Serving time

Time isn't really money, despite the famous saying.  When we have more money than another person, giving money to other people can make sense as charity.  But even the richest of us has only 24 hours in a day, and it often feels like the more successful we are, the more demands there are on that finite, precious resource.  Sometimes it really feels like giving my time in service is just serving time.

I have done a lot of different kinds of volunteering in my life, but I've done it in bits and spurts.  There was the year when my daughters had grown to be mostly responsible pre-teens and we hadn't yet adopted our infant son; I volunteered with our local Hospice.  Last year, when I was on sabbatical, I taught math classes one morning a week at a nearby Spanish-American community center.

Giving up time is hard.  There is so much else I want to do, and often volunteering includes inefficient, redundant jobs.  I'm thinking particularly of the time I was with Hospice; one assignment I had was to sit with a patient in the nursing home to keep him company.  But he had nurses and orderlies around him a lot of the day.  Did he really need me?  My being there made his wife feel better about his care, so maybe the answer is yes.  Still, sitting still is hard for me.

On the other hand, volunteering my own time and talents has almost always changed my own life for the better, introducing me to people and experiences that have stuck with me.  I met my honorary daughter through a hospice assignment, and I wouldn't give that up for anything.  And just last week, I got the following beautiful letter from one of my students from last year, telling me she's graduated.

Hola mujer, deseo que haya tenido un dia espectacular y asi mismo se el dia de manana le deseo mucho exito en sus labores diarias

le esccribo para contarle que me gradue de Recepcionista Medico y que estoy practicando en la computadora .

Disculpe que perdi su llamada ayer le agradecemos se recuerde de nosotros, usted sabe que la extranamos.

Her husband (who was also in my class) now has a job driving long-haul trucks, and they've both gotten their GEDs now.  We're going to get together for dinner soon . . . I think I've got myself a new friend for life.

*****

Coming up Friday: Labeling the house with fabric paint
Coming up Saturday:  Snooze alarms and special toys

Taking a walk on trash day

I am a person who admires dumpster divers and "freegans" (people who try to get all their stuff for free).  My impression is that the lifestyle is best suited to single, city dwellers, and not to suburban mothers-of-many.  There aren't a lot of dumpsters near me, really.

But going for walks or runs around my own neighborhood on trash morning can be very (ahem) rewarding.  I don't dig through my neighbors' trash cans, but I've found some really nice large items next to their trash cans that have been very useful.  Here's a partial list:

• a large, pink beanbag chair
• 12 yards of garden fencing
• a microwave oven
• a 5-foot long stuffed dog that now serves as a wrasslin' rug in our living room
• a large colorful umbrella, which I disassembled and made into a cape for Halloween.

I have a new, honorary daughter who moved into my home last May and who has sort of been watching me wide-eyed.  It was a real kick, then, to get a phone call from her one day while she was walking around down-town:  there was a set of storage shelves by the curb with some other trash cans; wasn't I looking for something like that?

The shelves had been left with a pile of trash outside of an apartment of someone who seemed to be moving away and doing both cleaning and purging.  A quick outdoor cleaning with soap and water, and the shelves were as good as new.  Now they're up in my younger son's bedroom.
  

Clothes for seven weeks

This past Friday after work, I spent 10 minutes figuring out what clothes I'll wear for the next 7 weeks.

What this means is that I looked through my closet and organized my clothes into clusters of four outfits per week.  Why four?  I teach three days a week and dress more formally for those three days.  I give myself one "dress-down" day at work.  I also dress-down on the weekends.  On those days, I grab something from my drawers, not from my closet.  So I'm really just picking out the more formal sets of clothes.  This set-up gives me structure (on my formal days) and flexibility too.

After bunching the clothes into groups, I linked each group of four outfits with a hair elastic, so I'd see which clothes belong together for the week.  If there was an outfit that required an accessory (special stockings or a belt or such), I found that item and hung it on the hangar, too.

Before you think that this is over-the-top OCD behavior, I'll share with you what I've discovered about the advantages of doing this.

The most immediate advantage, and the reason I started organizing my clothes this way, is that picking out clothes calmly and quietly on a tranquil evening saves me a bunch of stress  on hectic week-day mornings.   Even though I have a good morning routine and my boys know how to make their own breakfast, there is still a lot of last-minute craziness that can lead to "Decision fatigue".  I don't want choosing my outfit to be the reason I snap at my sons when they ask whether they're allowed to make pancakes instead of waffles, and whether I have lined paper for their notebook, and what to do about the dog barf in the living room, and whether I'll be free at 6:15 this evening to pick up their friend for a sleep-over.

But I've learned that banding my clothes together has a lot of frugal advantages, too.  Like these:

• I learned I have a lot of clothes.  When I did this the first time one early October, my groupings took me all the way into late November.  Who knew?  All of a sudden I realized I don't need new outfits as much as I thought.  Similarly, the summer outfits I banded together last Friday (September 2) will take me into mid-October.  By then, I'll put them all away and get out my cold-weather outfits.  This means that for more than three months, I won't wear the same outfit twice.  Realizing this cut my personal shopping this past summer down to almost nothing.
• I learned about the redundancies in my clothes.  When I pick out my clothes by thinking only "what will I wear today?", I focus on single outfits that I might like.  But when I organized ALL my clothes into groups, I was surprised to discover that I had 6 black sweaters.  This is because every time I see a black sweater listed at  50¢ at a yard sale, I think, "that would be a good thing to own; it'll go with lots of outfits".  Now I know that I already own quite enough black sweaters, thank you.
• I finally decided to get rid of a few of those outfits that seemed like a good idea at the time, but that I just don't like wearing.  It's one thing to keep passing over that outfit, saying "not today, but maybe later."  But when I admitted that I don't want to wear that outfit even 5 weeks from now, I knew that meant "never".  There are some clothes that look good on the hangar but bad on me.
• A surprise discovery was remembering that the opposite can be true: there are some clothes that look bad on the hangar, but good on me.  There's a black fitted dress I have -- in spite of my penchant for black sweaters, I really don't wear much black, though.  So I avoided that dress for a year or more.  But when I finally put that dress in the groupings and wore it, I got a huge number of compliments on it.  

What I'm about to say might sound like goofy philosophy, but the biggest thing I got out of all this is reconnecting the bulk of my stuff back to my life.  It's one thing to know that my closet and drawers seem to be awfully full -- that's just a sentence about how my stuff fits in my stuff.  It's entirely another thing to translate those clothes into several months of my life.  That's understanding my abundance in a more personal, meaningful way.
  

The last little bit: toothpaste and deodorant

Any frugal person knows how to put one bottle of goopy stuff up-side down on another bottle to drain out the last little bit.  We frugal-meisters consider it completely normal to transfer the small remnants of ketchup (or syrup, or vegetable oil) from one bottle to another.   I've been surprised to find that this isn't universal practice.  Wow!

It's possible to use the last bits of not-so-goopy things, too.  How do you use up the last little bit of toothpaste?  You can cut open the tube and stick your toothbrush right on in.

It's also possible to salvage the last pieces of lip balm or deodorant with the help of the microwave oven.  To do this, take several nearly-done containers of deodorant.  With a spoon or knife, scrape the stuff from all but one container into a small microwavable bowl.  Heat for a very short time  (5-10 seconds?).  The stuff will soften up.  Pour/scoop it into the remaining container.  (I've found that deodorant bottles have holes in bottom.  If I nuke ALL of the stuff, then the mixture leaks through those holes.  Leaving the stuff solid in the bottom of one jar avoids this mess).

The mixture takes about a half hour to cool and harden again.  Then it's ready to use!

Hang it all

If fixing a household object first means hunting for and then digging out the tools I need, there's a good chance I'll put off doing the repair.  So I've taken a tip from my uber-organized mom and made a tool-hanger that goes on a wall in my kitchen.  This solves the hunting and digging problem, allowing me to get straight to the fixing.

My mom's hung on her pantry door, tucked out of sight.  It seemed like it was a weekly family ritual that my mom would have to holler, "WHO TOOK MY SCISSORS?" (or screwdriver, or hammer . . . ) It was clear that these were the easiest tools to get to; but somehow we weren't always so good at putting them back!

I've had a tool hanger in my kitchen basically all my adult life.  Recently I realized that the reason I keep putting off tasks that involve using my drill is because my drill was tucked away on an overfull shelf in the garage.  So I made a very simple hangar using a canvas tote bag I got from some conference I went to.  The bag had a fold-over flap that, when I folded it up, became the "tools" section.  (All I had to do was sew on some nylon straps, scavenged from other projects, to hold the tools).  I threaded a pole through the top to add some support, and added a loop at the top so I can hang the thing up.  

This bag now hangs on a door in my sewing room, where it's easily accessible for household projects.  Why didn't I think of this before?

Why depriving my children is good for them

The August 21, 2011 Parade Magazine had a "Kid's Health Quiz".  The answers to this quiz reminded me that a lot of the ways I rear my kids -- ways that look like cheapskate deprivation to others -- are actually helping me to bring up my kids to be healthier and happier than "un-deprived" kids.

Here's one of those miserly things I do.  My kids are allowed at most one cup of fruit juice each day.  They are allowed one cup of milk each day.  They get no soda.  The rest of the time, whether at meals or just because they're thirsty, they drink a lot of water (fluoridated tap water, to be specific).

Is this horrible?  Parade Magazine has two quiz questions related to this topic.  Here they are.

1. Which is the biggest source of calories in a youngster's diet?  (a) Baked desserts, (b) Pizza, or (c) Soda/fruit drinks.
2. What's the most common chronic childhood disease?  (a) Tooth decay, (b) Diabetes, (c) Obesity, or (d) Asthma.  

The answers to these questions -- for the average American kid -- is (c) Soda/fruit drinks and (a) Tooth decay (although all four conditions are on the rise).  For my kids, spending LESS money on drinks actually means BETTER health.

I still remember a social worker asking about what our new son would be doing when he joined our house.  She knew we were a very active family that doesn't spend a lot of time on electronic entertainment.  She asked, "But you will let him play video games, right?"  I don't remember how we answered; I think we said something about spending time together as a family.  But the direct answer is that neither of our sons has video games in our house.  They watch TV only rarely (we make them pay with Mommy Dollars for the privilege).  Is this a terrible hardship?  Here are the relevant Parade Magazine questions.

1. Which of the following is an actual medical condition that kids can develop? (a) Guitar Hero Wrist, (b) iPod Finger, (c) Nintendinitis, (d) Cell Phone Elbow, or (e) All of the above.
2. Which essential vitamin are 70 percent of kids not getting enough of?  (a) Vitamin C, (b) Vitamin A, (c) Vitamin D, or (d) Vitamin B12.

The answers are (e) all of the above, and (c) Vitamin D.  Regarding Vitamin D, Parade notes that "It's hard for kids to get enough from food alone.  Consider letting them play outside for 10 minutes without sunscreen."  In this case, my scavenged basketball net with our many found and donated balls is not only a form of exercise, but also a form of nutrition.  Video games are neither.

No caring parents would let their children skip needed medicines just because the kids didn't like them.  We buy our kids costly things -- medicine, nutritious foods, education, bike helmets -- even if the kids don't want those things, just to make sure they stay healthy.  

Doesn't it make sense, then, to make sure that we do those cheap things that accomplish the same goal?  

Charitable loaning

One of my favorite "charities" is actually not truly charity, and it doesn't involve giving away my money.  Instead, it's about loaning money.

Through Kiva (a non-profit organization that links up lenders with people who need micro-loans) I've loaned a total of $8,800 to 40 different people.  My actual outlay for that money is a bit over $1000, slowly added into that loan-pot over several years.  As my loanees repay the money, I just lend it back out again.  I really enjoy the chance to see what people all over the world are doing -- Kiva posts their stories and gives me updates.

Because I can loan out at little as $25 at a time, and because I could always choose to get my money back or to reloan it to another person, this is a frugal way to help people all the way across the world.

The stories of the people I'm loaning to have an indirect impact on they way I view my own life, too.  For example, in the US there are actually more automobiles than drivers.  But when I loan somebody $100 so she can buy a bicycle to transport her goods to market, that puts my own car into a different context.  I like those reminders; they make me more content with what I already own.