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.

Where the money goes

Now that we're getting more money than I had budgeted for, where will it go?

Well, like any good consumers, we've bought ourselves a fancy new vehicle!  In fact, our new purchase cost us three times the value of our current lovely car.  Ooh, we are riding pretty!

Heh-heh.  The new vehicle is indeed fancy, but it's a bike.  And our car is a 2001 Prius with an ugly crunchy dent on the driver's side, so its Blue Book value is fairly pitifully low.  So, while this bike is still expensive by normal standards (it costs four times as much as my SPDM did, and I think I bought a super-expensive bike myself), the cost was still just a tad under $6K.

My husband's fancy new vehicle.

The blue book value of our car.  

When the SPDM got a flat,
we could switch wheels between our bikes
while we got my tire replaced. 

The reason for getting this bike is that my husband's other racing bikes are 15-20 years old.  And while they're still perfectly good bikes from a commuter/weekend rider point of view, they are getting too old for the racing circuit.  For example, a cyclist who has a flat often just trades wheels with the race support crew, but modern racing wheels don't fit on my husband's old bikes (just like newer Microsoft Word documents can't be read by old Microsoft software.  bleah.)

Is this a "frugal" purchase?  In some sense, of course, no:  nearly 6000 times no, you might say.   On the other hand, my husband regularly rides with people who spent $10K or more for their bikes, so in comparison to theirs, his is super cheap (!).   And the bike is hardly an impulse purchase:  he spends 2-3 hours a day riding.  We're really spending this money on something that is central to how he spends his time and how he creates his identity.  It's meaningful to us, even if it is a luxury item.

Okay, but it's not like we're about to shower ourselves in material goods.  We haven't felt particularly deprived this past year, so it's not like we think our lives will be better if we start spending large parts of our days in stores.  In fact, this past year of wide-open schedules has been so nice, that it makes even more sense to put our money aside to make wide-open schedules a permanent thing in a few more years.

In fact, we're highly influenced by the Your Money or Your Life argument that increasing spending on ourselves brings diminishing--and even possibly negative--returns on happiness.  We just spent a pile of money on a bike that takes us past comfort to luxury.  If we start buying more for ourselves, the result will be clutter.  At this point, the best way to use the money to make ourselves happier is by diverting it into places where there are true needs.

What happens if we spend more money on things
is that we have to clean and take care of those things.

If we share with other people,
the joy just bounces back on us.
Yee-hah!

So here's the priority for the extra incoming money.

1. Bump up the charitable giving to pre-sabbatical levels (or maybe even higher).
2. Max out my retirement accounts.
3. Set aside money for home repair projects (there are a bathroom and the kitchen that work fine, but should probably be spiffed up before we sell, five or so years from now).
4. If there's enough extra left over, establish a Donor Advised Fund.

(A couple of people have suggested adding money to college funds.  Fortunately, those are already fully stocked (in fact, probably a little over-stocked, because my sons are likely to go to a nearby, inexpensive Tech school rather than a pricey four-year college).  And we've already started a 529 plan for my grandchild.  If we didn't have future educational expenses already taken care of, these would be fairly high up on that list.)

Pears, oh pears

Years and years ago, I thought it would be sort of cute/romantic to ask for a pear tree for Christmas. My husband, who often laments that I never ask for anything, was delighted to oblige, although we waited until my birthday in March to buy and plant the tree (what with, y'know, weather and all that).  And we never expanded the list to include partridges or Lords-a-Leaping.

To defend my reputation, I would like to point out that it's not true that I never ask for anything; why, just this very year I hinted none-too-subtly that I would love to get a pencil sharpener for my birthday.  So there's that.

At any rate, I really didn't know what I was getting myself into when I asked for a pear tree.  Pear trees aren't these cute little trees like the cherry blossoms that decorate the edges of our street.  Mine started out as a ball of dirt with a big stick attached, and it's since grown into a 3-story-high tower of leafiness.

Moral 1:  Check the natural height of trees before buying and planting them.

Of course, I could trim the tree down . . . at least that's what I thought once I started to realize what this Franken-tree would mean to my backyard.  I've since gotten other fruit trees, including a prolific peach tree, and I've learned to heed advice that I should annually prune it to a max of 7-foot high.  A professional tree trimmer happened to be in my neighborhood last summer, and I asked him to look at my Pear Tower Tree.  He wrinkled his nose and said, "I know what you want me to do, but at this late stage doing it would go against my professional ethics."   To wit: my pear tree and I have incurred the moral disgust of professional arborists.

Moral 2:  Pay attention to pruning advice when the tree is still young enough that it's cute.  

The problem with the size of my tree is two-fold:  one is that it shades a bunch of my garden where I want to grow other things, and the other is that most of the pears are just too high for us to reach.

But to the good, there are lots of pears on the branches.  Lots and lots of pretty pears.

Except here's the weird thing about pears that I didn't know when I got this tree:  you can't just pick pears off of trees and then eat them.  As one of my favorite canning  instructions sites points out,

"Most pears ripen from the inside out, and if left on the tree to ripen, many varieties will become brown at the core and rotten the middle. This is especially common in most fall pears. Pears have a characteristically gritty texture caused by cells in the meat called stone cells. Although modern varieties have fewer of these stone cells, all varieties still contain them. Picking the pears before they have matured and holding them under cool controlled conditions prevents the formation of too many stone cells, and results in a less gritty pear!"

Okay, so we've got a multi-step process:  pick them early, store them under carefully controlled conditions (hah!!!), and then hope like heck we pull them out of the ripening process exactly when they're at the right stage where we can successfully eat/can/cook them.

Already you can see the pears rotting on the tree here -- and yet, if you pick these, they'll feel hard on the outside, gooshy and disgusting in the middle.  Sigh.

So it's time to rescue the viable pears now.  On Tuesday, J-son and I spent an hour or so together picking pears.

I worked from the "inside" (under the tree) picking as many as I could by hand.   J-son worked the outside, using our pear picker -- a long pole with a hook and a basket. This allowed him to reach about halfway up the tree.

Pears are an adventure to pick in other ways than height and ripeness -- unlike peaches, they're the about the same color as the leaves around them. So it's hard to see them.  We keep thinking we'd picked one section of the tree clean, and then we'd switch our angle and see crowds of pears hanging out in the exact spot we'd just picked, appearing there almost as if by magic.

In the end, we picked about two 5-gallon buckets worth of pears.  In past years, when I'd gotten fewer, I tried to ripen them in a bottom drawer of the fridge.  Sometimes that worked; sometimes it didn't.  This year, the refrigerator isn't even an option:  these babies aren't going to fit there.  So I put them in cardboard boxes near the canning jars in my basement.  Cool?  Sort of.  Controlled?  Ugh.  Who knows what kind of mess I'll find when I come back from my travels two-and-a-half weeks from now?  Maybe I'll have ten gallons of beautifully ripened pears.  Maybe I'll have a rotting mess.  Maybe I'll have several boxes of still-hard objects that could take the place of ceramic pears.

Moral 3 (and I've said this one before): Our possessions begin to own us, so choose your possessions wisely.

I've spent a bunch of time this week taking care of something of mine that was supposed to take care of me.  I don't have to pay money to take care of my tree (unless I want to find a tree trimmer who will sacrifice his professional principles to make my tree a little less unruly).  But I have spent time and energy and a bit of mental effort that I could have used for other parts of my life.

And yet.

And yet, although there are many things I would do differently if I were choosing a new ball-of-dirt-with-stick-attached today, I'm so glad to have this living thing sharing my yard and my life. It's a bit of a miracle that I can walk through my yard and have food (or at least, potential food) hanging in the air above my head.  It's a blessing to gaze out my window at something that showers me with gifts, even if I don't want them right now, or even if I don't want them in exactly the form that they're delivered.

So maybe my next tree will be a pencil-sharpener tree.  We'll see.

Talkin' Trash again

Here's a view from my curbside earlier this week:  two medium-trash cans (one for here, and one so beat up that it's "to go"), plus a side helping of four recycling bins.

It's a pretty typical picture on trash day, for most people.  But (and now here I'm going to do my little braggy thing) this is the trash result of a major (as in HUGE, top-to-bottom) clean-up of our garage.

And (more braggy stuff) we hadn't put out any trash cans at all since May.

And (even more brag-erations) is that what you see here are our fifth and sixth trash cans for the year so far -- to date, we've put out only six trash cans in the year 2015.  Yes, even with five people in the house, we're averaging about one trash can per month this year!  I'm feeling a little bit like we're really starting to get this low-trash lifestyle down right.

***

Where did the rest of the stuff in the garage go, then?  A lot of our cleaned-out material was stuff we're trying to get into the hands of people who can use it.   I've been using the garage as a place to store all of our "to donate" items.  When we finally got around to cleaning this out, we took a car-full of Arts and Crafts items to a non-profit on the other side of town -- it's a thrift store for craft stuff only.  I love this place; its mere existence finally convinced me that I can store my "I-might-be-able-to-use-this-someday" kinds of items "in the cloud" instead of in my own closets.  I gave away fabric paints, glass paints, fake fur, scrap books . . . all knowing full well I can go find similar items again for cheap, should I ever decide I need them.

We've been saving up books to donate to our local library book sale.  Those filled the trunk on a second car trip, while the clothes and other household items bound for Salvation Army hitched a ride by filling up the entire back seat.  

I sorted through all sorts of scrap wood, including some leftover from the Elephant-Mother-Chair.  I kept only the wood I could imagine using in the near future (garden renovation projects are planned for October), and I bagged/boxed the rest up as scraps for K-daughter, who just received a fire-pit from some friends and who wants to burn something it.

Plastic bags. How the heck do we get so many plastic bags, especially in my trash-phobic household?!? I took a fully-loaded bike trailer worth of those to the grocery store to recycle.  Sheesh.  Seriously, how do these bags keep reappearing at my home?

There is a still a pile of use-able but not donate-able items (roof shingles, plastic gardening pots, sleds, and other miscellany) in one corner of the garage.  I'll bring out this entire pile for display at the next neighborhood yard sale, which will be coming up in about a month and which attracts hordes and hordes of people.  I will probably sell most of this for $0.00.   I love free boxes!  

A milk crate and a cardboard box of hazardous household waste (motor oil, a can of oven cleaner, burnt out cfl lightbulbs -- some of it from cleaning out my dad's house and my ex-husband's house) will go to our local hazardous waste place later this week.   Or maybe I'll put some of it in the free pile instead -- might as well put it to use, right?  

There are a few hardware items I'll eventually take to our Habitat Restore, but I don't have enough stuff to make a trip worthwhile yet.  

Sweeping out the garage, I did my best to put the dirt-dirt (as opposed to styrofoam-dirt or plastic-dirt) in the compost instead of in the trash cans

Aannnnd . . . that leaves one recycling bin full of plastic bottles, three recycling bins with paper and cardboard, and two trash cans with a bunch of who-knows-what kinds of damaged goods and discarded packaging materials.

phew.    

  

Curating the past

This past fall, I framed a bunch of old family photos and heirlooms, and I gave them as gifts to my sisters, father, and other relatives.  It was pricey, but it was worth it to pull these treasures out of boxes and make them visible again.

Problem is, there are still more boxes. Still more treasures . . . a lot more treasures.  And maybe there are not enough people to treasure them.  What to do with all these leftovers?

I started inheriting the family memorabilia after I got interested in our history -- like many people, I was enthralled by the 1977 television series Roots, based on Alex Haley's novel.  After that, my grandfather sent me letters he'd written to distant relatives and their responses.  In my young adulthood, I travelled the country collecting stories and memorabilia from our elderly relatives.  Now I have a hand-drawn family tree dating back to the 1700's.  I have photos taken in the year 18-something.  I have giant, 80-year-old books of baby photos.  I have recipes.  I have diplomas and a few clothes and hand-tatted lace and a doctoral dissertation.

It's the kind of collection that everyone in my family thinks ought to be preserved.  As time goes by, though, it becomes clearer and clearer that, this collection, . . . well, . . . , um, everyone else is happy that they are not the ones preserving it.  Life is busy; there's not much time or inclination to sit and read those old, scrawly cursive handwritten letters.  And the photos of these people -- remembering how each of these unfamiliar faces fits into the family, it gets so complicated that looking at the pictures becomes another chore.  These relics reek more and more of ancient history; they feel less and less like the leaves and fruits of a living family tree.

So this collection has become my white elephant:  it's too precious and irreplaceable to toss in the trash, but it's also so unwieldy that nobody actually wants it in their own house.  We need a family library staffed by a family archivist; that's what we need.

Instead, we've got a corner of my sewing room and me.  I want my sewing room back, and I'm getting ready to resign from this job.

So, here's my plan.  Now that I'm on sabbatical, I'm really supposed to be doing my math (and, in fact, my math is what I want to do).  But I'm going to pick one morning each week, and during that morning I'll spend an hour digitizing and making sense of some part of the collection.  I'll transcribe relevant handwritten notes, so they're easier for us all to read.  I'll scan photos and diplomas so we have electronic versions.  I'll write up a family history, including photos and letters in appropriate chapters, so it's easier to tell who fits in where.  With any luck, by December, I'll have a "book" both in digital and in paper form, and that's what the family will be getting for Christmas.

And then, everyone will have one full year to claim anything they want from the collection.  Fair warning, full disclosure.  And if no-one else want this stuff, well, then neither do I.  The originals will all make their way into the recycling bins.

I'd be glad to take advice from other people who've tried similar things in the past.  Anyone?  Anyone?

A tale of three bags

My dad remarried a few years ago, after my mom passed away. He's bought a new home with his new bride, and he's been slowly slowly cleaning out the old home. About a month ago, my dad wrote to me and my sisters:

In emptying the house, a seemingly endless task, I have come across your mother's Kelty Back Pack, still in very good condition. Would any of you like it?

At about the same time, I was helping with our college's annual end-of-year garage sale, where we sort and sell off things that the students (mostly freshmen) decide they don't want to take home with them.  The stuff students leave behind is often incredible: clothes, furniture, electronics, food, school supplies.    We sell these items for true Miser Mom prices; floor lamps are $5, a complete set of pots and pans for $25, clothes for $1 each or $5 for a grocery-bag full.

This year, someone who knows the names of consumer items came over while we were still sorting the piles and piles of things students had donated; she warned me not to price two purses at our usual $1 each:  these were a Coach bag and a Kate Spade purse, still in their original plastic bag wrapping.  (So bags in bags!)  

 (There were also a pair of Ugg boots in their fancy cardboard box that got a special price, thanks to the same person who knows the names of clothes).

Of course, these cast-offs inspired the usual rant against spoiled students. How could it not?  To have some 18-year-old who gets showered with luxury items that she discards upon a trash heap -- it seems inconceivable to us.  The contrast is especially stark once the sale starts; our city is the home to many resettled refugee families.  We get families from Nepal, the Congo, the Dominican Republic.  Some families come together to our sale and buy enough furniture to stock their whole apartment:  $50 or $70 at Miser Mom prices for a heap of belongings that includes rugs, couches, fans, hot pots, dishes, clothes, shoes, bedding.  But no Coach purses.

The  Kelty backpack seems so much more virtuous; it was used by a woman who hiked through the woods with Girl Scouts, offering her time and expertise to young campers long after her own daughters had grown up and moved away.  Whereas the Coach-and-Spade combo was never even opened up.

And yet, I know my mom probably only used that backpack fewer than a dozen times; she liked the idea of backpacking more than the actual experience.  (She was an avid site camper, but not a long-distance camper, if that makes sense).  Her backpack was as much for "identity" purposes as it was for practical use.

Even more, because of my mom's long illness, the backpack itself probably hasn't seen use in the last dozen or two dozen years.  It's been sitting in the basement of my dad's home, just taking up space.  He has a lot of space, but still.  The backpack wasn't doing anybody any good for a heck of a long time.

Getting rid of things we don't want is hard.  My dad has been cleaning out this home for more than a year now [and my sisters and I are so so so glad that he's doing it, so we won't have to!].  He has the luxury of space, and he has the luxury of time.  The student who chucked her boots and purses into the Garage Sale Pile had only one or two days to clean out her dorm room.   And probably she had to leave behind everything that wouldn't fit in the car.  Would she have seemed less spoiled to us if she'd hung onto these bags without using them?

I'm not going to feel sorry for her or anything, but it does remind me how our belongings don't just serve us, but they also create obligations that weigh us down, that create moral quandaries, that take our time and our energy.

None of my sisters or me want the Kelty backpack.  It'll go to a charity garage sale, too.

An Un-acquired wisdom

I've become fonder and fonder of the financial musings of Jonathan Clements, whose articles appear in our Sunday newspaper.  Two weekends ago, he wrote an article entitled, "Money can also buy you unhappiness".  The bumper-sticker version of his argument?  Money begets buyer's remorse; we buy more things that in turn begin to weigh us down.

Here was one little three-sentence synopsis that I particularly liked:

As folks grow older, they often stop accumulating possessions and instead start giving stuff away.  You might view that as a rational strategy for those approaching the end of their life.  But I view it as acquired wisdom:  All those possessions start to seem like a burden that distracts us from life's pleasures.

Case in point is family heirlooms.  When I was in my early 20's, my then-husband and I toured the country, interviewing our elderly relatives about our family tree.  We helped them catalog photographs that had long remained unlabeled.  We wrote down stories about scandalous matches, eccentric aunts, persons with personality.  We cooked up family recipes.  We rescued some quilts, some photos, army medals, infant outfits.  It was a fabulous and timely road trip, because the keepers of these heirlooms -- our elderly grandmothers and fragile great aunts -- had amazing stories, and my then-husband and I were the last people to hear these stories and write them down.

And then we went back to our lives -- got our advanced degrees, our divorce, our first jobs.  But the stories we collected, those stayed with us.  As did many of the photos and other heirlooms.  I have carried these with me from home to home for two dozen years now, preserving them for . . . well, I wasn't sure for what.  Posterity, whatever that means.  

Now, with my children growing and moving out of the home, with my nieces and nephews likewise turning from larvae into human adult-like objects, I figured it makes sense to share all these beautiful objects that I just Do Not Want Anymore.   The acquired wisdom I have accumulated is that I want to un-acquire all these heirlooms.

A month or two ago, I gathered the photos/etc into groupings that seemed reasonable to me, and I took them all to a nearby frame shop.  I asked the owner to do with them what she will.  

Believe it or not, these photos look better when they're framed properly than they do in my old wrinkly plastic bags.  I like how great-grandpa's sharp-shooter medals came out.  And I like how grandma's cape, made by her mother a century ago, looks a lot snazzier ironed and framed than when it's wadded up in a ball.

 I have a nifty collage of photos of my dad as a toddler/child/teenager; this will be a gift for his new wife.

Did I mention great-grandpa?  He died in 1902, less than a year after my grandfather was born.  He died of an ear infection (can you imagine??), and left a widow to raise three children on her own.  Here is a little montage of photos of him from before he met my great-grandma.

I knew I'd be plunking down some serious money for all these frames.  It turns out I saved a bunch of money through my own indifference.  I told the framer just to be creative and to take her time.  She ended up using  her left-over materials from previous projects, and because she was in no hurry she could try out various ideas without having to commit to buying supplies.  Altogether, this cost about a thousand dollars less than I thought it would.

It was still pricey -- it's an expensive way to get rid of stuff I don't want.  But dang, does it look nice!

I am really happy to feel like I've preserved something worth preserving, and also to be giving my family a piece of their history.  But most of all, a la Clement's observation, I think that investing a bit of money to divest myself of a few possessions is evidence of an acquired wisdom.

So this is my most expensive Christmas yet: giving my heirs their looms, and giving me a bit more room.  A great gift all around.

Sorry, Charlie! (more adventures in minimalism)

I got an email the other day from a colleague I admire.  She began the email this way:

I think you may have thought I was running away from you this morning
...because I was.
You're probably not aware of this (because I've never mentioned it to you before)...but there is a scent you sometimes use that I'm allergic to.  It's much worse for me in the morning and I was afraid that if I stuck around, I'd cough and sneeze in [someone's] class, so I rushed off to avoid that . . .

When I read this letter and saw the word "scent", my immediate reaction was about body stink.  With two teenage boys in the house, our family spends a heck of a lot of time managing BO.  My knee-jerk reflex was to think I'd bombed out on the shower department. Ewww.

But then I realized the problem wasn't insufficient hygiene; in fact it was the opposite.  The culprit was a bottle of perfume I'd bought several years ago.   I was a perfume perpetrator.  

Now, I've read in various places about people who are allergic to perfume.  For a long time, I've worn occasional perfume wondering whether I ought to just give it up.

But on the other hand, this particular bottle was a more than just a bottle.  In the way that the things we own sometimes take on extra meaning and begin to own us, this particular perfume bottle had become a memory:  a gleeful memory of finding it on sale at a super low price ($5, I think) and of buying enough for both me and my friend Kristie, a go-for-the-gusto friend of mine who passed away from cancer about 6 months after this particular perfume purchase.  So this bottle of perfume was a symbol also of living life exuberantly, of honoring my long-lost Diva of a friend.

Which, honestly, is pretty silly.  Because Kristie didn't want to make people sick; she wanted to make life a giant celebration of festivity.   And in the back of my mind, I'd known that my perfume habit made me into a walking allergy attack for unknown strangers -- and now I even knew the names of one of my victims.

So, my morning routine has gotten one step shorter.  The perfume is gone.  Sorry, Charlie.

The discontent of owning nice things

We just got back from a week of family vacation, a week that we spent at the very new home of my dad and his new wife, "Sarah".

"Sarah" is a great companion to my dad; we're all glad that he found someone who shares his love of travel and square dancing and even math and physics.  And she's been delighted to be welcomed into our large and rather active family.

Still, this past week was  a bit of a soul-sucking adventure for me and my kids, all because of the wonderful new home that my dad and Sarah bought together, and also because of the wonderful stuff they filled it up with.

Sarah has played piano all her life, and now, at the age of 79, she has finally treated herself to a present she's waited for, for years: a Steinway grand piano.  This piano costs more than any car I'd ever bought, and so it's no surprise that our family members all got this little caution as part of a pre-vacation message from my dad:

 Which reminds me of a rule - no one, even me, is to touch her new piano without getting Sarah's permission first.

So, when on Tuesday night, one of my sons touched the piano, it was an occasion of great grief. First, Sarah told me she saw one of my the boys lean up against the piano and lay his hand on it.  (Sarah had given permission for another child to play the piano; apparently my son was listening and got too close). Sarah found a fingerprint on the glossy black finish, and this really upset her.  I immediately took off, rounded up both sons, had them apologize, and had them both promise not to go near the piano again.  I warned them ahead of time that their apology would be met with a stern lecture, not with forgiveness, and I told them they had to suck it up and apologize even more, not talk back.  Which they did.

But my dad came over to me shortly after, and told me Sarah was still distraught about the fingerprint, which she'd need a special cleaner to get off.  So, knowing that my kids couldn't make it right, I went and did the apology also.  I let Sarah vent at me for a half hour or so -- I knew she needed an outlet and a target.  After all, this was her dream piano, and she HAD warned us not to touch it, and we HAD touched it ourselves.  I totally get that this was our fault.  I apologized for my kids, and thanked her for her graciousness in hosting us, and I told her I completely understand wanting to keep her beautiful piano sacrosanct, because I *do* understand that.

But that doesn't mean the vacation was fun.  The rest of the week, Sarah was on edge about her belongings.  We went berry picking, and while the children delightedly showed their baskets of berries to her (still out in the orchard), she recoiled at their juice-stained hands and turned the happy day into one of dismay.  There were serious discussions launched by my sisters about the very slippery throw rugs Sarah had placed on the floor near the front door (many of us found them a tripping hazard), but Sarah rankled at the possibility of removing them because she fretted over having so many people pass over her shiny hardwood floors.

If the tension wasn't fun for my kids, I'm sure it was hard on Sarah, too.  She's used to living alone, and all of a sudden, because of my dad, she had nineteen people descend on her home and her belongings, swarming around her and leaving her no peace.  If we had been somewhere other than her home, I'm sure she would have found the crowd overwhelming just because of the number and noise of us.  It's even worse inviting these people in where they're in a position to inflict damage and dirt on her own carefully chosen, dearly prized belongings.

I understand Sarah, because I'm still a little wistfully bummed about dings in my own car (not even a brand-new car -- a 2001 Prius with 98,000 miles on it).  I'm not bummed enough to actually pay to *fix* my car, but I think about my crumpled old car, and I sympathize with Sarah's desire to protect the beauty of her new home.

At the same time, this week has reinforced my resolve not to buy anything nice until my boys move out of the house, because I just got another first-hand lesson that owning nice things doesn't always make you happy -- in fact, owning nice things can make you and everyone around you miserable.  And so maybe, even after the boys have grown up, if I want to get visits from my kids and their kids I'll try not to buy anything so nice that I care too much about my things.  We'll see.

Storing my wine glasses in the "cloud"

When I reorganized our kitchen and dining room a few weeks ago, I decided that we use our wine glasses so seldom, that I ought to store them elsewhere.  And if I can farm out my data and electronic documents to "the cloud", why not do the same with my wine glasses and other household objects?

***
Having more stuff than I want is not a problem that's unique to me.  Self-storage outfits have been around for ages, of course, for people who want to keep their belongings around . . . just not keep them in the house.  But what I'm seeing more and more in my own travels and reading goes beyond having less space than stuff; it's a growing realization from even the non-miser types that we people have more than we need, more than we want, more than we should.

Increasingly I see companies advertising their decluttering services -- these companies make money by coming to your home to "recycle, donate, or dispose of your junk responsibly".  It used to be you'd read articles about heirs arguing over inheritances, but nowadays newspaper articles often describe the difficulties children face when cleaning out their deceased parents' homes.  It's getting rid of things, not keeping things, that is the challenge.

If I thought I was imaging this trend, the latest Consumer Reports issue dispels all doubts.  This "what to buy" magazine has, for the first time I recall, a giant article on "how to sell your stuff".  They carefully and meticulously rank categories like "Auction House", "Consignment shop", "Online", "Yard Sale", and "Donate".  The magazine on "how to buy it" has started writing articles on "how to get rid of it".   Something big is afoot.

***
In a weird sort of a twist, this trend makes it easier and easier for people like me to let go of seldom used objects and store them . . . where?  well, as I keep saying, "in the cloud".  I've sent the wine glasses out there, somewhere, into the general populace.  I boxed up my wine glasses for Good Will, knowing that if I ever change my mind and decide I want to drink wine from glasses with stems attached, they're a yard sale away from me, or at most a so-called-thrift-store away from me.

One advantage of being a yard-sale shopper is that I get a yearly tour of what our world has enough of already.  I don't need to pile up spare suitcases in my basement; every summer I pass by never-used, lightweight, better designed suitcases than the ones I bought a dozen years ago (for real money).  Occasionally, when we add a new kid to the family who needs his own suitcase, I'll plunk down a whole dollar and buy one for him in his favorite color.  But I've been purging our grown children's clunky old "just in case"suitcases from storage spaces.  Send 'em back to the cloud.

Wine glasses.  Small kitchen appliances (especially coffee makers).  Printers.  DVDs.  Christmas decorations.  Women's clothes.  Spiral notebooks.  Picture frames.  Craft supplies.  Mugs.  Furniture. Sewing supplies . . . . It's all out there in the cloud.  If you donate any of these items and later decide you need it back, all you have to do is wander into the nearest church basement yard sale or local thrift store, and you can buy it back.

Better yet, don't buy it back.  Tell your friends you're hunting . . . because if your friends are like all the rest of us, they have all these things tucked away in the back of their closets, and they're dying for a good excuse to move this clutter out of their homes.   And taking their belongings out of their crowded house will be your little gift to them, and to their children, and to their children's children.

If you see my old wine glasses out there, you're welcome to 'em.

People-Colored Clothing Declutter

I wrote recently about how I'm drastically paring down my jewelry collection -- by "drastically" I mean I'm getting rid of ALL of it (except for my wedding ring).  I've gifted most of the collection already, and the rest of the assorted collection is getting ready to move into the hands of someone who knows someone who wants the rest.  From now on, as far as jewelry goes, I'll be happily nekkid.

This approach does not work, however, with clothes.  And I have a lot of clothes.  It's not that I do a lot of shopping; I probably buy fewer clothes than anyone in my circle of friends.  But because I take care of my clothes, mending as necessary,  they last me a long time.  (Right now, I'm wearing a black t-shirt from college, with my old dorm logo and the date "'85-'86" stenciled on the front.)   And because I'm nearly a half a century old, I've had a long time to collect a complete wardrobe.   So, between yearly yard saling, free clothes that just happen to come my way, and as-needed mending, I have accumulated a LOT of clothes.

I have so many clothes,  I developed a storage system for putting away the "off-season" clothes . . . and my system has evolved from two seasons to four.   I have so many clothes, that even with my "in-season" clothes, I've constructed elaborate schemes for choosing outfits for seven or even eight weeks into the future.  I have so many clothes, I spend my time fretting over them: organizing, deciding, categorizing . . . it's clear I've reached the stage where I don't own my clothes: they own me.

Alas, I can't do what I did with my earrings.  Even though I have the incredible career protection of tenure, and  even though I am blessed to live in a free country like the USA, I'd lose my job and my freedom if I just gave away all clothes and wore only my wedding ring.  Cold turkey is not an option.

Here's the problem with standard de-clutter advice.  They say, "if you haven't worn it for a year, get rid of it."   But what if you're an organizational, list-loving freak like me who takes that advice to mean, "Figure out a way to wear all your clothes every year"?    Should I really keep 40 different dresses that I wear two times each?  Because, man, they're taking up space in my closet, and they're taking packing/organizing/deciding space in my brain.

So I decided it's okay to come up with my own, completely arbitrary rule.  Rules, as any poet knows, do not stifle a person; they allow for creativity and flair.  Think of the difficulty of rhyme and meter; both of those are huge impositions on the English language.  And yet, when you do impose rhyme and meter, you get incandescent sentences, like this:

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Byron was a free-wheeling, rule-breaking kind of guy, but when he wanted to write something beautiful, he bound himself to the rules of poetry.  And, in my own less poetic or enduring way, I created rules for the closet.

So here was my rule.  I would toss all my clothes, EXCEPT for clothes I like in these three categories:

1. Black clothes, white clothes, black-and-white clothes.
2. Brown clothes, yellow clothes, (segued to include some hot-pink clothes).
3. Personally meaningful clothes.

The third category let me keep, for example, the blue Jackie-Kennedy-esque dress that my grandmother made for my mom.  I admit there's a bunch of wiggle room in category 3, but I don't think I abused it.

But even with the wiggle room of that last category, I found that this scheme let me do a very quick, mentally easy sorting-and-giving of clothes.  I'm down to about half of my former clothes, nearly effortlessly, and still loving the variety that's left.  Better yet, almost everything in my closet matches almost everything else.  

It was after I did the sort-and-give that I realized:  categories 1 and 2 give me "people colored clothes" (at least, in the sense that those are the colors we use to describe people's skin, even though of course those are mostly ridiculous descriptions).  I have no idea what that means about my closet and my clothes and me, but I sort of like it.

A Farewell to Earrings

I've been a Big Earring Person almost from the day I got my ears pierced at age 8. Big. Flashy. Wild. Earrings. The kind of earrings that my students remark upon in my end-of-semester evaluations. When you wear Big Earrings, they become more than just body decoration, they become part of your identity. They become the basis for gifts, a topic of conversation, even a Daily Decision.

This was the bulk of my Earring Collection, as of six months ago.

But in the past year, I've started questioning this particular part of my identity.  Big earrings don't mesh well with all the running/biking/swimming I've been doing.  They mean one more early morning dressing decision (at a time of day I'd rather be ultra-efficient).  They take up space, going against my anti-clutter fantasy.

I remember meeting a group of college women in a summer math program many years ago; one of these women remarked to me that what set her apart from the other  30 women is that she didn't have pierced ears.  For some reason that story stuck with me; until then I had thought my earrings painted me in a different light, but after that I realized I was just one color in a great big rainbow of earring wearers.  And that it's not wearing earrings that is, in some way, the counter-cultural adventure.

So I last spring, I experimented with not wearing earrings.  I gave them up for six months.  What would happen?

To my big surprise, the answer was . . .  nothing.   My life got a little simpler on me, and no one else seemed to notice.  Well, so much for shocking the world.

For me, as much as I'd loved the flash/pizzazz of my wild earrings all those years, I came to love the freedom from earrings even more.  So this summer I decided to give all my earrings away.

This has been tricky.  For one thing, many of these earrings were presents from my loving daughters, who I figured would be disappointed and hurt that I was dissing their gifts.  But when I explained what I was doing, they were actually completely okay: in fact, they delightedly swooped down on the collection to commandeer many of their favorites for themselves.  Here's what the battlefield looks like now.

Figuring out what to do with the remainder of these earrings is going to be a challenge.  Some of these are really probably garbage (the pair of earrings I made from my dog's rabies tags, anyone)?  But some are actually valuable (the gold earrings that my dad gave my mom have both sentimental and commercial value).

I look at these, and feel that old material paradox that has haunted me since I read E.M. Forester's essay, "My Wood":  I start by owning the earrings, but now the earrings own me.  I can't just bring myself to toss the lot, but no one I have asked so far wants them . . . so what do I do?  

The danger of successful DIY projects

It's the chain reaction.  It began with wanting to throw away less trash, so that now we do lots and lots more canning.  Managing all those canning jars in the kitchen turns out to be a pain in the . . . in the legs, because I spend too much time running cans up and down stairs to and from the basement shelves.  

So I got a piece of lumber I no longer needed, cut it to size with the old circular saw, painted it with leftover paint . . . 

. . . and voila!  A few more kitchen cupboard shelves, set at just the right heights for one-cup sized, pint-sized, and quart-sized canning jars.  There will be less stair-running now.  What could be the problem with this?

On a slightly more ambitious note, I finally got around to making myself a new bag (the style is sort of combination purse/briefcase/backpack).

I think it came out looking really nice.  I used some upholstery fabric I'd gotten at a church basement yard sale (the "fill a bag for a dollar" kind); that was my only expense.  Everything else was scrounged from other bags and such that seem to pass through the house.  I'd saved a motley assortment of straps, zippers, and fasteners.  I even had some gold/tan colored string that made perfect piping around the front of this bag.

Check this out: if you lift up the front flap, you see this (more zippers and fasteners):

Can't see it all?  Here's an annotated version.

I even love the selvage fringe (the unfinished edge of the fabric) that become the flap of my phone holder.

So, what's the danger with making my own bag?  Or my own shelves?

Part of the danger is that things don't always come out the way we want.  I'd spent a day (and $4 for some fabric) on an earlier version of a bag, and I'll just mumble my way past the fact that it didn't turn out quite so well.   Ahem.

Moving on. . . did I show you any pictures of the bag that came out well?  Yes, I thought I did.

And the danger of that successful project is this:  it is that making treasures out of trash encourages hoarding trash.   The odds and ends.  The "I just might be able to use this someday" kind of stuff that seems to lurk among the corners, closets, and drawers in this house.

For one thing, there is the closet full of paint.  This tower o' tint happens to sit precariously close to my husband's army clothes.  Perhaps not the best location.

There is the colorful, well organized collection of thread that will last me until I am 137 years old.  (I should know; I inherited my grandmother's thread still on their wooden spools, and I intend to pass what remains of them along to my future grandchildren).

The pin cushion the size of a soccer ball, with more craft-fetishes hidden at the back of the drawer . . .

The bottles of paints, the rolls of tape, . . .

The drawers of string and fabric and . . . well you get the idea.  

And this particular flurry of household creativity started out with trying to make less trash, remember?  To meander in a minimally material way through our everyday lives.

But every successful trash-to-treasure project just encourages me to want to hoard more stuff, because it just might someday be more treasure.

Sigh.

Techno-Rant, X-stuff, I-stuff, E-stuff

           Recap of the last week or so:  
Miser Mom laments that our things own us.
Miser Mom fears that the machines are taking over.
Miser Mom praises paper mail over the electronic version.
Miser Mom drags her children to watch (operatic) women die horrible deaths on stage,
       but seldom lets them watch Bionicles battle for world supremacy on TV.

Why is Miser Mom on such an anti-tech rant?  And why does she refer to herself in the third person?

yoicks.  The whole third-person thing is just silly.  But the whole technology rant has a reason.  Or rather a constellation of reasons, which are
 •  a nasty-large cell phone bill, coming on top of
    • Consumer Reports "50 best products" issue, arriving right at the end of
         • the yard sale season.

The end of the Lancaster yard sale season means that my own favorite Christmas shopping venues are basically closing down for the year, not to reopen until next May.  Shopping season is almost over for me; the coin jar is nearly empty and will begin its long, slow refill.  But before I quit buying things for the year, I want to top off the X-mas baskets, going into November free of that "aaahhh! What do I get her???" kind of last-minute panic.  So I've been mulling over the few people on my list for whom I didn't snag cool scores this summer.

Then I got the latest Consumer Reports at the same time as my monster cell phone bill.  Their featured "50 Best Products" include a jar of olive oil, a few bottles o' wine, a set of kitchen knives, cans of paint . . . and then lots and lots (and more lots) of things that you plug in, turn on, power up, power down.  And I just thought, if even I wanted to consider a techno-gadget for my friends and loved ones, I'd be giving them the gift that keeps on taking.  That's not nice.

Hence, the techno rant.  No i-things.  No e-things.  It goes against my moral fiber to buy the cheap stuff that will just require expensive batteries before it gets tossed into some landfill.  And I'm just too cheap to get the really good stuff (although I could pretend that I'm not too cheap, but that I don't want to hook my loved ones on an expensive e-habit, and that would be true, too).   (But the first reason really is that I'm too cheap).

So what do I get for people who I love and who I share connections with, but who are far, far away?  How do I get them things that don't take space on their shelves, or create even more garbage in this world of ours?  Some of these people are 77 years old and darned well off, and some of these people are 7 years old with no money of their own (but with doting parents who supply goodies as needed/wanted).  Neither extreme is easy to shop for.   And some of these people are young adults just starting out on their own, and I have no idea of the state of their current belongings or desires.

How shall we save the day?

Opera, of course.

Or rather, theater tickets.  My only homemade daughter knows that her birthday present for many, many years was a set of 3 subscription tickets to the local theater: one ticket for her, one ticket for me, and one ticket for a friend of her choice.  When she went off to college, we replaced that with passes to the movie theater near her school.  Two years ago, my nieces in San Diego got to go see a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta courtesy of their Aunt Miser Mom.   Theater may or may not be an option for family members this year.

Not to mention restaurants.  For young-adults-just-starting-out in distant cities, I believe that a gift certificate to a local (to them) restaurant can't be beat.  In fact, for my 77-year-old father, I'm going to meld plan A and plan B, and get him a lovely dinner at the restaurant near his favorite opera house.  This will come packaged together with a heartfelt note of gratitude for hooking me on sex-and-violence (as performed by sopranos and tenors who are backed up by large orchestras).

 And for the 7-year-old nieces?  The answer is its own drama in three acts.

Act 1.  Last year, I bought a puzzle book I thought they'd like.   They're bright kids; the puzzles I chose aren't connect-the-dots kinds of puzzles, but more like  "Turn LOVE into CASH by changing one letter at a time" kind of puzzles.  [LOVE - LOSE - LASE - CASE - CASH is one possibility.  Not your average 7-year-old].   But instead of sending them the whole book at once, I cut apart the pages and sent them one puzzle a week, together with a little note from our family.  I could imagine doing the same thing with a coloring book, actually.  I really love this idea; takes a lot of pressure off of writing a long note, and gives the kids something to look forward to . . .

Act 2.  . . . except I heard nothing back from the kids.  Did they like it?  Were the puzzles too hard?  I went into a funk about my cool idea that seemed to be disappearing into a black hole.  Then, this summer, both nieces told me how much they love getting my letters and puzzles.  In fact (they say) they've written several letters back, but somehow never seemed to manage to get the envelope, address, and stamp all together to send something back out.

Act 3.  Inspiration hit.  My nieces (and perhaps even a few young adults) will be getting envelopes, pre-addressed, for all the many many people in our family.  There will be -- yes-indeed-ee -- a few extra envelopes with the name and address of yours truly.  Perhaps I'll get some mail next year.

Creating such envelopes is not difficult on the computer and home printer.  Stamps are the most expensive part of the project, but they will be included (note that stamp prices will go up again in 2013, so buy now).  Cards, also, will be part of the package, again thanks to the wonder of the computer.

Tech?  No.  This year's X-mas gifts will be theatrical X-periences, and X-cellent meals, and X-pository outlets.


But this year's Noel gifts will have no E gifts.  (Say that out loud to appreciate it.  Heh.).

Rant over.

Taming the wild e-beast

Take a gander at what one of the folders in my email "in-box" looked like Sunday night (with names of people blurred out for privacy reasons).

In contrast, here's what my desk and office area looks like.  

Not really the same visual experiences, you think?   There's a huge difference between the looks of these two mail repositories, and this difference explains why email is both easier and harder than paper mail to deal with.  The good things about email (speed, low cost, low trash) I'll take as a given.  I love-love-love email.

As a matter of fact, here is a digression on one more cute reason why a mathematician loves email. We have a "secret code" that lets us send math long distances. (Okay, it's not so secret; it's called "TeX").   I can send a regular old email message with bits of this secret code, very ugly:

\item \tf The telescoping series $\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac 1{n(n+1)} = \sum_{n=1}^\infty \left(\frac1n - \frac1{n+1}\right)$ converges. 

 And my colleague can "decode" it to get this pretty picture:

Magic!  Before email (and TeX), sending math back and forth was painfully slow.  Now it's not.  Digression over.

But email stinks at being easy to tame. Both paper mail and email accumulate; both become overwhelming; both can take over their habitat.   But I think paper is a heck of a lot easier to sort into psychologically manageable "tackle me" piles. Because,

• I can (and do) sort paper into piles, and the piles have actual locations: things on the near corner of my desk are urgent; things on the floor are to file; etc.  It's true you can sort email into files, but the folders are different because of different names, not because of different locations.
• Sorting paper actually uses my body.  Not that putting a piece of paper down is exercise, but reaching to the left, or reaching behind me, or reaching up -- those are psychologically very different than clicking and dragging a mouse.  Not to be all new-age-y on you, but I do get a physical connection to the paper.  Even tossing a paper in the recycling bin feels more final than clicking "delete".  Let's just say that paper allows for a greater range of motion than email does.
• Paper stays put, mostly.  Once I put my mail on the left hand side of the desk, it's there; whereas new emails bump my old email down lower.  Things move around on the screen without me moving them.  Said another way, I have to search for the email by its name, not by its location.
• Paper has color and shape.  I can search my office for that small blue envelope, that memo with lots of writing on it, the bundle of papers stapled together.  It's possible to add "labels" to email with some programs, but the choice is limited (6 colors?), and I still have to add it myself.  Paper mail comes already with its own distinctive looks.
• I can write or attach notes onto paper.  If I could suggest ONE change to the gurus who design email systems, it would be to allow the person getting an email to attach something like a sticky note to the outside of the email:  "Call Sam".  "Follow up on Friday".  "Check budget and reply".  Look again at that picture of the email I'm sitting on.  It's hard to know just what the heck I'm supposed to do with each of those messages, unless I either remember what it said or I open it again, read it again, and decide what to do.

So here are some of my favorite e-sorting tricks for choosing and naming the e-folders I use.  (If you have good tricks, I welcome them).

• Name folders for time-specific projects with the year.  "Calc2012" is a folder of email from my current calculus students.  I'll hang onto until 2013, and then I'll trash it and all the mail in it, too.  Long-term, this will mean less email to clutter up the "search" features on my email.
• Keep a bunch of "action" folders near the top.  (I got this idea from David Allen, Getting Things Done).  Begin these names with @ (for action), $, or #.  Such as . . .
• $ Saturday.  That's when I pay the bills, so all e-bills go right in there, to be deleted/filed after I pay them.
• # waiting.  This holds those emails I don't need to look at or think about right now, but might want soon:  confirmation of purchases that are on their way to me; letter from a student who wants a recommendation, but who I asked to send a bit more information first; information about an upcoming weekend camp for the boys, etc.
• @ to print  self explanatory, no?  I don't print email often, but I'll chuck emails in here that have pointers to things I do want to print.  
• @ to do.  I never put any email in here unless I first write down in my planner exactly what I should be doing.  I don't want to get caught up in the "I have no idea what to do; I'll deal with this later" box of email.  No, this is for the big projects, for the letters of recommendation I plan to write, for the specific tasks I intend to do next Thursday.  All written down as tasks in my paper planner.   (The screen shot above is actually my @to do folder -- and by today, several of those tasks are Done!  phew!)

Beneath the action folders -- the ones I use most frequently -- I put the gobs of folders that I think of as "reference" folders.  These include letters from family and friends; semi-dormant committee work, messages to and from people who have invited me to speak in the past.

Moving email into folders (or just deleting it) is a bit of a constant chore, and sometimes I wonder if I should just do what so many of my students do:  just have one giant in-box with all my mail.  But keeping my in-box small keeps the list of things to scratch my head over that much more manageable.  So I don't have to fret that I'm missing something big.   And to me, that's worth the hassle, at least until I figure out a  better method.