Provision

It's amazing how, sometimes, the Universe provides exactly what you need.

For example, back in May I wrote that I was having my own kind of money problems: in particular, extra money is starting to come in faster than we're spending it, and I have to figure out a way to deal with that.  Well, just earlier this week, the Universe gifted us with a $32,000 home repair bill.  See?  Problem solved! Life is good.

That home repair bill turns out to be not quite as large as $32K after all --- what really happened is that my husband had been noticing our basement drain has started smelling increasingly . . . um . . . sewage-like, and so he called in a plumber to check it out.  The first plumbers he called in are a local firm with a reputation for up-selling.  In fact, the day before, when we'd asked them for an estimate on installing a hybrid heat pump water heater, they pushed hard for including a water softening system (and we don't really need that).  So, when  their diagnosis of our smelly drain pipe included massive excavations of the front yard and such (to get at the tree roots that are clogging the pipe), we were impressed by the size of the estimate, but guessed there might be a more reasonable approach.

When they left, we sort of basked in the thought that we're at the point that a $32,000 drain-pipe repair bill would be hard-but-not-impossible for us. But we're not total idiots: we also called around for other estimates.  We found a guy we like --- with good credentials, a lot of good online reviews, and a  bounty of in-person helpful advice --- who can do both the tree roots and the water heater for less than the first group could do just the water heater.  We'll probably go with him.  At any rate, more provision: we need to get rid of hydrophilic oak roots, and now we think we have a way to do so.

Here's another serendipitous shower of wonderfulness raining down on me. Last weekend, our host daughter Y and I had a conversation to figure out some of the best ways to have her help out around the house.  She suggested that one thing she could do would be to help chop up the CSA vegetables we get once a week, since chopping vegetables is one of her not-so-secret superpowers.  And since, every Tuesday, it takes me about an hour to cut up everything we get, I was very happy to take her up on this offer --- in fact, I suggested we do it together, because (a) spending time together is fun, (b) she has admirable taste in music, and (c) I was sure we could both learn something about vegetable preparation from each other.

Y chopping some of the food

Well, little did either of us know what *perfect* timing this would be.  Because this week's CSA box came stuffed to the brim with wonderful food.  Somehow, the chopping, packing, and labeling the vegetables (with the assistance of Chris Thile and his mandolin) took us two hours.

Some of the food that still needs to be chopped.

So, gobs of good food, and a fun person to cut it up with (not to mention bangin' bluegrass music to round out the experience).  Provision indeed.

And finally, for your provisional viewing pleasure, here is a photograph of my basil in the garden where the stone cat likes to soak up sun. 

I planted basil early this year, and it didn't grow, and so I decided to dub this spot the Persistence Garden, and plant the basil again.  And look what a profusion of plants are there now!  Enough that I chopped most of the plants in half (leaving the bottom halves rooted in the ground to keep growing), used the top halves to make 8 cups of pesto, and still have profusive amounts of basil remaining in service to future culinary projects.  

The frugal hot awesomeness of scrubbing

I've been noticing this theme in my life recently, which is basically that "scrubbing is awesome".  In particular, in a myriad of ways, I've been seeing instance after instance in which mechanical methods of cleaning (with occasional thermal assistance) have won arm-wrestling matches against chemical methods of cleaning.

The variety of ways this has made a difference is sort of impressive -- teeth, bathtub drains, hair, cast iron pans, and teenage armpits are just a few of the scrubby areas of my life lately.

Teeth.

My favorite toothbrushing photo!

I've written about this a bunch of times; I decided to experiment with not using toothpaste six years ago, just as a curiosity.  What would happen? I'd read in the Tightwad Gazette that scrubbing alone could be enough, especially for people who drink fluorinated tap water (as I do).  And over the years, my admittedly skeptical dental hygienist keeps giving me gold stars for good dental hygiene.  I'm not an anti-toothpaste nut, so I could imagine that someday I'd go back to using toothpaste for flavor or other reasons.  But it's sort of neat to know that scrubbing -- brushing and flossing -- alone has been just as effective as doing those both with toothpaste.



Bathtub Drains.
We have an old house with slow drains, and sometimes the drains slow down to the point of not moving --- particularly in the upstairs shower that sees a lot of girl hair going down the drain, but also occasionally in the upstairs sinks.  My husband used to love buying Draino and/or biological versions of drain cleaners, and pouring these down our pipes, with limited effectiveness.  Ugh.  We were literally pouring money down the drains, in the form of chemicals, and our efforts didn't even help much.   And then I switched to an occasional vigorous use of the plunger.  And a plunger is like magic, it's so good at clearing those clogs quickly and completely.

Bonus, now that canning season has gotten underway again:  when I'm done with a round of canning, I pour the leftover boiling water down the bathtub and sink drains that have a tendency to give us trouble.  The boiling hot water has to go somewhere, after all, and this way of disposing of it cleans a lot of the greasy gunk out of the pipes, making plunging an increasingly rare event.  Another awesome use of brawn and heat (which are essentially free and environmentally neutral) beating out purchased noxious liquids in petrochemical containers.  Yawp!

Hair
Here's one of those things I am hesitant to share, because it's not that I actually think shampoo is an evil conspiracy designed to enslave the naive masses, or anything like that.  I don't like buying stuff that comes in plastic containers, but the shampoo inside the container is not my enemy.  Still, in the pursuit of curious frugal adventure, I've experimented with alternatives to shampoo.  Baking soda, bars of soap . . . there are other people out there who are happy with those alternatives, but I didn't happen to be, so I went back to shampoo.

And then, about a month ago, I read a blog post by a woman who'd given up shampoo a year ago, using only hot water and a vigorous scalp massage.  I figured I'd try it -- worst that could happen is that I hated it and so at my next shower, I'd use shampoo again.  I also, even more significantly for me, decided to forego conditioner as well.

And let me tell you, that my hair just didn't feel as nice in the shower.  Conditioner, especially, has me leaving the shower with my hair feeling silky, but showering without conditioner made my wet hair feel . . . crunchy? clumpy? Maybe a combination of those two words: crumpy.   And as my hair was air drying, it was still crumpy.  But once my hair dried . . . magic happened.  Because my hair was fluffier than it has been in years.  I really liked the way it looked.  And ever since then, knowing I could go back, I've kept the experiment going, and it keeps giving me the same result.  Crumpy wet hair, then  fluffy-happy dry hair.

If I were swimming (chlorine and tangles), I'd definitely go back to shampoo and conditioner.  I'm not going to be a prosthelytizer who preaches the sin of shampoo.  But if not using shampoo actually makes my hair look better, well, then why the heck look back?  Scalp massages in hot water it is!

Cast Iron Pans
After having a few decades of serial monogamy with non-stick frying pans (our old pan would eventually get scratched up, and my husband would buy a new one to replace it), about a year ago I convinced our family to go with cast iron.  Such happiness in the Miser Mom world now!  Even better, we bought our new pans about the same time that Erica over at Northwest Edible lured me into purchasing the "ringer", a chain mail scrub pad.  Several of the reviews of the ringer noted that a good way to clean these pans is to keep them hot, scrub them out with water (and with minimal soap or none at all), and then wipe them down with a rag and a tiny bit of oil.  It turns out, this ringer-thing works well on pyrex, on our old gnarly baking pans, the crockpot . . . really on anything from the kitchen that gets stuff stuck to it.  And although I still do use soap, I've been mightily impressed by how well hot water and scrubbing make cleaning up our baking/frying dishes so much easier.

Teenage armpits
I am saving the best for last.  This example didn't start out as the best, let me tell you!  My sons hit middle school and they both turned into walking aroma factories.  We got the phone calls from the school nurse ("don't feel embarrassed; we have to call lots of parents about deodorant"), to which our response was "Yes! That's what we keep telling these stinky boys!  Deodorant, yes!"  J-son, my fashion king, remained stinky for all of about three months, moving eventually through the larvae stage of smelling like Axe everywhere he went (a dubious improvement), and eventually emerging from his aromatic cocoon as a sweet-smelling butterfly.

But N-son, oh, N-son.  Nothing worked with him.  He'd stink like month-old-sweaty-socks-at-the-bottom-of-a-gym-locker, and so we'd send him upstairs for a shower and deodorant.  He'd come out smelling like sweaty-socks-soaked-in-deodorant.  Kids teased him, or they avoided him, or both.  We'd go to church, and I'd beg my husband to sit next to our kid because I couldn't bear to sit next to him myself.

The biggest mystery of all was why the showers didn't have the proper effect.  We'd load him down with soap and shampoo and send him to bathe, and he'd come out smelling only marginally better.  We gave him instructions on parts of his body to target (hair! pits! private parts!), which he promised to lather and rinse, but the sweaty-locker-socks cloud hung around him like dust clouds around Charlie Brown's pal, PigPen.  I couldn't follow my 16-year-old son into the shower to figure out what was wrong . . . but man.  Something just wasn't clicking with this kid.

About two months ago, he came home in a mopey mood: he was being "bullied", he told me.  I asked for details, knowing just what I was going to hear. He told me that kids were being mean to him, saying that he stinks.  And, of course, he did stink.  I mean, I didn't blame the kids on the bus for not wanting to sit next to him.

So the next time he headed into the shower, I handed him a wash cloth and said, "scrub with this!"   And when he came out of the shower, he smelled . . . fine.  Truly fine.  And the fine-smellingness of my son lasted pretty much all day.

And since then, he's smelled okay after showers, getting smelly only after vigorous exercise, at which point a shower (with washcloth) brings him back to presentable.  He hasn't had anyone tease him, either, which is a wonderful state of affairs.  He had one lapse, which turned out to coincide with lack of washcloth, but this lapse only goes to show that it's not a biological miracle, but a mechanical one, that has led to his new state.  I'm assuming (hoping) he still uses soap, but no amount of soap works without the added scrubbing assistance of the washcloth.



So, scrubbing.  Scrubbing with a toothbrush, with a washcloth, with a plunger, with a chain-mail scrubber.  But any way I do it, scrubbing has been making my life a little less expensive and a little bit cleaner than before.

Awesome.

In(ter)dependence Week

Independence Day, Shmindependence Day.   I know that July 4 is the day that the U.S. declared itself separate from England, but it's not a day about "independence".  We don't celebrate it by going and sitting in our own little rooms all by ourselves, do we?  No! We celebrate it by getting together with other people, sharing experiences communally.

So happy Interdependence Week, everyone!  Here's a few photos from my own fun gatherings.

Last Saturday, my running buddies and I kicked off the weekend with a "Red, White, and Blue (and all other colors) Run".

On July 4th proper, my neighborhood hosted a parade, starting with a gathering of the next generation,

and rolling over into a 3/4 mile traverse of the neighborhood

with an amazing variety of scooters, bicycles,

wheel chairs, roller blades, strollers,

and even paws.

And then, but of course, later this week we had to have a Special Dinner with our family plus a student of mine.  My host daughter Y was out of town, and J-son was off at boxing practice, but the rest of us dressed for the occasion.  (My husband was taking the photo; he came to the dinner, too).

Love the red-white-blue leggings on Baby A!

For the main dish, I started by making rows of white rice,

filled in between the rows with Tex-Mex, plus a square of blue corn chips.  

(I made enough for two of these flags, so we have lots of leftovers.  It looks like we'll be having Stars and Stripes forever!)

Dessert was the ever-popular (as in, "Please mom, make it!") cheese cake:

with strawberry stripes and blueberry stars.

Although serious tip-of-the-hat to nine-year-old Olivia, who heard about our upcoming dinner and made the following cake for her own family!  Way to go, Olivia!

And afterwards, we put together a puzzle I'd snagged at a yard sale for a quarter.

When we put this puzzle together, what do we have? Do we have the Independent States of America?  No, we have the United States!

It's good to spend time with others around us, and to remind ourselves of just how fortunate we are to be part of this larger, wonderful country.

Throw-it-together and give it a name

This weekend, two of my family's favorite racers won big events.  (When I say "my family", I specifically mean "N-son and my husband", because they're the big race fans; J-son is spending the week visiting his former foster mom, and I am not a race fan and mostly just get to hear loud cheering and/or groans.)   Some dude named Hamilton won some automobile race, and some other dude named Sagan won a stage of the Tour de France.  There has been much jubilation among the men-folk in the Miser Mom household.

I made dinner in much the usual way:  scavenge the fridge for random material, throw it in a pot, and add salt and oil.  This is a surprisingly effective technique for generating an amazing variety of yummy dinners as well as for using up good food that might otherwise go bad.  Adding a name to the dish makes it taste even better (my church group says, "I've never had Tyrolean Vegetable Medley before; it's fabulous!"  Heh-heh!  Neither have I!).

And really, even unlikely pairings of vegetables seem to go well together.  So here, for your gustatory pleasure,  is the recipe for

Hamilton-Sagan Stew.

Heat a skillet with bit of oil in it.  Add a quart-sized canning jar of sliced onions (because we're so happy we could cry) and also some finely sliced beets (because our heroes can't be beat).   Total bonus coolness: the beets turn the onions red.

Then dice up the stalk of celery that is still good but is too limp for your husband, who normally loves celery, and add those diced pieces, leaves and all, to the pot.  Because, our racer heroes are going to have an even bigger take-home celery if they keep winning.  And then dice some leftover sausage (because I never saw-such great racing?) and toss that in, too.  And add some salt because these racer are worth their . . . um . . . salt.

Good enough that everyone asked for seconds.  Even though the whole point of the meal was a pair of firsts!

N-son shows what's left.  He says that holding the lid like this,
he looks like Captain America!

[Here's a thank-you to my friends for your condolences on the last show of my favorite radio guy.  I'm recovering from my intense sadness.  A bit.]

Thank you, Garrison!

Tonight, Saturday night, I'm listening to Garrison Keillor's last show.  For something like twenty years (okay, maybe twenty four years), I've listened to this show on Saturday nights, paying my bills and mending clothes while I listened.  When I married my husband -- twenty-ish years ago, so after I started my Prairie Home Habit -- he started taking my kids to the mall on Saturday night, so I could listen in peace.  (Isn't that funny -- that my habit would lead to someone else's regular trips to the mall?)

In fact, when we adopted N-son, we gave him Garrison as a middle name.  He's "N-son Garrison Miserchild", because of my Saturday night ritual.

Even though I've known this night has been inevitable, I am so very sad about the end of that it's hard to put it into words.  I'm trying to console myself by doing my annual charity giving, laying out the envelopes in alphabetical order (the right-hand-column are duplicates), and then writing what feels like a gazillion checks.

Thank you, Garrison, for helping my pay my bills and fix my clothes.  Thank you for the stories, for introducing me to some of my favorite blue grass singer, opera singers, gospel singers, etc.

Hooray for wood! (and sun! and power tools!)

The wonderful thing about wood is that it can have so many lives, and it can fit together in so many interesting ways.  Like this pile o' wood on the ground, for instance.  This summer, I moved the fence that goes around Miser Dog's yard, shortening the perimeter a lot, and so we have a lot of boards that used to be dog fence, but now they're just boards, waiting for their new life as . . . well, as Adirondack Chairs and maybe another bench, possibly, but also possibly many other cool things.




This other pile o' boards comes from a garbage can from a near-by neighborhood.  It's a very wealthy neighborhood, and not at all frugal, so my Thursday-morning runs, which happen to coincide with trash day, are always part Treasure Hunt.  "Treasure" as in, I've seen bicycles, fans in working condition, Big Stuffed Dogs, and many other perfectly wonderful objects sitting at the curb, next to over-stuffed trash cans full of giant cardboard boxes indicating the newest additions to the inside of the houses.

At any rate, I often round out my Treasure Hunt Runs with a subsequent bike-with-trailer gathering expedition, and that's the way these giant garden stakes (or at least, that's what I thought they'd be) came home to live with me. But they decided not to be garden stakes after all, and chose instead to team up with a cohort of former fence boards to become a Solar Dehydrator.

Boy, is it fun to futz around in the shade of my tree on a sunny day with a cordless drill and a bunch of useful scrap material!

Last summer I had some desiccating success with a make-shift dehydrator, composed of a small mountain of pieces of scrap wood and screens and storm windows, piled up on my garden table.  I was so happy with that, that I decided to make an easier-to-transport version.  Last summer's version had two small problems: (1), that the garden table isn't easy to move, so my dehydrator missed out on some of the sun each day, and (2) there were so many various pieces of scrap wood propped around the screens and such that set-up and clean-up took a bunch of trips from the garage and back.  

Neither of these was really a huge problem -- in fact, the set-up worked so well that I'm still enjoying dried cherries from last year, which is a blessing because this year's cherries were killed off by the cold, wet spring.   But I've been realizing it would be nice to have a quicker way to get things out into the sun.   It's not just dried fruits and vegetables; I'm hoping to be able to convert pieces of this contraption into a solar cooker, and also into a "Magic School bus" that allows me to take my canning-jar-started tomatoes out to play on sunny days in April and early May. 

Here's what my new dehydrator looks like. At the bottom level, there's my trusty old Little Red Wagon, with the red side slats removed.  Sitting on top of that is a base made of fence boards, held together with a frame made of Neighbor Wood.

I thought I'd need a way to fix the base to the wagon, but the base is heavy enough that it sits there happily without sliding or bouncing off, even when I pull the wagon across bumpy ground.  Huzzah! Someday this will also be the base for an awesome solar cooker (like this old cardboard one that finally disintegrated) and for the young tomato seedlings heading out for their spring field trips.

You can barely see the wagon handle off to one side, but it's there!

On top of the frame, we rest the first screen.   I made a second frame (not shown below) that holds a second screen.  Off to the side, standing up, is the third frame, screwed onto plexiglass from an old storm window.

Here they are, resting skew from each other, just so you can see the various layers.

And here are all the layers -- wagon, base, two screens, and a plexiglass top, all together.  I'll be able to wheel this around so it stays in the sunny spots, and when everything's done, I can carry the pieces easily back to the garage for standing-up storage.

This is so much fun -- a sort of grown-up version of the wooden blocks and Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys I used to play with often as a kid.  In fact, my sisters and I played with those so much that our dad made us a set of person-sized "Lincoln Logs" that we used to build forts in the basement, playing together in the forts we'd built, and then taking the forts down to rearrange them into other configurations.

So I'm glad that I have a solar dehydrator on wheels now.  But even more, it's nice to know that I can still go out and play with pieces of wood in my back yard.

My "&pf" method of getting things done

This has been a summer of many medium-sized projects.  I think I've knocked out about four referee reports, a bunch of gardening, a new syllabus for my fall calculus class, an improved fence-and-gate for Miser Dog's yard, and a few other projects that don't come to mind right away.  I'm still working my way slowly through writing a talk for this summer's MathFest, and starting next week I'll teach a mini summer course for high school students who might someday become first-generation college students.

In contrast to my mama-bear-sized projects, I'm getting to enjoy the amazingness of people around me who do remarkable feats.  My friend June off-handedly remarked, as we were getting ready for this morning's run, "I'm a little sore today because I rented a jack hammer yesterday."  (A jack hammer?  She's so impressive to me, June is!)   And that same day, my husband on a whim rode his bike 165 miles to New York City.  And then, when he got back today, he took off on his bike yet again to do grocery shopping because "I need 5 more miles to get over 200."   That's 200 miles in 2 days.  Yeah.

So, I'm not renting jackhammers to redo my own concrete window wells, and I'm not galavanting about between cities on my bike, but I am keeping on top of my email correspondence and staying ahead of the weeds in my garden.  And and that's okay; I'll get to be overwhelmed again once the semester starts up.

No, I'm enjoying the chance to spend each day with a mish-mash of activities, circling back again and again to the same projects, seeing them slowly come together and then eventually get crossed off the "needs to do" list.  And so my daily "to do" list has this weird symbol in it over and over again:

&pf.

That weird symbol stands for "and plan forward".  As in,

• "calc syllabus &pf"; 
• "math mag & pf"; 
• "Leitzel lecture &pf".  

Each time I see that "&pf" I know I've promised myself I'll spend a small amount of time -- ten minutes, a half-hour, maybe even an hour -- on that project today, but it's okay not to finish it yet.  Instead, when I've spent some time on the project, I make a note on a future day to spend more time on it, and then I get to check that to-do item off today's list.

The time management world loves to talk about "big rocks first":  you figure out the most important tasks---the "big rocks"---and do those determinedly, filling in around the edges with the less important pebbles and gravel.  Because, they say, putting in the big rocks first is the only way to fit all that hard material into the bucket of your day.

(As a side note, I have to say I'm totally tickled at how many of the images that come up in a google search involve putting rocks in canning jars).

But for me, my projects this summer aren't dead weight, they're organic ideas with many implications that I want to think about, return to, and that could consume the whole summer if I focused on them without making space for other parts of my life.  My projects are less like rocks and more like this bush that I trimmed.  Once I put the biggest branch (which itself had lots of branches) in the wheelbarrow, there was no space for anything else. I had to take the big branch out, fill the wheelbarrow with smaller twigs and leaves, and pile the big branch on top.

A bush branch sitting on top of the compost heap.

So I do the little things, and I add the big things in a bit at a time.  The advantage of coming back to the same thing over and over is especially helpful if the point of the project isn't just to get something behind you, but also to get something new in you, or more specifically, in your head.  I want the mathematical projects I'm working on this summer to stick with me, and I know that we learn things better when we space out that learning.  So I return again and again to the same paper, each time bringing another 24 hours, or another week, of perspective to the project.

J-son has been working in this fashion, over the course of months, on building a visible engine from a kit that my father bought him.  Back in March, he got stuck (probably because he put something together backwards).  I packed up the kit so that the sight of it wouldn't continue to frustrate him, and "planned forward" to June, when school let out and he'd have daylight time with his dad, who is a total gear head.  Once June came around, I asked them to spend just 20 minutes figuring out what went wrong and how to move forward.  Don't bother to finish it; just spend some time together.  The point is not to get it done; the point is to be doing it.

They actually ended up spending almost an hour together, making a lot of progress, and seemed to really enjoy it.  And they only stopped once my husband realized that the timing belt that came with the kit was the wrong size.  But because they'd gotten so much further than they'd planned, they weren't frustrated: they happily stopped (for now) and contacted the manufacturer for the correct part.  Once that part comes and they attach it to the model, they'll have fond memories of having worked together, and they'll get to spend yet more time together learning about something that they both find fascinating.

It's a good summer.