The amazing trash-free Xeryp storage containers

The Turkey Lady at our local market laughed at me as I handed her my rubber Xeryp tray, but she piled the turkey on top of it anyway.

Our Turkey Lady has been a cheerful supporter of many of our off-the-wall requests.  She supplies the giant turkey legs for our Pirate Dinner; she'll soon get us the turkey bacon for our April 15 Money Dinner; she sold us the hot dogs that starred in our Zoo Dinner as Octodogs.  (Well, hexadogs, but still.)  And, yes, she was the source of the 3 pounds of sliced turkey that N-son inadvertently gifted to the dog.

Our Turkey Lady has also been a witness and participant in my efforts to reduce the amount of trash we produce.  Lately, I've asked if she can place our sandwich meats and cheeses in glass containers that I bring, instead of wrapping everything in plastic and paper.  But the glass containers make it hard for her to weigh things, so she's weighed the meat or cheese on a plastic sheet and then used that to transfer the food (plus the plastic sheet) to our glass container.

But this past Saturday I brought her my rubber Xeryp tray, and she chuckled, but she obliged.  The rubber tray is light enough that it doesn't throw off her scales.

The Xeryp tray comes with a handy glass dome that we can place over the meat and cheese we buy.  When we place the containers in our fridge, these glass domes seal the sandwich fixings just as well as any of those zip-lock bags do (better, actually, because those bags are annoyingly hard for my family to seal correctly).  The domes are see-through, so I can easily see how much food is left.

And bonus, if you turn the containers over*, then these glass domes hold messier fare; they're good for storing leftovers and can even go in the microwave.  Isn't that clever?




* If you turn them over, then "Xyrep" becomes "pyrex".  Get it?  heh-heh.

[Note:  The lids of pyrex containers are not actually rubber; they are, in fact, plastic.  According to this 2008 news release, they are BPA free.]

Saving money vs. saving people

This is one of those think-out-loud posts.  Definitely one of those I-don't-have-the-answer posts.

I know what the question is, though.  In a generic form the question is, "how do I plan for saving for my own wants, on the one hand, and giving money to charity, on the other?"  Am I saving money or saving souls?  Am I rich in dollars or donations?

It's a philosophy question, really, not a financial one -- although certainly the financial aspects poke and prod me to think about this in ways that are tangible and distracting.

For me, the importance of sharing is so important that it's already woven through almost every aspect of my family's financial life.  Automatic deposits?  When my employers pay me, they deduct a bit of money from my paycheck for United Way.  Checking account?  When I get my paycheck, I tithe to our church on the take-home amount.  Credit card?  Every month, my credit card bill contains payments for our three sponsored children around the world.  And that doesn't even include our annual summer give, or occasional random donations to our local food bank, or money we micro-loan through Kiva, or non-monetary donations like books and blood and food.

All this is to say, the question of how much to give to charity isn't hypothetical or rhetorical in this case; it's one that I bump up against regularly, the same way many people think about, I don't know, the cost of transportation.  It's just there.

I wrote above that charity is woven through almost every aspect of our financial life.  One of the biggest exceptions is retirement savings, because retirement is . . . well, it's just a mess of a 401K/403b/IRA gobbledy-gook of a financial code.  It doesn't have anything to do with giving; it's all about keeping.

I've known good-hearted people who were weak-minded enough to let charitable impulses wreck their savings.  That's not me.  In spite of all I think about how to give my money away, our charity:retirement allocation ratio is something like 1:4, so our giving still pales in comparison to our keeping.  We're solidly on track for me to be able to retire several years before my college officially allows me to -- in fact, I might keep working a few years longer than I need to just so I can earn the title "emeritus" and the perks that come with that title.

And all of this affords me the luxury -- and I believe, the obligation -- to think about whether and how to give more.  You can call it liberal guilt, or you could say I believe that the Lord of the Universe occasionally tells some of his rich young people to sell all that they have, give to the poor, and follow Him, or you could point to popular psychology that says people who share wealth are happier than people who don't.  I'm sure my real motivation is somewhere in the swirl of all of those.



My current dream-solution is a donor-advised fund, like these ones at Vanguard Charitable.  A donor-advised fund is basically money you invest in the stock market (in this case, an index fund), but you promise the money will all go to your designated charities.  In my head, it's the philanthropic counter-balance to a 401K.  If I opened up one of these babies, I could save for retirement needs in one account and retirement charity in the Donor Advised Funds . . . and so this one aspect of my financial life that seems still so self-serving could be a little more other-serving, too.

BUT, the fund requires a $25K deposit to open the account in the first place.  And every time I think we might be getting to the point where we might get close to pulling that much money together, other life things pop into the way and gobble the money up.

So for now, I just keep looking at our savings account, with its pile o' money roller-coastering up and down.  And I pretend in my head that I'm putting all that money toward charity, but in practice I keep spending it on silly things like dentists, or schools, or taxes.  I'm not even really sure that a donor-advised fund is the right thing for someone like me to do . . . but at least I get to keep thinking about it out-loud, even if I don't know the answer.

Miser mom's birthday bash

After spending so much of my life too young to really be able to truly appreciate the richness of all that life has to offer, I have finally turned 48.  Finally!  

An event so momentous and long-awaited clearly deserves some kind of formal celebration, and my family cheerfully marked this moment with all due solemnity.

To wit: we had another Zoo Dinner, sort of like this one.  Some family traditions just have to live on, right?

The menu included the now-familiar boa constrictor (a pesto stromboli), feasting upon multiple nearby potato mice.  Hsss . . . eek!

Of course, it wouldn't be a Zoo Dinner without the now-obligatory ham-bear-gers . . .

 . . . and the Octo-dogs (which were hexa-dogs, because it was easier to cut six legs than eight.  But shoot!  I forgot to take a picture of those!)

Some of the celebrants were animals, too.  We had a panther ready to pounce on the food:

 But fortunately, he didn't attack his sister, the zebra:

 As usual, we turned the chairs around so the backs faced the table.

 That's so we could eat through the "bars" of our "cages".  Look!  Do you see my birth daughter?  She's moved back to our town, and I'm so happy she could join us for this happy day.

Panther Boy (J-son) wanted me to show how flexible his hands are.  The more he eats, the bigger he gets, and the harder the Zoo Dinner becomes.  But at least for now, he's content in his little cage.

******

So far, many of the gifts I've gotten have been re-gifts, and much appreciated re-gifts at that.  My daughter gave me a large cast-iron skillet that she'd found while cleaning out her dad's home.  My dad gave me two books about women in science from my mom's collection. K-daughter went a different route:  she got creative and painted me a beautiful picture for my office door.  And even though none of these gifts were expensive in the usual sense, boy, do I feel rich.

Is it bigger than a bread jar?

In my on-going quest to reduce trash, here is one of my recent happy discoveries: a bread jar.

It was originally, I think, intended to be a flour jar or cookie jar, but I use it to store home-made bread.  I can slice the bread, toss the slices and all the crumbs in the jar, and then watch the slices of bread disappear as people snack.  No stale bread in our home anymore.

When the jar empties out, I use the crumbs in fruit crisp or other dishes.  Then I bake some more.  

The dog ate our lunch money

This is the odd story of why I have started paying my sons to eat sandwiches.

The background to this story is that the boys have started attending a new school, which I will here call the Quaker Local School.  (Doubtless there will be a post in the future explaining why a Miser Mom who hates spending money and an Army Dad who is active in the military put their sons in an expensive, pacifist school, but that is irrelevant to why I pay my sons to eat sandwiches or why the dog ate them instead).

The new Quaker Local School isn't part of our city's school lunch program, so our old free lunch program is now completely gone.  And so my husband -- who is NOT a miser -- explained to me that he put $200 into the lunch accounts at the school.

And then the lunch accounts ran dry.

And the boys have been at the school for, like, not very long.

The money ran out because the boys eat a lot, but even more, because they spend a lot.  Given their own middle-school version of a corporate expense account, they were gleefully buying all sorts of food for themselves and also for their friends who forgot lunch money, and so their lunch money ran out.

Then my husband -- who is STILL not a miser -- explained to me that he put even more money into their lunch accounts, but he put a $5 cap on each lunch.

It was at this point that our usual harmonious marriage, with our yoked-oxen approach to rearing children, became just a little more, um, discordant.

She: "FIVE DOLLARS??!!!   Let them learn to make and pack their own lunch!"
He:  "They're at a new school; don't make them stand out and seem weird!"
She:  "It's the Quaker school.  Everyone else has frugal moms, too!"
He:  "They already have so much difficulty keeping track of homework and backpacks; why load them down with one more thing to remember?"
She:  "Making your own lunch is a valuable life lesson.  They need to learn to do this now."
He:  "They already have trouble keeping up with their other life lessons; this will be just one more thing to nag them about."

And so on.  There is no agreement.  Even though clearly I am right about this, I can see that mere logic and moral certitude will not convince my husband.  And I have a rule for myself that I try not to drive people crazy with my own little miserly way of living.

So instead, I just offered a proposition to the boys.  We did a little math lesson: $5 for lunch each day means how much per week?  $25 per week means how much each month?  If you were a grown up and you had $100 each month, would you want to eat that money or spend it on other stuff?

Then I offered to buy them sandwich-making stuff.  And because of the don't-drive-them-crazy rule, I can't override my husband and force them out of the school lunch program, but I can bribe them.  So I offered them sandwich stuff AND a cut of the savings.  The boys bit, so to speak.

To kick off the make-your-own-lunch program I bought too much, really: $30 worth of sliced turkey and cheese.  My husband was delighted at the quantity of food, but horrified that I would force my children to bring lunch to school.  ("I'm not forcing them!" I protested, "I'm offering them the choice").

Monday morning dawned, and J-son gamely came down and grabbed some leftovers for his lunch.  N-son decided to revert to grumpy teen-ager mode, though, and he balked:  "Dad put money in our accounts!  We don't have to bring lunch!"  Later, when I had left for work, he changed his mind just far enough to make a turkey-cheese sandwich for breakfast.  Then he left all the remaining turkey and cheese on the counter and walked away.  And the dog, figuring he'd won the lottery, found the rest and ate it.

When I got home, I had choice words for the son who'd fed $30 worth of turkey and cheese to the dog.  But I also had a crisp one-dollar bill for the son who'd packed instead of purchased.

That one bribe was all it took to win them over to my side, really.  Since that day, both boys have gamely rolled out of bed in the morning, put together a home-made lunch, and brought it to school.  Along the way and on their own, they've learned the joys of easy-to-grab leftovers.  They've asked for lunch boxes (I told them to wait for yard-sale season to start again).  They've got a start on a frugal habit that will hold them in good stead all their lives.

And this why, each day that I come home from work, I hand each of my boys $1 for bringing a sandwich to school.  I cringe a bit at this, but I know the alternative is at least five times as painful.

she disagrees with e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;       - e.e. cummings

Syntax is the part of the kiss, too.

The body needs its grammar: if you and I are on the level floor

and I reach up to kiss you,

or you pull me toward you to kiss me,

then my neck bends back, back, ack;

it leaves my participles dangling,

and I misplace my modifiers.

No, I avoid the run-on sentence.

I prefer to head for the stair step.

When I stand on the first tread, with your feet below,

my face is level with yours:

our kiss is a happy case of subject-verb agreement,

and our clauses come together

with parallel structure (of course),

not to mention that our fingers become the serial commas

that punctuate this, and this,

and that.

How much more meaning there is

when nouns replace pronouns:

when “you” and “I” in this kiss become “dad” and “mom”.

We smooch barely within the sight our children—

our birth children, step children, adopted children—

who have seen other parents argue, divorce, abandon, neglect.

And now they see Mom grab Dad’s butt.

And now they see Dad lose himself in Mom’s gaze.

And they yell, horrified,

and also delighted,

because the sentence of  this kiss has denotation,

but it also has connotation.

They know that I kiss you because I love you,

and that I love the children we have gathered willy-nilly into our home,

and that with this kiss, their syntax-loving mother

is teaching her children with her roving hands and parted lips

to read between the lines.

Food in jars, in the hands of the next generation

Canning jars.  They're addictive.

The boys have been swaggering about the house drinking their water out of canning jars (quart-sized).  They've been using pint-sized jars for ice cream bowls.

The latest member of the Miser Mom family to catch onto the jar-craze is my step-daughter, who is currently in grad school somewhere out in the midwest.  I sent her canning-jar-bling for her birthday, and by way of thanks she keeps sending snow, ice, and cold weather in our direction.  But aside from that, she's a good kid.

She has started taking her lunch to school in canning jars.  She carries her own yogurt (she says the black spots are chia seeds) . . .

. . . she brings vegetables, like these tomatoes . . . . 

. . . and she also made her own sauerkraut.  

 In fact, when she wrote to me about this last bit, here's how she described it: "Just thought I'd keep you up on my latest (without actually canning) canning jar adventures...this is me in the process of making my first ever batch of homemade raw sauerkraut. Which, for those who are not aware, has WAY better and more probiotics than yogurt anddddd is trash free!"   [I added her recipe below].

The CJB (Canning Jar Bling) that I gave her for her birthday was a roll of electrician's tape, a push pin, and a ziploc bag sealer.  This "Salad in a Jar" web site describes how you can uses this trio of objects to vacuum seal a canning jar -- not well enough to preserve food over the winter, but definitely well enough to dramatically extend the life of the food, in particular salad.

And here's the result: note all the salad and smoothies that are ready to go to grad school!  (The little black square on top of each can is the electrician's tape covering the push-pin hole.)

 Isn't that pretty?  Now she can make up all this salad at the beginning of the week, take one jar with her each day, and the last few jars will still be crisp and fresh at the end of the week.

Speaking of "crisp and fresh", now I'm heading out to go for a run in the ice and snow my step-daughter sent my way.  Ah, fun!
************

Make your own Minnesota Grad Student Sauerkraut:

It's actually just about 1.5 lbs of shredded cabbage (red, green, and some carrots) with 1T salt.  You put the cabbage and salt in a large mixing bowl and massage it until the cabbage starts to get soft (like coleslaw cabbage).  Then you pack it into a large mason jar (you want to get as much air out as possible.  Then--put some kind of weight on top of the cabbage so that the cabbage stays below the level of the liquid it releases and leave it on the counter for about 3-5 days or until you like you it tastes.

When you like it, you just move it to the refrigerator and it stays indefinitely (at least a month and by then you've probably eaten it).

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-easy-homemade-sauerkraut-in-a-mason-jar-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-193124  <-- This is a link to a more detailed description/confirmation that even if you sauerkraut begins to bubble or grow a little mold it's fine/even good!