Living Within My Means

My Writing Style

2011-01-17T15:57:00.001-08:00

I found a site through facebook where you cut and paste something you've written and it tells you what famous author your writing style is like. I used one of my blog entries and it turns out that I have a similar writing style to David Foster Wallace - whoever that is. I looked him up on amazon and read some of his reviews. One said that he had a "razor sharp writing style with a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects." Well, I certainly subject hop but most people call that ADD.

Another review said that he brings a "humane sobriety to his subjects" and I have certainly lived my life as sober as a judge! Does the similarity end there? I'll have to read some of his writing and let you know.

Daughter J & I spent the weekend looking at cars and searching for an apartment that will be close to my job. It will be so wonderful to live together again. We love the same food, the same TV shows, have a lot of the same interests and our general energy seems to jive.

Now that I am no longer poor as a church mouse, now that my inheritance is finally starting to come in, I was tempted to end this blog and start over. But this housing search has made me realize that continuing to live within my means is more important than ever! The challenge is just beginning. I can afford to go out and rent a nice house, or anything I want actually. But to continue to afford it as the years go by ... that's the important part.

We made a list of what our "must haves" in a home are. They are to have a washer & dryer, a full sized working kitchen, a sliding glass door that leads to a back yard or patio, so we can put in our dog door. It was quite a challenge but today we finally managed to find a place that fit our criteria. And by not renting a free standing house, we had to give up something. This place has no garage or storage or covered parking. So there you go. But by staying with something as nice as possible but still affordable, we will be able to be comfortable there for a long time to come. Now we just have to qualify ...

My Favorite Christmas Songs

2010-12-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

This is a pic of me, Barry Manilow, Suzanne Somers, and my good buddy Sharon Beavan backstage at the McCallum Theater in Palm Desert, CA on December 23, 1997. It was a Christmas charity concert that they did to benefit College of the Desert and we went backstage and met them afterwards. It was looking at this picture that me think about Christmas music.

I am a great afficienado of Christmas music. I've been collecting Christmas CDs from the beginning of time and have decided to let the world reap the benefits of my extensive knowledge. Here are my all time favorite renditions of my favorite Christmas songs.

In no particular order, they are:

1) Winter Wonderland by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormet - a warm, playful rendition off of the first Christmas album I ever owned (and practically wore out). Great chemistry between those two.

2) Christmas Bride by the Ray Coniff Orchestra. My dad owned only one Christmas album and every year I would get shivers when this came on. I ask you, why do artists record the same dozen songs when there are romantic under-exposed gems like this floating around?

3) Jingle Bell Rock by Hall & Oates recorded back when they were still Hall & Oates and not yet Daryl Hall and John Oates. Love Daryl's voice on this - as warm and playful as you're likely to hear it and, as always, clear as a bell.

4) Little Drummer Boy by Johnny Cash. He sings this song the way I would sing it, or most of us would.

5) Do You Hear What I Hear by The Carpenters. I know that Karen is famous for a couple of other Christmas classics but the way she builds on this one until that final flawless note at the end - how many singers could pull this off? Not many apparently, since most arrangers ruin the whole thing by stopping the build to play random music in the middle.

6) Mary Did You Know by Mark Lowry. I just plain love this song. Someone asked me if it's really a Christmas carol. When you are singing about Mary and her baby, what else could it be and when else would you sing it? Honorable mention to Clay Aikens but I'll go with the author's rendition (which is better to listen to than to watch - he way overperforms it).

7) Last Christmas by Wham! Supposedly set to the tune of Can't Smile Without You (really? I can't hear it ...) but a much, much better song. Love, love, love it.

8) I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by the Jackson Five. Little Michael is so cute on this, I always enjoy it, especially the ending where his brothers are teasing him.

9) Jingle Bells by Barry Manilow & Expose. It's a take off on an old Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters arrangement and I like it just a bit better than the original.

10) Little Saint Nick by The Beach Boys. What would Christmas be without my Beach Boys Christmas album?

What are your favorite Christmas songs?

Expect the Unexpected

2010-12-05T06:59:00.000-08:00

November was a perfect example of how being financially challenged hasn't kept me from having wonderful life experiences. Dinner at Cheesecake Factory for daughter #1's birthday (is there anything that makes you feel more human than dining out?) and spending Thanksgiving in Seattle with daughter #3's new in laws. Travel, celebrations, making new acquaintances...does it get any better than that?

I think that part of the fun is learning how to make do and get by while keeping expenses down. The rumor out there, perpetrated by the media, was that Thanksgiving airfare was so expensive that no one would be able to afford to go anywhere and even if you could the airports would be such a madhouse why would you want to? My ticket to Seattle cost $350 and the airports were quiet both ways, even though I flew on the two busiest travel days of the year - the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after. A perfect example of why I hate the media and never believe anything that comes from it.

A couple of interesting and completely unforeseen opportunities have come my way recently. A year ago I felt that I had no future, now the future is wide open and anything could happen. One thing I've learned is to never despair about or be afraid of the future because it rarely turns out how you think it will.

Speaking of making do and getting by, I don't have TV and am getting increasingly frustrated by the situation because I especially love all of the holiday programming. A friend suggested buying a converter box in order to at least get the local channels. I bought the box, turned on my TV, couldn't get it working properly and a couple of days later the picture tube flat lined. I am certainly technology challenged in my current residence. It's not that we don't have cable, we do - just not television. I hope to change that very soon.

My Ship Has Come In

2010-11-18T03:54:00.000-08:00

My stepfather died last weekend. It was very sad, he was in his 80's and had spent most of his senior years as a vital, spry gentleman - a Clint Eastwood look-a-like - with a misspent youth and a colorful past. Jack Thomas had been a bartender and pro bowler, husband to 6, father to 2, stepfather to 4. He left behind a grandson and a mourning granddaughter who, even though he was my Mom's second husband, was the only maternal grandfather she'd ever known.

He lived in Las Vegas and I'd last visited him in August. I planned my next visit with him at the end of this month. He'd been in poor health of late and I'd always wrangle a little private time with him to check in and make sure that he was still happy with his living arrangements and that his caretakers were indeed taking good care of him. He seemed very happy during those final years.

My step father was the only thing standing between my brothers and I and our long awaited inheritance. My father had died at the age of 65, leaving behind a 3 million dollar estate. Under my Mom's watch, over the next 12 years, she squandered and dwindled it down to a few hundred thousand dollars. Poor health, gambling, moving 10 times in 12 years, giving in to the bullying of a greedy child - she and Jack had whittled away at it until little was left. A sad, sad story and a warning to others who think that a planned inheritance will see them through their retirement years.

When the dust settles, I believe I'll be coming out of it with a Thomas Kincaid painting, some furniture and a small inheritance, in the 6 figures. To to sum it up, my ship has come in but it's a leaky rowboat. The truly nice thing about all this though is that I no longer have to sweat the summers (if you'll pardon the pun) for many years to come. I'll be able to enjoy my well deserved 7 weeks from mid-June to mid-August off.

I Joined A Gym

2010-11-18T03:06:00.000-08:00

I joined one of them there gyms. I know, I know $30 a month and $80 up front for the honor of giving them permission to dip into my account and take said thirty dollars. Monthly. Why did I do such an foolish, unspeakable thing?

Well, my roomie Mich and I have a best friend named Gail. We call ourselves the Three Amigos - or "Tres Amigas" (we're learning Spanish.) Mich & Gail were always going on about their zumba class. Nothing, no event no matter how earth shattering, interferred with them going to zumba 3 nights a week. To hear them tell it, it was the most fun one could legally have and the teacher was Something To See in action. Well, what could I do but go just to see what all the fuss was about. A 5 day free pass was secured and all excuses swept aside. It was time to enter the Inner Sanctum.

I had great concerns about this, which I repeatedly shared with my non-sympathetic Amigas. I had been leading such a sedentary lifestyle for so long that I wasn't at all certain that I could stand upright for an hour at a time, let alone move about vigorously. Also I had respiratory issues that stem from a bad ticker. I failed all respiratory testing that involved exerting myself. Any effort, even one as small as rising to go to the bathroom and returning to bed, caused my oxygen levels to drop dramatically - the opposite of most people's which rise upon exertion. I was afraid that if I worked out I'd pass out. I came up with a plan of action in case the worst should happen ... if I started to see stars I'd sit down until it passed ... girded my loins and headed resolutely towards the nearest 24 Hour Fitness.

Zumba is an exercise program similar to aerobics but set to catchy Spanish pop music. It involves salsa-type dance steps, some hip-hop, belly dancing and even (I swear) polka moves. The basic zumba step involves bringing your arms up to chest level, hands pointed outwards and shaking your booty. The class is filled with tiny hispanic women and a few of us white folk. It takes most of us whities quite a while to loosen up and start to use our "core" - that chubby area from under the breast to above the thighs, a move that comes naturally to our lithsome, graceful hispanic counterparts. But the biggest benefit of zumba, and what differs it from other work outs, is the core work out. You can actually tighten that tummy, reduce your backside and whittle away at that waist ... all things I desperately need to do.

Back in the day, when I was a young Mom, I used to take aerobics classes. It was an hour long class involving a warm up, mat work and a cool down. There were two or three songs of all out, full out exercise somewhere in the middle. From what I can tell with zumba, you go all out for the full hour. Oh there's a perfunctionary cool down song at the end during which we do stretches - which benefit me probably more than the rest of the our long ordeal does. But basically you go all out for the full hour. At least our amazing instructor does. I have taken class from a couple of other instructors and they might throw in a warm up song, but basically we go all out.

No one was more amazed than I when I made it through the first class. It wasn't until a couple of weeks into it that I had a moment where I thought I was going to pass out. While gasping desperately for air, Mich said I resembled one of those Dancing With The Stars celebrities trying to catch their breath after doing their number. But I have up until now remained fully up right and conscious at all times. The benefits were immediate. The next day at work I stood fully upright all day, instead of being bent forward at the waist and walking around with my butt sticking out. I was able to rise to my feet without needing the assistance of the nearest counter top. I walked with a spring in my step, instead of lurching unsteadily down the hallway trying desperately to look relevant. It was such an amazing transformation that I was hooked!

Now I go to zumba religiously at least 3 times a week. I'm also trying to make room in my weekend schedule for an hour long yoga class that happens at 10 am on Saturdays. I'm thinking the stretching would be a good balance to all the jumping around. If I have a day off and there's a morning class, I take that too. When I can't exercise on the weekends and I have to go 4 or 5 days between workouts, I start to stiffen up again and assume my old hunchbacked hobbit posture.

Wait, there's more! I haunt thrift shops searching for exercise wear and have actually been seen entering sports and dance stores hunting for dance shoes. People have started to comment on my new slimmer silhouette. If I could give up the candy I might actually drop some real weight. I know that Mich and Gail's clothes are hanging off of them but they've been at it longer than I have. As Mich keeps reminding me, it took me years to put on the extra pounds, it's going to take a while to lose it.

All in all, I think that $30 a month may be the best investment I've ever made. To take the normal zumba class around town costs $10 a pop. I'm taking at least 12 a month - you do the math. The benefits were staggering right off the bat. I'm hoping the zumba craze won't end for a very long time.

Going Cold Turkey

2010-10-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

Recently I rented my friend Mich's spare bedroom. We decided to try co-habitating on a trial basis for 3 weeks and if it worked out I'd formally move in (& start paying rent) on October 1st. Mich doesn't believe in watching television and is a vegetarian. I, of course, have the TV on constantly and eat pretty much anything that is no longer moving. Is there any hope?

There was a computer outlet in my room BUT my monitor broke during the move and so there I was with no computer. There was also no TV signal. We went to Time Warner and ordered TV reception, a DVR for me and to have a computer line run into my room. We didn't schedule it until October 1st though.

Going without TV was extremely strange at first. There was a TV in the living room but it was only connected to a DVD box. How would I survive without my daily General Hospital fix? How could I get by with no Duggars or Gosselins and without knowing how Florence Henderson was doing on Dancing With the Stars?

As I went through withdrawal, I could only watch what Mich rented from Netflix or had in her limited DVD collection. She had a lot of feel good movies and the last 5 seasons of Frasier. I occasionally popped something in to relax by. But to my surprise, once I got over the habit of having background TV noise on, I really didn't give much thought to any of the shows I'd previously thought I couldn't live without. Samantha Brown and Anthony Bourdain had to get by without me. I confess that one day during my lunch hour I pulled up a synopsis of what had happened episode by episode on General Hospital in my absence. I was pleased to learn that the show was pretty much as I'd left it and I wasn't much interested in what had happened since I'd last watched.

On the other hand, not having a computer really hurt! I felt so disconnected from everyone - no daily Facebook fixes, no friend's blogs. I couldn't check my personal email from work as there is a strong firewall in place at school sites. Once in a while after work I'd steal a few minutes at someone else's computer - my daughter's or Mich's laptop. It was amazing how little time it took to catch up on facebook and deal with my email. All the extra time I had spent online in the past was spent playing games and blogging. Hmmmm, food for thought.

Mich and I had a serious chat while Juan from Time Warner was here hooking us up today. She asked me not to watch TV in the living room while she was home so that she wouldn't get sucked back in and become a couch potato again. She begged me to be her savior. I confessed that I was afraid I'd become her corruptor and warned her that within a week she will know the first names of all of the DC Housewives.

I hope it's not true though. I hope I'll retain something positive from this experience. But since it is 2 in the morning and I'm sitting here on my new (used) computer blogging while watching Holly's World on TV, I can't say for certain that any good habits have set in. Only time will tell.

Fashion Fasting

2010-09-04T15:12:00.001-07:00

I've decided to continue to simplify/streamline my life in other ways. In my last post, I talked about Fiscal Fasting. Another term in the world of cutting back is Fashion Fasting. That means commiting to buying no new clothes for a set period of time (underwear doesn't count.)

I'm gearing up to move back to Palm Springs the day after tomorrow and am going through my clothes and shoes, packing and sorting. I'm not one to have a lot of clothes in the closet that don't fit or that I don't wear. I don't believe in keeping all different sizes, just in case. I have been steadily losing weight this summer so have had to take in a few pairs of pants and give away some of my bigger tops. I'm not sure I'll be able to commit to fashion fasting if the weight loss continues. Purchasing new pants may be in order at some point. But other than that, I'd like to try to not buy at least any tops until next summer.

I'm moving in with a friend who has a lovely condo in north Palm Springs. I'll get the second bedroom with a small closet. A wonderful invention is the Miracle Hanger. I've always used a similar type of hanger to hang several pairs of pants in a small space but with this invention I can hang tops. It's sobering to see at a glance how many work tops I have. Each hanger holds 5 tops and I have 9 hangers. Wow, 45 work shirts.

Not all of my tops are very nice, but they are intact, unstained and nice enough to wear to work. I work in the office of a middle school, so the dress code is pretty lax. You never know what will happen in any given day, you can end up on the floor crawling under your desk, being thrown up on in the nurse's office, spilling food on yourself in the lunch room, etc. We wear school shirts at least two days a week.

Also I live in the desert, so the temps are generally pretty balmy. Some people wear capris and sandals to work all year round. Being from the midwest, I insist on maintaining a winter wardrobe and a summer wardrobe. I usually only get to wear the warmer clothes from mid-November through mid-March though. Wearing socks signals the change of season to me.

Fiscal Fasting

2010-08-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

Amongst the upper classes, there's a term called Fiscal Fasting. The idea is to not spend any money at all for a set period of time as an exercise in self control. To the rest of us, it's known as running out of money before you run out of month. Since I only get paid once a month, I'm frequently, reluctantly "fasting".

I know I can survive on by salaryh but the true challenge is managing to live WELL on my salary. While living in Boston back in 2001-2003. I would get through the work week with $40 in my purse. I worked on Newbury Street, a very expensive part of town. Commuting was a cinch, a token for the T cost $1.00 each way. I brought lunch or food at the 7/11 outside the T stop. You could always get a hard boiled egg, banana, coffee, food bars, etc. pretty inexpensively. Lunch out was an occasional treat. Dunkin' Donuts was an occasional treat as well, and quite affordable.

Nowadays, getting by with next to no money most of the month is getting harder. Here in southern California my commuting costs are rising, along with gas prices . In the past I've always tried to figure out in advance exactly what I'll need to survive for the next month and bought it all the weekend after payday. The trouble with that plan is feeling flush for a few days and then broke and unprepared for emergencies the rest of the month.

My goal is to avoid fiscal fasting via better budgeting.

The Art of Living Well

2009-09-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

It's always fascinated me how some people appear to be comfortably well off while others are struggling but it turns out that they are bringing in similar salaries. How can that be? Credit cards may be an answer, or a second income but a lot of it is attitude. Another big plus is resourcefulness and the ability to handle money.

It's also amazing to me how one can be as poor as a church mouse and still have wonderful things happen. At least that's what happened to me this last weekend. My youngest daughter sent me an airplane ticket to come visit her in Las Vegas. The journey is wonderful, 40 minute flights out of the nearest airports, both of which happened right on time and without incident.

Once there I was wined and dined in lavish style, taken boating on Lake Mead and jet skiing for the first time ever! My daughter and her partner totally spoiled me. It's also amazing that my children give me money to help out. I never in a million years expected that would ever happen. The first time they did, I didn't know what to do about it. But then I figured, what the heck since I was generous with them for many years.

I really want to become independent again though and stay that way as long as possible. I want to not only get by on my own but to learn to live well on my own.

Traditions

2009-09-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

Last week we were housesitting at my brothers and he isn't a baker. There were no ingredients, so I was forced to resort to a box muffin mix. But this Sunday we are back home and therefore, back in business.

I decided to make the first recipe I spotted when opening my The Joy of Muffins: The International Muffin Cook Book. It was Irish Jam Muffins. This was a departure for me as I don't usually cook with buttermilk or lemon. OMG they were SO GOOD!!! You actually bake the jelly into them and top 'em off with a sprinkle of powdered sugar. I was glad I followed the recipe closely as they turned out so fine and high quality.

Here it is:

1 1/2 cops flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp soda
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp grated lemon rind
1 egg
4 tbsp. butter, melted
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp lemon extract
1 cup raspberry or blueberry jam
confectioners sugar

Mix together flour, baking powder, soda, sugar and grated lemon rind in a large bowl. Whick egg with melted butter, buttermilk and lemon extract. Make a well in dry ingredients and quickly add liquid ingredients. Fill greased muffin tins one-half full. Add two spoons of jam and cover with batter. Bake until done, remove from tins after five minutes and sprinkle tops with confectioner's sugar. Bake at 400 degrees, 15-20 minutes. Makes 12 muffins.

You have to understand that this took maybe 5-10 minutes in the kitchen to make and baked up really fast. There's no reason to make boxed muffins when you can throw homemade ones together from scratch so quickly and easily.

It actually made 9 nice, large muffins for us. I had one of those thingys that you grate lemons or oranges on to get a fine rind, can't remember what they're called. I was tempted to use vanilla extract since I didn't have lemon extract. Instead I just squeezed the lemon into the batter. Mmm, mmm, mmm...delicate, delicioso but be careful. That jam is really hot inside those muffins when they first come out of the oven!

I would have loved to use some black raspberry jam that my brother had at his house and was selling at the store for $5. But it would have been a frivolous purchase as I already had 3 kinds of jelly/jams at home. What I did was make 3 of the muffins with orange marmalade, 3 with prune jam, and 3 with strawberry jelly. I ate one of the orange marmalade ones and it was SO perfect. I'm not normally a big citrus fan but this made up into a light and satisfying product.

ADDICTIONS

2009-09-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

It's Labor Day ... 3 day weekends unnerve me. I've become much more of a routine-oriented person in my old age and not being at work on a Monday morning just feels wrong somehow. It's nice to catch up on your sleep though!

Yesterday morning we had blueberry muffins and this morning corn muffins. No recipes to share as these were from mixes. Since Jeanne and I are housesitting, we don't have access to all the ingredients we'd need to make home made muffins.

Jeanne lost her job this week. We had JUST been celebrating that her store had released a list of employees ranking based on secret shopping scores, meeting daily sales quotas, credit card aps, etc. and Jeanne was ranked number 1. Within the week she'd been called into the office and told that her job was discontinued. It was "nothing personal" and mostly based on seniority. Since J was one of the last hired, she is the first to be let go. sigh. At first I thought we'd get by OK if she gets unemployment, but then I realized that she really has to kick butt and get a job NOW since this area is so seasonal. Her goal is to get back into the grocery store industry as she did so well in that field before.

But none of the above is what I had intended to blog about today. What I want to write about is addictions. I once spent a few days with friends who were going through rough times financially. They had little in the way of groceries but a refrigerator full of beer! Go figure. Our downfall is soda. No matter how poor we were this summer, we still managed to have fresh two liters of soda in the house at all times. Not as expensive as some addictions, but still troublesome.

I can't imagine what this is doing for our bodies. It's time to go cold turkey but I don't believe in giving things up, I believe in making exchanges. Instead of reaching for the coke, I'll drink sparkling water or iced tea. Oddly enough, sparkling water is more expensive than soda, especially in restaurants.

Another example of exchanges instead of sacrifice - I used to have a shopping addiction. That was my hobby and a fun way to spend weekends while raising 3 daughters. If bored, we'd pile in the car and head to the mall. When I realized that my finances were taking a downward turn, I stopped shopping at department stores and instead shopped at places like Ross and Marshalls. Then I downgraded to thrift stores and garage sales. It was fun to head out on a Saturday morning with a 10 dollar bill and see all the stuff I could find to buy with that, every bit as satisfying as department store finds. Since I'm not a packrat, this led to my holding a lot of garage sales of stuff I'd accumulated in my travels. That became an important end of the month boost to our finances for years, before the advent of ebay and craigslist.

I'm a different person now. I don't gather as much, I mostly reduce my belongings and see how little I really need to get by. I think I'll start a company - the Simplification Organization. It's time to use my years of garage sale experience to help others!

Sunday Morning Special

2009-08-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

At the thrift store yesterday I found a little spiral-bound book entitled The Joy of Muffins. This fits right in to my never-ending pursuit of ways to keep Jeanne away from fast food. One of her favorite things to do on weekends is take the dog to the dog park early in the morning before I wake up and return with ... ta dah ... donuts and coffee...an unneeded $5 expense.

So I proclaimed that Sunday mornings are now Muffin Mornings, I'll try out a new recipe from my cookbook every week. I went through and marked the recipes that looked the most appealing. This morning I broke in the book by making Swedish Breakfast Muffins. I chose this recipe because I already had all the ingredients in the house.

This, the book says, is a 150 year old recipe and was surprisingly easy to make. The first muffins I think I've ever made from scratch. Here's the recipe:

2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
4 Tbsp. sugar
pinch salt
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 tbsp. oil (or butter melted)

As I'm writing this, I'm just now reading that there are actually directions for mixing up the muffins ... I just threw all the ingredients into a bowl and mixed. They turned out fine. But for the purists out there, here are the exact instructions.

Mix dry together in large bowl. Whisk together egg milk and oil (or butter) and pour into a well in center of dry ingredients. Mix lightly and quickly together. Spoon into greased muffin cups and bake until done. Serve hot with butter and maple syrup. Bake at 375 degrees 20 to 25 minutes.

They said it would make 12 muffins. It made 7 large muffins for us. I served them with butter and strawberry jam. Jeanne felt that the texture was almost like a corn muffin. To me they tasted like a scone. I like that it didn't call for that much sugar.

At the thrift shop I had also seen two silk blouses that looked like they'd fit. I didn't buy them because they were $4 each, but I checked my account last night and found that I'd already been paid! I didn't think it would show up until tomorrow - the last working day of the month. So I went back to the store today and tried on those two silk blouses, one peach and one lavendar. They fit perfectly and were in top condition. I also found a nice pair of black capris and some cute, black shorts - a big splurge! When I went to pay, I discovered that all clothing was half off today! I got 4 top quality pieces for $8. Woo Hoo!

This thrift shop that I haunt (I try to check it every weekend) is my favorite because it's Revivals - all proceeds go to support AIDS research and treatment. It's also a consignment shop and I had fallen in love with a painting I'd been keeping my eye on. This painting was going for $195. This visit I was going to ask about it, could I work out time payments or put it on layaway or negotiate with it's owners if it was on consignment. Luckily when I got there today it was gone. *Phew* that was close. This is why I don't tour art galleries. I always fall in love with something unaffordable and never forget about it and suffer greatly that I can't own it. Champagne tastes on a beer budget, that's me.

Julie and Julia

2009-08-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Jeanne & I decided to go out and celebrate my new job. We had to choose being going to Sizzler for a steak dinner or going to the movies (we couldn’t afford both.) I’ve been dying to see "Julie and Julia", so the movies won!

It was great fun, we actually splurged on the expensive Hot Popcorn, (which was cold) and two large sodas. Mid movie Jeanne excused herself and came back with another surprise – a box of candy. Life was good.

The movie was good too. I hadn't read Julie’s blog about cooking her way through Julia Child’s 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' but I had read her book. It was extremely entertaining. Meryl Streep played an affectionate, coquettish Julia Child and it was well written – the way the two women’s live’s mirrored each other.

You had to wonder how Julie afforded all those expensive ingredients. I know that eventually she put a paypal link on her blog so that supporters could contribute but what did she do until then?

A friend and I tried to blog and cook our way through Rachel Ray’s 365 No Repeats back in 2005. We made it through a month and then our families revolted and refused to eat any more of the weird, tex-mex type food. There’s a cute scene in the movie where Julie, Julia and their husbands are all reaching for the bicarb of soda to help digest the rich food. I could identify!

It is also every bloggers dream to break into the publishing world with their blog. It’s such a direct way to success and every writer’s dream … to have the publisher come to you. Every time you try to read some book about how to get your writing published, it’s always so convoluted … literary agents, editors, publishing houses, vanity publishing. I gave up a long time ago and shoved both my plays, my screenplay and my novel back into the drawer where they will probably always stay. My screenplay is coming back to life though in my mind and I want to do more work on it.

A New Job

2009-08-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

I am way excited as I have gotten a promotion! I've been testing and interviewing with my school district for over year. As you know, I badly need a 12 month, better paying job. I lucked out and snagged one of the 2 twelve month jobs up for grabs this fall! It's about 5 steps up the pay scale ... How much my pay checks will actually be remain to be seen.

I started the job last week. It's a doozy, I've more than tripled my work load working at a high school with over 3,000 students. But I intend to learn it all and become the foremost authority in my field.

Now I'm waiting to see if J gets hired by the same school district. We should know within the next couple of weeks as the para educators are put into place for the upcoming school year. If she does, that will help us out financially enough that we should be pretty comfortable.

The trick will be to manage our money well while continuing to live within our means. My biggest goal is to pay off our bills, mostly we just have some minor medical bills of J's to catch up on. We don't have any other debt that I know of. I also need to start paying back my retirement and building it up so that I can retire in 10 years with a nice pension.

Our other two goals are to buy a second car and move to a nicer place that isn't roach infested and has a washer and dryer. Hopefully those two things can wait until we have passed our 6 month probation periods.

Stay tuned as the next few months should be interesting.

Summer Woes

2009-08-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a long hot summer. Energy bills here in the desert are ridiculous. We're paying $200 a month to keep cool a 700 sq. ft. apartment with no washer & dryer. That's what we get for living in the So Cal Edison part of the Coachella Valley.

Needless to say, we've been patronizing the 99 cent store all summer. What a great place! I had to get some saline nasal spray according to my doctor and was able to find it there. I was also able to find large bottles of my fiber pills there. This stuff normally sells for $14.99. Needless to say, I stocked up on several bottles as you never know if they are still going to be there the next time you go shopping.

When we lived in Las Vegas, my partner Kate became infatuated with the 99 cent store. We weren't allowed to tell anyone, as she is from Cambridge Massachusetts and a bit of a snop. I didn't understand the attraction but there's a big one in the middle of town and it's amazing what you can find in there! Everything from cleaning supplies, pharmaceuticals, toiletries and food~!

At The Villa Of Reduced Circumstances

2009-06-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

I work for the public school system, so I am now off for the summer. It's terrifying because I'll get a 3 week pay check at the end of June, NO CHECK AT ALL FOR 8 weeks and then will get a partial (2 week) check at the end of August.

I've job hunted, ran an ad under Work Wanted on Craigslist, mentioned it on Facebook, got on the county TAC (temp) list, the school district summer help list, applied at stores online etc. No jobs have popped up. I'm willing to do absolutely anything for $10 an hour. I'm not applying for local temp agencies though. I signed up for 5 of them last summer and to this day have not ever gotten a single call from any of them.

So I guess there's nothing to do but to "grab a bottle and hunker down till dawn" (to quote Karen on an episode of Will & Grace.) I do have some interesting activities planned for the summer though and lots of time to blog, so I'll be posting more often.

I'm trying desperately to get a 12 month job with the school district, have tested and interviewed and am now on half a dozen hiring lists. I expect a break in that area this fall. Our air conditioning died out about a week ago and we got by, here at our home in the desert which we affectionally call The Villa of Reduced Circumstances (with a nod to Alexander McCall Smith), for 4 days before the landlord fixed it. Even though we were enjoying triple degree temps, I was good natured from beginning to end of the ordeal. What else can you do? He brought us a room a/c and we stayed in the living room throughout.

I've known this summer was coming and am really mad at myself for not stockpiling food. I managed to keep the bills paid throughout the year but I'm trying to have faith that God will provide some of the other stuff.

Not So Expensive Repairs

2009-05-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

Ah life, it’s always something. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.

We recently hit a patch of mechanical malfunctions - first the car died dead, then the computer, then our cell phone, then both of our phone outlets.

In the past this would have thrown me into a complete tailspin. Now I just shrug and deal, without any unnecessary expenditure of angst.

The car problems, a blown transmission, were against all odds covered by special warranty.

The computer repair cost $175 and it still sounds like a wheezing old geezer. I think that a new tower is in our future. Hopefully not our immediate future. We HAVE to coast through this summer in survival mode.

The cell phone was a lost cause. We received another donation of a used phone and had it hooked up to our account. I keep swearing to myself that I won’t keep it and won’t renew my contract, but a cell phone sure does come in handy sometimes. PLUS I hate using public phones, if you can even find one these days. For some reason I keep getting outrageous cell phone bills and I really do need to close the account before the summer pinch.

We were talked through our phone outlet problems by the good people at our cable company. So without too much fuss and bother we are back up and running at 100%.

Speaking of repairs, daughter J and I had our hay fever/spring allergies both clear up recently. Once we could smell, we discovered that the living room furniture we’d gotten from my brother’s condo reeked of cigarette smoke. We need to deal with that AND get Jeanne some properly fitted work clothing ... again, things that will have to wait until fall.

Beauty Pageants For Children

2009-03-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Beauty pageants for kids, a lot of people seem to think they are plain evil but I’m here to testify that they can be a really fun family activity, If you don’t believe me, read Delta Burke’s autobiography “Delta Style.”

When my oldest two daughters were little, I put them in dancing lessons – for grace and energy and something to do in the community. They would dance in shows several weekends each year, wear several different special costumes and we’d do their hair and make up.

We moved away from that area by the time my youngest daughter Mindy was old enough for dancing school and our new community didn’t have one. So she participated in pageants and cheerleading and it was all pretty much the same thing - family fun on the weekends that involved costumes and performing, with hair and makeup being done.

It takes major bucks though. It usually starts by spotting an ad in the local paper for a little local pageant. It doesn’t cost that much, you buy a dress, they compete, there are plenty of trophys and ribbons and the occasional crown tossed around and *voila* you are hooked! If your child is a winner, you are expected to enter them in the national pageant and that’s where it gets expensive. There’s the travel expenses of course, the entry fee, buying a page in the program, staying at the host hotel for a certain number of nights, fees for all the little sub categories, several changes of outfits – some that aren’t even worn on stage. It costs as much as a family vacation.

You can’t do things in halves either - the clothes have to be pageant quality. And several outfits are needed, such as interview, talent, swimsuit, evening gown, western wear, etc.

Mindy loved doing them and after grad school she came home to stay with me for a few weeks. I was living in Las Vegas then. She found out about a beauty pageant being held in town and thought she’d like to do it for old time’s sake while she was still young enough to qualify. The pageant folks were excited because they needed more entries in the older girl category but insisted that she’d have to book a hotel room for 3 nights in order to enter. We could afford the entry fee and she had the clothes but that hotel room put it right out of our range.

Oh well, I’m glad we were able to pull it off while she was growing up. And let me tell you, if a kid doesn’t want to do it … whatever “it” is (dance, cheerleading, pageants, piano lessons, sports … whatever) no force on earth can get them to do it. Several factors in the universe have to come in to play for a child to succeed at an activity - willingness on child's part, parental support, expendable income, talent/brains/beauty, it can never be just something the parent's want.

Jon & Kate Plus 8 - The Final Season?

2009-03-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

If you watched the March 23rd episode, J&K seemed to be about to address the rumours about their marital woes at the end of the season finale. Instead it was about the problems the couple are experiencing dealing with fame. Kate is handling it great (who knew?) and Jon is not dealing with it so well. I have my doubts about that. It can't be nice going out in public with 8 little kids you are trying to keep track of while people are undoubtedly calling them by names and reaching for them. But Kate says she loves it, so there you go.

I think it's probably the money she loves. Rumours of them earning in the mid to high 5 figures for each episode would certainly make the situation more bearable for me!

We've all watched this couple morph into very different people than they were 3 years ago. Their body language on the interview couch has been dismal for weeks now. They give love seats a bad name - sitting side by side, but never touching.

Jon is pretty difficult to read but he doesn't seem to be enjoying his kids as much as he used to. The episodes of him holding down the fort while Kate is away on business trips are pretty grim as evidenced by the recent “walk through the woods” (a.k. in fandom as the "Forced Deathmarch") that he dragged the kids out on. There was clearly no joy in mudville. He no longer seems to enjoy playing with the 'tups.

I think it was first obvious that things had changed with Kate during the puppy-buying episode. There were no family meals, the kids were eating while Jon & Kate each stood off at the side. Kate unveiled her new mod look when she stepped out of the van - long black coat, high heeled boots, etc. Not very mumsy like. Then she kept bellowing about how she had picked out "her" puppies. Also while she was chatting afterwards with the dog breeder, I remember thinking "Is she really flirting with him? Right in front of Jon???"

Could America's favorite family really be breaking up? Jon is probably secure in the knowledge that everyone who watches the show will understand why he left that shrew of a wife. What he isn’t counting on would be the backlash – people love those kids and don’t want to see them go through a divorce plus he'd be leaving Kate with 8 kids, aged 8 and under and that could make her more sympathetic.

Kate is not someone I’d want to divorce. And you can’t help feeling for those kids. How would they cope when Daddy is no longer “a part of their daily lives”? What do you think?

Crockpot

2009-02-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

I love crockpots. I love finding an unappetizing piece of meat in the “Manager’s Special” section at the grocery store, throw it in the crockpot, add some seasoning or rub or sauce or marinade, plug it in and turn it on low and there you go. Last night I threw a pkg of chicken thighs in with a bottle of sesame ginger dressing. I cooked some frozen veggies with chicken stock in the 2nd crockpot and had rice going in the rice cooker. It made an excellent dinner with enough left over for Tupperware containers for 3 work lunches. Also, it's easy to blow a fuse on our stove top if you get too many burners going at once, but the crockpots don't do that.

I bought my sister-in-law Jennifer a crockpot once and she wanted recipes. I explained to her that you throw in a piece of meat, a can of soup and *voila* 8 hours later you have dinner, not to mention the fun of being at work all day knowing that your dinner will be hot and ready for you when you get home.

She only looked perturbed (she’s from Connecticut, what can I say …) and promptly went out and bought herself a crockpot cookbook. Was Martha Stewart from Connecticut? I suspect so.

I found a wonderful blog that I heartily recommend http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/. It’s a years worth of crockpot recipes and fun facts and really captures the pioneer spirit that a true crockpotter must have.

Steve Martin

2009-02-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

My Big Splurge ...

It’s been a while since I bought a Starbucks coffee, so I was pleased to see that they have these new little green swirly stick things that stick in the hole in the lid so that it doesn’t slosh around in the car. It’s really cool.

My cup had printed on it

The Way I See It #112

which was a quote by Steve Martin Comedian and writer.

He wrote: If you’ve got a dollar and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve got seventy-one cents left. But if you’ve got seventeen grand and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve still got seventeen grand. There’s a math lesson for you.

The Way I See It, Steve Martin hasn’t bought a loaf of bread in a very long time.

Barry Manilow

2009-01-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

Back when I was young and well off…well, doing better than I am now … I used to do Barry Manilow. Well, I didn’t exactly DO him but you know what I mean. I was definitely a world class Fanilow. I traveled around the country going to see him. I went to conventions, concerts, etc. I didn’t keep track but I would estimate that I probably saw at least a 100 concerts and that’s a conservative estimate.

It was good clean fun during my family raising years. When the kids went to their Dad’s for vacation, off my friends and I would go. This went on from 1980 through the mid-90’s. Then concert tickets went into the triple digits and I dug in my heels and refused to pay those prices. I read a quote in a financial book “The more you feed an addiction, the stronger it becomes.” This was my addiction and I went off of it cold turkey.

To my surprise, I found that I missed the other fans more than I missed Barry. I mean how many times can you pay big bucks to see Barry Manilow sing "I Write the Songs", you know? I was always mindful of whether I was getting enough bang for my buck during my heyday and I’m glad I stopped before my addiction became just a mindless habit.

Would I like to have the money back I spent on my hobby? Not for the concerts, each show was a delight but yes, I wish I hadn’t spent so much on travel, conventions, fan clubs, dressing room decorating, photo taking, etc. Some of it was just plain stupid. But I don’t regret those days or the life long friendships that resulted.

Amazingly, the friendships continue. I have friends all over the United States and Europe and my youngest daughter (who inherited my wanderlust) has taken advantage of these connections to couch surf her way around the world.

Big Love

2009-01-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

We sprung for HBO & Showtime and somehow hit it so that we are paying less now for the same package we had two years ago.

I am in love with HBO and Showtime On Demand! You can click on Series or Movies and watch whatever you want whenever you want.

I was able to catch up on all last seasons Lword episodes and just caught the first episode of Season 3 on Big Love. OMG I love that show! They managed to pretty much show the entire ensemble of actors. It looks like everyone is back to reprise their roles. Even the oldest Henrickson daughter who played Meryl Streep’s daughter in Mamma Mia is back. And a stellar ensemble of actors it is.

The show is a series about a polygamist family trying to live a mainstream life and blend in with their friends and neighbors. They keep getting called back to Juniper Creek though, a traditional polygamist compound a two hour drive away from their Utah neighborhood. A strange concept for a dramatic series but definitely timely and highly entertaining!

One of the most interesting characters is the Henrickson ‘Sister Wife’ #2 Nicky Grant. Being the compound patriarch Roman Grant's daughter and born & raised in Juniper Creek, she’s really straddling both worlds while battling her own addictions of shopping & gambling.

So in the opener last night they showed a snippet from seasons past of the elder Roman Grant saying something romantic to the young girl slated to be his next wife. It jarringly reminded me of Hugh Hefner interacting with The Girls Next Door.

It looks like there might be a Wife #4 for ole’ Bill Henrickson. The woman he’s been haphazardly courting finally bedded him and that convinced her to give polygamy a try. I swear this show makes everyone want to give polygamy a try! At least polygamists hold on to the old wives instead of giving them the heave ho when they are ready for something new and different.

The financial obligations of maintaining such huge families would be horrendous, of course but if you think about it there would be a lot of able bodied adults to bring home paychecks.

Prepaid VISA Cards

2009-01-16T09:12:00.001-08:00

For Christmas I was given a couple of prepaid VISA cards. I found that I could order stuff online and pay for it with these cards, rather than my debit card. The advantage to this is tremendous.

Frequently when you order something and pay with your VISA, you are somehow giving the company permission to send you more product periodically and for them to thus help themselves to another chunk of money out of your account without warning. I had this happen to me several times, which is why I now go over my bank statements with a fine tooth comb.

One of the offenders was Lauren Bacall cosmetics. They send you all kinds of shit monthly once you’ve ordered their main item, the round makeup set compact (which in all fairness I have to add is a great product!)

Other companies that have continued to dip into my bank account once I’ve ordered from them are travel clubs, magazine subscriptions, gourmet food orders, credit report agencies, etc. It’s very insidious and sneaky, many many times even after reading the fine print I didn’t realize that this was an ongoing thing that I was agreeing to.

One of the ways they get you is to offer you something amazing … a free airplane ticket for trying their travel club, for example. You can cancel within 30 days without having to give back the ticket … that sort of thing. I stumbled into that by opening a bank account once. The travel club was presented as a “free service” that came with the account.

By paying for anything you order online with a prepaid VISA card, you aren’t allowing anyone access to your bank account or line of credit. All you are risking is the $100 (or whatever amount) that you used to buy the card initially. From now on, I intend to buy a $100 VISA card when I get paid once a month and use it for all online ordering.

Another thing I do is to once a year destroy my old ATM debit VISA card and order a new one with a new account number. Even going over my statements carefully, you can miss things plus it helps to clean out the cobwebs and avoid identity theft.

Another way to use prepaid cards is as a budgeting tool, especially for those of us who are paid once a month. Rather than keep envelopes of cash in your purse - it's too easy to grab from envelopes for impulse buying - instead I'll put $20 on my Starbucks card, buy a gas card to the station I frequent most often, buy a Trader Joe's card to use throughout the month. It's the same thing as buying prepaid cell phones. When the card is used up, no more luxury items until next month.

My friend Breann has a $500 limit on a visa card. Once that card is used up, that's it. That's her spending money for the month. A clever idea I haven't tried yet.

Buying Tires

2009-01-15T14:45:00.000-08:00

I’m not very knowledgeable about buying tires. In fact, I dread anything to do with auto-related purchases. I always feel taken advantage of since I’m a single woman. Also, I used to buy a new car every couple of years back in my wealthy past so no new tires were needed, but those days are gone forever. I now have a Saturn Vue that I’ve been driving since the summer of 2003.

I drove on the original set of tires that came with the car for 3 and a half years and finally got new tires in December of 2006. They were a size larger than the car originally came with and it felt a lot sturdier to have those larger tires on. The new tires lasted just about exactly 2 years. Lately they’ve been dying one by one. So last September I bought one new tire and in October I bought a second new tire. I crossed my fingers and hoped we could get through the holidays without having to buy the final 2 tires.

In November I had a coupon for an oil change at Ramon Tires in Rancho Mirage. They told me that I had 2 good tires and two bad tires (duh). Unfortunately one of the new tires was the wrong size!!! This led to a lot of panic with trying to figure out who sold me the wrong sized tire and why didn’t they know any better. They warned me about how evil it was to have two different sized tires on my car (“like walking with one high heel and one sneaker on”) and how it would throw everything out of alignment.

Since my boyfriend Phil was visiting after Christmas I took him with me back to Ramon Tires and asked how cheaply I could get out of this mess. They gave me a quote for 4 new tires at the price of $749.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 new tires when I already had, at their admission, 2 perfect practically new ones!

I came to the conclusion that having a man along was having it's ups and downs. Clearly I must look like a wealthy snowbird (a visiting tourist) but now I also looked like I had a husband and price was no object. Phil told me that he didn’t think it was that big a deal to have two different sized tires. If one was taller than they other, perhaps they could let a little air out of one tire so it was the same size as the other? I like how he thinks!

I went by COSTCO and looked at their tires. Phil pointed out that they only carried high end tires … specifically Michelins, which I couldn’t afford. A friend advised me to get out of Palm Desert and buy my tires in the less affluent areas of the Coachella Valley, like Cathedral City or Indio.

So I dropped Phil off at the golf course and went to Discount Tires in Cathedral City (my usual haunt) and the guy there said that the 2 good tires were exactly the same size. They were just different brands so the numbers were different but they translated to the same size. Hah, take THAT Ramon Tires!

He quoted me a really good price for 2 more tires and we had a deal! By the time Phil finished his 18 holes I was driving around with 4 good tires!!!!!!! *phew* Now I don’t have to go through this again for another couple of years.

Lesson learned - buy all 4 tires at once, a matched set.

At The Movies

2009-01-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

There is something about recessions/depressions that makes people go to the movies even more often. Escapism for the price of a movie ticket, I guess. I know I’ve been to a ton of movies this holiday season, way more than usual. Also, we are a little more comfortable these days because we have paid off our moving expenses (utility deposits, security deposits, etc.) and are now paying our true rent.

So this weekend I took my 16 year old granddaughter Rachel to the Palm Springs Film Festival. You can get a “six pack” of tickets for $50 and that got us into 3 films. Luckily all 3 films turned out to be really good. Saturday morning we went to see “The Witch Of The West Is Dead.” Shirley Maclaine’s daughter Sashi Parker played the elderly grandmother in a Japanese film and it was fun seeing her speak most of her dialogue in Japanese. It was also fun to see her in the audience looking very young and glamorous and ungrandmotherly. Aren’t actors amazing people?

Saturday afternoon we saw “The Black Balloon”, an Australian film about a family with the oldest boy being autistic. It was a wonderful story about how the younger brother both loved and hated his brother and dealt with how his life was turned upside down on a daily basis because of his brother’s condition. Rachel really identified with this film as she has two little autistic girls who frequently come to visit and was able to spot their different kinds of behaviors in the austistic onscreen performance of actor Luke Ford.

The third that we saw at noon on Sunday was “Tales from the Script” about screenwriters experiences having their scripts made into movies. I was worried that she might find this one too boring but she’s a prolific writer (just like her grandma!) and was really in to it.

All in all it was a great weekend visit, one of our best ever! Usually we have to go buy special Rachel food but now her palate has matured and she’s also into eating healthy, so no special food was needed.

Reality TV

2009-01-08T15:29:00.000-08:00

We spend a lot on our cable bill. I just can't bring myself to go back to basic cable, plus we don't go out much so ... what to do but pay up and enjoy ourselves? Over the last couple of years, daughter J & I have become addicted to Reality TV. One of our favorite shows is Jon and Kate Plus 8. Like the rest of America, we just love those kids.

Monday night we stayed up late to watch the start of the new season. At least it appeared to be the first show of the new season, but it looked old because of Kate’s hair which was short and red. She’s been growing it out lately, based on recent booksigning photos and those photos sure didn't match how she looked on this show. The network must have a ton of old footage that can be made into episodes but are limited by having to keep the kids around the same age and trying to match the parents evolving looks.

This episode was about making soup at home. I watched it carefully and don’t believe I heard Kate use her favorite word “organic” even once. She & Jon described some of the ingredients in her soups – broccoli & cheese in one and beef with an assortment of veggies in another. Once again I was amazed me at what sophisticated and adventurous palates her 8 kids have. When my 3 were growing up, they never cared for cheese-based soups or the squash or root vegetables that she named. She had two huge lobster-style pots on her stove and were cooking both soups at once which had to have taken forever! I also wondered at how many meals she’d be able to get out of that batch, since there are 10 in the family – she claimed that she’d be able to get 5 or 6 lunches out of it if she included grilled cheese sandwiches. This definitely made it worth all that effort!

Kudos to Kate in this episode for keeping her cool when her stovetop exploded and she had to get a entirely new stove. Trust me, non-working appliances are a biggie in the Mom stress-o-meter level counter. It was always the one thing that threw me as a single parent - the one hassle I couldn’t just shrug off even back when money wasn't so hard to come by.

The kids were jumping on a Little Tyke inflatable bouncy toy. I saw something like that at Sam’s Club recently and thought it would be a great thing for the Gosselins to have since they have so many kids of the same age. Lunch time brought about the oddest part of the episode - watching six 4 year old children sitting in high chairs and wearing bibs ... all righty then!

During lunch they announced that they would be moving soon. Kudos to little Alexis, the oldest of the septuplets, for figuring out how to get her own bedroom. Evidentally she’s “disruptive” and so sleeps on her own and was informed that this arrangement would continue in the new house. Yup, she scored a major coup in that family!

the 99 Cent Store

2009-01-08T10:01:00.001-08:00

Cool things I’ve found at the 99 cent store:

Kitchen sponges with the scrubber on one side

Fat Free Half and Half (for my coffee)

Super fresh produce

The best Italian meatballs ever

Plastic food storage containers

Holiday decorations

Office supplies

Eggs

Coffee

Vanilla frosting

A full color coffee table book about celebrity marriages (half of which were already kaput…)

Pizzas & Pizza rolls

Cute socks

Revlon Makeup

Tooth whitening kit

Sugar free candy

Sparkling water

Dog treats

Hair ties and clips

Self-tanning lotion

Pregnancy Testing Kit (!)

Joke gifts

The 99 Cent Store Rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Advantages of the Current Economic Crisis

2008-11-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

After my last post, I started thinking about the plus side of the current economy. For one thing, it's kind of fun to have everyone in the same boat.

I can only imagine that this is how it must have felt during World War II when everyone made sacrifices for the war effort. My friend even has her own 'victory garden' ... her personal victory over inflated grocery store produce prices.

Here are some other good things that have come out of the current crisis:

#1) Free Groceries - I have 3 great coupons in my purse right now. The first one was mailed directly to me from Ralphs grocery store. I earned $14 in free groceries by using my Ralphs Reward Card when I shopped. They also included valuable coupons for items I buy from there on a regular basis. The other two coupons came in the mail with the Wednesday circulars ... one is for a free $10 gift card if I buy $50 worth of groceries from Stater Bros. The other is for $5 of free groceries if I buy $30 worth at Fresh & Easy. These incentives are really appreciated. Also some groceries have gone up in price but I've noticed that others have dropped.

2) We have been forced to explore alternative forms of transportation. This is possibly the greatest thing that has come out of this crisis, more and more people sharing cars, using buses, buying scooters, etc. And believe me, I am someone who never would have considered using a bus to go somewhere, now everyone I know seems to be carrying around bus route pamphlets!

3) Recycling is something we do religiously now. Good for the environment plus we usually make enough to go out for lunch after turning in our cans and bottles.

4) As people are unable to sell their homes, more and more properties are coming up for rent and thus rent prices are dropping. We ended up with a two bedroom/one bath unit that rivals what I used to pay for rent $10 years ago!

5) I'm enjoying watching the governments efforts to get people back into all these houses that are sitting around empty. It will be interesting to see what incentives they come up with. I don't know if it will ever be worth my while to own a house again some day though. With house prices falling, all the old reasons for buying one have flown out the window! The only way it would make sense now is if it was an income producing investment, not for personal use.

6) How can I put this delicately, hmmmm ... the people who wait on me now at McDonalds actually speak English! Also, we live in a town that relies heavily on tourism and we appreciate our visiting snowbirds more than ever. This makes us more tolerant of their eccentricities.

7) Besides saving on housing and groceries, a lot of companies are trying to figure out ways to make things more affordable for people. We will all benefit from this, no matter what our economic status is.

8) There are more and more enjoyable reality TV shows about how people with large families manage to make ends meet. Besides being entertaining, a lot of the shows have helpful suggestions for trimming costs.

9) Better health - people are gardening, walking places, trying to make better choices when eating so that the food they have truly counts.

10) Camaraderie - I'm not the Big Loser trying to get by during a time of prosperity, everyone is feeling the pinch and trying to save money. Learning to get by on less is also good for everyone. My daughter and I are in a much smaller place than we've ever lived before and it's suiting us just fine. We enjoy being resourceful in creating storage space ... for example, using my 2 drawer file cabinet as a side table in our living room, using a hope chest as our coffee table, etc.

The Current Economy

2008-10-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Oh no! Our economy is in crisis! Wall Street crashed! The president got involved, making a big speech informing us about this sorry state of affairs. Even the candidates acknowledged it! Well, welcome to the party guys, what took you so long to notice?

This is some small ways of how the current economy has affected one person (me!):

1) My sewing basket was reinstated, the sewing machine brought out, dusted off and given a permanent place of honor in our house. No more new clothes … our clothing is patched, repaired and altered instead. If we need something new, it comes from WalMart or a thrift shop.

2) Food – no more experimental recipes using a wide range of ingredients. No more looking at the sides of packages trying to figure out calories, carb counts or fat grams. The only numbers I pay attention to now is price!

3) Pets – no new pets and we cover their little ears whenever we discuss whether we can afford to keep the ones we’ve got. Bob has needed a rabies booster for over a year, as well as eye treatments. Lady is a candidate for new knees, which will probably never happen. Their food is expensive but, since they are Chihuahuas, we keep buying it.

4) We move around to be closer to work to reduce our gas prices. This has to be done cleverly so that the amount spent on the move doesn't add up to more than the gas would have cost but we've pulled it off on more than one occasion.

Am I in favor of the government bailing out those big businesses that are about to go under? No. Am I prepared to deal with the consequences of those businesses going under? Not even. I can’t imagine the trickle down effect of that.

Inexpensive Gift Giving

2008-08-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

It's about this time of year that I start thinking about Christmas gift giving. I spent my summer of unemployment going through The Family Photos. If I couldn't be out earning money, at least I could be accomplishing something. I came to the conclusion that it has gotten far too cheap and easy to take and develop photographs. I have maybe a handful of photos of my parents and grandparents when they were young but at least a thousand of each of my kids, grandchild, nieces and nephews. My nephew Chris and his wife have a son named Michael that I call The Most Photographed Child in the World (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of Prince William of England .)

When my mother died, I inherited all of her photo albums. In addition to the 32 I had ... groan ... I now had 28 more! My lifestyle does not lend itself to hauling around tons of photo albums SO right before a big cross country move I took a deep breath and plunged in … I tore all the pics out of all the albums and put them in one big box that I schlepped to Boston with me.

Late one night I got an idea of what to do with them. It was precipitated by a drunken phone call from my brother imploring me to send him any pictures I might have of him with our deceased father and grandfather. I warily eyed the giant box of photos, not knowing where to start. I reached in and grabbed a random photo which turned out to be of my niece with my grandfather who had passed away 30+ years ago. Why did I have this photo? Shouldn't my niece have it? Does she even know it exists?

Right then and there it became my goal in life to rid myself of most all of these photos and get them back out to the younger family members they should be with. So during the summer of 2006, I started sorting. Everyone in the family had their own pile and the treasured group photos went to either the youngest person in the picture or the “star” of the photo – the one person front and center smiling into the camera. For Christmas that year, I put together photo albums for everyone. They weren’t even fancy or scrapbooked, just colored paper hole punched, bound with ribbon with a sheet of plastic on the cover. Christmas Eve everyone started tearing into their gifts and suddenly the room became silent. People had found their photo albums! There was tears and laughter (and we’re NOT an emotional family.) The photo albums, which cost me practically nothing, were the hit of the holidays!

This summer I started going through the photos that were left. I still have tons of them – what to do, what to do, what to do. I realized as I looked through them that most of these would have been duplicates. Most were photos of my mother’s kids and grand kids, which had been sent to her for every occasion. I needed a way to return LOTS of pictures back to the original givers without insulting them. I decided to make Photo Collage Place mats for the Christmas of 2008, one for each family member.

I had a great time dividing the photos into sets or themes and learned that it takes approximately 35-50 photos to make a place mat-sized collage. I cut and stuck the photos by glue stick onto cheap plastic place mats that I found at a street fair. Once finished, I covered my creation front & back with clear plastic contact paper. Still with me? It was fast and easy and could be done while watching TV. The photos I had of my ex-husband and his family were given to my daughter so that she can make photo place mats for them.

Guess what, even after all of this, I STILL have plenty of photos left for my private collection! A lot of the photos are of our ancestors and parents, all of who are deceased. My parents were big party animals and I have a photos of them and their friends taken at random parties over the years. How do I evenly divide those among family members? I’m thinking about making scrapbook pages of our ancestors, or of Christmases past and then copying them on a colored copier and making sure that everyone gets a set.

Another puzzlement is what to do with pics of my exes? Not just my ex husband, but do I really need a million pictures from another relationship that lasted for 4 years and ended badly? The problem was how to let go and what to do with these pics. I decided to keep any photos of my ex(s) in which I or my family, friends or pets also appear, the rest got tossed. It was extremely cathartic. I highly recommend it!

Food Cost and Quality

2008-08-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

The harder times get, the more fun it seems to be. Don't get me wrong, poverty is always a grind but when everyone else is feeling the pinch people start getting creative and enjoy wallowing in it together. I'm still spending a lot of time shopping for food deals and thinking about cooking.

A couple of years ago my friend Diane & I were hooked on the Food Network Channel. We co hosted a food blog and started experimenting with various recipes from Food Network shows and cookbooks, much to our families dismay. No matter what we made, nothing tasted very good! Our families started to revolt and we went back to the basics – meat and potatoes. But as I was eating my old meatloaf standby, I wrote to Diane and complained that food just doesn’t taste the same anymore. Was it me and my aging tastebuds or is this true?

Don’t even get me started on restaurants! A couple of years ago I went with a group of people to a restaurant for their $45 New Years Eve dinner special. My lamb chops were gross – too fatty to be eaten. I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to spoil every one else’s expensive meal. It made me wonder how many substandard meals they got away with serving that night, due to thinking like mine. I never went back to that restaurant of course, and the list of local restaurants I no longer patronize (for the same reason) has grown rapidly over the years.

Surprisingly I tend to get the most consistently good meals at chain restaurants – Applebees, Cocos, etc. Perhaps it’s their quality control. It’s just so disappointing to try to make an event out of going out to eat and end up paying for a meal that is substandard to what you could make at home more cheaply.

Another disappointing phenomenon is the price staying the same for items that are shrinking in size. You no longer get 64 ounces of ice cream, you get 48. You can tell easily by looking at candy bars. I remember the size of the bars I used to get as a child for a nickel. Not even close to what you pay a dollar for these days. Cadbury even has a disclaimer on their site that the eggs aren’t getting smaller, we just got bigger … so, not true. Then I read that candy companies are also using cheaper ingredients to make up the price difference, like the oil Hersheys is using in the chocolate. No wonder things don’t taste the same!

Then there’s the problem of meat at the grocery store. If I see the words “Aged Beef” I drop the package and run for the hills! There is nothing grosser tasting than aged beef but grocery stores and restaurants are only too happy to charge you big bucks to come to the same conclusion. Recently I made filet mignons that had been marked down as a “Manager Special” at my local Ralphs. It was completely disgusting. I’m so glad I didn’t pay full price. I had bought several packages (at $1.29 each) and my daughter implored me to just throw them away. I told her that I plan to use the meat in a crockpot stew dish but was there enough gravy and spices to disguise the taste? Finally I made chili out of them and was it good! It gave the chili a really rich, earthy taste.

The one good thing about items shrinking in size is that we Americans can use some portion control. I heard that the size of the burger that kids get in Kids Meals are the size that adults used to receive when fast food places first opened. My daughter and I have decided to order kids meals whenever we eat fast food. We have also learned to share entrees – one person orders a dinner salad, the other gets the entrée. I don’t mind ordering my own entrée occasionally through because I can take the leftovers home and make another meal out of it (and sometimes a third meal!) I don’t want to turn into one of those old ladies who hoard little bits of leftover food, but I think I am well on my way to joining their ranks.

FEELING THE PINCH

2008-07-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

I knew that this summer would be hard as we live in an extremely seasonal area. Last summer was bad enough and I worked full time! What hurt us was the high energy bills ($600+ a month) and the fact that my daughter’s job opportunities tend to dry up in the summer – there are less dogs to groom, less staff needed in retail, etc. To stay afloat, I took in boarders and sold everything that wasn’t nailed down via ebay, craigslist and a couple of garage sales.

Over this past year our circumstances have changed quite a bit. I was able to be rehired by the school district at a very good pay rate, but had to take a job at a school - so I have 7 weeks off in the summer. We moved into a condo inside of a gated community. Our energy bills aren’t as high, rent is less BUT we are unable to take in boarders or hold garage sales. Our computer is dead, so there is no ebay or craigslist, not that there is much left to sell anyway.

How are we managing? We are laying low, staying home, trying not to spend money. One ray of sunshine in all of this is that J misfiled her tax returns back in April which means she hasn’t gotten her refunds yet. We straightened out the mess and are expecting them to show up any day now.

I’m worried because our car is falling apart, literally. The engine is missing a motor mount and our muffler is hanging on by a thread. We need new belts and brakes, not to mention an oil, lube & filter change. If those returns don’t materialize in the next few days, it’s food bank time!

Sharing a Car

2008-06-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

J and I have been sharing a car for over a year now. This is a hard result of the current economy but something we are also inordinately proud of. To my surprise I discovered that going down to one car instead of two seems to be not at all unusual. Of the 4 women I work with, 3 are sharing a car with their adult daughters (the 4th one can only afford a moped.)

It’s amazing how well J & I have managed to cope with the one car. One way was by living in the same town we both work in and a plus to that was how it cut our gas bill in half. This didn’t just happen to work out that way ... oh no, it involved a move and my daughter limiting her most recent job search to nearby places.

Over time we've also gotten pretty good at figuring out how to eat cheaply. We are intimately familiar with the dollar menu at Burger King. We always eat when we go to Sams Club to pick up our prescriptions. We live near a Fresh and Easy and have learned what time of day to hit the store to get first dibs on the marked-down goodies.

Another treasure trove has turned out to be the 99 cent store! You can get everything at the store near us from fresh produce to frozen goodies. Yesterday we picked up a couple of frozen pizzas for $1.29 each (perfectly meal size for J.) Canned beans and veggies run about one-third of what they do at the grocers. We’ve also been getting our dog treats there and rationing them carefully. The cheap sodas aren’t bad either!

It's amazing how much our lives have changed and yet how enjoyable life still is. Our condo has a huge heated pool right outside our back door and we make a point of swimming at least once a day. We go to the library to check our email and rent free DVDs and books. And we splurged on a TIVO rental from the cable company so we can tape all of our fav TV shows. We hardly ever go out to eat and thus appreciate it so much more when we do.

How To Holiday On A Budget

2007-11-30T09:43:00.000-08:00

More on How to Holiday on a Budget:

Encourage your kids to focus on what they are giving people, rather than what they want to receive. Have the kids make a list and give them a budget, say $20/$25 (which ideally they’ve earned themselves) and let them shop. I suggest the dollar store but you’ll be amazed at their creativity, even if you end up at the mall. If they are using their own money, they will be sensible and deeply satisfied that the gift truly came from them.

Drawing names for family gift exchanges is a sensible idea that most families embrace. Ours never did. To this day, extended family insist that we all exchange lavish gifts. One thing I do is to purchase brand new, still sealed items that I find at garage sales and thrift shops throughout the year, then I have a stash to draw from. Another rule I follow is that if I see you on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, you'll get a gift. If I don’t, you’ll get a card. This has eliminated gift giving for multiple nieces and nephews and their offspring.

If in spite of your best efforts, you do get roped into buying gifts for entire families, give one gift per household – such as a large box of candy or a board game or make a movie night basket with a couple of new CDs, a couple packets of popcorn, a 2 liter of soda and a few boxes of the kind of candy you buy at movie theaters.

Another thing I’ve discovered is that there are items you can buy used that appear to be brand new – Christmas mugs, books with intact sleeve jackets, that sort of thing. I’ll buy Christmas mugs throughout the year, if I can find them for a dollar or under. As long as they are not cracked or chipped, there’s no way to tell if they are new or used. At Christmas time I fill them with individually wrapped Christmas candies, wrap them in plastic with a bow and they make great little gifts for co-workers. Swap out ceramic mugs for holiday styrofoam cups-filled-with-candy for the kids to give to their friends.

Now let’s get down to the actual gift purchasing. One thing I’ve noted is that it doesn’t matter what the gift is, it’s where you buy it from that counts. Anything from The Gap or Old Navy is cool to a teen, even if it’s a scarf and gloves. Bath & Body Works items (any fragrance) are welcomed by all females. Men get jazzed about gifts from Sharper Image or Brookstone. Even low amounts on gift cards from these stores seem to please people. Readers LOVE cards for bookstores. Gift cards are way cooler than giving cash, everyone loves to tuck those in their wallet, knowing that they get to go out shopping for themselves. My daughter-in-law loved the 99 cent store near her work. I was really poor one August as her birthday approached, so gave her a $10 99 cent store gift card and she really enjoyed that.

The trouble with gift cards is that you'll probably spend more than if you actually purchased a gift. You can get away with purchasing things that look much more expensive than they are. You can't do that with gift cards.

HOLIDAY HAZARDS

2007-11-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

Being a single mom at holiday time presents extraordinary challenges. No matter how or what well meaning relatives may contribute, it is still up to the person who has the kids on Christmas morning to provide the filled stockings and half a dozen gifts per kid under the tree. My ex and I split up when our girls were 12, 8 and 2 and so I spent a lot of years pulling it all together myself

Keep an eye on the prize as you navigate through the labyrinth of holiday obstacles. Don’t give out gifts early, no matter how tempting. Keep envisioning the tree, the gifts, the stockings on Christmas morning. That is mandatory, all else is expendable.

Artificial trees and wreaths are a single Mom’s best friend. If you store them carefully, they’ll last forever and believe me – most kids don’t give a hoot if the tree is real or not, as long as there is one. It doesn’t cost you a thing to get that tree out each year, dust it off, decorate it, put out the nativity scene, hang a wreath and stockings and voila … abundance! The house looks swell and the kids are happy. It’s amazing how much unneeded stress adults put on themselves and how little it really takes to satisfy the kids.

Beware of hidden holiday expenses! Those include new holiday outfits, gift & cookie exchanges, parties, traditional outings, etc. Very few single Mom’s budgets can handle all these December expenses. Be very careful about what you agree to and what traditions you establish. If it’s a yearly ritual to attend The Nutcracker at the ballet, suggest staying home instead popping popcorn and watching it on TV and see how that goes over.

On Christmas morning my Mom would always carefully budget a certain amount to be spent on each child. That led to some rather uneven gift giving. Someone getting something expensive might only get one or two items. Everyone else would get a whole bunch. I didn’t follow that with my kids. I tried to keep the number of gifts the same and give the big ticket items at birthdays. Most kids don’t have cash registers as brains. They don’t notice how much was spent on their siblings, but they do notice if one person runs out of gifts to open way before the others do.

Also remember – it’s all in the presentation. Wrap gifts as soon as you get them and make them look pretty. Put small items, like CDs, in bigger boxes. It makes the pile under the tree look bigger and disguises the item. Make the gift opening last as long as possible. Make everyone take turns, starting with the youngest. Stop periodically for refreshments or bathroom breaks. Save the stockings for last.

More holiday tips to follow …

Unexpected Income???

2007-10-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

I finally have Sundays off and have been able to go to church. I’d been hearing about a dynamic local ministry and decided to give it a try. It’s based on science of the mind and I like it very much. They frequently bandy about words and phrases like “abundance and prosperity” and “unexpected income.” What ARE they going on about? I thought. I was intensely in survival mode and feeling as poor as a church mouse.

The second service that I attended, the minister talked about a pledge that you could sign out in the lobby. You would agree to tithe 10% of any unexpected income that came your way over the next 30 days. Unexpected Income, oh that’ll be the day ... no point signing that. I couldn’t even afford the $50 needed to sign up for a church luncheon that was coming up in November.

Well, fast forward to the very next service one short week later. I not only had 3 sources of unexpected income create incredible “abundance and prosperity” in my life during that time, but could well afford the $50 luncheon in November! I hadn’t signed up for the pledge but was only too happy to double my contribution to the collection basket as it came my way!

I’d won a thousand dollars playing Bingo on Friday night (I’d been going for years without winning a thing,) my daughter’s father sent her some money to help her out during the slow season (a rare enough occurrence to warrant mentioning here) and heck, I’d even won a couple of bucks on my lottery ticket! How do you win $2 on one of these things, I asked the clerk at the convenience store? I have no idea he replied. He’d never heard of such a thing. Abundance and Prosperity, indeed!

The Good News & The Bad News

2007-10-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

Good news first, the director of human resources at my new job has approved my starting at the top pay step for my position! Woo Hoo! That should add up to a halfway decent paycheck come this month. Hopefully a good enough one to pay all our bills. Then we could use J’s paychecks for groceries and spending money.

The area I live in, the Coachella Valley, is very much populated by the “haves and the have nots.” We have Indian Wells, the richest city in America and only 20 miles away is Mecca, the poorest city in America. My friends run the gamet from Nancy, the doctor, who owns a 3 million dollar house to my friend Debi, who is trying to survive on a security guard's salary. But even Debi & I are not really poor. We enjoy great abundance in our lives. No one is hungry, everyone has food in the pantry, we are all lucky enough to be living here in paradise. We can’t always do everything we’d like to do but everyone faces limitations … time or money or health or whatever.

How To Make Money Without Having A Second Job

2007-09-27T09:07:00.001-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against getting a second job and may end up going that route. On the positive side, second jobs are good for paying off your bills because they leave you no time to be out getting into trouble (a.k.a. "shopping".) But negatively, second jobs tend to sap your strength and leave your friends and family wondering what you look like these days. In my experience, most second jobs end up being retail, standing on your feet for hours and you're lucky to make more than two or three hundred a month.

I've been doing tons of research on how to increase my monthly revenue without resorting to a second job and this is what I've come up with:

1) Clipping Coupons can save you big, especially on drugs, new food items and cleaning supplies. Not to mention, restaurant coupons for two-for-one-entrees ... what's better than free food!?! Well worth buying the Sunday paper.

2) Recycling (see previous post), my suggestion is to find a place to store your garbage bags full of recycling and take them in twice a year for a payoff sizeable enough to make it worth your while. Keep a trash bag in your trunk for bottles and cans you find at work and when you are out and about.

3) Selling: on ebay, half.com and craigslist can be simple and lucrative. Everybody has extra stuff around the house taking up storage space. You need access to a computer and a digital camera, the rest is pretty easy. Garage sales can also be a great source of emergency, end-of-the-month revenue. You can make two or thee hundred bucks for a morning of work.

4) Renting out rooms. This is a wonderous source of income. You can easily make $400 or $500 a month renting out even a little tiny bedroom. It would be hard to make that much money working a second retail job. It has it's drawbacks but I've been doing it for over 25 years now (ever since my divorce,) and haven't had any major problems. Just make sure up front that your renter has reliable (and legal) sources of income.

5) Working one shot jobs ... promotions, trade shows, conventions, food demos. These usually require standing somewhere or sitting at a table, being friendly and passing out things. Call your local convention center and ask if they hire local help. Also watch the paper and craigslist for these opportunities. Once you are on an agency's list, you'll get called periodically for jobs. Doing this once in awhile can be fun and get you out of the house working on your mingling skills. You don't have to be young and cute to do these jobs (but it helps.) Even senior citizens do them.

6) Catering jobs - banquet bartending, serving, food prep. Start by getting a food handlers license (a quick, easy process) and then calling the catering companies. You'll probably need a white shirt, black pants and shoes. Frequently you get paid the day of the event in cash. Last season, my daughter made a hundred dollars at a party and all she did was wander around for four hours refilling people's water glasses.

7) Being paid to have advertising signs on your car. For years I thought this was an urban myth but there are actually jobs like that. They send you the sticky decal and instruct you where to put it on your window or will even paint your entire car. You just drive around doing your thing and get checks each month. You'll have to do a bit of digging to find these opportunities - online or in national newspapers.

8) Work from home. I once had a great data entry job working from home part time entering new food items in a database for salesmen to order from (I don't consider it a second job if you can do it at home, sitting down and on your own schedule.) It was actually kind of fun! It paid $20 an hour. I got it by knowing someone who knew someone but I can attest that these jobs actually do exist.

9) House and pet sitting. This job isn't as easy as it looks. It's almost like moving. You have to take enough clothing and toiletries to get you through the duration and leave the house intact and pets alive and as clean as you found them. But it can be very lucrative and there's a big need. People hate to kennel their pets. Check with the local kennels and pet and house sitters and find out how much they charge. Don't sell yourself short, charge a good rate. Try it at first via word of mouth. If it works for you, gather references, get bonded and make up brochures and business cards. Also, there's an agency near where I live that provides doggy day care. They also provide over night care in people's homes. They advertise that these are the homes of people who don't work and have pets for your dog to play with. This would be good secondary income for senior citizens who wouldn't even have to be all that mobile.

10) Home based businesses - Amway, Avon, Cookie Lee, Mona Vie. Some people make money at these multi-level businesses, it always cost me more than I ever made though. I'm not good at signing up my friends to work under me but there are ways around that, you can advertise or have booths at trade shows and sign people up that way. If you are a go-getter and can sell your product to your coworkers at your main job, it would be well worth a try.

11) Get a skill or provide a service. Mobile notarys can make tidy amounts. It's usually a weekend seminar to get your notary license. You can only charge $10 per signature but you can charge a fee for your travel. Dog grooming in people's home is a great service, as some dogs hate car travel. Learn to do taxes, or face painting/clowning at kiddie parties, or ... well ... the opportunities are endless.

Anybody got any more ideas?

Abundance Beyond Belief ...

2007-09-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

I just got paid! How did I take advantage of this amazing windfall? Well, let's see. I added the $900 to the $300 I already had in my account. The $300 was already allotted for the rest of the rent. I called the car company and made a $311 payment over the phone (note to self: don't do that again - there is an $8 charge, check could have been mailed just as easily.) I went to AAA and made $115 car insurance payment. $166 will be automatically withdrawn in two days by the cable company for phone, internet and TV service. I had to put $100 in daughter J's account to cover overdraft fees (grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Note to self ... kill J.)

I took out $140 in cash; using $40 of it to buy gas for the Saturn (a trip to La Quinta and then to Beaumont that same day ate up half the gas.) I mailed my two ebay sale items for $10, bought groceries to the tune of $45 (saving $5 by using coupons.) Gave my daughter $20 to put in the Kia's tank. I met a new friend for lunch $10, bought yogurt for $5, dumped loose change into my coin jar and cannot account for $10. Hmmmmm ... tips? Where did it go? So now I have $60 in my account which has to be left there as a cushion to absorb unexpected bank fees.

Oh well, easy come, easy go. We are supposed to be getting a couple hundred from our border next week and J gets paid on Friday. Good thing because we still have to pay my Verizon cell phone bill ($77) and $400 for the electric bill by October 1st. (Note to self: don't kill J after all, her income is badly needed.)

Adventures in Recycling

2007-09-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

In my quest for ways to make ends meet, I discovered that I was unwittingly discarding valuable items each and every day. My middle daughter E informed me that all of those soda cans and wine bottles that I was tossing into the garbage were worth a lot of money. This, as you can imagine, immediately grabbed my attention and I pleaded with her to tell me more.

It turns out that you can turn in empty cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles for cold, hard cash! Who knew? E says that she saves her empties religiously and, about once a month takes them to a recycling center and drives away with, like, $50 in cash! Wow, that's enough to get us through at least a weekend of groceries, or a tank of gas, or a manicure & pedicure, or ... well, the mind reels at the possibilities.

So I did it, I saved and saved until we had 3 black trash bags full. Today I decided that the time had come to claim my $50+. I had lunch dates scheduled for the next two days and no way to pay my share of the tab. And there was no incoming cash on the horizon.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I went out in back this a.m. to find the bags of recycling. I located them in a big old box but, when I lifted them out of the box, I discovered a swam of ants all over the inside! Ewwww. I hit the bags against the wall of the house a couple of times and unhappily put the antsy bags in my trunk.

Where does one go to recycle? I aimlessly drove around the neighborhood until I discovered a structure that could only be used for something as random as recycling. There appeared to be a dozen or so people out in front, the caliber of which I normally don't get the opportunity to associate with. They all seemed to be pushing shopping carts full of cans towards the structure.

After parking, I walked over to a hut and found a helpful young man inside who barked at me "you want those weighed?" I explained to him that I'd never done this before and therefore didn't know what I wanted. He shrugged and walked away and I was left with no recourse but to watch my new cohorts, all of whom seemed to know exactly what to do.

An elderly gentleman turned his bulging black trash bag upside down and emptied the contents into a large blue bin. I noticed that only cans came out of his bag. His glass bottles he had neatly standing up inside a box of some sort. Then I watched a rather well put together young woman (compared to the others in our crowd) go up to an opening in the wall and start shoving plastic bottles, cans, and glass bottles inside. I asked her what she was doing and why she wasn't having her cans weighed. She said that either way worked fine and if I decided to put mine into the opening in the wall, I should put them in bottom first.

Bottom first, I could do that. Plus it would save me from having to sort the cluster of items in my trash bags. As the young lady finished, she pushed a button and a receipt popped out at her. She smiled back over her shoulder at me and said that she was taking it into the nearby grocery store and redeem it for cash! She would only be getting a dollar seventy-five but that would be enough for a burrito, right? Righto!

As I opened my bags, I realized that I had an awful lot of cans ... perhaps I should use one of those blue bins and have them weighed? So I dug in and started sorting. What a nasty, disgusting business! I ended up with all sorts of fluids all over my hands and clothing. Mental note: encourage family to wash containers before discarding them. Some of the items were even stuck to the trash bags but, luckily, I didn't encounter any of the afore mentioned ants.

I sorted and tossed until I had a practically full blue bin, which I pushed up to the ever helpful young man inside the recycling structure. He ignored me as I patiently waited my turn but then he asked the elderly gentleman if my blue bin belonged to him!!!! Excuse me but I hadn't work that long and hard only to have them misappropriated at this stage of the game. So I reclaimed my bin, while giving the young man a withering glance, and kept it at my side while I tackled the hole in the wall. I started putting plastic and glass bottles in there, one by one, bottoms first (I am nothing if not a quick study.)

The machine obliging accepted most of my offerings although it did spit a couple of bottles back at me. The young man won me over by adding a couple of random plastic bottles to my pile. Once I finished and had tossed a couple of larger items I'd brought (pronounced to be "trash" by people behind me in line) into the trash can. Apparently you can not recycle Tide or dog food containers.

I tentatively pushed the green button and the machine spewed out a receipt for $2.63! Then I pushed my blue bin of cans over to the young man who poured it into another blue bin and removed a couple of offending items. He weighed my cans, and produced a receipt for exactly $5.

As I stumbled trippingly over to the store to claim my bounty, I realized that it was far short of the promised $50+. But it was enough to buy 2 lottery tickets (funny how important lottery tickets become the poorer one gets) and some antibacterial hand gel, which was badly needed at that point. Needless to say, I cancelled both of my luncheon dates.

So that was my first experience in the Adventures of Recycling. And what do I have to show for it? A big bottle of antiseptic hand gel and ants in my car. Was it worth it? I'll get back to you about that!