoiced a client entirely electronically, including an expense report complete with receipts.
• We even sent a tax treaty document by post to the US!

Even when the outside world insisted on receiving physical paper, we managed to make that happen with little effort: a few minutes’ walk, a USB drive, a few pesos, and a stamp. I conclude from this experience that we have made our office paperless enough to travel anywhere with an internet cafe or a printing service. We have one major annoyance to eliminate this summer: TD Canada Trust’s Euro account requires the accountholder to sign a piece of paper in a branch in Canada to transfer funds out of the account. It also does not allow withdrawing cash in Euro. We intend to try out the Euro account with HSBC bank to see whether it indeed solves those problems. With this, we’ll have provided for the vast majority of our day-to-day needs, and for the rare item that requires an unusual amount of our attention, we will have saved up more than enough energy to deal with it.

Villa Serena, Mazatlán, México

On the advice of relatives, we chose to experiment with living at Villa Serena, located in Mazatlán’s old downtown. We found a one-bedroom apartment for USD 653 per month. This price included MXN 300 worth of electricity per month, and access to the amenities, although we did have to pay an additional MXN 150 per month to use the laundry facilities and MXN 25 per 19-litre bottle of water. We ended up spending a total of CAD 1129 + MXN 13942, or approximately CAD 2280 on housing costs for three months. That makes CAD 760 per month for rent, cooling, water, cable TV, and internet. The corresponding items cost us CAD 782 per month in Summerside. That makes it possible to live in Mazatlán quite inexpensively. We love that.

Cooking with my youngest sister-in-law, Mary

We ate quite well, mostly cooking, but occasionally eating out. We certainly enjoyed a lot of Hector’s bread at Molika Bakery, which we mentioned in a previous article. We spent about CAD 2280 on food for three months, or CAD 760 per month, which makes for a telling coincidence: we value food. We spent about CAD 183 on our Molika Bakery habit, CAD 32 on coffee beans, CAD 934 on shopping at the big grocery store, CAD 156 at the local market , CAD 216 on pizza, and the rest (about CAD 759) on eating out. After we returned home, we computed what we spent on food in June unrelated to travel, and it came to just under CAD 1000.

Traveling in style with our good friend, Jen

We love how little transportation costs at home, and in Mazatán, the taxis and pulmonías didn’t disappoint. We spent CAD 136 on transportation, excluding the trips to and from the airport, which totaled an additional CAD 53. Given the flat rate of CAD 6 or 7.50 per trip in Summerside, CAD 136 would buy about 17 trips, or 8 round trips, at home. We probably use about 4 rounds trips per month at home, which costs around CAD 180-200 over three months, depending on where we need to go. While we encountered some trouble flagging down a pulmonía in Mazatlán, we found the service overall both efficient and pleasant to use. I also owe the taxistas a debt of gratitude for letting me practise Spanish with them.

I think I can make a strong case that Mazatlán offers us an excellent place to live, with a cost of living very similar to Summerside. We consider our experiment a financial success, at least on the surface. We couldn’t resist looking at some real estate listings, and while houses cost considerably more there than at home, we had to double-take at the property taxes those listings quoted. As a single data point, a house listed at USD 250k carried property taxes of USD 200 per year. This compares favorably to the CAD 1250 per year we pay in Summerside. Although we would need a cash infusion to move there, it appears that we could live in Mazatlán spending under our arbitrary limit of CAD 2000 per month for basic living expenses.

Tim Ferriss' "Four-Hour Work Week"

I have started reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. When I’d read descriptions and reviews of the book, I formed the opinion that I already intuitively understood many of the principles at work, particularly as regards his steps of elimination and automation. Reading it confirmed what I’d suspected: I had already used these techniques and even counseled others to use them in my work as a classroom trainer and consultant. It sprang to mind a particular success story from my early software career.

I worked as a student-on-call at IBM in Toronto in 1997. I started on the Visual Age for RPG project, which entailed my comparing error messages between the older RPG compiler and the newer Visual Age RPG compiler. While they had automated the test that produced all the error messages they wanted to check, they hadn’t automated checking the messages from the two compilers to each other. Instead, I started doing that. I began with 50-page printouts: a master copy and printouts from each test run. I compared the two copies, then reported a defect when I found an unacceptable difference between the two. It took a few days to learn which differences they could tolerate and which ones they decided warranted a fix. It took me several hours to compare the printouts, and I resented the tedium. After a week, I had the thought that all successful people have: there has to be a better way.

First, I asked whether I could use e-copies of both the master copy and the test runs. They arranged for that with little effort. As I waited for that, I looked for patterns in the text I compared by hand, learning how to extract the messages from the surrounding text and how to describe meaningful and meaningless differences. Once I received e-copies of the master copy and a single test run, I started writing a computer program to load the two files, compare them, then summarize the differences, highlighting the meaningful ones as “almost certainly defects” and the meaningless ones as “probably not defects”. This gave me an opportunity to write my first truly useful programs in C, a language I hadn’t much used before, but one that I imagined would benefit me as a professional programmer. I don’t recall how long it took me, but I don’t remember anyone becoming impatient with me, so the time I spent must not have made me a bottleneck.

The first day, I used my new program to on the next test run, but verified the results by hand. I noticed that my program took about 30 minutes to run: I had an old computer, I didn’t know how to write particularly quick programs, and don’t forget the test runs amounted to 50 printed pages. At first, I looked around the office while my program ran for something to do, as I didn’t have access to the internet on my computer. I flipped through a few manuals, including a C manual that I thought might help me. That day I processed two test runs, the same as any other day, but noticed that my manual checking went quicker, because I could check the meaningful differences first, then the meaningless ones, then double-check the rest of the document to ensure that program didn’t miss any defects. To my delight, it performed more than well enough for me to start trusting it within a week.

Now the time had come to harvest my productivity crop. I collected that day’s test run and a new master copy, loaded them into my program, ran it, then wandered around the building, knowing I had about 30 minutes. I hadn’t realized the size and complexity of the old IBM building in Toronto. I began to understand the need for its intricate room addressing system, right down to numbering hallways, odd numbers running north-south and even numbers running east-west. I walked back to my office after about an hour of wandering to look at my program’s result. I reported two defects, then wondered what to do next. I had to wait for the next test run, and they wouldn’t run one for another couple of hours. I wandered the building some more and stumbled upon something of interest: a dart board in the cafeteria.

I started playing darts.

In less than two weeks, I’d gone from a terrifically tedious job checking two 50-page documents to one another by hand to IBM paying me roughly $150/hour (as a starving undergraduate student!) for about one hour per day, with seven hours of playing darts, reading, or generally relaxing. All this by finding an ineffective work process and streamlining it with a little elimination and a little automation. I had gained some relative mobility, as I only needed to spend about an hour a day in my office, reporting defects or fixing my test program.

Now I need to confess something: my program did not operate perfectly. Every two weeks or so, I’d notice something my program missed: a difference that my program interpreted as meaningless that I needed to report as a defect. This meant that, every so often, I reported a defect later than I could have. I was performing at far less than 100% efficiency. Funnily enough, it did not matter at all! I didn’t understand the theory at the time, but I experienced it then: the project had a bottleneck somewhere else in the system that moved more slowly than I reported defects, so I could generate no extra value by reporting those defects more efficiently!

Imagine that: producing better results wouldn’t have mattered at all, so it didn’t matter that I produced my results less than perfectly efficiently.

Since I didn’t understand bottlenecks at the time, I felt bad about “cheating” and added more rules to my program to handle these increasingly subtle distinctions between meaningful and meaningless differences. The resulting program did work better and did automate my work even more, allowing me to go from one hour of work per day to closer to 45 minutes; but if I hadn’t been refining a skill I would use later to make a lot of money, then I would have looked back on that as a waste of time. Had I known any better, I might not have bothered at all, and simply played more darts!

Long before I started reading The Four-Hour Work Week, I managed to use some of the principles he describes to turn an $18/hour job into a $150/hour, one-hour-per-day job where I got to play darts, read, and otherwise relax most of the day. I didn’t wait to perfect my time-saving system; I just started using it as soon as I reasonably could, even though it cost me extra time for the first week! Since then, I’ve managed to combine the goal of mobility with the principles of elimination to retire at 34 on passive income streams worth 1.5 times my family’s essential living expenses. You can do it, too, and I recommend The Four-Hour Work Week for beginners to read to help form their vision of a new life, and then to re-read a year or two later to refine your approach to freedom from the tyranny of tedium.

PhoneTag.com works as you might expect: you forward your unanswered calls to their service, your caller leaves voicemail with them instead of your current phone service, someone or something transcribes the voicemail to text, then they email the text to you and can send you a text message, if you like. It sounds great: no more phoning in to retrieve messages, since they can easily push those messages to me.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like.

I tried to forward unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com’s phone number. My phone responded with “Request not completed”. After a few attempts, I called Rogers Wireless and they forwarded all my calls for me, which allowed me to test the PhoneTag.com service. It worked. Sadly, the Rogers customer service representative told me that I had to choose between Rogers voicemail and trying out PhoneTag.com. Wait… what?!

As long as I subscribe to Rogers voicemail, I can only forward all calls or none. This means that I cannot forward only unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com unless I first remove the Rogers voicemail service from my account. I imagine eliminating Rogers voicemail will increase (!) my monthly fee, because service packages tend to work that way, and I didn’t want to deal with that possibility at that moment, so I had to abandon my PhoneTag.com experiment for the moment.

If you subscribe to Rogers Wireless and have used or still use PhoneTag.com, then please share your experience with us. I’d like to know whether you find it worthwhile.

We came back from our very first market trip saying, “Well, I didn’t think we were going to need a cheese budget to live here!”  We probably spend between $15 – $25 on cheese alone each week.  If you think this is just another latte factor, then you’ve likely never had applewood smoked cheddar, Le Sieur de Duplessis, organic PEI Gouda from the Cheese Lady or truffle-infused brie.  These aren’t luxuries in our household; they’re essential staples.

Even produce can be more expensive at the farmer’s market: cucumbers are $1.50 and a bag of salad greens is between $2.00 and $3.00.  But, we’ve had greens last over two weeks in the fridge (undertaking no special freshness-extending methods) so not buying food to feed the compost bin is a definite financial win.  Not to mention that the delicious salad greens we’ve been able to get have caused us to swear off iceberg lettuce forever!

Every Saturday, during our walk back from the market, we tally up what we’ve spent.  This week, it was about $120.  (We have a house guest coming this week, so we were buying for an extra person, too.) $46 of that went to fish truck guy for salmon, smoked salmon, haddock (Heavenly Halibut was sold out by 9:20 a.m.!) and scallops.  About $35 went to cheese, shitake mushrooms ($11) and a package of German sausage.  $21 was spent on produce (greens of all kinds, onions, herbs, peas, cucumbers).  And rounding out the spoils, $5 for chorizo (our first purchase so far from Pleasant Pork, since we don’t eat a lot of pig) , $5 for eggs and beef from “eggs and beef guy” and $4 for PEI strawberries.

So far it doesn’t sound like we’re much of a financial role model, especially given that we still need to use ValueFoods to supplement with things like milk, cream, butter, flour, rice, snacking fruit (apples, oranges, pears, bananas), lemon and limes, tea and cat treats.  But in many ways, our farmer’s market shopping is completely in tune with our financial philosophy: spend your money on what you value.

Even when we don’t necessarily spend less in absolute dollars, shopping at the farmer’s market significantly ups our value per dollar spent.  Here are just a few of those values we get for our money at the farmer’s market:

1. Quality: How many times have you bought a cucumber or an onion from a store and, totally seduced by the aroma, had to try it right away and then make everyone around you try it.  An onion for crying out loud!  And how many times does the captive audience think, “Oh, I’ll try it to be polite and shut this guy up,” but then exclaim, “Hey, that is pretty awesome!”  When every meal or quick snack of apple and cheese turns out to be a local food love-fest, I’d say you’re doing pretty well.  We value knowing where our food comes from, who produces it and knowing that we never have to eat crap again. (Can you believe we’re worried about the quality of food we’re going to find in Toronto because we’ve been spoiled by PEI?)
2. Quantity, or lack thereof (ie. “enough”): Good food comes in smaller packages, or at least has a higher unit cost.  We naturally, therefore, think more carefully about exactly how much to purchase.  Will we eat this all before it goes bad?  Do I really need this much? Compare that to how many $0.59 heads of cabbage we’ve never fully used.  Waste is waste, and if we’re willing to waste pennies, we’re willing to waste dollars.  Cutting waste by buying products that are too dear to waste has made us carefully and consciously consider how much is enough.
3. Intention: Yes, there are jewelery and craft vendors at the farmer’s market, but honestly, the chances of us walking out with a wooden lighthouse as an impulse purchase are slim.  When we go to the market, we’re there to buy food (specifically the basics) and there are no new shiny kitchen gadgets or snack food sales to steer us off course.  Although $120 for our weekly basics may seem high (and this week we’re expecting company this week so we erred on the side of being over stocked), if we’ve ever walked out of the Superstore paying less than that, and with only food items in our cart, I’d be shocked.  Shopping at the farmer’s market is our equivalent of the “make a list and stick to it” tip.  If we are tempted by something we hadn’t intended to purchase, at least we know it will be quality local food and our money will go to someone in our . . .
4. Community: OK, I know some people are still “eggs and beef” guy or “fish truck guy” in my mind, but at least we recognize each other and enjoy our transactions.  I’ve always said that one of my reasons for eating local was to have a network so that if ever the *&?!%# hit the fan, we’d have a food source.  And in a strange turn of events, while buying the Succulent Shitake this week, Tina confided that she’d never tried them herself and she asked me how we prepared them.  I never thought we’d have the chance to give back to the community anything other than our cash.  But, since I take pictures of everything we make/eat anyway, it might be nice to give the vendors something (a scrapbook page, a recipe?  Sadly I’m not the crafty/creative type) showing how we used and enjoyed their food.  Since we travel too often (as it stands now, anyway) to actually grow anything ourselves, this interaction and participation with our food supply gives us a connection to our food that we enjoy.

So, just like we make a distinction between “retired” and “rich”, we also differentiate between “spending less” and “spending well.”  Our goal isn’t to reduce our spending to the bare minimum.  Reducing our spending at all costs would at times be at odds with our values of purchasing high quality, healthy local products and supporting our community. Our goal is to reduce our wasteful spending to the bare minimum, spending that doesn’t give good value in return.

We’re saving money by not wasting money, and thereby able to feel like we’re living rich even though we’re clearly not. When you can get so much value from purchasing the basic necessities, things you have to buy anyway**, then maybe you’ll be less likely to make impulse or excess purchases that don’t really make you happy.

Do you think it’s crazy to get excited over your particular choice of laundry detergent?  TP? Olive oil?  Toothpaste? Maybe if you allowed yourself to buy the stuff you really liked (or to spend the time on making your own) rather than picking up the cheapest no-name brand or whatever’s on sale this week, then you’d feel more satisfied and less deprived as you navigate the superstores.  Maybe you’d feel a greater connection to a community (“Hey, you use the soap in the bottle covered with crazy, religious rants, too!”) or maybe you’d just feel good every single time you washed the dishes that the suds going down the drain aren’t causing shrinking testicles in frogs.  Maybe you’d be more likely to tell yourself, “I can’t afford this Meatball Grill Basket (thanks, Unclutterer.com!) because I know I spend a little more than the average person on good cheese every week.”

Spending well can lead to spending less.  Take the time to think about what you truly value — and more importantly, what you spend money on that you don’t actually value.  Then, even if your absolute dollars spent figure doesn’t change significantly (though there’s a good chance it will), at least you’ll gradually reallocate your resources to align with your values.  That’s true “retail therapy.”

* It seems like it really should be farmers’ market or maybe even farmers market.  My last choice would be farmer’s market (there’s definitely more than one farmer), but that’s what’s on the sign outside the building, so that’s the phrase I’m using.

** Not everyone needs to buy food, but most of us aren’t farmers.  For us, food shopping is a necessity.  But, everyone has their own list of essential purchases; even our local farmers need to buy TP, I’m guessing!

OK, so enough people have been asking me, “How’s the PEI diet going?” that I should probably publicly reiterate, we’re in the very preliminary stages of evaluating the diet, not going whole hog, so to speak.

I describe our current eating style as the, “Oh hey, if we were only eating PEI food, this would count!” stage of the game.  So, please don’t give us more credit than we deserve!  We may have noble intentions, but we’re only human.

All that being said, the Spring Street Farmer’s market in downtown Summerside has been a lifesaver.  It’s now been I think 4 consecutive weeks that we have not needed to cab it uptown to the Atlantic Superstore because we can buy almost all our weekly grocery needs at the Farmer’s market.  I can’t tell you how thrilled we are about this, and our decision to move here has been completely validated on this fact alone.  (We do need to hit the ValueFoods 1-2 times per week for things like butter, milk, cream, apples and household products.)

Jen and Derek have been our exclusive suppliers of all kinds of interesting salad greens (we couldn’t care less if we never see iceburg lettuce again!) while Emmerdale Eden farms (previously known as “The Cheese Guy”) blessed us with not only portabello but also shitake mushrooms last week, in addition to the most heavenly of cheeses and organic bacon.  (How weird is it to have heard Jedidja say that they were getting p.o’d with one of their pigs… oh, and next week, there will be bacon!?!) I feel bad that I don’t know “egg and beef” guy by name, nor do I know “waffle/sausage vendor who sells us rhubarb jam” nor the “fish truck guy” who give us halibut that doesn’t even taste like fish and the best smoked salmon we’ve ever had.  If I weren’t so shy, I would have struck up a conversation or two.  Heck, I only spoke to our mailman for the first time today and found out he’s from Toronto (Rosedale)! (He noticed our York University alumni magazines.)

Today, Jedidja joined us at Dooly’s for beer and pool… so much of the former we mostly forgot we were playing the latter.  We do always go for the PEI brew on tap, and we got so caught up in socializing that we only left just in the nick of time to deliver Joe to bowling, so I have a feeling we’ll be supporting another local business tonight (A-1 Beamer’s Pizza, who have been so, so good to us even in just these few short months) as he didn’t have time to eat first.

Dooly’s had a whole stack of the  Farm Fresh 2009 Directory brochures out, so I snagged one of them.  A happy coincidence as I’d been reading about ideas for both a Food Trading Group and an Online PEI Farmer’s Network just this morning.  So, we are still exploring ways to localize our food and food supply chain, but since we have travel plans for much of the summer and apparently winter takes forethought and planning, we can’t reasonably start anything until next spring.  We are in the idea-gathering stage and simply enjoying the fruits (and veggies, and meat) of the Summerside Spring Street Farmer’s Market to the greatest extent possible.

This morning’s breakfast, for example, was smoked salmon and Jen/Derek greens on homemade biscuits.  Last night’s dinner was a combination of leftover chili (local meat, but canned beans/tomato and grocery store onions, peppers) with pre-cooked farmer’s market potatos (thanks to egg and beef guy) that was leftover from making fish cakes with fish truck fish.  Don’t even get me started on the scrambled eggs w. shitake mushrooms/bacon breakfast we had with Corey last weekend!  So, I think we’re doing quite well with what we have, but we certainly have not forced ourselves into any kind of hardship, or required MacGyver-esque maneuvering to put a complete meal together.

The only things we could possibly complain about (and I use that term loosely), are

• the fact that we really do have to haul our butts out of bed at what seems like a terribly unreasonable time Saturday mornings to ensure that things like mushrooms aren’t sold out.
• we don’t always know who will/won’t be at the market, and what they will/won’t have for sale
• It’s only on Saturdays, and we may return home from a business trip on a Sunday/Monday/Tuesday and be out of luck for that entire week grocery-wise.

Minor quibbles for sure, but enough to make us willing to try to establish better relationships with local food producers/organizations for sure.  For a normal week at home, though, the market has more than provided and I don’t think we’ve ever eaten healthier!

Thank you to the Spring Street Market, and all the vendors, organizers and supporters who make it possible.  You’ve made it pretty difficult to envision life on the road this summer (although our house sitters are in for the time of their lives!), and we’ll make it back to you just as soon as we can.

Related Links:

Jen and Derek’s Farm Fresh Veggies – http://farmfreshveggies.blogspot.com/

Emmerdale Eden Farm - http://www.emmerdaledenfarm.com/

Jedidja’s Blog (New beginnings and continuing adventures in food, fitness, farming, and sustainable living on beautiful Prince Edward Island) – http://newlyplanted.blogspot.com