100 Thing Update

Some of my students dropped by my office the other day to turn in their papers.  (Good!  More to grade!)  I asked what they'd be doing over the weekend, and they said they were going to redecorate their dorm rooms.  I joked, "Would you like a cow?"

I have more than a hundred cows of various kinds lurking around in my office.  There are cow stuffed animals, cow magnets, cow pencils, cow picture frames . . . you get the idea (partly).  All of the cows are gifts from other people, a legacy of a bad pun that got out of hand.  (Long ago, in high school, I'd called calculus "Cow Class".  That joke was the basis for my first cow gift, and they've reproduced themselves exponentially since then, you might say).

So when I asked, "Would you like a cow?', it was a reflection of my own office motif.  I didn't expect my students to answer, "Sure!".  But they did, so (remembering my 100 Thing Challenge), I grabbed a cute terra cotta cow and handed it over.

Here's a more complete update on the Challenge, which is going slowly.  (The plan, such as it is, is to try to give away 100 things sitting around our home to people who could actually use those things.  I guess office things count, too).

1. Train-shaped birthday candle holders to my little buddy Catherine and her baby brother Tony.
2. Math book to the Harbaugh Club.
3. Aloe plant, in a spare pot, to the Harbaugh Club.
4. Six canning jars to a friend who wants to can olives.
5. Cat Condo to Melissa.
6. A free turkey we got from the grocery store, to a family at church who told our pastor they weren't going to be able to get a turkey this year.
7. Cow figurine to my students Jill and Emily.
8. Latin vocabulary cards to a different Emily.
9. Your Money or Your Life to Justin

Only 91 to go!

Nit picking

A conversation I had with a friend last week took me back to the dark days of a miserable February a dozen years ago.  It was rough February partly because my husband was traveling a lot -- one of the unhappy side-effects of his new higher-paying job.  I was parenting between one and three kids, two of whom were my new step-daughters.  It wasn't always easy.

But what made that particular February so incredibly bad in a big way was bugs that were bad in a little way: lice.

I'd never had lice as a kid, so when my daughter got sent home from school, I wasn't quite sure what to do. (Did I mention that she was my long-haired daughter?)  The nurse sent a note that said something about trying lice shampoo.  I am not at all the kind of person who wants to pour pesticide on my own child's head, but I was so freaked out (and clueless about what else to try) that I dutifully went out, bought that, put it on my daughter's hair.  Miserable long story short, her brand of lice had developed a resistance to Nix.  I got to read about that in the paper a few years later, and all I could think was, "no kidding!"

No matter how many times someone says, "It's not your fault", we couldn't help feeling like social pariahs.  My child was carrying a communicable disease, and at the slightest mis-step, I might infect my friends.  Did I mention it was miserable?  And it seemed to last forever.

Through trial and error, after a few agonizing mis-steps, I finally discovered the technique that worked for us.  Here's what I bought:  baby oil, a shower cap, and a nit comb.  This last was a metal nit-comb (which you can find at most drug stores).  The plastic nit combs that come with the nasty nit shampoos are worthless; the teeth are too far apart.

For a period that lasts a bit more than a week, there's a lot of work.  Every night, I would put baby oil on my daughter's head -- I read that the oil helps to dissolve the glue that keeps the nits (eggs) stuck to the hair, making them easier to comb out later.  I'd comb out and then braid the hair next.  She'd sleep with her hair in the shower cap, which helped to keep the oil from getting all over everything.

Every night and every morning, I would comb through her hair, first with a regular comb to get out tangles, and next bit-by-bit with the nit comb.  It's called "nit picking" for a reason -- this is exhausting, painstaking work.

In the mornings, after the combing, we'd shampoo her hair to get the oil out, and then we'd blow dry her hair.  We'd then throw towels, sheets, and pillowcases down the laundry.  Her coat and hat, her stuffed animal -- anything that might come into contact with her hair -- went in the dryer, if not in the washer as well.  Heat supposedly kills lice.  And in February, there's a lot more clothing being worn!  It seemed like the dryer was running non-stop.

A year later, the lice epidemic came around again.  The second time around was still exhausting, but it didn't seem to have the same sense of agony -- we had the supplies laid up, and we knew the drill.

I wish my friend the best as she goes through her own bout with this tiny, itchy, nasty beast.  

When our things own us

This past Saturday, there was a moving sale in our neighborhood -- a rare December garage sale.  It happened to be right on our route back home from a doctor's visit, so of course, I stopped to peek around.

As I was browsing the knick-knacks, I heard the owner repeating to other people, "This lamp originally cost $300, but I'm selling it for $75.  I'm letting it go that low, but it originally cost $300."

The lamp in question was definitely unusual; it looked a bit like a hanging windsock -- although to be honest, my first reaction was that it looked like a uterus.  The lamp shade (if you call that part a "shade") was made of gold silk.  Definitely an acquired taste.

Now, I'm fond of things that are quirky and acquired tastes.  I could imagine people who might want a golden uterus lamp.  But what struck me about the garage sale was how much that initial price of the lamp seemed to have the owner fixated.  She no longer wanted the lamp, but the price meant she couldn't sell it for a yard sale price, either.  That cost was holding her hostage, as it were.

It's easy for me to point a finger at others on this kind of thing, but hard to see it in myself.  How often do I not get rid of something because it cost a lot to buy?  How often do I buy something I don't need just because it seems to be a "good deal"?  This is something I think about a lot.

One of the phrases that helped me rethink my role with my possessions a while ago was in a de-cluttering book that asked, "does that object love you back?"  Some things I own make me smile -- our christmas/halloween/easter tree, for example.  Some things I own make me groan -- the lantern someone gave me as a gift that I never seem to use but have to keep dusting.  I've tried harder to value my possessions by my own reaction to them, not by what they cost or where they came from.  But still, it's a constant struggle to figure out how to own my possessions without letting them own me.

Just FYI, I donated the lantern to Goodwill, and I passed up the golden uterus lamp, even though it was a real bargain.

Oh, Christmas tree

When I first started my job here 19 years ago, a friend and I got to go to a summer craft show held on my campus.  My friend and I quickly discovered we had good taste, or at least expensive taste: it seemed like everything we liked cost a lot.  The blue bowl cost $60.  The leather bag cost $300.  We admired; we reeled; we kept walking.  One of the things that I fell in love with was a cast iron tree, meant to be mounted on a wall.  I lingered there longer than usual; it cost $1000.  I reluctantly walked away.

Every summer, my friend and I would go back through that same craft fair, and every year I'd drag her over to the tree-maker's stand so I could gaze adoringly.  Finally, in 1998 I got a "commission" of sorts to go give presentations during a week-long workshop on math and art, up at Dartmouth.  The organizers said they'd pay me $1000.  The workshop started the day after the craft fair, and I decided that was an omen, or permission, or something.

A recent post from Dogs or Dollars reminded me that it's time to decorate the tree.  This year, she's renting a live tree that will eventually go live out its life as a woody guardian to a stream -- I love that idea.  In fact, I checked to see whether our local conservancies have a rent-a-tree program.  (They don't, but I'm going to suggest it to the group I send a yearly check to).

So December is decorating time.  Sometimes we butcher the evergreen bushes in the front yard to bring in some branches that smell good, but mostly we just decorate the cast iron tree with lights, ornaments, and whatever cards our friends send us.  My tree is artificial, of course.  If you amortize the tree over the past dozen years, I've paid something like $80 a year for the tree.  If I hang onto it for, say, 50 years, that's $20 a year.  That's still not cheap, especially if you think of it only as a Christmas tree, which is sort of what it is during this time of year.  But at other times of the year we decorate it with small pumpkins (the Halloween tree) or eggs (the Easter tree).   I pretend it lives the life that Sgt. Joyce Kilmer envisioned in his poem:

     . . .
     I think that I shall never see
     A poem lovely as a tree.

     A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
     Against the sweet earth's flowing breast

     A tree that looks at God all day

     And lifts her leafy arms to pray

     A tree that may in summer wear
     A nest of robins in her hair

     Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
     Who intimately lives with rain.

     Poems are made by fools like me,
     But only God can make a tree.

     . . . 

Morphing into a merry miser

I wasn't always such a miser.  Two decades ago, I was a sort-of-normal, frugal consumer.  I shopped at the mall, but I hunted for good deals while I was there.  I went out for dinner once a week with friends, but -- while I marveled at one set of friends who gave up restaurants entirely so they could save for a home -- I myself didn't eat out a lot.  I bought my groceries at a real grocery store, but I tried to get generics whenever possible.  I'd read Joe Dominguez' Your Money or Your Life, so I tracked my spending, discovering that I spent way more than I'd intended on airport books, and less than I'd intended on socializing with friends.  I had a small home with a manageable mortgage, and no other debt.  You know, normal shopping and spending, with a whiff of financial restraint.

Then I got married.

My husband was a sort-of-normal, big-spending consumer.  I didn't realize the difference between our approaches until after we'd moved into the new home, blended our families, and obligated ourselves to several other large financial ventures.  We got into a bunch of debt quickly.

Step 1 to digging ourselves out of the hole was when we agreed that I should take over managing the money.  That didn't solve all the problems, but it solved two big ones quickly: it put the person who obsesses about record-keeping in-the-know, and it relieved the guy who doesn't want to think about details away from those pesky details.

Step 2 was to cut back on some big expenditures (put less money into retirement, mostly).  This slowed down the downward slide a lot, but it wasn't enough.  We kept bleeding out more money than we brought in, and the obligations we'd already made severely limited how much we could cut from our monthly budget.  Step 3 was for my husband to find a better-paying job.

Even with these three changes, though, it was clear we couldn't always make ends meet unless something else changed.  I began to go to the mall less often, ate out with friends less often, tried to convince my husband that generics were okay.

One day my husband brought me home a copy of Volume I of Amy Dacyzyn's Tightwad Gazette.  (He proudly pointed out he'd gotten it at a used book store for 25¢).  I devoured the book.  Then I read it again.  Then I went to the library and got the sequels.

A miser monster was born.

The changes in my life are too numerous to mention.  The biggest change, really, is how much fun I have.  Figuring out how to spend less money has scratched all sorts of itches I'd felt -- the environmental itch to use fewer resources, the bleeding-heart itch to support local farmers, the competitive itch to do better than last year, the creative itch to make something great out of whatever is in front of me, the dutiful itch I have to share the wealth with others. The biggest trick was figuring out how to do all that while having fun.

Not only have we made it through the worst of the bad-financial times (knock on wood), but I've turned all those early negative emotions of fear/resentment into what's almost really thrill-seeking.  That's what surprises me most -- I thought miserliness was deprivation, but it's really an outlet for creativity.  Even when the big bad debt is no longer knocking at our door, I'll be yard saling, mending, gardening, canning.  As Amy Dacyzyn says, "Even millionaires need to wash out their plastic bags (or hire someone to do it for them.)"  I've become a merry miser.  

What our bags say about us

I recently finished re-reading Snoop, a book about how to figure out what people are like by looking at their homes and offices.  I don't know how well it helped me snoop on other people (why don't you invite me to your home, and we'll find out??).   But it did help me appreciate something about my husband.

The author, Gosling, bases a lot of his analysis on 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.  (Conveniently for those with weak memories, in this order they spell out "ocean").

My husband and I are high on openness (did I mention we're going to Haiti in 20 days?) and relatively low on agreeableness (if you sob on our shoulder, we're likely to tell you to suck it up).  We differ from one another most markedly on the traits in between.  I score really high on the conscientious scale; my guy not so much.  He scores high on the extroversion scale; I really value my "alone time".  So it's not surprising that one of our marital traditions, as it were, is that he calls me on the phone several times a day.  Just to say hi.  Because extroverts just like contact.  But me (conscientiously doing work), I want to get down to business, and seeing that there's no real business, I get tetchy, wanting to get back to work.

This also explains our approach to shopping bags.  Me, I have a large stock of canvas bags, ready to go to the store or anywhere else.  Part of the bag stock is by the back door near my well-organized garbage; the other part of the bag stock is in the trunk of the car (but of course).  And yet my guy comes home with plastic bags just about every time he goes to the grocery store.

Now, plastic bags don't cost me money, but they cost the world money both in manufacturing and disposal costs, so I'll lump the avoidance of plastic bags under the miser umbrella.  My guy agrees, at least in principal. So why does he bring them home?

Because using them takes longer.  He explained this in some detail to me the other night.  In the self-check-out lines, each canvas bag has to be "tared" (that is weighed) and the shopper has to call out to the cashier, and the cashier has to push buttons.  Meanwhile, other shoppers in line have to wait longer.  He hates waiting behind other people (he's not exactly a delayed gratification kind of a guy), but he also hates being the reason that other people behind HIM have to wait.

As for me, I don't care about those other people waiting a little longer.  And I think plastic bags are so evil that the extra time that so bugs my husband is something that wouldn't register on my radar.  And even if I did notice the extra time, I'm a huge fan of delayed gratification and self-control, so I would suck it up.

It'd be easy for me to think of plastic bags as what impulsive, inconsiderate people do.  But Snoop helped me realize that I've got the "inconsiderate" part wrong, at least in this case.   I'm not giving up on getting those bags out of my home, and now I've got a new angle for thinking about how to work together with my husband on this. 

neighborhood swing set

About 40 years ago, one of my neighbors (C.P.) built a large wooden swing set and jungle gym for his daughter.  When she grew older and no longer wanted to play with it, C.P. offered to loan it to a neighbor with small kids until those kids outgrew it.  Thus began the travels of the swing set.  It's been in almost a dozen different yards, from what I can tell.  Here's a picture of it in our yard a few years ago.  As you can see, it's a massive, substantial, and very stable set.  Moving it isn't easy.

I like this idea of temporary ownership -- especially when it comes to kids' things, because they so quickly go through different phases of life.  The swing set was probably in our yard this past time for about 6 or 7 years -- long enough to seem like "forever" to our kids, and long enough to make them sad to see it move along.  But that's a short portion of the swing set's 40-year lifetime of being enjoyed by kids all around our neighborhood.

What impresses me the most about this wandering swingset is C.P. himself.  This isn't some store-bought thing; it's something he designed and built himself.  And from the way he monitors its disassembly, moving, and reassembly in each new yard, it's clear he's both proud and protective of the piece.  The rungs of one of the ladders broke when we moved it to my yard (that's why the jungle-gym portion is no longer attached), and I could tell he was a little fretful about that.

And yet, he's willing to share it with others anyway, to relinquish control over his baby when it's in the yard of other people.  That's a kind of selflessness that I admire, and I doubt I could emulate.