Fan Mail Friday (2)

Fan Mail Friday again -- once again, this means mail that I am a fan of.

For this first link, I owe a huge thank-you to my student Steph.  She's graduating tomorrow, and none of you has any idea how incredibly proud I am of her.  She thinks of herself as my acolyte, but really I've learned so much from her.  We're a mutual admiration society.

As our family continues our two-trash-cans-per-month experiment, we've been put to shame not by an amazing family, but by a whole amazing town. Kamikatsu, Japan is a town with no trash. But like our family, this means multiple disposal bins -- in their case, 34 different kinds of recycling bins, It's really rather mind-boggling.

http://gimundo.com/news/article/the-town-without-trash-kamikatsu-japan/

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Our CSA deliveries started this week; green vegetables have started arriving. Yay! I've longed for this week for several months now. Does getting fresh vegetables this way save money? For me, it's yet another way to avoid stores -- that's a huge plus, and I think the psychological benefits of not-shopping are significant. You could say it's the "lead us not into temptation" form of grocery-getting. Too, there are indirect health benefits of eating organic, locally produced vegetables, or at least that's the prevailing wisdom.  But if we did a side-by-side comparison, perhaps my food would appear to be the financial splurge.

So imagine my surprise/delight this past week, when I got this very proud email from our local Farmer's Market, saying that all those rumors you hear about farmer's markets being more expensive? Not true! Or so they say. Here's an excerpt:

The Truth about Prices at Farmers Markets

You've probably heard that buying from farmers markets is more expensive than buying from a grocery store. We want to debunk some of these myths. More and more research is being done that compares prices at farmers markets with those in grocery stores. And the numbers may surprise you.

According to research done by the Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance and the results of another study reported by KOMO News, a Seattle-based news network, certain produce is definitely lower in cost when bought at a market. This was the case for collard greens, which only cost 75 cents a local farmers market compared to a range of $1.33 to $2.49 at other grocery stories. While this may not be the case for all produce, the article estimates an average of 62 cents of savings for a variety of produce compared with grocery store prices.

Well, I don't know that this report is exactly unbiased, or even that I myself can safely compare prices.  I've become such a fan of eating in-season veggies whenever possible that I just went through two-months of vegetable celibacy, waiting for the lettuce of May to arrive.  Not exactly an example other people would want to emulate.  In some ways, thought, that's what this report says:  if you buy locally produced, in-season vegetables, they're cheaper at a market than imported-from-Chile vegetables from the grocery store.  I suppose I can believe that.

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And finally, here's a blog post that I've stored away and read over-and-over.  I don't home-school my kids, but I'm getting ready to "home camp" them this summer.  The boys are getting too old for regular summer camps, but they're too new to our home to be left to themselves all day.  I'm honestly more than a little nervous about how the summer is going to go.

So, of course, I am making lists.

And what am I making lists of?  Of things we can do together.  Of things they can do without me.  Of things cheap and interesting.  And a huge inspiration behind this particular collection of lists was a post on "Get Rich Slowly" called, Be a budget traveler, in your own town.    There will be updates on this adventure in the future, no doubt.

Charity envelopes

Putting our money where our mouth is.  That's what I talked about yesterday.

I have this love/grief relationship with charities.  I really want to support things bigger than myself, but I hate getting buried in paper just because I sent a check.  I spend a lot of time requesting to be taken off of extra mailing lists.  But what about all those envelopes from the charities I do give to?

I collect my envelopes up all year long.  Some of the nonprofits send me so much mail that my check probably doesn't go very far.  The NAACP, for example, has me on their list under two different spellings of my name -- even though I have repeatedly (meaning, many many times) asked them to fix that.  So I get all mailings from them twice.  And Doctors without Borders sends me about a gazillion reply envelopes a year with REAL stamps on them.  They're throwing their money away -- or worse, they're mailing their money to other people, who throw the money away for them.  Sheesh.

Reply envelopes with real stamps on them.
All from the same place.

All year long, I collect all requests. For those places I know for sure I don't want to give to, I write back asking them to remove me from their list, just so I don't get buried under notecards and goofy mailing labels.  The places I might eventually give to, I save in a slot in my desk.  Every once in a while, I go through and cull the duplicates, just so I can fit all my envelopes back in the "charity" slot.

Once a year, I pull all the envelopes out and sort them.  Okay, here comes the geeky part.  Yes, I alphabetize my charity envelopes.  I sort them out on the floor.  I cull down to just one reply envelope from each place.

I remove all the stamps from the many Doctors without Borders reply envelopes.  It is some weird kind of frugality I have, I know, that I'm mailing out $2000 in charity checks, while carefully ungluing unused stamps, and carefully re-gluing them to other envelopes.  I just can't throw that money in the trash.

I'll wet the paper, remove what I can, and then use glue
to attach these stamps to new envelopes.

My husband and I go through the envelopes, making choices about which places to give to.  We try for a mix of global and local.  We also try to mix feeding people, healing people, economic development, environment, and the arts.  I am sure we don't have the right mix.  The world, it's full of need.

And, unfortunately, the world is also full of paper.  The checks have gone out; they're in the mail.  And I know what I have sent out will come back to me tenfold.  Unfortunately.

Where your Tax Dollars Go . . .

Where do your tax dollars go, you wonder?  More specifically, where do your tax dollars go in the Miser Mom Household?

Last year, when we officially adopted J-son, our social workers told us we'd get a tax credit for the adoption.  Honestly, we didn't believe them.  We'd heard the same thing before, a decade ago, when we adopted N-son.  It turns out that back then, our combined income was so high that adoption credits didn't apply.  Even though we didn't get any of that promised refund on our taxes, it was sort of nice to be considered too rich to enter that particular carnival ride.

Our big new deduction son.

So when we filled out our tax forms this past February, it was with some considerable surprise that we found out that J-son is considered "special needs" and that the IRS did indeed therefore want to share YOUR hard earned money with US, to the tune of $13,500.  Quite a tidy little refund, all the more so because we didn't really expect it.  (Technically, it's a tax credit, not a tax deduction or refund.  Either way, it's money in our figurative pocket).

So first of all, thank you for paying your taxes; I'm not sure you knew that some portion of your withholdings would be coming our way.  And second of all, I figure you deserve some accounting of where your money will be going.

First of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is (in a figurative sense).  I've been collecting my charity envelopes all year.  We do give regularly to a few places (our church, World Vision, United Way), but once a year I like to make contributions to other places.  On the list this year:  our public radio station, some environmental groups, several human rights groups, our library, local food bank and  economically based charities, a few schools.  All in all, we'll spend about $2000 on non-profits.

A Herbst appliance.
It doesn't look as scary as this
when it's inside a real mouth.

Second of all, we're putting our money where our mouths are, literally.  J-son -- handsome though he may be -- is getting braces.  Perhaps you can see from his smile above why he'd need them.  N-son won't be left out of the fun; he is going to have a bionic-man-esque contraption called a "Herbst appliance" to straighten out his jaw.  Because we can pay up-front (did I say thank you to the American tax payer?), we're getting a 6% discount from the orthodontist.  We also have some help from dental insurance.   We're figuring our household contribution will be about $8000.

My guy and the boy we hope will become X-son.

The rest of the money?  That will get plowed into what we hope is our fourth-and-final adoption, God willing.  That's the child from Haiti we met back in December.  I'm estimating that our total adoption costs for X-son will run more than $15,000.  We've had some (and by "some", I mean "lots") of help from our church and from friends.  And now, thanks to Uncle Sam and the IRS, we've had some help from you, . . . whether you wanted to help us or not.

So, thank you.

Special Dinner -- Siete de Mayo

¡Ayer por la noche celebrémos el Siete de Mayo!

That means, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo two days late.  Our special dinner last night was tacos and rice, but it was very colorful.

Hablé en español todo el tiempo hasta que mi familia se fueron locos.  (I drove my family nuts by speaking only in Spanish).  

The dinner was lots of fun, except for the speaking Spanish part (and even that was fun for me).  And the best part came at the end of dinner.  I put on a dance tape I'd bought on my trip to Mexico two dozen years ago.  

Yuri:  You gotta hear this.  Listen when you can get up and dance.

Yuri was a Mexican phenom; I might describe her style as a cross between Madonna and Joan Jett.  Way back in the day, I danced over and over to ¿Que te pasa?, and last night I got to include my family in the fun. 

Miser Mom shows her sons the moves.  N-son is bowled over.

¡Disfrute el momento!
Live it up!

$150

This week we spent $72 on food,

bringing our average weekly grocery spending since March to $150.

The first $70 we spent for the week is boring:  my husband bought oil, peanut butter, tuna, apples, and hamburger buns.  The last $2 of the weekly spending, that deserves a bit more comment.  Because it represents the tip of the temptation of the iceberg of summer spending.

Not food, but for food.  Some canning jars and a corn tool.

Technically, that last $2 wasn't money we spent on food.  It was money I spent at yard sales.  I got 7 canning jars and and a corn cutter, and on this treasure trove, I spent $1.75 (okay, so I rounded up to $2).  But that small amount of money is a hint at what's to come.  Because I have Lust in my Heart -- tool lust.  Here are some things I am e-drooling over.

Lust #1:  A Corn Zipper.

In a small way, I am drooling over the "Corn Zipper", touted online as a quick way of stripping the corn from its cob.  The cute little tool I bought at a yard sale this Saturday gets somewhat inferior reviews form the online critics, but at 25¢, I figure I can afford the experiment myself at home.  The pricier corn zipper may or may not breach my walls of temptation.

Lust #2:  A Cherry Pitter.

More likely to win success at drawing my credit card from my wallet is a Cherry Pitter.  We love cherries, but I grumble at the work involved at saving fresh cherries for winter months.  If I can convince myself that this dozen-dollar attraction is likely to save me effort, and in particular if it's likely to get me to purchase even more cherries we can can or dry, well then, I might get it.  I wish there were a way to test-drive a pitter.

But the contraption that's really, truly singing the siren song that lures me onto the rocks is this odd-looking creature below:  a strawberry stem remover.

Because strawberries -- those first fruits of the year -- they call to me.   For the past several years, we've driven a half-hour to the strawberry fields, and we've picked strawberries together.  By "we", I mean, my friend and I.  My kids pretend to pick berries but mostly get distracted.  I stoop for several hours under the warm sun.  It is a lot of work.  The picking work is followed by a lot of work washing and de-stemming.  And this is followed by a lot of work canning.

Two years ago, I spent hours and hours on strawberries, and I put up a dozen jars of strawberry jam.  The first time I opened a jar, my husband ate half of the jar at once, and then asked for more.  When I suggested we might want to save some for later, he said, "Well, I thought you made this so we would EAT it!".  There is clearly a disconnect between the effort involved in preparing strawberry jam and the effort to eat it.  I'd love to reduce the former.  The contraption above gives me high hopes.  I lust.

One potato, two potato, . . .

There's a field of research called "auxology" that studies two things you might not think are related:  peoples' heights, on the one hand, and average economic well-being, on the other.  The general idea is that if all other things are equal, a rich society is going to be taller than a poor society.  All other things aren't ever equal of course, but in broad generalities, the connection between wealth and health means that economic growth is an indicator of human growth, and vice versa.

The exceptions are notable and noteworthy.  One of the most studied exceptions comes from Ireland in the early 1800's.  The country was poor -- very poor.  There wasn't a lot of work.  And yet people there were tall.  Why were they so tall when they were so poor?  The cows in Ireland produced cheese and butter for the wealthy British, but the parts of the milk that could spoil easily stayed in Ireland.  Add those milk-leftovers to potatoes, and you've got a healthy meal, complete with most of the vitamins and protein you need.  As one article I read on the subject wrote,

High stature [height] of poor Irish in pre-famine Ireland is associated with their nutritious potato diet, lower work effort and relative isolation that reduced spread of diseases.

The fact that one-third of the population was "entirely dependent on potatoes" led to the Great Potato Famine, in which more than one million people died.  Okay, so mono-crops are really not a good idea.  That's an important lesson.

But another important lesson is that, if there's not a potato blight, then these humble roots are healthful enough to keep an entire island alive and thriving.  And if it's good enough for Ireland, it's good enough for me.  Our family loves meat-and-potatoes.  Our family also loves potatoes-and-meat.  Or even potatoes-and-cheese.  Or even just plain old potatoes.

Here's one of my favorite ways to cook potatoes.

1. Grab a big, clean plastic bag.  
2. Add 1/4 flour, another 1/4 crunchy stuff (cracker crumbs, bread crumbs, oats, whatever).  
3. Add spices (oregano, parseley, chives, salt, pepper, whatever)
4. Wash 5-10 potatoes and cut into 1/2" cubes.  Toss them in the bag, too.
5. Add about 1Tbsp to 1/4 cup oil.
6. Shake everything up.  Place potato mix (without the plastic bag) on a greased sheet.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for a half-hour or so, stirring once or twice.

Serve with salsa.  Makes great breakfast leftovers, too.  If it lasts that long.

Love is not enough

It's been one month since C-son joined our family.

Bringing a new child into the home:  all those classes and meetings we were required to attend beforehand warned us over and over, love is not enough.  Naive parents think that if they just love this kid, he'll turn out fine.  So we learn about post-traumatic stress syndrome.  And about recovering (or not) from abuse.  About ADHD, and drug addiction, and discipline.  About attachment disorder.  About kids who seem to be doing fine, and who suddenly -- 6 months after they've moved in -- pack their bags and sit on the edge of their bed, ready as always for the move to the next home.

They don't warn us about the overwhelming amount of paperwork.  That, we find out about as we go. (Getting C-son's medical and psychological records sent to the new doctors, making sure we can get his meds, and getting his health insurance card in our own hands -- that is still an on-going process).

C-son has moved around a lot in his life.  He's lived in 15 different homes, with 15 different sets of adults, and he's only 15.  It's hard to imagine.  It's also hard to believe that he's such a gentle soul, because he looks so big and tough.  But when he gets upset, he doesn't seem to get angry.  He goes hides in his bed, pulls his cover over his head, and stops talking.

Love is not enough, but it's something.  When he goes into hibernation, I've taken to reminding him that it's my job now to love him forever and ever.  That when he's happy and being good and the world is going his way, I'm going to love him and take care of him.  But when he's feeling terrible and misbehaving and things are awful . . . then, then I'm going to love him and take care of him.  No matter what, that's my job.

The other day, he got into a spat with his brothers and went upstairs.  For a little while, no one could find him.  But I knew where he was; I've had my sitting-on-the-floor-of-the-closet days, too.  I sat outside the closet, reached in, and held his hand.  I reminded him that I love him.  That I'm so tough, he can be mean to me and I'll still love him.  That it's okay for him to feel bad, because I'll take care of him.  After a while, I pointed out that there was not enough room for both of us in the closet -- did he want to come out and sit on my lap?  Get a hug?

He did.  We cuddled together, and then we went downstairs for my husband's birthday cake.  Celebrating together as a family.

Love is not enough.  But it's something.