Turk For Your Textbooks! Why I'm refusing to pay out-of-pocket for my textbooks!

Anybody who's a friend of mine on Facebook may have noticed that last night I linked to this story about the ridiculous cost of textbooks. I returned to school a couple of years ago to get my nursing degree, and I know that I'm not alone. When the economy is in decline, school enrollment goes up because people look to train for more lucrative careers or to enhance their current careers by developing new skills. But some textbooks are $200 and $300 a piece, and the price goes up every few years with each new edition. When you try to sell your books back (if that's even an option, depending on where you are). So are you going to decide not to go back to school? Of course not! Going back to school is a great decision for you and (if you have one) your family. So here are some tips for getting what you need on the cheap.

You can support your fellow students by trying to find one who's already taken the class and buying their used textbook. I try to skip this option just because the price is not usually going to be the best one I can find. But it's a good option if you want to support a friend, or if you don't like to mail order.

When I look for textbooks, I start at Amazon. And unless you are studying a field that has frequent and rapid changes (like technology, computers, etc.), you can most likely use an older edition. Think about what you're studying. If you're studying sciences, the information is most likely the same since the last edition was printed. Unless it's a very recent history class, history has not changed since the last edition was printed. If you're comfortable using an old edition, by all means do it. Arguably the most difficult course in my curriculum is Human Physiology and I used a ninth edition textbook instead of buying the thirteenth edition. I looked at my friends' textbooks and a lot of the sentences were still the same, and the information was the same. Old editions are just fine for me! You will save lots of money using old editions. Here's an example:

This was my anatomy and physiology textbook. When I was in this class, they were still using the red textbook but they have since come out with the black one. If you compare the prices, you will save $74 renting the old edition versus the new edition. Believe it or not, you will actually save more if you buy yourself a copy of the old edition! Renting the old edition is $21.75; buying your own copy of the old edition is $8.55! So if you buy an old copy of the textbook instead of renting the new one, you will save $87.20! Do you think humans grew any new organs or worked much differently between 2008 and 2011? Probably not.

Now, again, this will not work for every class. I don't recommend using a really old edition (over 5 years or so) unless you're completely strapped. And if you have math problems or chemistry problems to turn in, don't do this unless you can confirm with a friend or another student that the problems are the same from edition to edition. Which leads me to option #2...

Check to see if the school library has the title on reserve and/or available for checkout. If you are someone who mostly studies from lectures and lecture notes and only uses the book for reference or to check facts, this may be a good option for you because you won't have to pay anything to take advantage of this. However, these are limited resources because if the book is already checked out you're out of luck, and if it isn't, books on reserve can't be removed from the library and can only be checked out for an hour or two at a time. If you sit there and make photocopies of everything, it will end up costing more than what it's worth. This option won't work for me most of the time but if you're in a pinch and you take great notes, go for it.

If you live in an area with lots of schools that offer your program (like I do), sometimes you can find your textbooks for free or on the cheap on craigslist or freecycle. I have found three required texts for my program for free doing this! If you're on freecycle, you can post a "seek" for old textbooks and you might be lucky enough to find someone willing to part with what you need.

If you're just looking for some good free reference information for papers and research, give Google Books a try. Publishers will add pages of their books to Google Books for consumers to preview them and decide if they want to buy them. The books on there are usually not complete books so I wouldn't depend on them if you think that you need to have access to the whole book. But if you're looking for information you might be able to find what you need there.

But what I'm doing is even better than all that.

If you haven't heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk, by all means go check it out. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a website that allows individuals and companies to post "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) - stuff like surveys and transcription - that you can do to earn money. The money then goes into your Amazon Payments account, and you can apply it to anything you buy from Amazon. Cool, huh? So you can actually work off your textbooks by doing tasks in your spare time. If you use the tip above about buying used old editions, you won't have to do much of that at all. If you like doing HITs, you can keep doing them and just transfer the money into your banking account for a little extra scratch.

Speaking of extra scratch, one of my future posts will be about all my "hustles" to get extra money in my pocket. If this post was helpful, you won't want to miss it. In the meanwhile, good luck on finals and turk on!

Dance 10, Looks 3: A flavor-focused reflection on my ugly-yet-delicious food.

There are lots of reasons why I don't blog a lot.

Number one, of course, is that I'm in nursing school full-time and I work part-time. It's a huge commitment of my life that will eventually be more than just a labor of love.

But while I was making dinner tonight, I thought about all the reasons why I don't blog about my food more often. There are blogs I've been meaning to do, like about how I make iced coffee at home (and if you're not doing it, you should) and these really yummy ginger-berry popsicles I made a while back. Sometimes it's because my kitchen is not ready for prime time and is too dirty for me to take pictures in it.

I'm also someone who's really bad at making recipes because I enjoy cooking as an organic process. I have great recipe concepts - like my legendary fried catfish or shrimp grits - but I almost never make things the same way twice because I can always think of something else to do to change it up and potentially make it better.

And sometimes, my food is downright ugly.

I suck at visual presentation as a whole (I guess it's good that I married a graphic designer) in pretty much every aspect of my life. I hate dressing up and doing my hair. I have zero interest in decorating. The day you catch me buying curtains is the day I caught someone looking at me in the window earlier that morning. So when I put up a picture of my food, I've usually come up with something that - for me - is an attractive dish. But for every attractive dish I put up a picture of, I've made five to ten things that were way more delicious and far less attractive.

Say I were to tell you that when I came home from work tonight, my dinner was a Mediterranean Tuna Salad Wrap with fresh cucumber and cream cheese. Sounds delicious, right? Yeah, well, it was. It was pretty bangin'. And I ask if you want one too, and you get pretty excited and say, "Sure, make me one." And then I bring you this:

Yep. Ugly.

Part of my failure with tasty but ugly food is idea versus execution. This wrap had great contents but the filling busted out of that wimpy Joseph's lavash wrap. (To be fair, those things are really tasty and excellent for you, and they make awesome thin-crust pizzas. They just suck at wraps. I keep being optimistic, and then disappointed.) But to be fair, I'll tell you what I did.

I started thinking about a plain cucumber and cream cheese sandwich, or maybe spreading cream cheese on cucumber slices and just eating it like that. And then I remembered seeing a pin about hollowing out a cucumber and stuffing a meat salad in to make a carb-free "sandwich." I came home and got the cucumber and the cream cheese out of the refrigerator, and then I looked at it and remembered how much I like dill weed, and told myself, "This could be way better." So I took a bath first and thought it through a little bit before heading to the kitchen. (By the by, I put dill on A LOT of food, and nary a meat or egg salad in my house goes without it. It may be my favorite herb.)

So I come back to the kitchen, and I make the tuna salad. Because I'm using cream cheese, I use olive oil as the fatty element. I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise to begin with - I either use olive oil for good fats, or plain yogurt for lean protein. A teacher told me about the yogurt in 1996 and I never stopped. I put a buttload of dill in there, some lemon pepper, and the other usual suspects, and let it sit while I spread the cream cheese on the lavash, and then cut thin slices of cucumber and put it on the wrap. Then I dumped the tuna salad onto the cucumbers and attempted to roll it. I may as well have rolled it in tissue paper.

But it was delicious, and pretty much exactly what I wanted for dinner.

So celebrate your ugly-tasty concoctions.

A non-food reflection

I have been pretty inactive on here recently, and that's for two reasons: I started my second semester of nursing school, and I lived through Hurricane Isaac.

My husband and I didn't have power for a week, and we lost all the contents of our refrigerator and freezer (hence the no-cooking posts). My birthday always occurs during one of these hurricane episodes too, which means that I have the day off to do very little with it because everything is still closed from the hurricane. It's pretty depressing.

My husband and I are pretty busy folks - I go to nursing school full time and work whenever possible, and my husband works full time and goes to school four nights a week. My school load has been really arduous lately because now we have to make up the time we missed from the hurrication, so we're both in hyper mode and it has been a pretty miserable, high-stress time for us and I know that it's been hard for me to stay encouraged to keep working.

Given all that, I figured that I would share something that I haven't really shared with anyone.

As some of you reading may know about me, when I started nursing school I was working in an assisted living facility. I wanted to transition into a health care field to help supplement what I was learning in school, and I tend to get bored and frustrated when I don't work. I also recognized that one of my challenges as a future health care provider was my struggle to process feelings of death and felt like working there would give me the opportunity to confront those feelings head on.

I learned untold things from working there - everything from medical abbreviations to drugs to diets to wound care. And yes, I definitely learned about death.

Mrs. B was a resident there who reminded me of one of my best friends growing up, and how I would imagine she would be as an older lady. She tried to stay as independent as possible and as silly as it sounds, most of what I would do for her is "spot" her and make sure she stayed safe and didn't hurt herself. One night I helped her into bed and she asked me to give her a good night kiss. At that point I knew that this wasn't just a job for me.

A few months later, Mrs. B had gone through some changes. She was weak and couldn't get around like she used to. She was sleeping a lot more than usual. She was heavier and couldn't help me to move her into chairs or her bed. She stopped leaving her room, asking for meal trays to be brought up to her. Before long, the trays went untouched and she didn't even want the dark chocolate Hershey kisses that I used to have to wipe away from around her mouth when she fell asleep. She started telling others that she was ready to die.

She refused her medications and liquids, and just stayed in bed. Soon enough, she rested back and lapsed into labored, open-mouthed breathing. We moved her nasal cannula into her mouth so she could get some more oxygen, and we swabbed her mouth out with sponges and cool water.

I left work on a Saturday night knowing she wouldn't be there when I came back the next day. It upset me to think that soon, someone else would be sitting in her place at the table, someone else would be living in her room. I cried my eyes out and knew if I stayed at home that night I would just feel worse, and I needed to get my mind away from it. I went out with my sister and talked through it but the sadness was still in my heart.

Sure enough, she was gone the next day. A sadness loomed over work for the next few days. I remember seeing Mrs. B's daughter cleaning out her mom's things and not being able to keep it together when offering my condolences. I knew that I couldn't keep doing this for the rest of my life and asked myself how I could best cope with the loss of people I had cared for without hardening myself to death.

I wanted to remember Mrs. B forever because she was the first person I had taken care of that died. But I knew there would be many others, and that I would learn something from all of them. So I got a small, pretty notebook and opened it up and wrote down Mrs. B's name.

Her name was soon joined by Mrs. L. After that, Mrs. D, Mr. V, and many more. After each one died, I would write him or her down and think about what he or she meant to me. I would then flip through the book to remember them all and why they were special.

As time went on, I learned that dying is kind of special. It doesn't feel good for the survivors, but a lot of the people who died were ready to go - and all I really did was make them as pleasant and comfortable as possible while they were on their way. There are very few professions that can truly give you an opportunity to help others achieve inner peace.

After I left the nursing home, I kept up with who passed away through friends and obituaries. After the hurricane there have been more deaths than usual, and I've been visiting my book more frequently. But I've started to perceive my book a little differently. I started the book to help me cope with my feelings of sadness and loss. But now every one of the people in the book has helped me to become better at taking care of people, and I owe them my best effort at becoming a nurse because they let me take care of them first. In a sense, my sad little book has become my other-worldly cheering section.

I won't pretend that I never get upset or depressed when I hear that someone else I took care of passed away. But having my book helped me to respect their lives, remember how they helped me, and know that I am better at what I do because I was fortunate to have them in my life.

Comida por un corazon: Quick Chicken Shawarma and Fruit Salsa with Cinnamon Wonton Chips

School is getting ready to start up for both me and my honey. I went today for orientation and start classes Thursday, and he starts Monday. He works weekday mornings mostly, and he works close enough to home that he usually drives home for lunch.

He always looks a little crestfallen when I don't have anything special made for him for lunch, so if I'm in the mood and I have the time I will cook him a nice hot meal.

I found these grilled chicken breast patty things that you cook like Steak-umms at Walmart. They're very convenient and only take about five minutes or so to cook. So I cooked up a couple of those and put some Cavender's Greek Seasoning, dill weed, and lemon pepper on them to season them. I put them on top of some Joseph's pita bread with some roasted red pepper hummus. (If you aren't eating Joseph's pita or lavash, you are BIG TIME missing out. They have great, healthy stats and are very versatile.) I topped them with some romaine lettuce mix and red onion, and used some Tzatziki Yogurt dressing I found at Target to finish it off.

I even made some dessert - some fruit salsa a la Pinterest with some wonton chips with sweet cinnamon! I seasoned them like so: 

• 1 1/2 tbsp honey
• 2 tbsp melted coconut oil - this only takes about 20 seconds in the microwave
• cinnamon to taste

I used the same process as before for the most part, but I used some vegetable oil on the muffin tin because the sugar content is considerably higher and I didn't want them to stick. They came out delicious - light and crispy, and a wonderful complement to the fruit salsa. My husband loves fruit (especially apples, strawberries, and peaches - all the fruit I used), so I knew this would be a hit.

Unfortunately, my honey had to work through lunch so I had to enjoy all the yums by myself. Don't worry, there's still plenty of chips and fruit salsa for him to snack on, and it only takes a second to whip up another shawarma. But I was a little sad. 

So I decided to take advantage of the time I had alone to enjoy something my husband really hates when he's at home. I'm semi-addicted to 12 Corazones - I don't know how to describe it other than a Latino version of "Singled Out," but with the Zodiac. And before you ask, no, I don't speak Spanish. For some reason, I just like it - and it drives my husband nuts. So since I didn't have mi corazon with me at lunchtime, I spent my lunch with 12 of them. :)

Eaglemoss Icebox Cake: A Work in Progress

We are a DC Family.

My husband is a fanatic of all things DC Comics, Batman in particular. He recently started collecting these iron figurines of all his favorite DC characters that are called Eaglemoss figurines. After our trip to the grocery store this morning, for some reason he was compelled to display them in a more organized fashion in our living room.

While he was fiddling around with his Eaglemoss figurines, I made this dessert that I had been thinking about trying to throw together in a slimmer fashion for a couple weeks now. I called it Eaglemoss because it seems like kind of an old-timey name for an old-timey recipe.

If you've never heard of an icebox cake, the basic idea is that before the dessert gods made boxed cake mixes, a home chef would make a cake by layering cookies and whipped cream or ice cream until the cream got into the cookies and made the whole thing a gloppy delicious mess. No bake, no fuss. So I figured, perfect summer dessert. Two ingredients, no oven required. Why not try to make it more calorie friendly?

So on our visit to the store this morning I bought the light frozen whipped topping. I didn't buy the fat free kind because that usually means they try to sneak a boatload of sugar in there to improve the flavor. I also purchased some reduced fat chocolate cookies.

I came home and got out my springform pan - one of those pans with the loose bottoms and the side with the buckle. I had no intention of taking the pan apart because I intended the cake for me and my hubby to snack on and not for any great presentation, but if you elected to do so that's the best way to get it done.

I started with a bottom layer of eight cookies, but you should be able to get by with more or less depending on how you crumble the cookies. It seems that each cookie layer requires 5-8 cookies, and the finer the cookies are crumbled, the longer they go toward making a whole layer.

I topped this layer of cookies with a layer of 12 tablespoons of whipped cream.

Repeat until the cake is at the top of the pan and end with a layer of whipped cream. Freeze for about 3-4 hours to set. Serves 8-12.



I say this is a work in progress because my cookies didn't get as mushy and melty as I'd hoped. Also, it seemed like the cookie to cream ratio was too much in favor of the cookie side. I may experiment with this further, maybe using those 100 calorie packs as cookies instead of the regular kind. But all in all, a serving of this cut for 12 people is only 186 calories! My husband was a very happy fellow and enjoyed this thoroughly after getting his figurines just right...

Bayside Wonton Chips!

I enjoy cooking a lot, especially when I have time for it and can experiment with a good idea. I'm not a huge fan of recipes, and I like to think I have more culinary successes than failures using this method. One of my favorite rules that I learned from Sam the Cooking Guy is when in doubt, 375 is a good go-to temperature for most things.

My husband and I have been dieting lately, and I was hoping to make some quick, healthy, grab-and-go breakfast for us using this idea from Pinterest. So I had some wonton wrappers and a mini-muffin tin, but I guess it didn't occur to me how little those wonton wrappers were because I had a lovely crispy bowl that was too small to hold anything. However, the texture reminded me of another one of my favorite crispy foods that are pretty much off-limits for dieters... 

So I made a bowl mixed with olive oil, salt, garlic powder, and lime juice and mixed it all together (easy on the olive oil, about 1 tbsp for the whole recipe - if you use a brush, you'll be able to make it last longer - and the rest to taste). I took each wonton skin and cut it in half with a pizza cutter to make two triangles.  I dunked the wonton triangles in the mix and used the same muffin pan for the failed tortilla bowl experience to stand up the wonton triangles and make the lovely curve that helps hold the salsa on the chip. 

I baked them for five minutes at 325, salted them again fresh out of the oven, and I came out with these: 

They actually stand up to salsa better than regular chips because the dough is denser than tortilla chips, and they are still light and crispy! A serving of 16 wonton chips is sixteen chips for 160 calories (give or take a couple calories for the olive oil) versus 140 calories for only 7 of the tortilla chips above - half the calories per chip! Also, 6g protein and 0.5 g fat for the wonton chips, versus 2g protein and 7g fat for the tortilla chips! And you can make these taste any way you want - onion powder, chili powder... even cinnamon and sugar with some yummy fruit salsa!

As an aside, they're called "Bayside Wonton Chips" because "Saved by the Bell" was on TV while I was making them, but feel free to call them whatever you want as long as you make them and enjoy them! 

Firsties!

I've been toying with the idea of blogging for a while, but have resisted doing so because like many things in my life I feared getting carried away with it and losing time for all my other pursuits. But I figured, eh, why not. For those of you hopping around that aren't familiar with me or anything else about me, I'm a newlywed and a nursing student. I guess you'll find out the rest along the way. Enjoy!