A small thing to love: sunlight

This past academic year, I've been buried under paperwork.  Perhaps I have mentioned my burial a time or two; sorry to be such a whiner.   My paperwork prowess comes with its own kind of nebbish pride, but it isn't the kind of thing to inspire lofty conversation or deep emotional connection, y' know.  

So a week or so ago, I was especially grateful for a morning walk with N-son, a chance to be (a) outdoors and (b) with an actual person.  N-son and I walked eastward, into the rising sun, and we fell into our old habit of playing "I like".  The game is simple: we take turns saying things that we like to do.  It is a game that sounds incredibly hokey, and yet N-son and I, we always fall to playing it when we walk together.  And when we walk across the campus into the rising sun, we both know that my opening line will likely be,

"I like having the sun on my face."

This time of year, there are many reasons to be grateful for the sun, many of them frugal.

For example, by taking my tomatoes outdoors to play in the sun in their Magic School Bus cardboard box lid, I get big healthy tomato seedlings without paying for grow lights or electricity.  Frugal score one for the sun!

Another example: by capturing daylight in these special solar jars, . .

 . . . I get free night lights!  Frugal score two for the sun!

Or what about this?  By putting my own body in the sun during the day -- say while I go jogging along merrily with my friends -- I manufacture my very own life-giving, health-building Vitamin D.  The Vitamin D Council (did you even know there was such a thing?) says

The two main ways to get vitamin D are by exposing your bare skin to sunlight and by taking vitamin D supplements. You can’t get the right amount of vitamin D your body needs from food. 

The most natural way to get vitamin D is by exposing your bare skin to sunlight (ultraviolet B rays). This can happen very quickly, particularly in the summer.

So sunlight saves at least $9 (compared to taking costly vitamins) per year. Whoop!  Frugal score three for the sun.

But there's more of course. Moving into a sunny reading spot (either indoors or outdoors) saves money on lightbulbs.  A well-timed dose of very bright sunlight helps travelers overcome jet lag. A solar clothes dryer (e.g., an outdoor clothes line) brightens those whites, saves on dryer costs, and preserves clothes longer.  Frugal score four, five, six, seven, and eight for the sun!

And this time of year, everywhere I go, people are glorying in the weather.  No matter what our resolutions, winter is a hard time to exercise outdoors.  It's not so much that it's more difficult to be outdoors in cold weather, but rather that it's difficult to be outdoors more.  But spring has sprung us from our cages, so now when I walk outside, I see students from classes past (hugs, hugs).  I see professors who just got tenure (high fives!).  I see colleagues from other offices (gossip, gossip).  Sunlight is a social capital enhancer.  It brings people into contact by bringing us out of our buildings.  Score nine-through-goodness-knows-how-much for the sun!

I know we've just come off of Earth Day. I love that day.  But I also love having the sun on my face.  I'm ready to celebrate Sun Day now.  

The swapping jar

Here's one of the nice things about living in a world where we have plenty: if I spill something on the shirt that I'm wearing, I can take it off and put a clean shirt on right away, while the dirty shirt wends its way through the laundry pile.

I remember reading a story when I was a child about a girl who burst into tears when her dress got splashed by a passing car, because she didn't have another dry dress to wear.  I had a student who visited her family in Zimbabwe over break, and while she was traveling her suitcase with all her clothes was stolen -- and by that, she really meant ALL her clothes (except the ones on her body).

I think about these stories and I remember to be grateful once again for all the clothes I own.  Having enough of a wardrobe that I can swap out the dirty for the clean at a moment's notice:  that's a blessing.  I try not to take this blessing for granted.

And since Tuesday is my canning jar fetish day (has anybody noticed this?  probably nobody but me) I just wanted to point out that this Swap-ability blessing extends beyond clothes. 

To wit, one of the small canning-jar-fetish-things I'm so grateful for is that I can (and do) exchange clean jars for dirty jars at a moment's notice.  And for this reason, I use canning jars for things like our butter dish, and also for corralling our kitchen scrubbers . . . 

. . . and (as I mentioned last week) for messy foodstuffs like oil.  If the jar gets disgusting, then I just use a new jar!

There are other containers that I interchange, beyond canning jars and clothes (are clothes "containers"?).  I've remained a huge fan of printer-boxes-with-one-edge-trimmed, even though they're not perfectly beautiful, because they are at least instantly replace-able in my son's high-energy bedroom

and also, they really help me keep my supplies (like my light bulbs + the receipts for the lightbulbs) organized.

So the canning jar part of this post is just a symbol of the grander aspect, the aspect that signals bounty and ampleness, of having enough and then some.  I have enough clothes, enough jars, enough boxes, that I can just grab clean ones when I need them.

Life is good.

Allowance Arithmetic

Our family has moved away from Mommy Dollars as a form of currency (pause to shed a tear or two . . . sniffle . . . sigh . . . okay, now we can return to the topic at hand).  We've moved to an allowance system that I'm really enjoying, that I'll describe more later.  For now, it's enough to say that my teenage sons get $5/week.

Of course, the amount a parent gives a child depends on many things, including the child.  And with that said, I would like to share True Questions of an Allowance Getter:

On a week after we'd skipped allowance one week -- so he was about to get $10 instead of the usual $5 -- N-son asked me:

"If I give one dollar to church and save $4.50,
how much money do I have left?   

Is it $3.50?  Is it $2.50?"

What's most interesting to me as a Math Mom is how he arrived at these numbers.  N-son is a pleaser: he wants to do what's right by his mom.  We've drilled in the "tithe" lesson enough that N-son now automatically begins with setting aside $1 for church.   (This doesn't necessarily mean he knows that $1 is what you get when you compute 10% of $10; he'll often set aside $1 out of a $5 allowance for church.)

Having subtracted $1 from $10, he then decided to divide the remaining money in half, and devoted the first half to savings.  I think it's remarkable both that he can figure half of $9 in his head, and also that he's absorbed my lessons enough that savings, not spending, is the the second item in the list.

But here came the problem.  In his head, he had to reconcile all these numbers.  There's something about $4.50, and he's giving $1 to church, so does that mean only $3.50 left?  But when he repeats the problem in his head -- there's $3.50, but he gave $1 to church -- is there only $2.50 left?  Keeping so many different quantities straight is really tough.  

With careful and kind logic, we determined that under these circumstances, the amount N-son can spend is actually a full $4.50.  At this point, we left the realm of arithmetic and embarked on applied philosophy.  Miser Mom asked her child, "If you’re going to spend $4.50, what are you going to spend it on?  Will it make you happy?"  N-son carefully wrote, "What  I think i'm going to spend my 4.50 is food for when I get hungry and i'm not home".

Good choice.  (Although I *do* feed my sons, I swear!)

The choices part is the reason I love our current allowance system so much.  But that's the part I'll write more about later.

Money Dinner

Tax day has come and gone.  In the Miser Mom Household, we celebrated Tax Day with our favorite new tax deduction, appropriately documented . . . .

. . . Baby A!  K-daughter's daughter celebrated her first night out of her own home by joining her MiserNana in our annual Money Dinner.  We decked the table with coins from around the world, plus a few left-over chocolate coins from a friend's Hanukah celebration.

And then we feasted on some of our favorite money-themed foods, including the bringin'-home-the-Turkey-bacon from market, plus a giant pile of the green stuff (kale chips) . . .

. . . and some scrounged food as well, a la these giant tortilla chips.

(The chips, I got in my usual mooched-food way: I helped to clean up at a a big event on campus.  After urging as much leftover food on other people as I could, I took home my own baskets of sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, and these great-for-our-money-dinner chips).

This year we played a small quiz game:  do you know what a penny looks like?  (I printed out a few sheets from http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/common_cents/).  This was surprisingly tricky and fun.

There was, but-of-course, themed clothing.  I wore a vest with coin-like buttons, plus stockings that remind me a little of dollar signs.

Looks rich, yes?

There was money jewelry adorning certain diners at the table, too; plus, let's just take another look at this adorable one, yes?

Enough already, Nana!

No?  Okay we'll stop.

***
Okay, but it's worthwhile pointing out how much our celebrations cost the Miser Mom household.  This year a bunch of people were out of town, so the Money Dinner was a small event:  4 eaters plus Baby A.  Oh, and then later, J-son came home and ate all the leftover food on the table, so maybe that counts as five eaters.

I splurged on the Turkey Bacon, buying 5 pounds for $30;  I split this into 6 equal parts and froze most of them, so let's say $5-6 for meat at the dinner.

[Or you could say more like $20, if you want:  I wouldn't have bought that expensive meat if it hadn't been for the dinner, so the extra will just make our other meat-enhanced dinners that much more expensive.  We're replacing cheap (say $10-ish) ingredients over several meals with something that costs $30, so maybe the bacon expense incurred by this one meal is more like $20].

We also bought $4 worth of kale.  And . . . that's it.  The rest of the food was scrounged. Even if we hadn't scrounged food, we would have made a simple alternative (I think our usual homemade dollar-shaped pretzels are actually yummier than the tortilla chips anyway).

So this celebration that we look forward to each year costs us somewhere between $9 and $24 this year.  Having fun doesn't have to be expensive!

A Non-miser husband speaks for himself

Every once in a while, I mention that my husband is not a miser.  This is the Gospel Truth.

Even so, he and I seem to get along just fine.  
And to underscore the point that it's possible 

for a frugal-nut like me to live happily with a Muggle like him (and vice versa), 

my husband asked if he could address my blog readers directly.  

Here is what he wrote, with a few small commentaries from yours truly.
-MM

*****

Dear Miser Mom Readers,

Let me introduce myself. I am Miser Mom's husband. You will probably remember me as the spendthrift that Miser Mom saves from his financial sins by her laudatory thrift.

As I hope is clear from MM's posts, we agree strongly on many issues that confront families in modern America, and we support each other even when we don't participate actively in the other person's projects. So I admire the lengths MM will go to to save a dollar, use less water, make less trash, drive less, or eat better.

For any of us who live with or are close friends with a true believer of a religion we don't agree with, we have the experience of admiring their devotion, even when we see the glint of crazy in their eyes.

Wait! Does this mean he thinks I'm a bit of a cult-like crazy? 
 Yes, I'm afraid it does.

As it happens, we get along partly because when we see the glint of crazy in each other; we either encourage it or get out of the way. As much as humanly possible, we do not try to hold each other back. So as MM became more and more miserly, I simply got used to using rags instead of paper towels, to cooking more, and to cutting back my spending on big-ticket items to the lowest it has ever been in my long life.

I confirm.  He spends buckets, but he used to spend bathtubs!

For instance, I keep a spreadsheet of all the motor vehicles I have owned. I will share it if you are interested. Since 1969, I have owned 41 cars, trucks and motorcycles. I owned 27 of them by the time I was 30, nine more before I was 40, and (in the 18 years since I have been with MM) we have owned a total of five cars and are still driving the 2001 Prius she bought in 2003. Only five cars in the last 20 years. Quite a difference. 

This is probably the biggest sacrifice my husband has 

(voluntarily, I swear!)  made in order to conform to my odd ways. 

He's a total gear-head. 

His last car was an ugly box, which must have just mortified him, but he never complained;

our current car doesn't even have a trunk that's large enough to hold a bike.  

And since MM last wrote about clothes [see this post from Saturday], let me say that in my closet are 10 suits, including a Tuxedo. I bought them on sale, but I only shop at men's stores, so they list for more than $1,000 each. Same with the 2-dozen dress shirts and 50+ silk ties I own. But I have only bought a half dozen shirts and several ties in the last decade. No suits. MM has me convinced I can mix and match what I have until I am too old to care.

One of the things I do that MM never says a discouraging word about is race bicycles. This hobby is very expensive by any measure, but under the gentle influence of MM, I have decided to be different than my racer buddies who all buy a new $5,000+ bike every five years or so and a new $2500 pair of wheels in between new bikes. I am riding the same carbon fiber bikes I have had since 2002 and 2004. I have replaced many wheels and gears and chains in those years, but no new bikes. By the way, since 2002 I have ridden more than 120,000 miles, mostly on those two bikes, so I am getting good use from them.

So if you MM Reader have a spouse, child, or other person in your life who does not share your passion, even if  they just don't share the glee of finding that perfect blue suit at a yard sale for 50 cents at the end of the day, when it was marked as costing five whole dollars at 7 a.m., it does not mean you have no influence on them.

And Miser Mom would note that it doesn't matter a whit what the suit "costs" at 7 a.m.; 

all that really matters is how much you're willing to spend.  

I know I can find women's clothes for $1 or less, if I'm persistent, 

but I'm willing to pay $5 for boys'/mens' clothes, because those are harder to find used. 

But the bigger point is that persistent personal frugality of my own, 

with every attempt to be non-judgmental of my family and friends, 

has ended up having profound effects upon their lives, as well as mine, in the long run.  

Homemade Pour Spouts for canning jars

Three years or so ago, I started the old cog wheels a-spinning.  For a mere $9, I'd heard, a person could buy a Cuppow lid that turns a canning jar into a beverage vessel.  I wanted, I wanted, I wanted a lid like that.

But of course there is no way I'd spend $9 on a lid.

There are also reCAP lids for canning jars at a more modest $8.  Erica of Northwest Edible Life occasionally wafts these seductively in my direction, tempting me.  

But $8 for a lid?  Still not me.

Still, as a woman who has developed a persistent case of Canning Jar Fetish, I have not let the quest for cheap spouts daunt me.  No, I remain undaunted.  I am sure that a Miser Mom version of a pour-spout canning lid is feasible.

And sometime this past winter, in between acquiring more household members and navigating ice storms and swimming through a sea of bureaucratic memoranda, I found my inspiration.  Here is what I'd been looking for, lo these many years; here is my no-cost Spout Solution: 

Milk Carton Mutilation.

Behold the completed look, as applied to my Baking Soda container.

Note that this lid contains several layers:  (a) the ring, (b) the merely-decorative "Pure Baking Soda" layer, (c) the Mutilated Milk Carton layer, and then finally (d) the jar.

Here, somewhat less prettified, is a Half-and-Half carton standing vigil beside its comrade, who sacrificed its integrity to become the lid of a salad dressing container.

A noble sacrifice indeed.

And suppose, just suppose, that a person wants a pop-lid spout instead of a screw lid spout, so that the contents merely dribble out instead of gushing forth?  Well, many syrup bottle spouts are interchangeable with milk container lids, as evidenced by my oil container below.  This is a true Frankenstein of a creation, with a canning jar body, a mutilated milk carton head, and a syrup spout brain.

Yes?  Yes?  Somebody else tell me you want to take a pair of scissors and dissect an empty milk carton today.  Yes?

Bike Grocery Accessories

A week ago, when I described how our family is now a one-car family, Penn asked,

Re: biking, can you do a post on your favorite accessories for helping you be more successful with biking? How do you carry your groceries, etc?

I aims to please.  The short version of bike-grocery-acquisition accessories is this:

1. Attitude.
2. Backpacks.
3. Clothes (Gloves, hat, shoes).
4. Dark glasses.
5. Effervescent* lights/reflectors.

*Effervescent? Well, I noticed the ABCD theme,

and wanted to find a word that started with "E".

Here's a slightly more detailed version of the same list.

1.  Attitude

Before the first time or two I ventured forth to buy groceries on my bike, I felt like I was getting ready to trek to the North Pole, or climb Mt. Everest, or something.  Did I have all my equipment? What if something went wrong?

And then I realized:  it's just a ride to the store.  And then a ride back. If I get a flat, I can walk home (our stores are less than 2 miles from my home).  If the groceries don't fit in my bag, I can just put them back, or even abandon them on the side of the road.  I'm not really blazing trails through the Amazon Rain Forest or guiding a team across Antarctica.  

Once I had that amazing revelation, everything else got easier.

2. Backpacks

Our family has been gifted with numerous backpacks.  On the table (below) are three of my favorites. The green messenger bag closest in the photo is small and fun, but the one-strap mode means that it's more likely to swing off my back onto my belly while I ride.  There's a medium sized backpack (with two straps) further back, and I use that one occasionally as well.

But the backpack I actually use the most for grocery shopping is the biggest of these three. It was a gift to my husband from his sister many years ago.

What I like about it---apart from the size (and the size is amazing)---is that it has two shoulder straps (so it doesn't slip around while I'm riding) . . . .

. . . plus it has hand straps, so once I'm inside the store I can carry it around like a normal shopping bag.  I store empty containers that need refilling in the bag during the week, so this bag becomes my shopping list as well as my shopping bag.  This week, you can see I need refills on milk, eggs, and yogurt.

For really really big loads (when I buy my turkey, or when I buy 50 lbs of hamburger, or when I buy 70 lb of dog food), then I'll use a bike trailer.  The boys also use the trailer to haul donations to Goodwill or to take hazardous materials to our Waste Authority.  But we don't use this trailer very often; the backpack seems to work well for us most of the time.

3.  Clothes (Gloves, hat, shoes jacket)
The wind and cold really do make a big difference on a bike.  But the good news is that the frugal versions of warm clothing work very well -- often better than expensive bike stuff.

Case in point:  gloves.

Last summer when I was doing training rides of 25 miles or more in very hot weather, I appreciated fancy bike gloves that have "sweat pads" so I could wipe the sweat out of my eyes instead of going blind.  But for around-the-town riding, a pair of hand-me-down faux(?) leather gloves work great.  The main criteria is that they should stop the wind -- knit gloves are essentially worthless.



Case in point:  hat.

Here is my teddy bear, modeling my expensive balaclava, designed to keep my face warm.  I really don't like this particular hat; it fogs up my glasses, and the chin part gets ice and it freezes.  Mr. Frugalwoods had similar problems, and he bought what he calls a "face mask".   I may check this out in the future.

But me, I just substituted a whole bunch of fleece ear bands (either purchased at yard sales or harvested from local sidewalks); I'll I wear several, one around my neck, and one over my nose, and one around my ears.








Likewise for shoes.  In cold weather, priority one is stopping the wind from getting to my toes.  My fabulous (and very expensive) clip-in bike shoes were perfect for making sure I could go 112 miles in one long 92-degree day last summer, but they stink at 2 mile trips in cold weather.  For short trips to the store, my pair of yard-sale-purchased Ugh-like boots totally rock.

4. Dark Glasses.   Actually, any good glasses.

I would like to tell you that my free (harvested from a parking lot) sunglasses are great for biking.

Alas, they're not.

They look fab, but they don't stay on my head when my head is pointing down.  I really do need eye protection that has curved ear pieces, and also that fits close to the head so that wind doesn't slide in sideways.

I splurged and bought a pair of $20 "IronMan" glasses (not shown here) from the drugstore.  I'm glad I did, because that got me back on the bike.  But I am also glad that found a cool pair of yellow bike glasses for cheap/free.  These work really well in low-light situations.

5.  Effervescent Lights/reflectors

Any bike store can and will sell you great bike lights. These can be pricey, but they're worth it.  

Even more, I've become a total fan of "Lightweights" spoke reflectors.  You don't have to turn these on; you don't have to charge these up, and people can see these from the side as well as from the front and back.  My husband hasn't put these on any of his bikes, but my kids and I have them on ours.  Love, love, love these!

And that's how I get my groceries on a bike; it's really pretty easy.  But I've only been doing this for two years, so I'm sure I have more to learn.  Suggestions for improvements are ALWAYS welcome.

[Un] usual spending on clothes

Here is what Mint just told me.  Mint just told me, "You have unusual spending on clothes this month:  $436 in the last 30 days."  That amount is just insane.

What is even worse, though, is the line below it:  "You usually spend $50".  To which I say, the heck I DO usually spend $50 on clothes!   I happen to know for a fact that since yard sale season ended last September 2014, six or seven months ago, I've spent a total of $5 on clothes (for a math conference t-shirt I was sort of peer-guilted into buying on Pi Day).

No, the target of this particular little statement about usual/unusual clothes spending is not about Miser Mom; it's about Miser Mom's husband.

And we might have mentioned a time or two before that her husband is not a Miser.

Of course, I brought this up with him.  My goal is to practice a Don't-Drive-Them-Crazy kind of frugality, so I tried to be as neutral as possible ("Hmmm . . . Guess what Mint just said?"), but of course any money comment from me comes automatically charged with deeper meaning.  My husband's reaction began with denial.

"I didn't categorize it correctly in Mint yet."  

 Then,

"Well, it wasn't really all clothes; it was sports stuff." 

And it turned slowly to justification.

"J-son needed to dress up for school".

My poor husband.  He's married to a woman who believes that, even though money doesn't grow on trees, clothes do. Or is it that they grow on sidewalks?  Some of my favorite articles of clothes are things that I found lying on the ground while I was out running:  a decent pair of running shoes, a gorgeous sweater, a t-shirt, and of course the amazing flaming glove.  (No, seriously, I love that glove).

Indeed, one day after my husband took his credit card to the mall, a friend dropped off two humongous bags of clothes for our boys.

Free.  With really nice clothes inside of the bags.

So the whole four hundred and thirty six bit -- not to mention the you usually spend fifty bit -- well, that's the Stuff of Insanity.

But is it, really?  My husband, he's got his feet planted on opposite sides of a chasm.  On one side of this chasm is the Miser Mom he loves dearly.  On the other side is the rest of the world.  In particular, the other side contains the Lacrosse team and the parents and kids from J-son's new Quaker Local School.  The coach tells my husband, "We're glad to have J-son on the team; he merely needs [this list of very expensive equipment]".   The team says, "as a bonding and belonging thing, we are all purchasing [these costly jackets] that will identify us as an enviable social unit."   The parents say, "now that we have all watched our children play their game, we will drive together in our SUVs and minivans to a restaurant where we will turn twenty dollar bills into snacks".

And for my husband, what he wants most of all, is for my sons to belong.  My guy remembers being teased and ostracized in high school; he does not want to see the same dreadful fate rain down onto  these boys of ours, these boys who have already proved themselves to be at risk of falling into bad crowds.  I, with my overwhelming confidence, can afford to be a little counter-cultural, but my husband needs to pay dearly so that my sons are not.

And can I scoff?  I am, after all, the person who points to peer pressure and belonging as the reason I squandered my entire winter wardrobe budget on a Pi Day t-shirt. A $5 t-shirt, mind you.  But the reasoning is the same.

It's a tough question.  It's not that my husband and my boys love things for things' sake (well, okay, maybe the boys do); it's that the clothes and equipment they are buying are the tokens and symbols of the community they are glad to embrace.  There are ways to accumulate these tokens without spending money and time at a mall, but not everyone is as good as sidewalk harvesting as I am, I know.

But still.  $436.  Sigh.

If you give a kid a cookie . . .

This year, we've instituted a weekly "Girls Night".  Just about every Friday evening, my two local daughters have come over to the home to play cards, or we've gone out to restaurants (rarely, because they know that's not my usual style), or we've gone to plays or such on campus.

The boys at first pretended to be jealous of this, so I offered them a "Boys Night" every Tuesday with me (the night their dad works late at his office 81 miles away), and that satisfied them -- although in practice, they've usually totally ignored me so they could go play with their own friends or their own cell-phone games.  (Alone time for me!!  YeSS!!!)   But I kept Tuesday nights listed as "Boys Night" in my calendar, and so one week in February when J-son actually suggested an activity we ought to do together, I had the time already set aside and ready to share. 

He said, "We ought to make Jolly Rancher Cookies!".  I think he totally expected me to say "no", because, well, c'mon:  Sugar.  Commercially bought candy.  And it's candy wrapped in Trash, at that.  Definitely not a standard Miser Mom activity. 

But people are more important than things, and since this was the first real date night that either of the boys had asked for, I floored J-son by saying "yes".

Hence, we did cooking that began with pulling trash off of commercially-bought sugar candy, followed by exuberant use of a mallet.  Shouldn't all cooking begin with whacking the heck out of something?

We used (of course) canning rings as our cookie cutters, and then we used an apple corer to cut the holes in the dough where the crushed candy would go.

The effect in the end was almost Easter-Eggy.  If I'd had more time earlier this April, I totally would have done this again to add Easter-Egg Cookies to the kid's baskets.

The boys were entranced, delighted, proud.  They took photographs of their own.

We even made a special cookie just for the master chef whose idea this was -- J-son himself.

And when it was all done, they said, "We should do this again!".

But I guess it's enough to know they can have me if they want me; that's all that really mattered.  Since then, video games and friends seem to have a stronger pull once again.  So I get my Alone Time back, mixed together with some really sweet memories.  

a small thing to love: a toothbrush

A toothbrush, because t's a minor marvel. 

A toothbrush, because it's so nice to scrub the teeth in the morning and make your whole mouth feel clean.

A toothbrush, because if you use a toothbrush and floss regularly, you don't need toothpaste (or at least *I* don't, according to my dentist).

A toothbrush, because when you re-purpose it, can become a kitchen brush, great for cleaning anything with small crevices and cracks:  the rim of the sink, the threads of a dirty jar, the space between the buttons on the coffee maker.  And another repurposed toothbrush works great in the bathroom.

(Really, using a toothbrush to get into those little spaces often makes a mostly clean thing really sparkle around the edges).

A toothbrush, because what could be better for cleaning those canines?

That's all.  I'm glad for toothbrushes.

Easter can-[ning jars]-dy

How to do Easter baskets on the cheap?  How to minimize trash and plastic?  Canning jars, natch!

This year continues to whomp my butt with work and a few other exciting family events, so I didn't get around to dyeing eggs.  But I made it to Market as usual for my weekly milk and yogurt, and while I was there I picked up two quart-sized jars worth of candy (jelly beans and Wilbur Buds); no trash.  I transferred the candy to my cutest little 8 oz canning jars, and used those in lieu of plastic eggs.  There were no complaints.  

Other contents of the baskets:  packets of seeds, some colorful pencils, and chocolate rabbits purchased by an older child who decided her younger brothers should get bunnies.  Instead of making name tags for the baskets, I just topped each one with the child's napkin and napkin ring (already labeled with their names).   Not uber elegant, I admit.  But uber elegant wouldn't have happened in a swamped year like this one anyway, even if I'd felt like commercializing this most sacred of days by turning it into a Gimme Fest.

Werewolves show their wolf-y form during a full moon; my next door neighbor is more of a where-bunny.  After church, we came home to discover that my children were not doomed to a truly plastic-egg-deprived Easter, after all.  We had our yearly hunt through the back yard . . . a challenging hunt indeed, because our particular Easter Bunny climbs trees (in her bathrobe, even!) to hide her loot.  And the squirrels always steal some of the eggs for themselves.

J-son hunts for eggs in the tree house.

Post-hunt, the kids sock away their loot, and I collect the plastic eggs and return them to our Bunny (so she can hide them where she will next year). Then, the happy hunters always head next door with chalk in hand to write thank you notes.

N-son writes "THANK YOU" in his favorite block letters.

Our neighbor's driveway becomes almost as colorful as the baskets on our dining room table.

If you look carefully, you might have noticed an addition or two to the group in the driveway.  And this is how Y makes her entrance into the Miser Mom blog (although she's actually been in our home since December.  I might have mentioned a time or two that it's been a busy year!)

Welcome, Y, to our family traditions!

Update (downdate?): Ten bikes, One car

Last October, my husband and the boys went on a weekend road trip to visit a far-away daughter.  This little road trip ended up tipping us over the brink toward saving a bit more money on transportation.

For a year or two now, my husband and I had been toying with the idea of selling off one of our two cars.  For one thing, ever since I fell in love with the bike that I'd named the SPDM, we've been sort of grokking to a lifestyle that is increasingly bike-centric.   But even more, the boys are nearly old enough to get their learner's permits, and I will totally admit I've been biting my nails over the idea of seeing these ADHD, energetic, impulsive boys in charge of a massive machine-O-death.  Ditching one car would give us an excuse to delay their initiation into the world of motor-vehicle-operation.

So almost a year ago, my sons and I had had this little conversation:

Me: J-son, when you turn 16 in September, your dad and I are going to buy you your very own vehicle!
J-son: You're going to buy me a car? Wow! What kind?!
N-son: J-son, she's not buying you a car! Our mom is too fruuuuuugal!
Me: That's right, darling; I'm buying you your very own bike!
J-son: Awwwwww.

So, September rolled around, and with it, J-son's 16th birthday.  We got him a fab bike -- and for good measure, we soon got N-son his own bike, too. So now our family is decked out with an abundance of 10 bikes.

And a month later, on their way back home from their October road trip, my husband's old car died.  Kaput.  We used our AAA membership to tow it the rest of the way home, clean it out, and donate what was left of it to a local charity. We'd made the transition to a one-car family.

And y'know, the transition has been really okay.  In fact, it's actually been sort of nice.  Here are some of the things made cutting back so easy for us:

• Living close to work.  I'm a 10-minute walk from my office.
• Public transportation.  My husband's commute is more like 81 miles each way, but there's an Amtrak train station 2 miles from our home; my boy's school is 7 miles away, but they can usually take a school bus.  The train and the school bus are actually nicer than taking a car most of the time.
• Bikes!  I buy groceries on my bike.  My husband and the boys bike to and from school on many of the days they have after-school events.  Especially during the summer, we go to social events by bike, which has the added advantage that we can arrive and leave at different times.
• Calendars.  My husband and I have long had a habit of what we call "planner meetings" where we discuss upcoming events.  Now we add the car into that discussion.
• Sharing.  J-son's recent Lacrosse practice means staying late at school, which means no bus; so we're grateful for car pooling.  And twice when my husband was out of town with the car for an Army weekend, a good friend let me borrow her car so I could go see K-daughter.  I filled the car up with gas as a thank you.  
• Rental.  When I give math talks, the university that invites me pays all my travel expenses, and it's actually cheaper for them to pay for a rental than to reimburse mileage for my own car.  Go figure!  So I feel good about saving my host a bit of money on my trip, at no expense to myself, by renting a car for out-of-town travel.  

Mostly, though, I think the transition was easier because we'd been planning it out in our head for a while before we actually got to the break-down point.  So we had our plans lined up (not to mention, our bikes hung up), ready to go.

Enjoying my cold

Earlier this week, my husband and N-son got the flu.  Yuckkers.

Thursday night, I started coming down with a cold.  It's the kind of cold that most people would describe by saying,  "I'm coming down with a bad cold".   But because it doesn't look like it's going to become a flu, I decided that I'm going to experience it as "a good cold".

I'm coming home from work and just curling up in bed.  Mmmmm.  I'm surrounding myself with piles of rags, and I'm letting glorious (or gloriously icky) things come out of my head into those rags.   Totally fascinating.  I'm telling people, "you don't want to see me; I have a cold," -- and all of a sudden, they don't want to see me.  My busy schedule has developed a bit of wiggle room.  It's not so bad.

Here's the only real disadvantage, the only cool thing I haven't gotten to do because of my cold -- to meet my granddaughter, Baby A, born earlier this week.  We're both being turtles in different ways right now.

Baby A: my granddaughter.  We're both enjoying our naps this weekend!

Memo to my other kids:   I just want to point out how INCREDIBLY convenient it is that my first grandchild is "Baby A".  I strongly recommend that my next child who has a baby name that kid "Barbara" or "Bobby" or "Bronwyn" or "Buzz";  after that we can move on to "Charisma" or "Carlos" or "Corrinne", and so on.  The daughter who wants to name her eventual child "Zixila", I'll just say that you better get your sisters popping out kids soon if you want to keep your child in alphabetical order! 

Teenage Transformer

It was only five years ago we met J-son for the first time.  Here he is below, the kid in yellow. What a pip-squeak!

Now, lo these five years later, a lot has happened.  He got some orthodontic work, some food, a heck of a lot of discipline, even more food . . . and what's happened?  He's like one of those toys that you fold and fold and it changes from a taxi into a giant robot.  Yes, it's Teenage Transformer!

And when he's not wearing his super-hero Lacrosse outfit, he dresses a lot like a grown up!

Amazing how that happens, isn't it?