Survial Strategies: introduction

it has been some time since I actually sat down with this blog to think about the future; much has happened and is still in flux since January of 2008; to be brief, I had a heart operation, declare bankruptcy and encountered a patch of ice at 6:33 am on a dark February morning, resulting in a knee operation to reconstruct it and then learn to walk again, though I will never walk as well as before;
I have had to sit down and think through the future and accept that building my own house is not going to happen, without a lot of money to hire people to do it for me; but that has not stopped me from dreaming and working out my life as if I were living the dream;
In one way I have been forced to by my circumstances, [living on a minimal pension, in my brother's basement, with 3 rooms and a shower / toilet,] to become more conservation minded; the 3 R's of Reduce, Recycle, Reuse; which to me means reducing my life style to the basics, but still living well, though at a slower pace and with fewer outside perks;
For the next few blog posts I will described a couple of the strategies that I have incorporated into my life so that I can attempt to live well, and try to get positioned to move beyond the present struggle to live a better life;
You may be wondering why I use the term living well and what it means; simply put, it means to eat, travel and experience a quality of life beyond my means without spending beyond my means or borrowing to make up the difference; in my case it means specifically, to purchase, store, and process food stuffs, such that my food expense is low on an average month; to keep my travels to walking distance, my other purchases to the absolute necessities (other than the occasional bottle of wine)and to be able to put money into purchasing items to make living cheaply easier; as well as to purchase tools or technology to give me a hope of advancing my chosen life style; more on that as we move along;