As some of you may know, Ania and I spent a long time in a very difficult financial situation.  Between when she needed to stop formal employment for health reasons and very recently, we officially had only my income for our survival.  Unfortunately, that income was not quite sufficient for our fixed expenses, let alone buying groceries, so we had to scramble to make the necessary extra money…every month…for over a year.  We did what we could to reduce our expenses and put off a lot of eventually necessary purchases until her Ontario Disability Support Payments began, including writing expensive things like seafood almost completely out of our diets, but there was no getting around the need for more money.  As I am legally prevented from taking on much employment by my visa status (and it would have been a bad idea for my schooling anyway), a lot of this fell on her, and she did her level best to sell art and food and run errands for our neighbors, all the while looking for work she would survive doing.  For my part, I took on the unenviable task of collecting alcohol containers to return for deposit.  And in the year and change I spent doing that, I learned a few things.