Kid cell phone update

On July 17 of last year, I bought my teenage boys their first cell phones.  As I did so, I carefully communicated (and firmly laid down) lots of rules.  I should add that, in anticipation of getting real phones (!!!!), these rules were very readily agreed to.

It took only one day to learn our first important lessons of cell phone usage [to wit: ring tones cost a lot].

 (I owe a big thank-you to Kelly for warning me about potential reactivation fees!)

Two weeks later, we had our next serious talk about cell phone moderation, with a few new rules added in, to enhance "information and immediacy".

Now, a year later, the lessons are coming more slowly.  But the lessons are still coming.  For those of you contemplating some version of the maiden voyage of a cell phone plan, I thought I'd spin some tales of some of the rough waters we've encountered plus some of the yarns about smooth sailing.  With as many nautical metaphors as I could muster, here is my version of knowing the ropes and keeping the whole cell phone practice ship-shape.

The cell phones, one year later

The cut of her jib:
We got a pre-paid plan so that my boys couldn't possibly go over their limit by 1000 minutes in just one month (oog---as actually happened a few years earlier with one of my step-daughters on our family plan).  Our current plan costs the boys 99¢ for the first call of the day and then 10¢ per minute for any call to a non-Verizon phone.  I pay $10/month (usually several months at a time) and expect the boys to make up the rest.  This has put an upper limit on any damage the boys can do, and I highly recommend this for a first-time plan for exuberant users.

Taking the helm:
I set up electronic account monitoring two days after the boys got the phones, but I wish I'd done this before they had the phones.  For any novice sailor (or cell phone user), there are unexpected obstacles in those unchartered waters.  It's really incredibly helpful to be able to watch in nearly real-time what's going on.

Early on, I checked usage daily.  Even now,  a year later, I check the e-records somewhere between weekly and monthly.  I can give the boys feedback ("that *86 dialing is costing you a bunch of money!", "You keep dialing a number that is not on the Verizon plan, and you've paid 30¢ for that this week.")   E-monitoring gives us much more immediate feedback than we'd get any other way.

Testing the waters:
I set up the phones initially (I thought) so they'd be for voice only.  I explained to the rep who was selling me the phones and setting them up that I wanted voice only, and I had her turn off texting.  It was one day later that we learned that the rep hadn't also turned off picture messaging.  Bleah!  By that I mean, an expensive bleah!  We fixed that via annoying phone calls back to Verizon after the boys spent a pile o' dough sending each other silly pictures of themselves, not knowing that each picture had its own cost.

In for some rough weather:
Even after that, though, we discovered that there were all sorts of ways  that the boys were either knowingly or unknowingly (we're still not sure) blowing money on crazy non-voice things.  Ring tones ate up a bunch of their funds.  N-son blew through almost $50 in games one week when I wasn't monitoring the e-records closely.  As we said, we're not entirely sure whether he knew they cost money or not -- he said he hadn't realized it.

Batten down the hatches:
If you do want voice (and only voice), you need to push much harder on the rep than I did when you're setting up the phone.  Be persistent, and keep asking about ways that a kid might do anything that is not actually talking.  Do not trust the rep to actually turn off any feature that is potentially money-generating (for them) and money-wasting (for you).

Close Quarters:
From the start, I gave the boys the rule that they MUST leave their phone with me overnight:  I have physical control of the phone from 9 p.m to 9 a.m.   This has turned out to be an invaluable help, both for reasons that I expected (it keeps them from playing on their phones all night or calling people at crazy hours), but also for reasons that I hadn't anticipated (they tend to lose their phones, and this way I learn about it quickly and put pressure on them to find them quickly.  Also, they tend to damage anything in their reach, including phones: more on that below).

Under their own steam:
As the year has moved forward, the boys have indeed learned a lot about basic phone usage.  There are shoals and reefs we still have to steer away from, but generally they've learned quite a bit.  Overall, I'm glad with how far they've come in responsible phone usage this year.  The phones have lost some of their novelty, and so the boys aren't constantly using (or mis-using) them.

Keeping things ship-shape:
Phones are things.  And things break.  Things are especially likely to break if they come too close to my highly active sons.  And these phones have spent a lot of time with my bouncy boys.

The screen on J-son's phone is not supposed to look like this, but now it does.  N-son's phone is not supposed to have its battery exposed, but (as you can see from the first photo above), now it does.  Neither phone works quite as well as it used to.  That wear-and-tear is part of the reason that the boys leave their phones high and dry on my shelf nowadays, instead of carting the phones with them wherever they go.  I'm still trying to decide to what extent I should enforce my early rule that they pay for breakage of phones.   At any rate, it looks like these phone are nearly on the rocks.  

Has the tide turned?
N-son has managed to save $86 on his meager, Miser-Mom allowance toward a new phone.  [This $86 is on top of the $200 I require each boy to have in "emergency savings" so they can repair the inevitable things they break.]  He's planning to put it toward a Republic Wireless smart phone, for which I promised I'd pay half.  I'm figuring that once he gets his new phone, we'll have many more battles over time spent playing games than we had this year --- but also many fewer battles than if we hadn't had a year of voice-only learning.

(I'm also hoping he'll realize the importance of caring for that phone when he gets it, now that he's seen that my urgings to be careful with the old phone together with the broken status of the old phone seem to have some bearing upon one another.  But I might be too optimistic here.)

Stay the course:
J-son also has plans to purchase a smart phone some day.  His plans were blown a bit off-course when, in his words, a tennis racquet "got broke" (meaning, someone who looks a lot like him repeatedly bashed it into the ground until the wooden frame smashed into pieces).   The resulting hole in the emergency fund is just now being refilled, so the future phone upgrades are still that -- a hope for the future.

So, the voyage of the S.S. Cell-Phone continues.  I'm sure I'll have more lessons for us all in the future. Anchors, aweigh!

Bricolage -- an update

A year or more ago, I wrote about a new storage system I was trying out.  Best part of that system is, it has a very cool name:

 Bricolage : ":construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also :something constructed in this way".

The main ingredient in my own version of the bricolage storage system is printer paper boxes with one (front) edge trimmed.  I chose these cardboard boxes because . . .

• They're cheap (but of course) -- in fact, I can get them from various offices around campus for free!  
• They're versatile; we can (and now do) use them all over the house and garage.
• They're easier than drawers and such (helpful to my son, who has physical difficulties using his right hand).
• They're easily replaceable (my sons tend to destroy a lot of what they touch).  
• When they do get destroyed, we can recycle them with other cardboard.

What they are NOT is beautiful.  I had visions of possibly covering/painting them with something.  Hasn't happened.  

But as Aristotle pointed out, every object has both form and function.  Even if the form isn't beautiful, how's the function?  Twenty months after I started this experiment, it's worth checking:  do the boxes actually perform as I'd hoped?

I declare SUCCESS.  To wit, here is an actual candid picture of N-son's bedroom.  Note the relative absence of things on the floor.

It is not actually the case that his organizational skills rise to the high standards set by his (somewhat obsessive) mother.  Note that both the "action figures" box and the "books" box both contain a bunch of books.  Tsk tsk.

But as I said, it isn't like we cleaned up anything for this photo.  It's very easy to get stuff off the floor and into these boxes.  When a real cleaning spree comes, it's easy to see if the boxes contain what they're supposed to.  And to my surprise, the boxes have pretty much held up for a year, with minimal amount of replacement needed.  Go figure!

If we need to relabel a box, it's easy to do that with a piece of folded-over paper and a binder clip (as I did with the "Special Dinners" box in my own storage closet below -- it's hard to see the label in this photo, but it works well in real life).

But speaking of putting them in closets, I've found serendipitously that these boxes fit perfectly into our existing closets.  Here's a box on the top shelf of our linen closet.

This next photo is supposed to convince you that I'm not really an obsessive neat-nik.  (Obsessive, yes; neat-nik, no).   The rest of the closet isn't nearly as tidy or well labeled, and that is just the way it really is.  So there.

For those rare, rare times when yard-sale-purchased gifts just won't do

Buying gifts.

This gift thing is a real challenge for a committed frugalist like me.  I'm thinking about gifts now because it's yard sale season, which is when I do most of my gift-buying.

For one thing, yard sales are a great place to gather up cool trinkets and toys that are very small -- come early December, we'll wrap them in a shoebox and send them via Operation Christmas Child overseas.  And speaking of children, this is a great time to get inexpensive things that my boys lust for:  J-son still fawns over the $5 lava lamp I got him two years ago; N-son loved his 25¢ Sponge Bob lamp to death, unfortunately.  The living room where I'm typing now is completely strewn with the wooden train track sets that cost about a jillion dollars in a real store, but that I snagged 4 years ago for $15.  So, yes, my boys will get yard sale presents from me for Christmas this year (and they're going to love them).

Even for adults, it's entirely possible to find great gifts at yard sales.  For one thing, most of my friends and family know of my allergy to stores, and they are cool with getting nice things that for some reason don't have tags attached.  For those people on my gift-giving-list who might be offended by getting second-hand items, I have to be a bit more careful, but I don't have to abandon my open-air-market ways.  Really, our society is just so over-full-of-stuff that people sometimes sell new items, still in the box, for pennies on the dollar.

But there are times when even I think a yard sale gift won't do.  There are big life events that just seem to call for something more substantial than the usual curb-side treasure.

For example, graduation.  I've had four family members graduate from college recently.  Graduation is a Big Deal in our family, and it calls for something significant.  But what does a frugal, stodgy person like me get for a Contemporary Individual of today?  And can I do something that honors the person and celebrates that achievement, while still remaining true to my own values of thrift, discipline, and all that other dismal stuff?

This was an especially hard question for me when I thought about my older step-daughter, one of the first of the next generation to graduate.  She'd grown up both in my house and in her mother's home, and the two homes had very different approaches to spending.  I mean, our homes were even more different than you might expect just knowing me.  For example: her mom bought her a brand new car when she turned 16.  My step-daughter already had her own computer and her own smart phone.  She had so many clothes that she gave her hand-me-downs to me.  It was really hard to think of something -- anything -- I could get her that she didn't already have, or that her mother's side of the family wouldn't have gotten her a better one.

At almost the same time, my birth daughter (who didn't yet know how to drive but who had taught herself to knit and crochet) was graduating.  For her, it was easier to decide:  she needed a sewing machine.  Yes.  She was, after all, flesh of my flesh, and we both knew she'd love taking after her mother in the mending and creating way as well.

Somehow, it dawned on me that I had the answer to *both* gifts at once.  Because although my step-daughter might not actually ever use that sewing machine, really, there's a good chance she wouldn't have ended up needing anything I gave her.   But my step-daughter knew how much I love sewing, so she'd realize the gift meant a lot to me.  Better yet, there was no way her mother was going to go out and buy her a sewing machine, so I wasn't about to get trumped.  [Since then, her boyfriend used it to make a dog bed for her dog, so I know it's gotten some use.  Score!]

And that is how I hit on the graduation sewing machine:  a gift that is substantial and fancy enough to be worthy of a graduation honor, but that is still consonant with a Miser Mom lifestyle.  My crafty nephew got his sewing machine a year later; my younger step-daughter is getting ready to take hers to grad school this fall.  She's already made herself a spool-bag with it.  Whoop!

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.

Underwater Dinner

Cue the Beach Boys music!

We don't have a video of N-son boogie-ing it up -- too bad.  But we've got a tall chair for K-daughter (who just got her life guard certification, whoop)!

 Goldfish swimming in their blue and green oceans (okay, really Swedish fish in jello):

 A Shell-fish dish (get it?  shell pasta and shrimp):

 plus rare fish sticks and sand (couscous):

 Here are some surfers ready to dive into the food!

 And the master chef is ready to dive in with them.

Family (Meal) Planning

After that very long post on food waste, I just thought I'd share two little pictures of my latest bit o' food planning joy.

I rescued from the trash a little white board that J-son had loved nearly-to-death.  I wrote the days of the week in permanent marker.   Each weekend, I add weekly events and meal ideas for the upcoming week in erasable marker.

I leave this out in the dining room, and the kids seem to love looking ahead to see what's coming up.  (Oooh -- this week we're going to have the Underwater Dinner!).

If it were just me doing the cooking, this would probably be too much work -- after all, we do have a family calendar in the pantry that everyone could look at if they want to.  But with 5 people involved in making meals, and with the crazy summer schedule making every week a totally different adventure, this seems like a great way to keep everyone on board (oog).  

A contrarian view of food waste

It's summer, and here in the verdant rolling hills of Lancaster County where our farms boast the most fertile non-irrigated soil in the nation, thoughts are turning to food waste.  The general consensus:  food waste is terrible.

I'd like to take a contrarian view.  I think that many supposedly-frugal people make much too big a deal of food waste, and that letting food rot isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Not necessarily a bad thing -- but bear with me, here.

It's true that my family doesn't throw away much food.  The food we toss tends to be plant matter -- apple cores, vegetable peels, coffee grounds, the occasional wilted green.  It all goes into the compost bin, where it rots -- just like all the other 146 billion tons of biomass produced each year in the natural world.  When we pull dandelions from our yard, we don't say "dang, we're wasting food!" (even though dandelion greens are edible).   A head of lettuce or a stalk of broccoli doesn't magically become some kind of sacred object merely because it got to spend some time in our fridge.

I'll even go so far as to say the same for meat; animals die in the natural world all the time without being eaten by people.  When I drive by a deer killed at the edge of a highway, I don't think, "man, there goes more wasted food".   Why should I single out a chicken for special "wasted food" status more than, say, a wild duck that met its maker in some fowl accident?

No, when we complain about food waste, the problem is not with the food itself.  In this case, food is a proxy measure for other things that we ought to be paying attention to.  Food is easy to see and measure, just like a child's height is easy for a doctor to measure.  Short kids and tall kids can both be healthy, but a doctor keeps track of a child's height as a proxy for catching problems that might be harder to detect.  In the same way, wasting food tells us that there might be other problems we're facing we need to be aware of.

Let's look at three arguments that people give for not wasting food:  each of these points at a problem that might or might not be fixed by eating that yogurt before it starts sporting those blue fuzzy warts.

1.  People all over the world are starving.
I'm a bit partial to this sentiment, especially considering there's a child we're hoping to adopt from Haiti who has lived through many hungry times himself.  But as any 5-year-old can tell you, you won't feed the hungry people of Haiti (or even of your own city) by shipping a few of your leftovers off to them, nor even by eating less food yourself.

The problem of world hunger is not caused by how much food you buy at the grocery store.  According to Oxfam,

Famine is the “triple failure” of (1) [local] food production, (2) people’s ability to access food and, finally and most crucially (3) in the political response by governments and international donors. Crop failure and poverty leave people vulnerable to starvation – but famine only occurs with political failure. 

In other words, the best way to feed people across the world (or even in your own community) is to donate to or work with organizations that can help to deliver food into the right hands.  Emergency aid helps a lot, and so does help establishing a stable and local food infrastructure.  Advocating for your colleges, restaurants, and groceries to donate excess food to food banks would be a huge help.  Eating those last few bites of cheese before it gets hard, not so much.

2.  Growing, transporting, and selling food takes up vast amounts of our planet's resources.
I agree.  A lot.  In fact, if you want a picture of what I call "waste", look at this:

(How many different ingredients does it take to
make this plastic-encased cake "unmistakably fresh"?)

 or this:

(Organic apples in a bag that will out-last my great grand children).

Even though we ate all the cake, and even though we ate all the apples (well, not the cores), to me THAT is the true picture of food waste.  So much of the food we buy comes wrapped in trash, and we think that's normal.  And the trash that our food comes in isn't even remotely biodegradable; unlike the food that it once covered, it'll be around moldering (but not composting) in landfills for millennia.  THAT is DISGUSTING.  

I'll say that again.  The food we don't eat but put back in the ground turns into dirt that can grow new plants that can feed our world again someday.  Plastic bags and foil wrappers are a one-way trip from "resource" to "garbage".   And that is a true waste, in every sense of the word.

Of course, there are hidden pictures of waste that go with every foil wrapper, plastic bag, and plastic-and-foil-lined-cardboard-juice-container.  Even if we can't see it, we all know about the waste of fuel and fertilizer used in growing and transporting all that food.

The solution to this waste is only partly to consume less food.  The solution, for any ecologically concerned person, also includes trying wherever possible and reasonable to purchase locally grown foods in season.  It involves learning to preserve food (or possibly finding local people who can preserve food for/with you).  It includes choosing foods that are less energy- and ecologically-intensive (such as avoiding processed foods; also possibly increasing the number of plant-based dishes you cook and moving toward meatless or less-meat meals).

The solution also involves paying attention to packaging.  Sometimes, it involves buying in bulk to reduce packaging.  For even more careful people, it means avoiding packaging whenever possible.  Over the years, we've learned places where we can buy milk in glass bottles that we return to the dairy for a refill; our market reuses egg cartons and yogurt containers.  I'm far, far from perfect . . . but I'm proud that as of June 19, our family has put out only 8 trash cans so far this year.

In my eyes, a person in Pennsylvania who buys two bushels of local, organically grown tomatoes in August (using her own buckets as storage containers) and then lets the whole lot rot on the ground . . . that person has created less waste than if she ate every last chunk from a tropical fruit platter encased in plastic and shipped from half-way around the world in January.

3.  Food waste means wasted money.
Okay, now you're talking.  Systematic food waste points to a kind of inefficiency that I really do get twitchy and unhappy about, even though (unlike the two other problems above) it is a problem that affects only the household that's tossing the food.

There are a gazillion techniques for making sure we don't let food go bad, and therefore don't have to make trips to the grocery for even more costly food.  (Here's a particularly pithy set of ideas).  I'll add one technique I haven't seen much elsewhere:

Practice running out of food.  And then, make running out of food part of your normal practice.

Actually, I don't mean running out of all your food -- one of my American-born sons lived through days of food insecurity when he was small, and it still haunts him.  But it's okay to run out of "Easily Spoilable Food A", and then switch to "Long Shelf-Life Food B" until the next grocery run.  For example, I buy a half-gallon of milk each Tuesday, and my kids all know that when that runs out, they switch to water until next Tuesday.  [And if you're worried about their calcium intake, I'll point to the three heads of kale they eat in one sitting, plus all the other leafy green things that scramble into our home from the nearby farms.]  Similarly, when school is out for the summer, I buy a bit of sandwich meat and cheese which goes down early in the week; then we switch to peanut butter or hummus we make from our vast stock of dried beans.

Other ways I make efficient use of food in our home:

Turning old food into new food
The pantry principal
How not to go shopping
My weight in vegetables with no plastic

But these cute little ideas for how to manage the food already in our house, they miss the bigger point.  The takeaway message is this:

Food waste is so bad, but not because of the food.   So the solution to food waste might start by thinking about what's already in our own refrigerators and pantries, but it can't stop there.