My green sweater

I snagged a cute green cardigan at our College's annual end-of-year yard sale.  This sweater passed three important Miser Mom tests:

1.  It was essentially free.   I did work something like 6 hours at the yard sale, but I would have volunteered even if I didn't get to do a bit of "shopping".  
2. I'd actually been itching to get a light button-up sweater; it would fill a gap in my wardrobe (as opposed to being redundant).
3. It matched my travel scarf (or rather, didn't clash with it too badly), thereby fitting into the color palate of "everything matches everything" that has made my sartorial life so much easier these past few years.

Sometime last week, the fall-like weather seemed to call for wearing a cute new (to me) sweater.  That's when I realized -- alas -- it had developed a small stain.  Darn.  

So I tried scrubbing the stain.  No luck.  Then I tried spot-bleaching the stain . . . which worked, in the sense of removing the stain, but failed in the sense of creating a big white bleach spot. I nearly gave up and put the cardigan in the "rags-to-recycle" bin, but then I thought, what the heck, might as well see what happens if I just bleach the whole thing.  I soaked the baby overnight. 

So now I have a darling pale yellow cardigan, with green-tinted buttons.  And still nothing has ended up in the landfill, so in that sense, my sweater is still green. 

Yay.

What seams difficult . . .

On Saturday nights, I listen to Prairie Home Companion, and I pay bills, and I mend clothes.

Except that now that my sons are finishing up 11th grade, getting closer and closer to the day they'll launch into the world on their own, I pay bills and have my sons mend their own clothes.

Fixing a ripped seam -- like the one on N-son's bike jersey -- takes maybe 3 minutes if you know how.  And I darned well want my sons to know how, and not to toss a piece of clothing that's easily fixed just because they're too intimidated by the process of pinning the fabric or threading the sewing machine.

The first time my sons asked me to mend some clothes and I turned the job back over to them, they panicked.  To me, that says that the lessons were all the more vital.  How did I let them get to that point?

I'm really pleased that by now, they accept the task matter-of-factly.  They know how to back-stitch at the beginning and end of the repair, how to remove pins as they stitch along, how to turn the needle so that it finishes up, how to snip the threads when they're done.

They're even sort of proud of their skills.  Sort of.  But I guess I don't have to leave that particular chore up to my sons; I can take on the the task of being proud so they don't have to do it themselves.

[addendum:  when I read a draft of this post to N-son, he replied, "Boo-YAH, I'm proud!"  So I guess that's yet another thing he can handle, after all.]

My foul-weather friends

Last week, when the outside temperatures were getting very cold (as opposed to this week, when they are getting very, very cold), I rode my bike downtown as usual, to serve breakfast at our local soup kitchen.  It's a thrilling sort of wonderfulness, breezing through a dark city so early in the day that I have the streets pretty much all to myself.  Just about every time I make that ride, I feel unaccountably happy just to be alive and awake, and I also feel yet again that I'm so lucky that I wound up living in a great city like mine.

So it tickled me that all the other volunteers and staff, who have seen me riding my bike every week for the last year and a half, were amazed that I would ride my bike in the cold.  When they pestered me about this, I used what has become one of my family's favorite Mr. Money Mustache lines:  "There's this wonderful invention; it's called clothes. You put them on your body, and then you stay warm."  Fellow servers kept returning to the fact that it's very cold outside, and I said "Yes, I know; that's why I decided not to wear my bathing suit here!"  They asked me how far I had to bike to get there; when I told them "2 miles," you'd think I had told them I had swum here from France.  What a distance to travel!  How could a person ever do that?!?

For the record, I truly believe biking two miles in the cold is more comfortable than driving two miles in the cold. I have experience with both.

When I first got my job here at my college, I was a single mom with a two-year-old daughter and I lived a mile and a half from where I work. The only thing the cold car had going for it, comfort wise, is that it blocked the wind.  Those winter mornings that I drove my daughter to her preschool (next to my work), she cried from the cold the whole way there, even though I dressed her in as much warm clothing as I could, and even though I then wrapped her in blankets.  That car ride was danged uncomfortable, not just because the weather outside was cold, but the entire car itself was a giant Cold Sink, one that sucked all the warmth from our bodies into the icy seats and frigid metal frame that surrounded us. Even if we had driven far enough that the engine could warm up, and the air inside the car started to become bearable, every other interior part of the car would hang onto its coldness for a long time.  Worse yet, our bodies were strapped into immobility, and we couldn't move around to generate muscle heat.

For a two-mile trip, the car didn't even allow us to spend less time in the cold weather:  what with walking to the car, getting my  bags in the car, and then parking and walking from a parking lot to her day-care/my office, the time spent outside of a warm building was just about the same either way.  Nowadays when I go on a two-mile trip, I put my backpack on indoors, and my biking starts and ends at the doors of where I'm going.

So the bike isn't much colder than the car.  In fact because I'm exercising (using my legs to crank up the ol' body heat as well as to move me along those dark city streets) my internal thermostat feels like it's at a much happier place.  That's why I think that tooling along on the bike is actually more comfortable than shivering in an automotive straitjacket.

Not that I'm a total nut about cold-weather biking, mind you.  The weather, as I've mentioned earlier, is currently changing from "very cold" (freezing temps) to "very, very cold" (single-digit temps).  And just the other day, after biking a half-mile to my dentist and back through very cold temps, I wimped out and decided not to bike the extra four miles over to our blood bank (nor back again, while drained of blood).  I didn't drive, either -- instead, I walked the two blocks to my office and caught up on paperwork.  And don't think that I didn't mentally beat myself up, pitting my own comfort against saving the life of a sick or injured person!  But despite the self-flagellation, I don't know when I'm going to go give blood, because four-and-four miles through the increasingly (very)^2 cold December weather is wigging me out a bit.

That being said, the older I get, the happier I get about being outside in winter.  It's not that my body is changing, it's that I've discovered clothes.

The first clothing epiphany I had was in graduate school when I accidentally bought a pair of humongously thick-soled Earth Shoes. The shoes were so ugly that even the other math grad geeks made fun of me for them . . . but for the first time ever in the post-frostbite portion of my life, my feet were warm in winter.  Ugly be damned: I could walk outside in January and not be miserable!  So even though my current shoe selection is much less of a fashion wreck, I make sure I have a good selection of thick-soled boots to get me through the winter.

Strategy:  I spend a bunch of time during the summer yard-sale season rounding out my boot wardrobe, making sure I have 3 or 4 pairs of potentially worthy boots waiting for me come December.  This usually means I buy a "new" pair of boots every year or two, so my annual boot budget alternates between $0 and $5.  Having four pairs of boots feels a bit like luxurious overkill, but I've learned I can never tell in summer which boots will hold up in snow and slush until there's actual snow and slush, and having a good selection of back-ups keeps me from having to resort to those pricey "thrift" stores where boots can cost a crazy $7 or more. I'm currently rocking a pair of Ugg boots I snagged with a bunch of other stuff in a "fill a bag for $5" yard sale.  

And speaking of clothes: tubes.  Tube-like headbands that go on my ears are, like, 50 times better than a hat, for reasons that I can't at all understand.  Tube-like things that go around my neck and keep the wind off my neck have made all sorts of outdoor excursions more comfy.  Somehow, I didn't know about these tube things until a few years ago, and now I've become a bit of a compulsive tube collector.

Also, the older that I get, the more I take to heart the wisdom of layered clothes.  Right now, as I type this, I'm wearing purple warm tights under my jeans, and I'm also wearing three different knit tops, one over the other.  I used to think layers made me look like a Girl Scout (probably because I first got lectured about layers while I was backpacking a lot with the Girl Scouts, and the layers we wore were waffle-weave long-johns topped with flannel shirts -- imagine that).  But nowadays, I like how the different layers add more color to my outfit, and of course they also help me stay warm.  Plus, I get to wear even more of my favorite clothes all at the same time.  Win!

So there you go.  Warm clothes have become my foul-weather friends, appearing exactly when I need them the most, and assuring me that they've got my back even when the rest of the world is giving me the cold shoulder.  I'm going to go cuddle up with another sweater right now.

A Tale of Two Shoes (or, rather four shoes, because two pairs )

This past month, J-son went the frugal route and paid $140 for a pair of "new" shoes for himself, while I went crazy expensive and plopped down $5 for mine.

Or something like that.  Our experiences are just a little story about how "anchoring" prices can affect what we think about what we pay.

J-son loves shoes.  He really, really loves them -- so much so that last Easter, instead of putting candy in J-son's Easter basket, I gave him a shoe polish kit, and he fell over himself thanking me.  He has a carefully curated stack of shoe boxes in his bedroom, each containing its own pair of sneakers.

About a month ago, J-son came home jonesing for a new (well, new to him) pair of shoes.  His friend's dad had bought them a year ago for $400, had hardly ever worn them, and was now getting ready to sell them for the low, low price of $140.  J-son had spent most of his money on other things already (snacks, movies, and other shoes), so he didn't have the money in his bank account, but he knew that his birthday was coming up and with that, he saw the possibility of beaucoup de birthday money dawning on the horizon.

You can take it for granted that he got the usual Miser Mom homilies delivered during his waiting period:  "A sure-fire way to blow $260 is to buy a pair of shoes for $400 and sell them a year later for $140."  "This is why you don't waste money on silly things like Quick-Mart snacks; because you won't have money for things you care about."  "Before you got the last pair of shoes, you said that they were the only thing you wanted; how do you know these will be any different?" Blah, blah, blah.  He'd heard it all before, but he and I both know that consistency is a crucial aspect of parenting, and who was I to let him down on the consistency front?  J-son listened to my pearls of wisdom with good grace, even occasionally agreeing with me.  But he really, really wanted the shoes.

His birthday rolled around, and with his birthday came some birthday money.  I will admit that haggling was involved: J-son is super nervous about the prospect of voting, and his community-oriented mother hinted strongly that actually registering to vote (which he wasn't super keen about) might somehow be linked in her mind to birthday-shoe money (which she wasn't super keen about).  Voter registration happened, and birthday money happened, and J-son scraped his money together into a pile and spent "only" $140 on this amazing, wonderful, long-awaited pair of shoes.

With the box.  Because the box is part of the package, apparently.

Are these not lovely?  Already he's told me he's saving up for a bigger shoe-cleaning kit.

About a month before J-son joyously emptied his bank account---and also pre-dedicated his birthday money, and would have given away his first-born child (had that been part of the asking price)---for his new shoes, I went through my own kind of anguish over whether to spend as much as $5 for a pair of shoes for myself.

The reasons for my recent shoe hunts are manifold.  Because of a case of frostbite I got as a kid, my feet get cold easily, even in the summer, so I wear shoes a lot.  I wanted summer shoes that I could slip on without socks, that had good grip (so I could bike in them), that I could wear with just about anything (skirts, shorts, etc),  and that were super flexible and light, so I can sit cross-legged in them.  My previous summer shoes (N-son's abandoned water shoes) had been perfect -- and free.  The pair before that, I found at a yard sale for a dollar.  But both of my previous summer shoes were wearing out badly, and yard-sale searches had turned up nothing.

I have a personal rule of thumb to try to spend no more than $1 for a pair of shoes, unless the shoes are so amazing and so hard to find that I agree to double that amount to $2.  The last time I violated the rule was almost three years ago:  while I was training for a marathon in a super-cold January and was worried about frostbite, I bought a pair of warm running shoes for the exorbitant price of $11.  I've tried to avoid a similar crazy splurge ever since.

So I was keeping my eyes open for a decent pair of summer shoes, but as yard sale season waned I was realizing how vanishingly small my chances of success were becoming, and I could feel my price point slipping.  And then I popped into a so-called thrift store and saw this pair for $5.

So expensive.  So, so expensive.  But the shoes were everything I wanted, and actually even prettier than my previous summer shoes. (Can you see in the picture that there's gold tint mixed in with the brown stripes?  oooohhhh . . . )  They've got great tread.  They're flexible.  They slip on and off.  They look great with all my outfits.

So I splurged, spending a whopping $5:  500% of my normal shoe budget and 250% of my "fancy" shoe budget on this cute little pair of shoes.  I didn't clean out my bank account or spend future money, but I was just as spendy, in my own Miser-Mom way, as my young and enthusiastic son.

Crunchy air-dried patience

Here's a picture of laundry patience:  clothes hanging up in my family's garage.

The "patience" part isn't that air-drying clothes takes a long time -- that's not the part of of laundry maintenance I want to talk about.  No, the "patience" part of this story is that it took my family almost two decades to get to the point of air drying our clothes.

It's not entirely true that this is the first time we've consistently air-dried our laundry.   Back in 2009, when my husband was in Iraq for a whole year, I co-opted little N-son to be my laundry helper, and we hung every item from every load of laundry that year.  Between boycotting the dryer and unplugging the TV for a year, we cut our household electricity expenses from upwards of $50/month down to $25/month.  So I know whereof I speak when I say that the dryer sends our money up in smoke, or at least up in warm, humid air.

But my husband is the Lord of the Laundry, and he doesn't particularly like my Darwinian approach to cleaning clothes (Darwinian in the sense  that I figure only the fittest clothes deserve to survive the washing machine; if something shrinks or turns color there, it didn't earn its place in my closet anyway.)  So I've been excluded from the laundry area -- not only from the washer, but also the dryer.

My husband does air dry delicate clothes, including most of his bike outfits.  He owned a large wooden drying rack when we got married, and early on in our marriage, I bought him (at his request) a second giant rack.  So it's not lack of supplies or knowledge that has kept us from air drying.

No, it's the crunchiness factor.  My "don't drive them crazy" directive means I don't nag my husband to conserve both money and the environment by making the painfully obvious choice to air dry clothes, but somehow my subtle opinion has become apparent anyway.  (Right?).   It is possible I sort of tease him about his frivolous dryer habit, but if that is so, I get equal teasing back about the alternative, which is wearing clothes that feel like cardboard.  Given the choice between wearing the figurative hair shirt of crunchy clothes, on the one side, or stylin' those soft outfits, on the other side, my classy husband chooses style.  And since he's the Lord of the Laundry, what he says, goes.

So imagine my surprise when, early this summer, I saw the drying racks come out of the basement into the yard, and then I saw actual clothes on them.  And not even spandex clothes, but cotton clothes.  And then I saw towels on the racks, too!

What had gotten into my husband?  Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- no, not at all. But I didn't know what wonderful turn of events had caused my husband to decide to air dry clothes now, after two decades of dedicated dryer devotion.

I asked him about this cautiously, not wanting to frighten him back into the machine.  It turns out that part of the reason for this new frugal-venture is our old frugal-venture: we have no air conditioning.  He decided that running the dryer just made the house too hot.  And the basement is too humid to air-dry clothes, which is why he moved into the yard.  A bit more experimenting moved the laundry into the garage, where it's protected from rain (as well as from a neighborhood skunk), and where the temperatures are high enough to bake the clothes into dryness overnight.  In fact, he likes this so much that I set up a long rod (formerly, one of my neighbor's curtain rods, which I trash-picked on one of my morning runs) that he uses to hang shirts on plastic hangars.

After nearly a summer of air-drying clothes, what does my husband think of this?  Well, he's realized that nobody in the house "seems to mind cardboard shirts" (his observation).  He might switch back to the dryer once the temperatures drop a bit more, but I think he'll be more inclined to take the air-dry option than in the past.

So that's how I "convinced" my husband to adopt this frugal habit:  I waited 20 years.

College used-clothing sales

Spring.  I'm reveling in the extra sunshine, the warmer weather, the robins that fill the baseball field on my walk across campus.  Spring.

And on my campus, it's not just the annual ritual of returning robins that has been catching my attention, it's also the annual ritual of casting off clothes.  I've found a group on campus to manage our annual and massive campus-wide yard sale that will happen once students leave, and we're gearing up for that.  Yay!

But elsewhere on campus, smaller sales are already happening.  I share this because it's possible there are similar things going on at campuses near other people.  To wit: the athletic department on my campus has a yearly sale on gently-used athletic uniforms.

In the past, I've gotten cheap jog bras and running shorts for myself here; I've gotten polos for my sons, and passed over awesome jackets only because we already have too many at home.  This year, I bought N-son two pairs of basketball shorts, $2 each.  (I also bought a board game that I can't name, for a sum I can't disclose, because it'll be a birthday present for someone who reads this blog.  Shhhh!)

By the seat of my (husband's) pants

Because . . .  patching a hole in the seat of the jeans is faster than buying a new pair.

(Cheaper, too, of course).   The seat ripped out right before a trip that my husband took to New York, and I got the pants fixed and back onto his body in time for the train, with nary a trip to a store needed.

But a butt fix is faster only if the jeans are still mostly good --- that is, only provided the jeans aren't so old and threadbare that I'm not committing myself to continually sewing patches on top of patches.  Alas, my husband's jeans are getting to the dangerously threadbare stage.  Eventually, I'll declare them defunct, remove the solid parts for patching future jeans, and toss the rest.  (I still haven't found a local place that recycles rags -- our local Goodwill says they toss them in the trash).

Oh, but ripped jeans can be one of the most comfortable pairs of pants to wear, can't they?   My sister, who lives in California, tells me she realized she needed to go shopping for new jeans finally when a fire evacuation caused her to pack up and leave her house for a few days, and she realized while packing that every single pair of jeans she had was ripped.  Comfy, but torn.

So, for  now, I patch his jeans -- the seat, the knees.  The end of the jeans is imminent, so this is merely a stitch in time that buys more time. 

Qmart versus Yard-Mart

On Friday, in anticipation of a round of applesauce canning, I made a quick bike trip to a store I will just call "Qmart" to pick up two dozen more canning jars.  (Dang, I keep thinking I have enough jars, and then I keep running out!  And Qmart is the only local place I've found where I can buy them).  Then on Saturday, after running up and down hills with my girlfriends, and before actually doing my applesauce canning, I biked around to a bunch of yard sales.

So, Friday was Qmart; Saturday was Yard-mart.  The contrast continues to strike me.  Friday I was looking for a specific thing; Saturday was just taking advantage of random opportunity.   Friday I was surrounded by shoppers who wanted to get more stuff; Saturday I was surrounded by people who wanted to get rid of what they'd already bought.

Melissa summed up the angst well in a comment she made on an earlier post of mine:

I now live outside of the US and on a trip back to the States earlier this year, I made a few strategic stops at thrift stores to search for things I needed. I was stunned at how every single one was stuffed to the gills with...stuff! I wasn't even going to retail establishments and yet every inch of store space at every store was full of the outcasts/excess of American life/consumerism. Made me feel that my gleaning was just as much public service as it was a matter of caring for my own family!

I'm so incredibly susceptible to the excess/gleaning argument.  I think the most depressing thing for me at Qmart was being line with a bunch of other people who looked like they were struggling financially, but were buying all sorts of kitsch that I'd see people selling the next day for cheap.  The guy in the line in front of me bought clothes for his 3-year-old daughter, all tagged and with plastic hangers and such, and he spent $180.  For little girl clothes.  Which are like, everywhere at yard sales, sometimes with the tags still on.  sigh.

But let's look at a few other aspects of retail versus re-use shopping, compared side-by-side:

Location

• Qmart:  Off a fairly major road, with nasty traffic and an ugly, massive asphalt parking lot. 
• Yard-Mart:  All the heck over the place, but because of that, on neighborhood roads.   I stopped at four yard sales Saturday.
• Who wins?   Yard-mart! (local roads vs. major roads)

Travel Distance

• Qmart:  4.2 miles round trip
• Yard-Mart:  3.5 miles
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (3.5 miles vs. 4.2 miles)

Ambiance

• Qmart:  Fluorescent lights, manicured shelves, huge lines.
• Yard-Mart::  Blue skies.  Wind. Fresh air.  I mean, wowwww!  It was a perfect day for being out of doors.
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (fresh air vs. fluorescent lights)

Conversation

• Qmart:  I heard the couple behind me in the checkout chatting (I got to practice my Spanish eavesdropping skills; yay) and the guy in line ahead of me asked the cashier a bunch of questions about redeeming points from the card he'd brought.  The conversation I overhear is all about what we're bringing home, or what things cost.  No actual conversation myself with others.
• Yard-Mart:  So much fun!  Stop 1, a group of  friends decluttering.   They're supporting each other in getting rid of clothes they no longer want.  I help by taking a hoodie.   Stop 2, a solo woman clearing house.  People keep asking, "How much are you asking for this?", and she says, "Just take it!"  She's cleaning house for free, and keeps giving her things away for free. We chat for a while about taking insulin and about health in general.   Stop 3, a family at my church is (again) decluttering, and we catch up on family gossip before I take a tank-top and a jar, and then move on.  Hugs all around.  Stop 4, a cute young couple is moving.  They say, "It's hard to think about how much people accumulate if they live in the same place for many decades.  Make an offer!  Take this stuff off our hands!!"  We chat about a sewing machine they're selling, and the conversation veers to their mother (who bought it and used it once), to wishing they could learn to sew but not right now.   
• Who wins?  Yard-mart! (totally)

What I got

• Qmart: Two cases of canning jars (a dozen wide-mouth pint jars plus a dozen quart jars)
• Yard-Mart: Three tank tops, a hoodie, and two or three jars, plus a coffee maker.
• Who wins? Tie:  If there's something very specific and urgent I need, especially something that doesn't appear in yard sales, then Qmart wins.  But yard sales rule for random non-urgent gleaning. 

What I spent

• Qmart: $25.42
• Yard-Mart: $5.75.   One of the jars I picked up, though, was a reusable milk jar from our local dairy; on Tuesday I'll bring that down to Market and get $1.50 back.  Whoo!   So all that for $4.25.  Not bad.
• Who wins? Yard-mart!  ($4.25 vs. $25.42)

The price of shoes at yard sales

. . . aaannnd here's a funny yard sale story.  I found a cute pair of shoes (with heels, AND with real tread!) marked "$1" a friend's yard sale. These shoes come with some local history; they've belonged to a friend of that friend, someone who we all admire as a fashionista, and yet the shoes don't seem to even have been worn.  Clearly a good deal.

But the deal got even sweeter when my friend who was selling them looked at me holding out my dollar and said, "Nah, you can take them for free.  But you have to take this Chia Pet, too."  

Too funny.

It reminds me of Amy Dacyczyn (author of the Tightwad Gazette) describing a yard sale she held "at which we gave away our entire collection of Englebert Humperdink's Greatest Hits, free with every purchase."

***
FYI, although the cost of yard sales shoes varies a lot from yard to yard, I've found around here that if I just wait until I come across shoes I like that go for $1or $2, I can still keep my closest fully stocked -- way too full, even.  

The exception is boys' and mens' shoes.  For a few years,  I was willing to pay as much as $5 for my sons' shoes.  Nowadays, I can't find any shoes that my teenage boys like, so they buy shoes with their dad at real stores.

What I did with the clothes you donated

This past week, we've taken a break from home-bound chores and schoolwork.  J-son has spent the week with his former foster mom; N-son and I have been volunteering with his church youth group at a giant place called GAiN.   GAiN is a relief organization with a giant warehouse about 8 miles from our home.  What goes on at this warehouse? People pack up food, prepare seed packs, sew things, and pack clothes and blankets.

The sewing was sort of fascinating to me.  Here's one group of sewers making reusable menstrual pads.  This kind of activity is so right up my alley.  We got to hear all sorts of warm-hearted testimonials about how giving these to girls allows them to remain in school, how women who got these danced and clapped because they wouldn't have to sit all by themselves on a pail one week each month.  Good stuff.

There were other large groups of people sewing quilts to send to refugees, both for refugees in camps and for those resettled.

Okay, but that's not what *I* was doing.  I was working on sorting donated clothes to send overseas.  This was personally incredibly fascinating to me. I'd heard about how many, many clothes Americans discard, but I hadn't gotten to see redistribution myself.   If you're curious, too, here's what I got to see.

When we say "lots of clothes" . . . well, this is what "lots" looks like in the warehouse. There are rows and rows of these "Gaylord boxes" -- triple thick corrugated cardboard boxes, about four feet tall.  Each one is full of unsorted clothes or blankets.  

To sort the clothes and get them ready for packing, a forklift would bring four or five of these over to the prep area. How do you get the clothes out of these giant boxes?   You throw several small and enthusiastic children into the Gaylords!

The view of kids in Gaylords from my Quality Control table.
Those baskets of clothes are getting ready to come to me for the first sort.

These kids were totally aDORable, and they had a fantastic time. For them, it was sort of like being in a ball pit or a trampoline park, because they took off their shoes and went playing in these boxes. In addition to throwing piles of clothes into laundry baskets for easy carrying, the kids did a lot of treasure hunting. "Look what I found!" They had infectious energy. (And when their energy flagged, we'd pull them out, send them to work somewhere else, and toss a new kid into the Gaylord).

From there, the baskets of clothes went down a series of tables:  quality control, sorting, pre-folding, and packing.  In the photo below, you can see the unsorted clothes in the Gaylords on the right.  The Gaylords on the left are "special cases" of clothing, and the tables where we sorted and prepare clothes are in the middle, hard to see because they're covered with clothes, too.

My job (with about a half-dozen other people) was "quality control".  I'd pull out some clothes for special treatment:  costumes, new clothes with tags still on them, non-clothes that had somehow made it into the clothes piles.  Those went into the Gaylords that you see in the left above, headed for (??  not sure, but probably somewhere appropriate, I hope).   I also pulled out clothes that were unsuitable for sending overseas for other reasons: any image of an American flag, or camouflage, or nasty stuff (skulls, obscenities).  Those clothes (which could make their wearers targets for attack in other countries) went into another Gaylord, I'm guessing for domestic use.

And then I checked the remaining clothing for quality.  Any missing buttons at all, and the entire garment went into the rag bin.  Zipper doesn't work?  Rag.  Any tears or tatters, including "fashionable" tatters, rag again.  (In a refugee camp, tattered clothing isn't a sign of wealth or fashion).  I checked for stains, especially under armpits and on white clothes -- rags again.

I know that when I've given clothes away, I've occasionally had the mindset of "well, someone could fix this", or "well, even though it's not perfect, surely there's someone out there who would appreciate having something to wear."  The people who trained me kept pointing at the rows and rows of giant Gaylords full of clothes:  shipping is expensive, and nobody wants to pay to send damaged clothes overseas when there are so, so, so many boxes full of nice clothes to send.

I asked some of the teenagers working at the Quality table with me what this experience made them think about their own clothes: does this make them want more clothes?  Or fewer clothes?  They all were wide-eyed at the incredible excess, and said it made them want to have fewer clothes.   We were at the anti-Mall.

The rags weren't destined for trash, by the way:  they were still going to a marginally useful future.  They'd be torn up and turned into rags, sold (one person told me) for 10¢/ton.   If you care that your donated clothes will actually be useful, it's probably worth cleaning them and fixing buttons, but if that's impossible, the clothes are still probably worth donating rather than putting in landfills.  Bea of the Zero Waste Home recommends that if you have damaged clothing you want to give away, to clearly mark it as "rags".  I don't know if that actually works, but I think from now on, I'm going to try.

What happened after Quality Control?  My fellow QC'ers and I passed the clothes along to the next table--the sorting table--where the next round of volunteers sorted clothes into adult sized, child sized, winter ("Siberian winter", we were told, not "chilly African evening winter"), and a few other categories.  They passed clothes along to either the appropriate Gaylord or to the "adult" or "children" table.

The next table of volunteers "pre-folded" each piece of clothing once lengthwise, smoothing it out.  The last table was the skilled workers; they finished folding and packing the clothes into wooden boxes about the size of a hay bale.  This folding and packing was done very carefully so as to fill the box as completely as possible.  Because from there these hay-bale-shaped boxes went . . .

. . . to the baler.  Below there's a fuzzy picture of N-son working a manual fork-lift with pallets and boxes.  He, too, loved his job.  The balers would dump the packed clothes out of the wooden boxes into the baler machine, which would tie the clothes into a bale with just two plastic strips holding it all together.  This bale was wrapped in plastic sheeting for protection, labeled with contents, and stacked.  The minimal amount of packaging helps to keep shipping costs down.

What an experience this was!  We were surrounded:  surrounded by things, surrounded by hundreds of volunteers, and constantly being reminded that somewhere outside the walls of this warehouse we were in a world with almost 20 million refugees.    So much, and yet not enough.  

update on People-Colored Clothing

Two summers ago, I decided to try to declutter my clothing collection in an unusual way:  I decided to keep only a few sets of colors of clothes.  In August of 2013, I wrote these words.

So here was my rule. I would toss all my clothes, EXCEPT for clothes I like in these three categories:

1. Black clothes, white clothes, black-and-white clothes.
2. Brown clothes, yellow clothes, (segued to include some hot-pink clothes).
3. Personally meaningful clothes.

The third category let me keep, for example, the blue Jackie-Kennedy-esque dress that my grandmother made for my mom. I admit there's a bunch of wiggle room in category 3, but I don't think I abused it.

I realized after I'd cleaned out my closets that I'd pretty much chosen "people-colored clothing."   I wasn't sure whether I'd find the rule overly constrictive (Debbie M. said she could never live this way, which I completely understand), or whether instead I'd find it freeing (one of the Grumpy twins told me that she lives happily on only one basic color of clothes, which I could sort of envision, but not really). Well, now I've had two years to live with color-restricted clothing, and I have to say it's actually been kind of nice.

Lately, I've been realizing just how helpful (and even how much fun) this self-restriction has been.  For one thing, I've been doing a bunch of traveling, giving math talks here and there, and each time I pack my suitcase, I pack light by choosing only sets of clothes that match.  That's a whole lot easier to do when I only have a small set of color choices to choose from:  Will I dress in black, white, and gray?  Or do I pack my  browns and yellows?

Because of my travel scarf, I've increasingly been going with browns and yellows.

Rozy describes a "pashmina" -- a wool version of a scarf.  Mine is a cotton beach wrap that my sister got for me years ago.  It's light enough that it can tie up like a scarf, . . .

 . . . but large enough that I can wrap it around myself like a shawl or blanket in cold airports and cold committee meeting rooms.  (Why do hotels chill their meeting rooms so much!?!)

Plus, it's sort of pretty.  

This spring, I keep reading bloggers who've been sucked into the giant vortex of "The Life Changing magic of Tidying Up".  Although I'm not sure I'd agree with the book myself, I've always admired people who go to extremes -- if only because their uber-extreme-ness gives me a chance to defend my own moderate extremeness by pointing at how much nuttier they are than I am.  To wit: I love love love, but do not want, to fold my socks so they stand up in the drawer.  Totally amazing.  Thank you, Erica!

Still, having enjoyed my three-category clothing experiment, I decided it was time to take it one step further and get rid of the blacks and grays in my drawers.  Here's what my drawers look like now.

Lest you mistakenly think I've become a Marie Kondo clothes folding convert, I'll point out that I'm really of the "roll clothes into cylinders and mush them together" camp.  My clothes are all visible, but not crisp and neat.

The current criteria is that my clothes -- with the odd exception of these hot pink shirts that just keep elbowing their way back into my drawers -- all match my travel scarf.  Now anything I pull out of my drawers will match.  Sort of.

My mom had a 1950's cookbook on our shelf growing up called "To the Bride".  It had remarkably (unintentionally) funny and dated advice.  One of my favorites was, "The cookie jar is the most important part of the kitchen.  You can either purchase a cookie jar to match your kitchen, or you can design your kitchen around the cookie jar".   As for me, I've designed my current wardrobe around a beach wrap.

If I decide in the coming months that I hate this restriction, all I have to do is enjoy my usual summer open-air entertainment (yard sales) and restock my closets and drawers with other colors.   But for now, I'm having fun having even fewer clothes, but more chances of successful and quirky combinations, than before.  

[Un] usual spending on clothes

Here is what Mint just told me.  Mint just told me, "You have unusual spending on clothes this month:  $436 in the last 30 days."  That amount is just insane.

What is even worse, though, is the line below it:  "You usually spend $50".  To which I say, the heck I DO usually spend $50 on clothes!   I happen to know for a fact that since yard sale season ended last September 2014, six or seven months ago, I've spent a total of $5 on clothes (for a math conference t-shirt I was sort of peer-guilted into buying on Pi Day).

No, the target of this particular little statement about usual/unusual clothes spending is not about Miser Mom; it's about Miser Mom's husband.

And we might have mentioned a time or two before that her husband is not a Miser.

Of course, I brought this up with him.  My goal is to practice a Don't-Drive-Them-Crazy kind of frugality, so I tried to be as neutral as possible ("Hmmm . . . Guess what Mint just said?"), but of course any money comment from me comes automatically charged with deeper meaning.  My husband's reaction began with denial.

"I didn't categorize it correctly in Mint yet."  

 Then,

"Well, it wasn't really all clothes; it was sports stuff." 

And it turned slowly to justification.

"J-son needed to dress up for school".

My poor husband.  He's married to a woman who believes that, even though money doesn't grow on trees, clothes do. Or is it that they grow on sidewalks?  Some of my favorite articles of clothes are things that I found lying on the ground while I was out running:  a decent pair of running shoes, a gorgeous sweater, a t-shirt, and of course the amazing flaming glove.  (No, seriously, I love that glove).

Indeed, one day after my husband took his credit card to the mall, a friend dropped off two humongous bags of clothes for our boys.

Free.  With really nice clothes inside of the bags.

So the whole four hundred and thirty six bit -- not to mention the you usually spend fifty bit -- well, that's the Stuff of Insanity.

But is it, really?  My husband, he's got his feet planted on opposite sides of a chasm.  On one side of this chasm is the Miser Mom he loves dearly.  On the other side is the rest of the world.  In particular, the other side contains the Lacrosse team and the parents and kids from J-son's new Quaker Local School.  The coach tells my husband, "We're glad to have J-son on the team; he merely needs [this list of very expensive equipment]".   The team says, "as a bonding and belonging thing, we are all purchasing [these costly jackets] that will identify us as an enviable social unit."   The parents say, "now that we have all watched our children play their game, we will drive together in our SUVs and minivans to a restaurant where we will turn twenty dollar bills into snacks".

And for my husband, what he wants most of all, is for my sons to belong.  My guy remembers being teased and ostracized in high school; he does not want to see the same dreadful fate rain down onto  these boys of ours, these boys who have already proved themselves to be at risk of falling into bad crowds.  I, with my overwhelming confidence, can afford to be a little counter-cultural, but my husband needs to pay dearly so that my sons are not.

And can I scoff?  I am, after all, the person who points to peer pressure and belonging as the reason I squandered my entire winter wardrobe budget on a Pi Day t-shirt. A $5 t-shirt, mind you.  But the reasoning is the same.

It's a tough question.  It's not that my husband and my boys love things for things' sake (well, okay, maybe the boys do); it's that the clothes and equipment they are buying are the tokens and symbols of the community they are glad to embrace.  There are ways to accumulate these tokens without spending money and time at a mall, but not everyone is as good as sidewalk harvesting as I am, I know.

But still.  $436.  Sigh.

Rich in Socks

N-son is hard on his socks.  Actually, he's hard on all his clothes, staining everything and wearing holes in the knees of his pants in the usual boy way, but also performing peculiar acts of mutilation, such as chewing holes in the neck and sleeves of his shirts.  Socks are merely another casualty of the general clothing carnage.  Heels and ankles develop un-darn-able holes so regularly that my husband (the Lord of the Laundry) has stocked up on socks, much in the same way that every August, I put up jars of tomatoes for the long winter ahead.

One consequence of N-son's vast collection of socks is that our home has become the Where's Waldo? of the sock world.  Take a gander around our living room; and you're likely to see random socks . . . under the couch . . . in the train set . . . next to the dog bed.  Ditto for just about any other room, including of course N-son's bedroom.  There are good socks and bad socks, whole socks and hole-y socks, clean socks and ewwww.

Early this week N-son and I cleaned his room.  This was not the "productive-seeming-busy-work" kind of cleaning, where I send N-son to his room to rearrange and re-stack his piles while I work on math.  No, this was an intense, three-hour mommy-son-bonding version of cleaning of the room.  At the end, N-son complained that it was so devoid of junk piles that "my room echoes now".    It was that kind of cleaning.

At one point, we tackled the sock drawer.  I began with this little mantra on avoiding clutter.

How many pairs of socks do you actually need?  I think seven pairs ought to be enough.  If you have seven nice pairs of socks, we can throw away the socks that have holes or are totally gross, okay?

We spread all of his socks out on the floor and began sorting.  We counted out sets of "nice" socks . . . one, two, three, four, no--let's put this one in the "toss pile", five, six, seven.  Phew!

Then N-son picked up another pair of socks, and a look of dismay crossed his face.  "What's wrong, honey?" I asked.  "I like these socks," he said, "but I already have seven!"  His sorrow was evident.

Darling.  That's okay, darling.  You can keep them.  When you have enough socks to get by, you can get rid of the socks you don't like.  But also, if you have enough nice socks, and then you have even more nice socks, that's what it means to be rich.  You have enough, and a bit more. 

N-son, I told him, you are rich in socks.

This was exactly what he needed to hear.  These socks, he loves them, and they are his.  To be rich in socks; it's a good feeling.

Frugal active waiting

My new expensive shoes next to my beloved $1 shoes,
hanging out on the bookshelves.

I'm one of those people who likes to wait before I buy something.  I'm one of those people who likes to use things that I already have.  Don't buy stuff; don't trash stuff.  That's me.

I know the dangers of this approach.  Y' know, I had some sweet elderly relatives who covered their good sofas in plastic to preserve it for the day that the truly fancy event would happen . . . but no event ever was fancy enough to pull that plastic off the couches.  I've known more people than I can count who live amid piles of scraps and odds and ends, closets cluttered with buckets of miscellaneous tools, because they just might be able to use this some day . . . but they never do use those scraps and tools.  This past year, I had to grieve the death of a sweet guy who didn't bother going to the doctor until the coughing and weight loss were so bad that the cancer had grown to an 8-pound mass of evil within his belly.  We all have to wonder whether we'd still have him around if he'd just gone into his doctor's office right away.

So I'm well aware that procrastination can lead to a life where we always act as though now isn't enough, where we live amid the clutter of "maybe someday", or where we can jeopardize our own well-being in the name of patience and self-sufficiency.

And yet, I do believe we should wait for what we think we want.

Waiting doesn't have to be passive.  Waiting doesn't have to be avoidance.  Here are some ways I like to wait actively.

Have a deadline.  

I really want to have a matching set of silverware for my table, instead of the mis-matched, bent, and broken set I currently use.   But there's no way I'm going to buy a nice set while the boys are still living here:  not only are they hard on silverware, but when they get in a sneaky mood they'll take food (jars of peanut butter, cartons of ice cream) up to their bedroom at night, and then throw away all the evidence, including the spoons.  So I'm waiting until the day they move out to get the new stuff.  I'll even help them stock their new apartments with what tableware we have left.  Hah!

On a shorter time-table, I am often willing to nurse along a pair of shoes, or to do without a crock-pot, or to hold off on buying other household items until summer rolls around.  That's when the yard sale season opens, and I know I can often find what I'm looking for for nearly free then.  If I don't find, for example, shoes for the boys at a summer yard sale, then I'll splurge and go to a so-called thrift store where their shoes cost several dollars.

Use the waiting time to experiment.
I got frost bite on my toes when I was a kid, and ever since then, my feet have been really sensitive to cold.  This winter I started having a bunch of trouble with cold feet, mostly because of all the new/increased exercise I'm doing.  Biking 25 miles in 35°F weather makes my feet turn yellow.  I even had trouble after a 6-mile run on a cold day.  So I knew I was going to need to get different shoes, but the heck if that meant I was going to rush right out to the mall and buy some.

Instead, I paid attention to my feet in a variety of shoes.  Do plastic bags over my socks help?  (No).  There was a theory that having cold calves constricts blood flow to my toes -- did bundling up my legs help?  (No).  Extra socks?  (Not that, either).  Did the expensive neoprene bike-shoe covers that my non-miser husband splurged on solve the problem?  (Nopers).  Thick soles helped -- the hot pink running shoes I've done several long races in keep me warm, but they don't have good traction in the wet or snow.  Eventually I realized that my feet always managed to stay warm when I'm wearing a pair of boots with really thick soles, with leather uppers, and fuzzy lining.  Even when I biked around in 20°F weather, my feet stayed toasty in these babies.  This is different from my running shoes (which have a canvas mesh on top) and from my thin biking shoes.  So now I know what I'm looking for.

Practice gratitude for what is already there.
Most of our houses are already overfull, to the point that it's hard to clean or organize them.  So while I wait for that summer crock pot, I marvel at the odd assortment of pots and pans I already have.  I think of X-son down in Haiti, and I'm more humbled than ever at my shelves full with food from around the world.  I get ready to run, and I'm grateful for my health, for the clothes I managed to pick up for cheap at previous yard sales, for friends who run with me and encourage me.   So instead of thinking about my cold feet, I try to cultivate a warm heart.

Use the experiments to identify temporary alternatives.
I found I could do a lot of my bike errands while wearing my fuzzy boots.  While I was looking for a good new pair of running shoes, I could (temporarily) avoid the coldest days, do shorter runs.  While I'm waiting for summer yard sales, I can use the stove instead of a crock pot.  This is NOT a permanent solution; it's a matter of cost-benefit analysis.  If using an admittedly second-rate alternative 5 times allows me to buy the thing I want for $50 less, that's $10 per use.  Often that analysis makes the wait worth it to me.

By the same kind of analysis . . .

If waiting means extra damage or danger, don't wait.
The leaky roof that could lead to internal water damage: call a roofer.  The twitchy brakes: go to the mechanic.  The strange cough: get it checked out.  That termite: bring in a home inspector, and if needed, an exterminator.  Save those waiting muscles for those things where waiting saves, not costs, money or health.

When you can't save money by waiting, buy a bit at a time.
When I started riding my bike a lot last spring, there were a lot of things I knew I would need.  But that didn't mean I needed them all right away.  Instead, I gave myself the "reward" of one new thing per month.  Each of these gave me a bit more bicycle freedom:  first, the bike lock so I could actually do errands.  The lights, so my boys and I could travel together at dusk.  Eventually, the shoes and clips.  These were all fairly expensive (by my standards), but by spreading them out I got to extend the fun of the new purchases.

Know the market.
There is no way I would buy a coffee pot for more than $5; I know I can get one at a yard sale for that much or less.  Women's shoes size 7 and 8 are everywhere for cheap.  But it's harder to find larger shoes, or boys' shoes, and the kind of bike equipment I've been looking for is almost non-existent on the second-hand market.

So when I found a pair of size-9.5, thick-soled, fake-leather-upper running shoes at a so-called thrift store for $11 last week, I knew that was a decent price.  Even more importantly, these shoes were just what my experiments told me I was looking for, and my past yard-sale experience told me I was unlikely to find a pair like them again, even during the summer.

Stop waiting.
The point of active waiting isn't to wait for the perfect moment; the point is to help me make the best decisions I can with my limited amounts of time, money, and knowledge.   Spendthrifts blindly throw money at a problem; cheapskates blindly throw time at it.  But wise waiting involves opening up our eyes, and that will eventually mean opening up the wallet.

So yes, even though those $11 shoes cost five-to-ten times as much as I normally spend, I bought them anyway.  My buddies and I ran 10 miles the next day on slushy, icy roads in 15°F weather, our coldest, longest run of the year so far.  And my feet were still fine at the end.  Huzzah!

People-Colored Clothing Declutter

I wrote recently about how I'm drastically paring down my jewelry collection -- by "drastically" I mean I'm getting rid of ALL of it (except for my wedding ring).  I've gifted most of the collection already, and the rest of the assorted collection is getting ready to move into the hands of someone who knows someone who wants the rest.  From now on, as far as jewelry goes, I'll be happily nekkid.

This approach does not work, however, with clothes.  And I have a lot of clothes.  It's not that I do a lot of shopping; I probably buy fewer clothes than anyone in my circle of friends.  But because I take care of my clothes, mending as necessary,  they last me a long time.  (Right now, I'm wearing a black t-shirt from college, with my old dorm logo and the date "'85-'86" stenciled on the front.)   And because I'm nearly a half a century old, I've had a long time to collect a complete wardrobe.   So, between yearly yard saling, free clothes that just happen to come my way, and as-needed mending, I have accumulated a LOT of clothes.

I have so many clothes,  I developed a storage system for putting away the "off-season" clothes . . . and my system has evolved from two seasons to four.   I have so many clothes, that even with my "in-season" clothes, I've constructed elaborate schemes for choosing outfits for seven or even eight weeks into the future.  I have so many clothes, I spend my time fretting over them: organizing, deciding, categorizing . . . it's clear I've reached the stage where I don't own my clothes: they own me.

Alas, I can't do what I did with my earrings.  Even though I have the incredible career protection of tenure, and  even though I am blessed to live in a free country like the USA, I'd lose my job and my freedom if I just gave away all clothes and wore only my wedding ring.  Cold turkey is not an option.

Here's the problem with standard de-clutter advice.  They say, "if you haven't worn it for a year, get rid of it."   But what if you're an organizational, list-loving freak like me who takes that advice to mean, "Figure out a way to wear all your clothes every year"?    Should I really keep 40 different dresses that I wear two times each?  Because, man, they're taking up space in my closet, and they're taking packing/organizing/deciding space in my brain.

So I decided it's okay to come up with my own, completely arbitrary rule.  Rules, as any poet knows, do not stifle a person; they allow for creativity and flair.  Think of the difficulty of rhyme and meter; both of those are huge impositions on the English language.  And yet, when you do impose rhyme and meter, you get incandescent sentences, like this:

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Byron was a free-wheeling, rule-breaking kind of guy, but when he wanted to write something beautiful, he bound himself to the rules of poetry.  And, in my own less poetic or enduring way, I created rules for the closet.

So here was my rule.  I would toss all my clothes, EXCEPT for clothes I like in these three categories:

1. Black clothes, white clothes, black-and-white clothes.
2. Brown clothes, yellow clothes, (segued to include some hot-pink clothes).
3. Personally meaningful clothes.

The third category let me keep, for example, the blue Jackie-Kennedy-esque dress that my grandmother made for my mom.  I admit there's a bunch of wiggle room in category 3, but I don't think I abused it.

But even with the wiggle room of that last category, I found that this scheme let me do a very quick, mentally easy sorting-and-giving of clothes.  I'm down to about half of my former clothes, nearly effortlessly, and still loving the variety that's left.  Better yet, almost everything in my closet matches almost everything else.  

It was after I did the sort-and-give that I realized:  categories 1 and 2 give me "people colored clothes" (at least, in the sense that those are the colors we use to describe people's skin, even though of course those are mostly ridiculous descriptions).  I have no idea what that means about my closet and my clothes and me, but I sort of like it.

Clothes sorting day

The end of school has come and gone; the boys are home for the summer.  I've promised them lots of chores during these long, otherwise unstructured days; I figure if I keep my promise, they'll learn a lot; if I don't keep my promise, they won't mind.

Making shorts decisions.

Chores began in earnest yesterday.  Thursday was "Fashion Show Day", a day to sort clothes.  We dug through closets and storage bins and pulled out all their clothes, lugging them all into the dining room.   When I say "all their clothes", I really do mean ALL.

Then I sorted everything into piles by kind of clothing (coats, long-non-school pants, long school pants, etc.).  And then I brought in the boys to try things on and make some hard choices.

Kids' clothes have a way of multiplying; they're like the fluffy little Tribbles on Captain Kirk's ship:  they seem cute and harmless at first, but before you know it, they're everywhere.   The clothes seem to procreate in my son's closets.  Outfits in their dresser drawers start expanding, swelling to the point that drawers can't close all the way, and eventually exploding into scattered piles on the floor.  Piles of shirts and shorts seem to generate themselves spontaneously underfoot, behind the living room couch, in the corner of the dining room.  Even my own carefully tended storage closet seems to grow slowly denser and denser -- a stealth army of shorts and jackets silently occupying territory.

Two overflowing laundry baskets of clothes to give away.

So one major goal of the cleaning is culling the herd of clothing.  I set population limits and strictly enforced them.  For example, each boy got to choose his favorite seven t-shirts and five pairs of shorts to keep in his room.  They got to choose ten more t-shirts and pairs of shorts to store in the basement.  The rest, we donated.  We gave away huge amounts of clothes, some of which are too small, some of which are no longer loved, and many of which are redundant.

The mending basket, with notes to my forgetful self.

Major goal number two is knowing what I have so I can intelligently fill in the gaps during the summer while yard sale season is in full swing.  The boys have more t-shirts than they would need even if they were an entire football team.  And somehow we accidentally acquired/inherited/bred enough school shorts to last them until they are old enough to run for president.  But long-sleeved school shirts?  Those are a rarer beast.  So I'll pick up nice school shirts if I can find them cheap enough, but I'll steer clear of shorts.

For this reason, labeling boxes and bins as I go along is crucial.   Man, do I love labels!  For an absent-minded professor like me, they're like "external memory".  I keep a stack of pre-cycled paper (paper with one side blank, that is) and a dark magic marker to label piles, bins, baskets, and even individual clothes as I go along.  With so many piles, it's just too easy to forget what's what.

 I label individual clothes that need mending.  I label boxes with what's inside them.  And when everything is sorted, I go through the boxes and make counts of what's inside, so I know what kinds and sizes of clothes I need to scout around for.  And I know what NOT to shop for, too (dang, how did we wind up with so many pairs of school shorts?)

Keeping a record of what clothes we have,
and therefore what areas of the wardrobe are running thin.

This, I won't kid myself, is a lot of work.  It took us probably two or three hours, including carrying baskets, trying things on, and cajoling and threats.  We took breaks to meet a friend, and another break for some yummy homemade granola snacks.   But  the work is behind us now and the clean, well-labeled storage area is smiling out at me at last.

The boys have relatively spacious closets and dressers.  The clothes are ready to go forth and multiply once again.

Get Over Yourself (or, Liberal praise for a Conservative approach to clothes)

I don't actually think I'm a space alien.  I'm pretty sure if you saw me, you wouldn't immediately peg me as belonging some utterly unusual culture or special tradition, the way you might instantly pick out the Amish who live in my county as being unlike yourself.

But when it comes to buying and wearing clothes, I do often feel like a Martian among Earthlings.  I'm the alien observer, the visitor from some other planet.  I have a hard time following ordinary conversations about shopping and dressing.   My best friends all know this.  So when they talk about clothes, they do the important part of their talk among themselves, and they only bring me into the conversation at the end, once the business part of the conversation is out of the way.  After all, who wants to hand over urgent Earthly matters to a Martian?

Case in point: a recent conversation about wearing bathing suits.  This was a discussion between my running buddies TL and K, and I just happened to be there for the conversation because, well, because we were running together.  I was there, but mostly I wasn't talking because of two reasons: one reason is the whole "what exactly do you say?" problem  I have with normal clothes conversations, and the second is that TL and K are way better at running up hills, which is what we happened to be doing at the time (if you can call what I was doing on that hill 'running', which is another matter.)

So I got to be the alien observer.  The gist of the conversation happened to be that K had bought a swim suit that either had or didn't have a butt-skirt (I forget which way it went), and she was having a difficult time wearing it to the pool with her kids.  The difficulty she had was because of how she looks in it.  (Please remember that K is beating me up this mile-long hill as she says this; she's an incredibly fit person who is worried about how she looks in a swim suit).

TL (who is likewise bounding, gazelle-like, up this hill) commiserates.  There is much discussion of how a suit looks on us, of how we feel about how our suit looks, about our need to accept our bodies (or our swim suit styles? I forget), and of coming to terms with appearances and such.  I couldn't take notes, so I don't remember it all, but if you're an Earthling I'm sure you can fill in the details.

We got to the top of that evil Duke-Street-hill about the same time that TL and K seem to have achieved some kind of resolution.  At this point, it was okay to bring in the Martian perspective, so TL turned to me and say, "And what about you?  You always  have a different take on this kind of question.  Do you like how you look in your bathing suit?"

What does the Martian think?  The Martian thinks they're asking the wrong question.

Here's the question the Miser Mom Martian thinks about:  why am I wearing the swim suit?

Sometimes, it's to accomplish a particular task (for example, getting in a swim workout).  In that case, what I think about is how well the suit fits and how well it lets me do my workout.

The other reason to wear a swim suit -- the big cultural reason -- is to show respect for the people and the circumstances around me.  That is, when I go to the pool with my kids, I wear a swimsuit to respect the pool tradition.  In my head, it's not about me, it's about the other swimmers and sun bathers.  And if I'm wearing a suit that respects local conventions, then I don't have to worry about myself; I can think about everything else:  my kids, the people around me, swimming, conversations, etc.

Mariah Carey wore her ball gown to the pool,
but that was a special occasion (her fifth wedding anniversary).

Here's another way to think about it.  I may or may not "look good" in a swim suit; I may or may not look good in a ball gown as well.  But I wouldn't wear a swim suit to a fancy dinner, and I wouldn't wear a ball gown to the pool.  The reason for the clothes is the event, not my own body.  Said another way, it's not about me; it's about the occasion.  That's actually a very liberating way to dress.

Maybe because I read so many old novels and devoured Miss Manners etiquette columns as a kid, I tend to think in old-fashioned ways about the role of costuming.  (My clothes are funky and a bit eccentric, but my thinking about them is old and crusty).  One hundred years or so ago, we didn't talk so much about self-expression and personal freedoms.  Our language and our society in those days focused much more on the collective.  It's only very recently that we've come to think our clothes define us, rather than thinking that our clothes are a tool for binding us more closely to the social fabric.  And --- as the conversation between  TL and K shows --- I don't think that the change has necessarily made us happier.

My husband heard the first part of this post and asked me, "So, what does that mean about the swim suit?  Should she wear the suit with the butt-skirt or not?"  Bzzzt!  Wrong question again!  The clothes decision goes like this:  "I'm taking my kids to the pool so that we can have fun together and with other people at the pool.  What clothes will allow me to do that?"   The answer will depend on community standards and tradition (does this more-or-less match what other people might wear?)  and also on functionality and fit (does the suit allow me to move around on deck and in the pool?).

After that, the best way to look good in your suit is to stop caring about how you look, but instead to enjoy the pool and the people around you.