On the road again (and in the air again)

This has been a big travel week for yours truly.  I'm writing this post in what is the wee hours of a Long Beach, California morning -- although the hours don't feel all that "wee" to me, since 5:30 a.m. local time is 8:30 a.m. back at home.

I'm going to back up and do a small bit of bragging.  This travel is all funded by some professional development money that landed in my lap because, last May, I won a fancy award for teaching at my college.  The award is semi-ironic because, of course, last year I was on sabbatical and wasn't teaching at all.  So either I won this award now because my school figures, "She's a great teacher when she's away from her students; once she gets back in the classroom, it's all downhill from here, so we'd better give her the award now before she spoils it."  Or it's because they figured, "She's so freakin' good, that even when she's not in the classroom she's a better prof than all the others."

Me, getting a teaching award, trying to look all humble and that.

At any rate, whatever the reason, I got to stand up on stage at Commencement and make the already-long event last even longer, keeping students from their degrees while they listened to yet another boring citation.

With this award come a sizable chunk of money that I could use either personally or professionally.  I decided not to plunk the money straight into my own bank account, because what I really want to do is travel around to do some math, and so I put the money into a "professional development" fund where then money doesn't get taxed (meaning, more money for travel).

And this past week, I've been spending that money.  A 3-day trip to North Carolina used up about $250 of the moolah; it also gave me a chance to chat with some mathematicians who I met last summer, and whom I might want to work with again in the future.  It was a seriously great trip.

In the Miser Mom way, I tried to keep expenses low.  The university I was visiting paid for my hotel and meals, and I used my travel money to spring for a rental car and gas.   The more I do rental cars for long trips, the more I love the idea of not owning cars and just "borrowing" them from the cosmic car library when I need them.  Cars have gotten so much nicer since 2001 when my old (dented up) Prius was made, and my Prius is a pretty nice car!  Intermittent luxury is sort of fun.

This trip to California is even more of a treat, if that's possible.  I'm at a conference hosted by SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in the Sciences), so it's not as much about my research as my NC trip was.  But because I have this big fat pillow of money buried in my professional development mattress, I could afford to bring other people along.  I'm paying the way not just for myself, but also for an undergraduate math major and for a visiting professor (that is, a prof who just got his PhD two years ago, and who has a 3-year position, not a tenure-track position,  at my college).  So there are three of us who made the 14-hour trip from Pennsylvania to California yesterday.

And again, frugalizing.  I couldn't trim the hefty registration fees, and airfare+shuttles for three people is some serious dough, no matter how careful we are.  But I found a cozy AirBnB three blocks from the convention center that cut the lodging costs in half, compared to nearby hotels.  We all packed super light, minimizing luggage fees, and I have been doling out the trail mix that successfully tided us over through crowded airports and traffic-jam-laden shuttle rides.  (LA traffic-- Sheesh!).

Sort of ironically, this money that I got for teaching (or for not teaching, since I got it at the end of my sabbatical) is taking me away from my students yet again.  I've co-opted some of my colleagues into giving my students an exam while I'm away from them, and my travel schedule means that I won't get to grade and return their exams to them for a while -- I'm neglecting my students temporarily.  But I'm so glad I'm here (my first ever SACNAS conference! woo-hoo!) and I'm so glad I got to bring some people with me who wouldn't have gotten the chance to come on their own.   Huzzah for frugal communal traveling! 

A Tale of Two Shoes (or, rather four shoes, because two pairs )

This past month, J-son went the frugal route and paid $140 for a pair of "new" shoes for himself, while I went crazy expensive and plopped down $5 for mine.

Or something like that.  Our experiences are just a little story about how "anchoring" prices can affect what we think about what we pay.

J-son loves shoes.  He really, really loves them -- so much so that last Easter, instead of putting candy in J-son's Easter basket, I gave him a shoe polish kit, and he fell over himself thanking me.  He has a carefully curated stack of shoe boxes in his bedroom, each containing its own pair of sneakers.

About a month ago, J-son came home jonesing for a new (well, new to him) pair of shoes.  His friend's dad had bought them a year ago for $400, had hardly ever worn them, and was now getting ready to sell them for the low, low price of $140.  J-son had spent most of his money on other things already (snacks, movies, and other shoes), so he didn't have the money in his bank account, but he knew that his birthday was coming up and with that, he saw the possibility of beaucoup de birthday money dawning on the horizon.

You can take it for granted that he got the usual Miser Mom homilies delivered during his waiting period:  "A sure-fire way to blow $260 is to buy a pair of shoes for $400 and sell them a year later for $140."  "This is why you don't waste money on silly things like Quick-Mart snacks; because you won't have money for things you care about."  "Before you got the last pair of shoes, you said that they were the only thing you wanted; how do you know these will be any different?" Blah, blah, blah.  He'd heard it all before, but he and I both know that consistency is a crucial aspect of parenting, and who was I to let him down on the consistency front?  J-son listened to my pearls of wisdom with good grace, even occasionally agreeing with me.  But he really, really wanted the shoes.

His birthday rolled around, and with his birthday came some birthday money.  I will admit that haggling was involved: J-son is super nervous about the prospect of voting, and his community-oriented mother hinted strongly that actually registering to vote (which he wasn't super keen about) might somehow be linked in her mind to birthday-shoe money (which she wasn't super keen about).  Voter registration happened, and birthday money happened, and J-son scraped his money together into a pile and spent "only" $140 on this amazing, wonderful, long-awaited pair of shoes.

With the box.  Because the box is part of the package, apparently.

Are these not lovely?  Already he's told me he's saving up for a bigger shoe-cleaning kit.

About a month before J-son joyously emptied his bank account---and also pre-dedicated his birthday money, and would have given away his first-born child (had that been part of the asking price)---for his new shoes, I went through my own kind of anguish over whether to spend as much as $5 for a pair of shoes for myself.

The reasons for my recent shoe hunts are manifold.  Because of a case of frostbite I got as a kid, my feet get cold easily, even in the summer, so I wear shoes a lot.  I wanted summer shoes that I could slip on without socks, that had good grip (so I could bike in them), that I could wear with just about anything (skirts, shorts, etc),  and that were super flexible and light, so I can sit cross-legged in them.  My previous summer shoes (N-son's abandoned water shoes) had been perfect -- and free.  The pair before that, I found at a yard sale for a dollar.  But both of my previous summer shoes were wearing out badly, and yard-sale searches had turned up nothing.

I have a personal rule of thumb to try to spend no more than $1 for a pair of shoes, unless the shoes are so amazing and so hard to find that I agree to double that amount to $2.  The last time I violated the rule was almost three years ago:  while I was training for a marathon in a super-cold January and was worried about frostbite, I bought a pair of warm running shoes for the exorbitant price of $11.  I've tried to avoid a similar crazy splurge ever since.

So I was keeping my eyes open for a decent pair of summer shoes, but as yard sale season waned I was realizing how vanishingly small my chances of success were becoming, and I could feel my price point slipping.  And then I popped into a so-called thrift store and saw this pair for $5.

So expensive.  So, so expensive.  But the shoes were everything I wanted, and actually even prettier than my previous summer shoes. (Can you see in the picture that there's gold tint mixed in with the brown stripes?  oooohhhh . . . )  They've got great tread.  They're flexible.  They slip on and off.  They look great with all my outfits.

So I splurged, spending a whopping $5:  500% of my normal shoe budget and 250% of my "fancy" shoe budget on this cute little pair of shoes.  I didn't clean out my bank account or spend future money, but I was just as spendy, in my own Miser-Mom way, as my young and enthusiastic son.

Fall chores keep falling on my head, la la la

Here are some random autumn thoughts, to go with the random autumn chores that come along with the thoughts.



 The apple tree in front of our house is heavy with apples.  It's calling to me, reminding me to set aside a weekend for canning applesauce.  That weekend ain't gonna be real soon (we've got a birthday coming up this weekend), but the tree is reminding me I can't wait too long.  Gotta clear out space in the calendar, not to mention the kitchen.





A second sign of fall: the leaf tarps and the rakes have come out of the garage.  Huzzah for dirty old tarps that we can rake leaves onto, and then drag to where we dump the leaves for pick-up!  It's much easier raking a few leaves onto a nearby tarp, which we can slide across the grass, than raking a lawn-full of leaves all the way across the yard!



And the tomato plants in the back garden are starting to wither up, with the last few tomatoes trying valiantly (and mostly unsuccessfully) to turn red.  Time for green tomato chutney, I think!

But I realized as I was pulling my tomato cages out of the ground, that other people might be doing the same, so that now would be a perfect time to go "shopping" for additional tomato cages.  I shot a quick query out to Freecycle, and sure enough, I snagged a half-dozen cages from a neighbor about 2 miles from my home. I biked on over there and brought them home, and they'll be ready and waiting for me and my canning-jar-started tomato seedlings next May.

A web site that I love for frugal reasons

As a person who believes strongly in community, conservation, and frugality, I have been having a lot of fun lurking on local frugal-enabling sites.

One of my most constant lurks is Freecycle.  (Does everyone know what that is nowadays?  It's basically like Craigslist or a local E-bay, except everything offered or asked for is free).

There are ways that Freecycle is a bit overwhelming, I admit.  I get an email every day listing about a gazillion things (well, only 25, but it seems like a gazillion).   I almost never actually get anything off of Freecycle myself.  (The one thing I did get that I remember is a beautiful giant colander; I love it.  That one colander alone would be worth a year of skimming through my daily morning emails.)  Most of the time, I skim the daily email and delete it immediately.

So, potential for free stuff is there.  But the reason I really love Freecycle is that it allows me to give away stuff that I wouldn't have been able to take to Goodwill or other re-use it stores. Last week, when I was cleaning out my garage, I realized I no longer wanted

• 20 cinder blocks,
• 2 large fluorescent light fixtures,
• a lounge chair cushion (sans lounge chair), and 
• a half-gallon of windshield washer fluid.  

I posted all of these on Freecycle, and 36 hours later, all but the windshield washer fluid are gone.  And my garage looks so much cleaner!  And I got to hear a lot of neat stories about other people's upcoming projects -- one of which is my former next door neighbor whom I haven't seen in years.  Hooray for connecting with frugal people!  I'll re-post the windshield washer fluid again later in the year, once snow starts to fall.  I'm sure it'll go faster then.

When I run through my nearby upscale neighborhood on trash day, I'm often amazed at what people send to the landfill:  about a month ago, on just one morning, I saw several large pieces of furniture, an electric fan, a chalkboard, and I forget what else, all out at the curb awaiting the trash truck.  It's just so sadly wasteful!  And then later this day, I saw on Freecycle this little "Taken" post that made me giggle:

My mom used to save the hair from her favorite dog and give it to one of her friends with a spinning wheel.  My mom's friend made dog-hair-yarn that my mom then crocheted into a little doll's house rug.  My sisters and I were NOT delighted by this -- we were adults by this time, and I think my mom was in the early stages of the dementia that would eventually take her life.   I don't know if the dog hair from the Freecycle post went to a spinner or to someone's garden (where it might help keep pests away), but I just love the fact that someone, somewhere, wanted something as seemingly pointless as dog fur.  That is totally grossly adorable.

Some people near me throw out perfectly good bicycles and furniture and shelving, just for lack of imagination or effort.  And some people near me go to the other extreme, and find good uses for dog hair.  Given my druthers, I'm going to stick with the dog hair crowd.

I just can't pear it anymore!

Good-bye, pear tree!

Last summer, I wrote about how tricky it is to harvest pears; they're finicky about ripening.  Our pear tree itself has grown massive, shading our garden, dangling its pears several stories above our heads, and producing fruit that alternates between hard green rocks and brown slime balls.

Since we had other tree issues as well -- our maple tree (the one that holds our adored tree house) has branches that have been scraping the roof of the house -- we got a few estimates for tree trimming (maple) and tree removal (pear).  I mean, when I got this tree, I *loved* the idea of a pear tree in the abstract, but the reality has been less than romantic nine-ladies-dancing, in spite of the fact that my true love gave it to me.

Tree work is expensive.  I wasn't too surprised when the four-figure estimates started rolling in. We found a tree company that we liked and offered them the job . . . and then waited until they could work us into their queue.  Estimated wait time: four to five weeks.

And then we lucked out.  If you look at the very right edge of the picture above, across the alley you'll see the bark of a tree that belongs to our neighbors.  Or rather, I should say belonged, because the tree died in place, and the neighbors decided they needed to take it down.  Yesterday, I woke up to the sound of heavy machinery (cranes, chipper/shredders, and chain saws), and by the end of the day their tree was safely horizontal instead of dangerously vertical.

But while the tree crew was out there, a whole bunch of other neighbors (including me) started mobbing the crew, asking them for quotes on our own trees.  ("As long as you're here, how much would it be . . . ?").    And the crew very gladly took down a bunch of other trees, as well as trimming quite a few more.

The crane that worked on trimming
our maple tree.
Its feet stick out like a water bug.

Tree crews are just really fun to watch.  There are people high up in the air, in cranes, wielding chainsaws and ropes with pulleys, yelling lumber-jack-y things at one another.  The limbs come down bit by bit, sometimes dropping directly down, sometimes being lowered by ropes attached to pulleys that swing around other limbs.

Down on the ground are the kinds of trucks that my sisters and I loved to play with (in Tonka versions) in our own dirt piles, when we were kids. My favorite was a little beast that looked like a cross between a bull-dozer and a pair of giant salad tongs:  its job was to troll across the yard, scoop up branches, and haul them back to the chipper-shredder.

And just like painting a room, the real work in tree trimming and cutting isn't in the painting or trimming; it's in the set-up and clean up.   Getting all these amazing machines in place must be an amazing feat of scheduling in the first place.

Which is why I wasn't too surprised at the high price estimate when we started scoping out tree work, and why I jumped at the chance to grab this crew while they were already set up -- we'll end up paying only about half of what we'd have paid if the other crew had come around.  It's not everyday you can find a way to spend $500 less than you'd planned, just by running out in your back yard and waving your arms at workers in hard hats.

So the pear tree came down, and by the time I grabbed my camera, it was already being winched along the ground to the chipper/shredder.  In this picture below, the top of the pear tree looks like a bush just beyond the garage.

But you can see it's a bush on the move (thanks to the winch).

And what's left of the pear tree now?  A stump . . .

. . . with two rock-hard pears left behind.

The whole loss-aversion thing that we humans carry around with us makes me feel a bit sad to see the tree go. I mean, it was a living thing, one that I planted myself, and now I'm responsible for killing it.  Taking down this leafy green giant is not like what my neighbors did, taking down dead or dying trees.

But what's left behind is an open, sunny place that my garden will be able to expand into.  And the sunshine, which my vegetables yearn for, makes me happy.  

So, notes to self:

• Before I plant more trees, figure out how big they'll get first.
• Before I plant more fruit trees, learn more about collecting the fruit.
• Before I hire tree trimmers, check with all my neighbors to see if we want to work out a neighborhood deal.

I just can't pear it anymore!

Good-bye, pear tree!

Last summer, I wrote about how tricky it is to harvest pears; they're finicky about ripening.  Our pear tree itself has grown massive, shading our garden, dangling its pears several stories above our heads, and producing fruit that alternates between hard green rocks and brown slime balls.

Since we had other tree issues as well -- our maple tree (the one that holds our adored tree house) has branches that have been scraping the roof of the house -- we got a few estimates for tree trimming (maple) and removal (pear).  I mean, when I got this tree, I *loved* the idea of a pear tree in the abstract, but the reality has been less than romantic and nine-ladies-dancing, in spite of the fact that my true love gave it to me.

Tree work is expensive.  I wasn't too surprised when the four-figure estimates started rolling in. We found a tree company that we liked and offered them the job . . . and then waited until the could work us into their queue.  Estimated wait time: four to five weeks.

And then we lucked out.  If you look at the very right edge of the picture above, across the alley you'll see the bark of a tree that belongs to our neighbors.  Or rather, I should say belonged, because the tree died in place, and they decided they needed to take it down.  Yesterday, I woke up to the sound of heavy machinery (cranes, chipper/shredders, and chain saws), and by the end of the day their tree was safely horizontal instead of dangerously vertical.

But while the tree crew was out there, a whole bunch of other neighbors (including me) started mobbing the crew, asking them for quote on our own trees.  ("As long as you're here, how much would it be . . . ?").    And the crew very gladly took down a bunch of other trees, as well as trimming quite a few more.

The crane that worked on trimming
our maple tree.
Its feet stick out like a water bug.

Tree crews are just really fun to watch.  There are people high up in the air, in cranes, wielding chainsaws and ropes with pulleys, yelling lumber-jack-y things at one another.  The limbs come down bit by bit, sometimes dropping directly down, sometimes being lowered by ropes attached to pulleys that swing around other limbs.

Down on the ground are the kinds of trucks that my sisters loved to play with (in Tonka versions) in our own dirt piles, when we were kids. My favorite was a little beast that looked like a cross between a bull-dozer and a pair of giant salad tongs:  its job was to troll across the yard, scoop up branches, and haul them back to the chipper-shredder.

And just like painting a room, the real work in tree trimming and cutting isn't in the painting or trimming; it's in the set-up and clean up.   Getting all these amazing machines in place must be an amazing feat of scheduling in the first place.

Which is why I wasn't too surprised at the high price estimate when we started scoping out tree work, and why I jumped at the chance to grab this crew while they were already set up -- we'll end up paying only about half of what we'd have paid if the other crew had come around.  It's not everyday you can find a way to spend $500 less than you'd planned, just by running out in your back yard and waving your arms at workers in hard hats.

So the pear tree came down, and by the time I grabbed my camera, it was already being winched along the ground to the chipper/shredder.  In this picture below, the top of the pear tree looks like a bush just beyond the garage.

But you can see it's a bush on the move (thanks to the winch).

And what's left of the pear tree?  A stump . . .

. . . with two rock-hard pears left behind.

The whole loss-aversion thing that we humans carry around with us make me feel a bit sad to see the tree go. I mean, it was a living thing, one that I planted myself, and now I'm responsible for killing it.  Taking down this leafy green giant is not like what my neighbors did, taking down dead or dying trees.

But what's left behind is an open, sunny place that my garden will be able to expand into.  And the sunshine, which my vegetables yearn for, makes me happy.  

So, notes to self:

• Before I plant more trees, figure out how big they'll get first.
• Before I plant more fruit trees, learn more about collecting the fruit.
• Before I hire tree trimmers, check with all my neighbors to see if we want to work out a neighborhood deal.

The frugal hot awesomeness of scrubbing

I've been noticing this theme in my life recently, which is basically that "scrubbing is awesome".  In particular, in a myriad of ways, I've been seeing instance after instance in which mechanical methods of cleaning (with occasional thermal assistance) have won arm-wrestling matches against chemical methods of cleaning.

The variety of ways this has made a difference is sort of impressive -- teeth, bathtub drains, hair, cast iron pans, and teenage armpits are just a few of the scrubby areas of my life lately.

Teeth.

My favorite toothbrushing photo!

I've written about this a bunch of times; I decided to experiment with not using toothpaste six years ago, just as a curiosity.  What would happen? I'd read in the Tightwad Gazette that scrubbing alone could be enough, especially for people who drink fluorinated tap water (as I do).  And over the years, my admittedly skeptical dental hygienist keeps giving me gold stars for good dental hygiene.  I'm not an anti-toothpaste nut, so I could imagine that someday I'd go back to using toothpaste for flavor or other reasons.  But it's sort of neat to know that scrubbing -- brushing and flossing -- alone has been just as effective as doing those both with toothpaste.



Bathtub Drains.
We have an old house with slow drains, and sometimes the drains slow down to the point of not moving --- particularly in the upstairs shower that sees a lot of girl hair going down the drain, but also occasionally in the upstairs sinks.  My husband used to love buying Draino and/or biological versions of drain cleaners, and pouring these down our pipes, with limited effectiveness.  Ugh.  We were literally pouring money down the drains, in the form of chemicals, and our efforts didn't even help much.   And then I switched to an occasional vigorous use of the plunger.  And a plunger is like magic, it's so good at clearing those clogs quickly and completely.

Bonus, now that canning season has gotten underway again:  when I'm done with a round of canning, I pour the leftover boiling water down the bathtub and sink drains that have a tendency to give us trouble.  The boiling hot water has to go somewhere, after all, and this way of disposing of it cleans a lot of the greasy gunk out of the pipes, making plunging an increasingly rare event.  Another awesome use of brawn and heat (which are essentially free and environmentally neutral) beating out purchased noxious liquids in petrochemical containers.  Yawp!

Hair
Here's one of those things I am hesitant to share, because it's not that I actually think shampoo is an evil conspiracy designed to enslave the naive masses, or anything like that.  I don't like buying stuff that comes in plastic containers, but the shampoo inside the container is not my enemy.  Still, in the pursuit of curious frugal adventure, I've experimented with alternatives to shampoo.  Baking soda, bars of soap . . . there are other people out there who are happy with those alternatives, but I didn't happen to be, so I went back to shampoo.

And then, about a month ago, I read a blog post by a woman who'd given up shampoo a year ago, using only hot water and a vigorous scalp massage.  I figured I'd try it -- worst that could happen is that I hated it and so at my next shower, I'd use shampoo again.  I also, even more significantly for me, decided to forego conditioner as well.

And let me tell you, that my hair just didn't feel as nice in the shower.  Conditioner, especially, has me leaving the shower with my hair feeling silky, but showering without conditioner made my wet hair feel . . . crunchy? clumpy? Maybe a combination of those two words: crumpy.   And as my hair was air drying, it was still crumpy.  But once my hair dried . . . magic happened.  Because my hair was fluffier than it has been in years.  I really liked the way it looked.  And ever since then, knowing I could go back, I've kept the experiment going, and it keeps giving me the same result.  Crumpy wet hair, then  fluffy-happy dry hair.

If I were swimming (chlorine and tangles), I'd definitely go back to shampoo and conditioner.  I'm not going to be a prosthelytizer who preaches the sin of shampoo.  But if not using shampoo actually makes my hair look better, well, then why the heck look back?  Scalp massages in hot water it is!

Cast Iron Pans
After having a few decades of serial monogamy with non-stick frying pans (our old pan would eventually get scratched up, and my husband would buy a new one to replace it), about a year ago I convinced our family to go with cast iron.  Such happiness in the Miser Mom world now!  Even better, we bought our new pans about the same time that Erica over at Northwest Edible lured me into purchasing the "ringer", a chain mail scrub pad.  Several of the reviews of the ringer noted that a good way to clean these pans is to keep them hot, scrub them out with water (and with minimal soap or none at all), and then wipe them down with a rag and a tiny bit of oil.  It turns out, this ringer-thing works well on pyrex, on our old gnarly baking pans, the crockpot . . . really on anything from the kitchen that gets stuff stuck to it.  And although I still do use soap, I've been mightily impressed by how well hot water and scrubbing make cleaning up our baking/frying dishes so much easier.

Teenage armpits
I am saving the best for last.  This example didn't start out as the best, let me tell you!  My sons hit middle school and they both turned into walking aroma factories.  We got the phone calls from the school nurse ("don't feel embarrassed; we have to call lots of parents about deodorant"), to which our response was "Yes! That's what we keep telling these stinky boys!  Deodorant, yes!"  J-son, my fashion king, remained stinky for all of about three months, moving eventually through the larvae stage of smelling like Axe everywhere he went (a dubious improvement), and eventually emerging from his aromatic cocoon as a sweet-smelling butterfly.

But N-son, oh, N-son.  Nothing worked with him.  He'd stink like month-old-sweaty-socks-at-the-bottom-of-a-gym-locker, and so we'd send him upstairs for a shower and deodorant.  He'd come out smelling like sweaty-socks-soaked-in-deodorant.  Kids teased him, or they avoided him, or both.  We'd go to church, and I'd beg my husband to sit next to our kid because I couldn't bear to sit next to him myself.

The biggest mystery of all was why the showers didn't have the proper effect.  We'd load him down with soap and shampoo and send him to bathe, and he'd come out smelling only marginally better.  We gave him instructions on parts of his body to target (hair! pits! private parts!), which he promised to lather and rinse, but the sweaty-locker-socks cloud hung around him like dust clouds around Charlie Brown's pal, PigPen.  I couldn't follow my 16-year-old son into the shower to figure out what was wrong . . . but man.  Something just wasn't clicking with this kid.

About two months ago, he came home in a mopey mood: he was being "bullied", he told me.  I asked for details, knowing just what I was going to hear. He told me that kids were being mean to him, saying that he stinks.  And, of course, he did stink.  I mean, I didn't blame the kids on the bus for not wanting to sit next to him.

So the next time he headed into the shower, I handed him a wash cloth and said, "scrub with this!"   And when he came out of the shower, he smelled . . . fine.  Truly fine.  And the fine-smellingness of my son lasted pretty much all day.

And since then, he's smelled okay after showers, getting smelly only after vigorous exercise, at which point a shower (with washcloth) brings him back to presentable.  He hasn't had anyone tease him, either, which is a wonderful state of affairs.  He had one lapse, which turned out to coincide with lack of washcloth, but this lapse only goes to show that it's not a biological miracle, but a mechanical one, that has led to his new state.  I'm assuming (hoping) he still uses soap, but no amount of soap works without the added scrubbing assistance of the washcloth.



So, scrubbing.  Scrubbing with a toothbrush, with a washcloth, with a plunger, with a chain-mail scrubber.  But any way I do it, scrubbing has been making my life a little less expensive and a little bit cleaner than before.

Awesome.

A far shave, three years later

Three years ago, I bought myself a safety razor.  Now, a thousand days later, what do I think of this little aspect of my life?

Basically, I'm a fan.

There are downsides to using this little razor, I admit.  The main ones are

• armpits.  It's hard to get into that cup-shaped area without nicking myself.  I admit I adjust mainly by not shaving my armpits close during the winter, and by being extra careful or switching to another razor for that area during the summer.  
• traveling.  I can't take this Very Dangerous Object in my carry-on luggage, so I use a disposable razor when I'm on the road (or in the air).

But aside from that, this little baby has been smooth sailing (or smooth shaving). Just as with my former plastic-transformer-style razors, I use soap or maybe a bit of coconut oil instead of shaving cream, and I seem to be able to get a good close shave on my legs and chin.  It's easy to use, and easy to change blades when I need to (I'm tossing all my old blades in that paper coffee cup instead of into the regular trash can, for safety considerations).  I probably change blades slightly more often than I used to change disposable razors (or multi-cartridge heads), mostly because I didn't mind letting my old multi-blade razors get dull to the point of almost getting rusty, and I don't do rusty with the safety razor.

(In fact, because I'm so not-picky about the plastic razors, when I need a "new" travel shave-kit, I mostly just snag a razor that one of my kids or my husband is mostly done with, and give it a bit of extra life before it heads dump-ward).

Cost-wise, I'm so far ahead it's hard to calculate.  Three years ago, the metal razor together with 25 blades cost me about $13.  Since then, I recently bought an additional box of 100 blades for something like $10, and I figure that box will last me many more years.  

And trash?  Well, someday, I'll have a paper-cup-worth of razor blades to recycle at a scrap metal dealer.  And every once in a while, when I switch blades, I have a paper wrapper (smaller than a gum wrapper) that comes wrapped around the new blade.  But I have no plastic packaging or even plastic razors that I'm tossing (aside from a very occasional travel razor); that makes me happy.

Spending $915 on mathematics

Phew!  My computer is back.  I (well, my awesome Tech-Sters) managed to save almost everything, with the exception of random sets of photos.  So I'm going to quickly blitz through the post I wanted to put up last week.

The first week of May, I went to a kick-butt math workshop in San Jose.  I didn't snag funding to go, but I was fairly sure that the workshop would be good enough for me that I decided to pay out of pocket for this six-day trip.

doubles as a suitcase;
I left the milk/egg containers at home.

Not surprisingly, the biggest expense was cross-country airfare, to the tune of $565. I got to leave my discarded yard-sale books in Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago (but I wasn't done with books in the other three cities I spent time on the ground in); being willing to take multiple legs brings the airfare down somewhat.  I also packed everything for the week into my Market backpack, avoiding luggage fees.

Speaking of transportation, using the IRS rate, we spent another $50 on mileage to and from my home airport; also I spent another $25 on a four-mile taxi trip from the airport in San Jose to my lodgings.   Once I was in San Jose, I walked the 2 miles to and from the workshop daily.  (One mathematician said, rather wide-eyed, "but that will take 40 minutes!", and I didn't quite know how to respond.  "Um, yes, but it's actually good to spend that much time walking each day?").

Lodging was the next biggest expense.  San Jose is wickedly costly -- the nearby Holiday Inn was offering rates of $257 per night.  Clearly, I was not going to spend 5 nights at that price.  I tried hard to find friends in the area who might be happy to put me up, but when that proved unsuccessful (no local friends with guest rooms), one of my former students suggested AirBnB.  And so I spent $334 for the week -- plus, my host drove me back to the airport, saving me another $25 cab fare.  Awesome!

A former student (now mathematician)
and me, at a reception.  Yay food!

Another frugal win was spending only $16 on food.  I got lucky in that the workshop offered all participants (even me, who wasn't officially funded by them) a continental breakfast, lunch, and a late-afternoon reception.  So most days, I didn't eat any "dinner" but was still more than well-fed.  I bought $3 coffee in the airport, once each direction (can't take it through security, so that was the only way to get it), and on the way home I broke down and bought a $11 sandwich, because my trail mix and chickpeas had run out.

And the chickpeas -- that's what I really wanted to post about.  Because I've been bringing trail mix with me on many trips, and I *love* that I can eat it without standing in lines/generating trash/paying wads of money.  But it's dry, and sometimes I also want something with a chewier (meatier?) texture.
So, I don't have pictures (dang computer crash), but I just want to say:  roasted parmesan chickpeas!!!!  Here is a recipe from Michael Pollan.  Also, garlic and paprika roasted chickpeas!  Yum.

College used-clothing sales

Spring.  I'm reveling in the extra sunshine, the warmer weather, the robins that fill the baseball field on my walk across campus.  Spring.

And on my campus, it's not just the annual ritual of returning robins that has been catching my attention, it's also the annual ritual of casting off clothes.  I've found a group on campus to manage our annual and massive campus-wide yard sale that will happen once students leave, and we're gearing up for that.  Yay!

But elsewhere on campus, smaller sales are already happening.  I share this because it's possible there are similar things going on at campuses near other people.  To wit: the athletic department on my campus has a yearly sale on gently-used athletic uniforms.

In the past, I've gotten cheap jog bras and running shorts for myself here; I've gotten polos for my sons, and passed over awesome jackets only because we already have too many at home.  This year, I bought N-son two pairs of basketball shorts, $2 each.  (I also bought a board game that I can't name, for a sum I can't disclose, because it'll be a birthday present for someone who reads this blog.  Shhhh!)

Bad Toilet Karma

In this Wednesday's edition of "what she bought", we give you a trip to the hardware store -- plus, while we're out, a brief visit to a print shop.  And as a bonus, we bring you a toilet repair tutorial!

The SPDM at the print shop.  

I think the Grumpies put a curse on me in the comments of one of their recent posts when they told someone "I think Miser Mom has a tutorial on fixing toilets".  I didn't actually have one, although a year ago I had written that my husband and sons found it surprisingly easy to replace the flapper valves.  Then, this past summer, the hinges on my toilet seats gave way.  The Toilet Curse struck yet again last Thursday as I prepared for the annual winter math meetings: the toilet started running constantly.  These toilets!   Although they are low flow (which is the positive, eco-reason we bought them), I am less and less impressed with their movable hardware.

The thing on the left has an arm that goes up and down with the float.
In a toilet that works, when the arm is up, the water stops flowing.
The open pipe in the middle should stick out a bit above the water (but here, it doesn't).

This time, the problem wasn't a bad-fitting flapper valve; instead, the long stem piece with the arm that goes up-and-down (you can see it I really know my plumbing terminology) didn't shut the water off even when the floater had lifted the arm up.  Hence, trip to the hardware store and nearby print store, where I spent a grand total of $63.44:  $34.34 on printing family letters, $20-ish on a new smoke detector to replace one that wigged out a few weeks ago, and $7.48 on the stem-arm-thingie.

Shopping haul.

Note that this means fixing a toilet yourself can be really cheap: only $7.50.  And I was delighted to find that if I just looked around a little, I could get a new "Toilet Fill Valve" (oh, so THAT's what it's called!) in a cardboard box instead of in plastic fortress casing.

From here, it's just a simple matter of following the directions, which actually are straightforward and well illustrated.  I love plumbing instructions!

There are even more detailed directions inside the box.

Okay, except that nothing is ever PERFECTLY simple when it comes to plumbing repair.  In the case of a . . . what's it called?  Oh yeah, in the case of a toilet fill valve, the hard part for me was getting off the old one.  The difficulty is partly geometry:  there's a "locknut" down under the toilet that holds the valve on, and it's hard to see it, and it's hard to reach it.

The nut that holds that stem in place isn't easy to see or to reach.

 There's also friction (the threads had gotten gunky over time, making it hard to turn the locknut), and there was even more geometry (the other end of this all is the valve itself, which is inside the tank, and you have to hold that still while turning the nut -- and of course, the inside stuff is a bit wet and slippery).

Once I grabbed the stem with the vise grips, it cracked.
No going back now: onward to install the new valve!

Taking off that danged white locknut took about 45 minutes, about 40 of which I futzed about by myself. Then my husband came by to help.  With my husband using the vise grips to hold the valve still, and with me using pliers and a bit of elbow grease to turn the nut, we got the nut the rest of the way off in only 5 more minutes.  So the moral of that story is: big pliers, a vise grip, and two people.

From there, it really only took less than 10 minutes to finish the job -- and that included cleaning up the mess.  And I could tell you how I did it, but the directions are in the box and they're really easy to read, and better than anything I could write.  

Frugalizing my road trip

I'm writing this post from a hotel room, chilling out after a talk I gave at a regional math conference in a region that happens to be far from my home.  And even though the folks who invited me are paying my travel expenses, I'm doing my best to keep my trip as minimal (in a monetary sense) as possible.

Here are two of of my minimal efforts:  rental car and grocery store.

Rental Car.

So, it turns out that reducing our family fleet down to one car (plus nine bikes) saves me and my husband a bunch of money, even though it means occasionally we rent a second car for long trips.  

But does renting an extra car mean I'm foisting an expense off onto my mathematical hosts?  Doesn't renting always turn out to be more costly in the long run than owning?   Actually, to my surprise . . . no.  I've been amazed at how cheap it is to rent a car for a long trip.  In my case, I'm over this weekend, I'm driving something like 1300 miles roundtrip (crazy, but I kind of like really long drives).  If my hosts were reimbursing me for the IRS mileage rate on my own car, they'd be forking over nearly $750.  If I'd flown, between airfare, parking, and shuttle costs, it wouldn't have been much less than that.  But renting a car, even including gas, is going to come to less than $300 -- a more-than-50% transportations savings for the folks who invited me.   That sort of floored me.

And as a side benefit, driving in a modern car is amazingly fun.  I still remember how much I loved the quiet ride of our Prius when I first bought it used . . . in 2002.  (It's an original 2001 Prius).  I still think of it in my head as an amazingly quiet and smooth car.  But my Prius, no matter how I picture it my head, is now an old car.  Folks, it has a cassette deck.  

So when I get in my rental car . . . wow, I realize the age of my own.  Not that I'm complaining about my car, mind you -- it's just way fun to temporarily be able to drive a very quiet car.  It's fun to play with the key (which folds, swiss-army-knife-like, into its electronic fob.  How cool is that!?!).  It's a little piece of heaven to be in a car that is the kind of clean that my teen-age-boy-toting, hungry-husband-hauling personal car has not seen in a decade.  I don't need this extravagance all of the time, but as a once-in-a-while luxury, I can take it.

Not to mention, mid-October is a fabulous time of year to drive through Western Pennsylvania.  No photo I took can do justice to the beauty of the fall foliage I drove through.  Ooooh.

Grocery Store

. . . And then, I arrived at the hotel my hosts had arranged for me.  Clean and quiet, but in the midst of a three-mile stretch of parking lots containing the best-known chain stores of Generic Retail Americana.  

By the time I arrived, I wanted real food (I'd packed a gallon of trail mix for eating in the car, but now that I was out I wanted something more . . . um . . . food-y).  And I had my choice between packed parking lot after packed parking lot of chain restaurants:  Onion Garden, Fried Lobster, SubMart.  All crammed with the cars of other diners (at least, so it appeared from the outside).  So I bought my dinner at a grocery store instead.  

And because I bring a plate, spoon, and napkin with me wherever I travel, I had a lovely sandwich in my quiet hotel room:  sourdough bread, hummus, and pickles.  All of the ingredients for $6.47, with lots leftover for dinner the next night.  And it's just possible there was a bottle or two of beer, bought separately, that my hosts won't have to spring for themselves.

Bonus: scrounging again

At the conclusion of the conference, there were piles and piles of donuts left over, plus cases and cases of bottled water and fruit drinks.  I urged the organizers to urge all the undergrad students to take home donuts, but the undergrads were stuffed.  So with the many blessings of my hosts, I boxed up the donuts to take home to my sons.  I left the bottled drinks with my hosts (those won't go stale, so their math club will get a bunch of use from them in coming weeks and months).

What surprised me (and what sort of always surprises me) is how grateful the people who bought all this food are when someone suggests that they give it away.  It's such an obvious thing (to me), but other people often seem to feel grateful to have "permission" to say, "please take this home with you".   Go figure.

Qmart versus Yard-Mart

On Friday, in anticipation of a round of applesauce canning, I made a quick bike trip to a store I will just call "Qmart" to pick up two dozen more canning jars.  (Dang, I keep thinking I have enough jars, and then I keep running out!  And Qmart is the only local place I've found where I can buy them).  Then on Saturday, after running up and down hills with my girlfriends, and before actually doing my applesauce canning, I biked around to a bunch of yard sales.

So, Friday was Qmart; Saturday was Yard-mart.  The contrast continues to strike me.  Friday I was looking for a specific thing; Saturday was just taking advantage of random opportunity.   Friday I was surrounded by shoppers who wanted to get more stuff; Saturday I was surrounded by people who wanted to get rid of what they'd already bought.

Melissa summed up the angst well in a comment she made on an earlier post of mine:

I now live outside of the US and on a trip back to the States earlier this year, I made a few strategic stops at thrift stores to search for things I needed. I was stunned at how every single one was stuffed to the gills with...stuff! I wasn't even going to retail establishments and yet every inch of store space at every store was full of the outcasts/excess of American life/consumerism. Made me feel that my gleaning was just as much public service as it was a matter of caring for my own family!

I'm so incredibly susceptible to the excess/gleaning argument.  I think the most depressing thing for me at Qmart was being line with a bunch of other people who looked like they were struggling financially, but were buying all sorts of kitsch that I'd see people selling the next day for cheap.  The guy in the line in front of me bought clothes for his 3-year-old daughter, all tagged and with plastic hangers and such, and he spent $180.  For little girl clothes.  Which are like, everywhere at yard sales, sometimes with the tags still on.  sigh.

But let's look at a few other aspects of retail versus re-use shopping, compared side-by-side:

Location

• Qmart:  Off a fairly major road, with nasty traffic and an ugly, massive asphalt parking lot. 
• Yard-Mart:  All the heck over the place, but because of that, on neighborhood roads.   I stopped at four yard sales Saturday.
• Who wins?   Yard-mart! (local roads vs. major roads)

Travel Distance

• Qmart:  4.2 miles round trip
• Yard-Mart:  3.5 miles
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (3.5 miles vs. 4.2 miles)

Ambiance

• Qmart:  Fluorescent lights, manicured shelves, huge lines.
• Yard-Mart::  Blue skies.  Wind. Fresh air.  I mean, wowwww!  It was a perfect day for being out of doors.
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (fresh air vs. fluorescent lights)

Conversation

• Qmart:  I heard the couple behind me in the checkout chatting (I got to practice my Spanish eavesdropping skills; yay) and the guy in line ahead of me asked the cashier a bunch of questions about redeeming points from the card he'd brought.  The conversation I overhear is all about what we're bringing home, or what things cost.  No actual conversation myself with others.
• Yard-Mart:  So much fun!  Stop 1, a group of  friends decluttering.   They're supporting each other in getting rid of clothes they no longer want.  I help by taking a hoodie.   Stop 2, a solo woman clearing house.  People keep asking, "How much are you asking for this?", and she says, "Just take it!"  She's cleaning house for free, and keeps giving her things away for free. We chat for a while about taking insulin and about health in general.   Stop 3, a family at my church is (again) decluttering, and we catch up on family gossip before I take a tank-top and a jar, and then move on.  Hugs all around.  Stop 4, a cute young couple is moving.  They say, "It's hard to think about how much people accumulate if they live in the same place for many decades.  Make an offer!  Take this stuff off our hands!!"  We chat about a sewing machine they're selling, and the conversation veers to their mother (who bought it and used it once), to wishing they could learn to sew but not right now.   
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (totally)

What I got

• Qmart: Two cases of canning jars (a dozen wide-mouth pint jars plus a dozen quart jars)
• Yard-Mart: Three tank tops, a hoodie, and two or three jars, plus a coffee maker.
• Who wins? Tie:  If there's something very specific and urgent I need, especially something that doesn't appear in yard sales, then Qmart wins.  But yard sales rule for random non-urgent gleaning. 

What I spent

• Qmart: $25.42
• Yard-Mart: $5.75.   One of the jars I picked up, though, was a reusable milk jar from our local dairy; on Tuesday I'll bring that down to Market and get $1.50 back.  Whoo!   So all that for $4.25.  Not bad.
• Who wins? Yard-mart!  ($4.25 vs. $25.42)

I've been out-frugaled by my husband!

I woke up on Sunday before dawn (per usual), to find that my husband had taped up  this note in the kitchen:

  Microwave broken.  

Circuit breaker ok.

Sure enough, the clock on the microwave oven was dark.  Pushing buttons did nothing. We had become a family that was microwave-less.

It's funny how something little like this becomes a minor emergency.  I know that X-son, down in Haiti, lives a life with almost no electricity at all, and I know that many people in my own city have sadly intermittent access to food.  But knowing all this didn't help me keep feeling a spasm of panic at doing without this machine that instantly reheats all our plentiful leftover food; a magic machine that at a moment's notice boils our clean tap water or softens our yummy butter or cooks up a fresh potato for a quick snack for my hungry sons between meals.  The abundance in my cupboards disappeared in the face of this broken microwave.  Color me ungrateful.

I'll admit I panicked partly because I feared this situation meant that my husband would be taking a trip to large stores and flinging his credit card about.  Replacing a microwave oven would mean both creating waste (although we would offer the old appliance to a local guy who recycles metal, there's still much of this that would go to landfills), and it would mean spending money on a new set of metal/plastic/other that would eventually follow the first microwave.  Not to mention, spending money.  (Oh, yeah, I did mention that already).

So even before my husband emerged from the bedroom, I got busy on Craig's List.  I found a few smaller, used microwaves for $25 -- my version of preventative shopping.  I was right to pre-prepare with a solution of this sort:  my husband, once he woke up, announced to me he'd already found a sale on microwaves for "only" $30 for small ones, $200+ for large ones.  I countered with my Craig's List finds, and thereby bought myself a bit of time.

But that's when my husband surprised me . . . he out-frugalled me.  He asked, "by the way, did you check the fuse on the microwave?"

Um, no, I hadn't.  What does a fuse on a microwave look like?  How the heck does a person check a fuse?

It was my husband's turn to be surprised; he'd figured that if he knew how to do a home repair, I ought to be, like, ten times better than him at it.  Instead, I was clueless.

So, for the similarly clueless, here's what I learned.  The electricity all just completely going out like that (for example, even the clock on the microwave wasn't lit up) meant that a fuse had blown.  It's not hard to take off the cover of the microwave and expose the electronic guts, thusly.

My naked microwave, with the cover cast aside.  

Taped onto the cover I'd removed is a set of directions that lists wiring and parts.

There's also a wiring/fuse list glued to the top of the microwave, under the cover.

My husband pointed out the fuse to me; it looks like a mechanical pencil eraser. He took out the main fuse, biked over to a nearby hardware shop, and bought a new one.  Our total expenses?  $3.31.   Not three hundred dollars and change; not thirty dollars and change; but a mere three dollars and change.   Yessss.

We popped in this new little fuse, plugged in the microwave, and everything was back to normal.  Better even than Craig's List!  And almost zero trash (just one old fuse and a bit of packaging around the new one).  SOOOO much better.

As a bonus, now I know how to change a fuse on a microwave oven . . . a skill that probably won't be of daily use, but still that makes me feel like an ever-more-well-rounded Miser Mom.  Huzzah!

Gozas de Goznes (Toilet Hinge Happiness)

Here is one of those rare joys of sabbaticals that professors seldom confess in public:  we get to fix our toilets at our leisure.  Oh, yeah, baby.

On Saturday morning, N-son came into my room and declared cryptically, "the broken toilet seat isn't my fault!  All I did was . . . "  . . . and then he continued into an incomprehensible something-or-other of events recently past.  The thrust was, the toilet seat in our most-used bathroom seems to have fallen off the toilet.  Nobody's fault.

In fact, I blame the manufacturer.  About seven or eight years ago, we replaced all four of our toilets with low-flow varieties.  I appreciate the lower water usage, but the hardware has left me unimpressed.  Cheap plastic hinges.  The paint on the seats has worn off a bit, leaving ugly splotches   (and really, splotchy toilet seats are . . . unappealing).   So when N-son declared the broken toilet seat wasn't his fault, I was ready to give him credit for telling the truth.

And yet, a broken toilet seat. At this point, we morph from a pure Home-Repair story into a Joy-of-Sabbatical story, because in everything that follows, the lack of urgency plays a starring role.  On this particular Saturday I had no grading; I had no committee work; I had no looming syllabus deadlines.  The day was mine to tinker with toilets.  I unscrewed the seat and lid from the porcelain everything-else, tossed the seat in my backpack, and biked myself over to the hardware store.  Could the nice gentleman in the plumbing aisle please direct me to the replacement toilet seat hinges?

In fact, no, he could not.  "You'll have to replace the whole seat assembly," he told me, pointing toward the racks of $50+ toilet seats displayed in their full gaping glory.  I gently argued back:  I don't want a new toilet seat; this one is fine (in a splotchy sort of way). All I need is a new hinge.  My hardware helper shrugged his shoulders and suggested a nearby plumbing supply store.  "But they close at 1:00 on Saturdays."

Well, fine, I'm on sabbatical.   I don't have to buy an expensive seat right now. I made a few other hardware purchases that I'd been planning on, and toddled my bike homeward to do other household repairs.  The hour of 1:00 came and went, and I decided that at least temporarily, we could place the wooden seat on the porcelain rim, without attaching it.  Sub-optimal, but temporarily tractable.

I tried buying toilet seat hinges online, but could only find a different version of cheap plastic hinges -- not only cheap plastic, but also versions that would require drilling new holes in my splotchy seats.  So I opted to wait until the local plumbing supply stores opened up.

Monday morning rolled around. Thanks to the joys of sabbatical-dom, I decided I could temporarily delay writing up the proof of Theorem 1 of my latest paper.  Instead, I stuck the errant toilet seat back into my backpack, jumped back on my bike, and pedaled on over to the nearest plumbing supply store -- not un-coincidentally, the very place our family bought the four toilets that are now beginning to fall apart on us.

The parts counter of a plumbing supply store is an interesting place.  I was the only woman there; the other people at the counter were all guys in various versions of plumbing-pro t-shirts and work pants.  I was the only bicyclist there, too.  Conversations hushed when I walked in.  Awkwardness.  I mentioned to one of the guys, "my bike probably gets better mileage than your pickup, but I can't fit as much in the trunk."  He didn't make eye contact.  More awkwardness.

The place itself looked like a bar, complete with stools and a counter.  Behind the counter there was a poster in a style that reminded me of Nazi/Soviet propaganda, one that had an Ayn Rand feel to it.  A tall, muscular man was standing nobly astride the top of a hill, with adoring people below and around him, their faces at his foot level gazing up gratefully at him.  The caption read, "Plumbers protect the health and safety of our country".  I wanted to say, Look at me!  I've got a toilet seat in my backpack!

One by one, the other plumbers made their requests at the counter, still avoiding eye contact with me.  When it was my turn, I pulled my toilet seat out of my bag.  "I need toilet seat hinges," I told the clerk.  "They don't make those," he answered.  "You need to buy the whole seat.  Don't blame us; it's the manufacturer."

I was back to where we'd started -- the not-my-fault version of the story.  But danged if I was going to spend $50 or more on this project, especially if the three other seats were bound to follow.

As I was leaving, one of the plumbers muttered under his breath, "Restoration Hardware dot com". He didn't look at me as he said it, but I appreciated his rebel advice.  Still, I discovered the only hinges that RH.com had were for cabinets, not toilets.  Too bad.

I decided to try a new version of my internet search, this time with more metal involved:  "bronze toilet hinges".  This led me quickly to the slightly cheaper, but still metal, "chrome toilet hinges".  I ordered two sets (because, y'know, when the next toilet seat happens to be not-somebody-else's-fault . . . ) for $9 each.  In the meanwhile, my husband had the brilliant idea that we could bring the seat from the basement toilet, the one we seldom use, up to the often-used-toilet, and have a working seat right where we need it, moving the seat-needing-fixing to Siberia.  Brilliant.  I'm not sure why I didn't think of it myself several days before.

In Spanish, goza means "pleasure".  Apparently, that's not far removed from "hinges", goznes.  Happiness is a hinge that swings back and forth.  My new toilet seat hinges arrived like magic through the mail only a day or two after I ordered them.  I did have to drill a few holes, fix a few splotches.  But it's okay, I'm on sabbatical, so I have time.


And the proof of Theorem 1 turned out  beautiful, too.