I’ve been trying to get by on less: spending less money, buying less useless crap, using less in my daily life. In other words, I’m trying to do my best to live within my means and use what I have, rather than rush out to the store to buy more stuff.

This is a goal that I aspire to, but fail to achieve on a pretty regular basis, as my current bank balance would attest. But I try, and sometimes it pays off.

I did have a tiny money-saving success story a few weeks back when I stumbled into Starbucks VIA packs (those little individual instant coffee tubes), for $1.00 for an 8 pack at Wal-Mart. I’ve never tried them, but it seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Eight cups of coffee for a buck isn’t bad, and I do like Starbucks. So I bought six packages, or 48 cups of Starbucks coffee on demand at a whopping discount. (Think about it… let’s say I average $3 each time I go to Starbucks. That would be $144, before the tip. And I got all that coffee for just six bucks. Brilliant, right?!)

Wow, in three paragraphs I’ve admitted to being terrible with a budget, having an addiction to overpriced corporate coffee, and shopping at that megastore that shall not be named (again).

At any rate, I digress. Today I made a cup of my VIA coffee (which, I should explain, creates a sort of coffee sludge on the side of your cup, and must be stirred rapidly to dissolve fully and become drinkable) but decided I wasn’t in the mood to drink it black. I was going to buy some coffee creamer the other day but talked myself out of it, especially as it’s full of corn syrup and other stuff I don’t even recognize as edible. No need to spend money on that, I decided.

So in my coffee dilemma I noticed the container of my beloved porchgurt (homemade plain yogurt, which is nothing but milk and active yogurt cultures) that I brought for lunch. It’s just milk, right?

How bad could it be?

I really didn’t need to ask the question. Upon entering the hot cup of VIA, the yogurt seized up into a fetal position, and I think I heard the active cultures screaming in agony. Whether the pain the porchgurt experienced came from the hot liquid or the instant coffee powder was hard to tell.

Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.

But how did it taste? The first sip wasn’t too bad. The second, not great. It just didn’t seem “creamy” enough… the coffee was still rather black even with a couple spoonfuls.

Let’s just say that adding more purchgurt did not help.

In fact, had the Starship Enterprise entered a cloud formation that looked like my coffee, they would have turned back at warp 8.

So this time around, my experiment failed. But it wasn’t all a loss… in looking for an image for this story, I encountered the blog Putting Weird Things in Coffee. In particular, I found the post about adding Blue Cheese to coffee. They’ve also tried adding bacon (and now I’m thinking, maybe bacon doesn’t make everything better).

In hindsight, maybe porchgurt + coffee wasn’t such a crazy idea after all.