Spending $915 on mathematics

Phew!  My computer is back.  I (well, my awesome Tech-Sters) managed to save almost everything, with the exception of random sets of photos.  So I'm going to quickly blitz through the post I wanted to put up last week.

The first week of May, I went to a kick-butt math workshop in San Jose.  I didn't snag funding to go, but I was fairly sure that the workshop would be good enough for me that I decided to pay out of pocket for this six-day trip.

doubles as a suitcase;
I left the milk/egg containers at home.

Not surprisingly, the biggest expense was cross-country airfare, to the tune of $565. I got to leave my discarded yard-sale books in Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago (but I wasn't done with books in the other three cities I spent time on the ground in); being willing to take multiple legs brings the airfare down somewhat.  I also packed everything for the week into my Market backpack, avoiding luggage fees.

Speaking of transportation, using the IRS rate, we spent another $50 on mileage to and from my home airport; also I spent another $25 on a four-mile taxi trip from the airport in San Jose to my lodgings.   Once I was in San Jose, I walked the 2 miles to and from the workshop daily.  (One mathematician said, rather wide-eyed, "but that will take 40 minutes!", and I didn't quite know how to respond.  "Um, yes, but it's actually good to spend that much time walking each day?").

Lodging was the next biggest expense.  San Jose is wickedly costly -- the nearby Holiday Inn was offering rates of $257 per night.  Clearly, I was not going to spend 5 nights at that price.  I tried hard to find friends in the area who might be happy to put me up, but when that proved unsuccessful (no local friends with guest rooms), one of my former students suggested AirBnB.  And so I spent $334 for the week -- plus, my host drove me back to the airport, saving me another $25 cab fare.  Awesome!

A former student (now mathematician)
and me, at a reception.  Yay food!

Another frugal win was spending only $16 on food.  I got lucky in that the workshop offered all participants (even me, who wasn't officially funded by them) a continental breakfast, lunch, and a late-afternoon reception.  So most days, I didn't eat any "dinner" but was still more than well-fed.  I bought $3 coffee in the airport, once each direction (can't take it through security, so that was the only way to get it), and on the way home I broke down and bought a $11 sandwich, because my trail mix and chickpeas had run out.

And the chickpeas -- that's what I really wanted to post about.  Because I've been bringing trail mix with me on many trips, and I *love* that I can eat it without standing in lines/generating trash/paying wads of money.  But it's dry, and sometimes I also want something with a chewier (meatier?) texture.
So, I don't have pictures (dang computer crash), but I just want to say:  roasted parmesan chickpeas!!!!  Here is a recipe from Michael Pollan.  Also, garlic and paprika roasted chickpeas!  Yum.

Plumbing with my son

One of my resolutions/goals/plans (whatever you want to call those things) for the year was to do a weekly house-fix task with J-son.  The reasoning was partly to take care of deferred maintenance around the ol' castle before my sabbatical ends, but also to give J-son himself some attention and care.  Time-In with Mom. Not to mention, Mad Skilz.

The nice thing about a goal like this is, even a partial victory leaves everyone better off.  Since January, J-son has gotten a lot of attention and skill-work from another direction (dad and boxing), so the weekly house-fix has been more like a monthly house-fix.  I dug post-holes and repaired the dog fence myself; I haven't gotten around to drop-ceiling repairs yet.  But at least J-son and I together replaced smoke detectors and fished toothbrushes out of toilets, so y'know, we're not at zero.

Here's the latest Time-In House-Fix: replacing a shower head.  I wrote a long time ago about how easy this is -- basically just like changing a light bulb.  The lesson of this little exercise wasn't so much about teaching the intricacies of plumbing work as showing J-son by example that the project is super easy.  

What happens if you get a new shower head and you don't like it?  Well, then, you just take it off and put another one on, silly!  The shower head that was in our bathroom was one I installed about 5 years ago.  After all this time, I decided I really wanted one with a hose, not because I need the hose attachment while I shower, but because having the hose makes cleaning the tub SO much easier.  So, I biked to the hardware store, found the most water-miserly hose attachment I could find, and biked it on home. (Cost: $37).

I handed the package to J-son and gave him some tools: wrenches and teflon tape. (It turns out he didn't need me to get him any of these).  He read the directions -- the little package in his hand is the teflon tape that came with the shower head.

He didn't need the wrench, either, it turns out.  Here he is removing the old shower head.



(Can you see the muscles?  Did I mention boxing?)  He got the old shower head off and the new one on so quickly that I didn't even have time to take good pictures.

Voila!

What she bought: grocery store and craigslist

I did two shopping events this week: the grocery store and Craigslist.

Shopping trip #1 was to an actual grocery store.  Because I almost never go to this place on my own, my husband inadvertently duplicated my efforts this week.  I'd taken the grocery list off the fridge; I'd taken the cloth shopping bags off their hooks; I'd taken the bag-of-plastic-bags that was marked "return to store for recycling."  So, I thought it was obvious that I'd gone to the grocery store already.

I bought $158 worth of stuff: 10 gallons of olive oil, plus a splurge on bananas and Chunky Monkey ice cream for Friday's Monkey Dinner, and---probably most urgent---rolls and rolls of toilet paper.  I didn't buy a lot of different things, but the things that I bought, I bought a lot of them.

And then my husband, thinking "we have only one roll of toilet paper left in the house", and (not seeing any of the signs that I thought were so incredibly blatantly obvious but apparently were not) did another grocery run, buying milk and cereal and snacks, and buying rolls and rolls of toilet paper.

So now we have rolls and rolls (and rolls and rolls) of toilet paper.  My husband, who was a PR guy for most of his career, loves making puns; he tells me that they're "professional development". And so he'd tell you that our cupboards are overflowing so our shopping wasn't money down the drain; that now we're flush with success; that all that shopping has left him pooped. And of course at some point he'd have to say "and that's no sh*t".  For my shopping efforts, he says "many tanks!", and that he's bowled over.   (Perhaps this is why I don't go to the grocery store more often.)

***

Shopping trip #2 was part of my twisted resolutions: basically, in trying to cut back on whiskey, I decided to emulate the FrugalWoods and buy a Soda Stream.  Because . . . well, it seems fun and frivolous (especially to my family, who say, "Mom bought a what?!?" -- it's fun to be the kind of person who can be shocking for doing semi-normal things).

I scoped out prices on Amazon for an upper bound, and then I lurked on Craigslist for a month or so.  Most units there sell for $40 to $50.  This past weekend, I saw someone advertising a moving sale with a Soda Stream listed, but no price.  I decided to try to aim low on the price, even though she was offering canisters along with it.  Here's our email conversation back and forth:

Me: I might be interested in the soda stream; I've been scouting around for one for about $30.  What price are you asking? 

Soda-Stream Person:  I would take $15 since I'm including the brand new canister as well as the partially full one.  How's that sound?  

Me:  Um . . . aren't you supposed to try to talk me into a *higher* price?  At any rate, I'm interested.  I have free time today before 5:30 to come by, if that time frame would work for you!

So, I talked her into accepting $30 anyway.  Because, karma or something.  Plus, y'know, our family is already flush with success.

What she bought: milk and monkey makings

Monkey brains, anyone?  Per usual, my lone shopping trip for this winter week was to market.  In addition to bringing home scrounged bagels and scrambled eggs, I bought my usual dairy and eggs, and I "splurged" (??) on a half-dozen green peppers that we'll put to use this Friday when we make "Monkey Brains" for our family monkey dinner.  More on that, later this week!
Total spending: $21.


And I love feeling all Miser-y over spending so little money.  Even though I know it's a sham.  Of course, one big, huge part of the reason that I'm spending so little on groceries these days is that my husband likes to drop by grocery stores at all hours of the day and night to pick up one or two (or twenty) items;  because he spends $100-$150 a week on groceries, then there's less for me to have to pick up.

But another huge part of the reason that I do so little grocery-ing myself is less sham-my;  it's because cooking in the winter often looks like this: grab some canning jars full of food that I put up in the summer, pull some dry goods off the shelves, and dump them into crock pots and bread makers with a smattering of spices.  Last night's dinner was soup (turkey stock, corn, tomatoes, and some rice), bread (warm bread and butter! yes!), applesauce, and peach/blueberry crumble (with breadcrumbs that I collect in a canning jar in the freezer).


In the summer, I feel like I spend so much time (mostly happy time, I admit) chopping and prepping foods.  Part of the happiness is just the chance to be near fresh vegetables that grew out of nearby dirt--to me, that continues to be a miracle of miracles--, but another part of the happiness is knowing that the Summer Me is gifting the Winter Me with the chance to have meals like the one we had last night: hot soup and bread on a cold night, pulled together with food that traveled all the way upstairs from my basement.

Yum.

What she bought: spilt milk and soggy cell phones

This week, as is fairly usual during the cold winter months, my only shopping trip was to market.  I usually bike there, making it a stop home after I've helped serve breakfast at our local rescue mission.  But the snow we got on Saturday was so humongous that there are still entire streets that are anti-cleared:  not only are the streets still full of snow, but the ends are blocked by giant mounds of snow (taller than a person), where the snow plows dump snow from the main roads.  My bike isn't made for snow.

So I walked the two mile or so to the mission, carrying my backpack on my back. Walking was kind of lovely, especially on the way there, before the sun came up and the cars came out.  Then I walked to market, and I bought dairy stuff: a half gallon of milk, some cheese, two quarts of yogurt.  $17.

***
And if the story ended there, all would be good.  But that wan't the end of the shopping trip.  On the way back home, when I was super close to home, I decided to stop walking in the snowy streets along with the cars, and instead to cut across our campus, where the facilities crews have been going non-stop with heroic efforts to clear the paths.  I should have stuck with the streets -- dang, why don't I remember that ice is always a worse danger than snow?

At any rate, I hit a little patch of sidewalk that had been cleared, and then had some snow melt onto it, and then froze over.  Invisible ice.  Whomp -- I went down.  I didn't hurt myself or anything.  But about a half a block later, someone noticed that I was leaking milk; the glass milk jug in my backpack had broken.

Six hours later, I realized that my phone wasn't working.  I'm not exactly addicted to my phone -- in fact, the only reason I noticed is that I wanted to take a picture of J-son's newly pierced ears. The phone isn't cracked -- I don't think it was the crash that hurt it; I think it was sitting in milk that zapped the electronics.

Sigh.  I would sort-of love to have no cell phone, but I know my husband would freak.  Fortunately, we happen to have a back-up cell phone waiting for just such an emergency, although I vainly believed it would be my sons' emergency, not mine.

But it's gotta be said, right:  there's no use crying over spilt milk in my cell phone.

What she bought: the kitchen sink

So, our host daughter, Y, popped her head into my sewing room Saturday night and asked, "Is it okay if I put some duct-tape on the kitchen sink?"

This is not the kind of question I get every day, and I spent a couple of seconds with the gears in my head whirring around trying to perform computations and correlations:  duct tape?  sink?  Is there some natural connection?  I finally answered, "um, sure, but is there a reason you want to put duct tape on the sink?"

She said, "well, there's a leak, and so I figured duct tape would stop it."

Oh.  A leak.  Of course, duct tape is not the solution to a leak, so I got up from my sewing room, went down to the kitchen, and took a look for myself.  Sure enough the kitchen faucet had sprung a hole, about midway along the arm, so that when you turn on the water most of the water performed the correct duty of coming out the nozzle, but some of the water sprayed straight up toward the ceiling like a drinking fountain.  Cute, and possibly with practical uses for a creative person, but not really what I want in my kitchen.

My husband had the car that day, so I called and asked if, on the way home, he might stop at the store pick up an extra kitchen faucet set.  He did.

Sunday, I brought J-son down into the kitchen with me for a little plumbing lesson.  Stage one, clear out everything under the sink; stage two, turn off the water.

Except the shut-off valves on these old, old pipes are old and a little rusty themselves, and the hot-water valve just didn't want to turn.  J-son enthusiastically offered to use a hammer.  I equally enthusiastically rejected that kind offer -- oh, geez; that's JUST what I need!  (Anybody remember the time J-son "fixed" his bike with my mallet?  Neither the bike nor the mallet survived).

We tried a more gentle form of coercion, but when part of the hot water shut-off valve knob broke off in my hand, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor.  A new faucet installation might be within my ability, but a busted water pipe is beyond my meager plumbing skills.

Since, on Monday, I headed out for yet another math trip, I delegated the calling of professional plumbers to my husband.  It really is nice having him around to take care of things in the house!

The plumbers apparently brought along a faucet with them; it's a super super nice faucet.  I'm really too cheap to splurge on something like this myself, but I'm secretly (okay, not-so-secretly) delighted at the upgrade we've gotten.

It comes at a price -- that price being $750.  With that, we also got new shut-off valves under the sink, plus a one-year protection plan.  I was not around to negotiate on this; my husband assures me it was a good deal, and I try not to second-guess people who I've asked to take over a project when I can't do it.  So I'll declare this a success.

But  I sure do hope I don't have many more plumbing adventures this January!

(I've silently lusted after hose-handle faucets.  And now I have one!)

What she bought (or not), basket weaving version

So, I actually didn't do any shopping last week.  I was at the humongous math meetings in Seattle.  The closest I got to being inside a store was to go to the book exhibits, which happen in a giant room that seems to go on forever and ever.  Book sellers from all kinds of different publishers (although mostly academic presses) come to convince people to buy their stuff.  There are also all kinds of software vendors, and also math toy vendors, and even people offering massages.

But my favorite part of this exhibit hall isn't the books, etc; it's the art exhibit.  I grew up hearing people make jokes about easy college courses by calling them "basket weaving" classes, but mathematical basket weaving is actually stunningly complex and impressive.  I didn't get a close-up, but these were fabulous pieces.

There are a lot more than basket sculpture work; there are paintings and beadwork and prints and sculpture.  My own mathematical work looks (sort of) at how we look at lines -- in particular, how a bunch of straight lines can come together to make curved things, and how those curves look when you smoosh them onto flat things (for example, by taking photographs or looking at reflections in a mirror).  So two of the pieces I totally loved were these ones, below.



But buying them, well, even if I had been in a buying mood, the art wasn't for sale.

(In fact, I did amazingly little buying of standard travel stuff.  My college and my professional organization are kind enough to cover about half the cost of my airfare, hotel, and meals; plus, I'm on so many BigShot committees this year that I only bought my own lunch once and my own dinner twice, so my expense reports are going to be easier to write).  

Bad Toilet Karma

In this Wednesday's edition of "what she bought", we give you a trip to the hardware store -- plus, while we're out, a brief visit to a print shop.  And as a bonus, we bring you a toilet repair tutorial!

The SPDM at the print shop.  

I think the Grumpies put a curse on me in the comments of one of their recent posts when they told someone "I think Miser Mom has a tutorial on fixing toilets".  I didn't actually have one, although a year ago I had written that my husband and sons found it surprisingly easy to replace the flapper valves.  Then, this past summer, the hinges on my toilet seats gave way.  The Toilet Curse struck yet again last Thursday as I prepared for the annual winter math meetings: the toilet started running constantly.  These toilets!   Although they are low flow (which is the positive, eco-reason we bought them), I am less and less impressed with their movable hardware.

The thing on the left has an arm that goes up and down with the float.
In a toilet that works, when the arm is up, the water stops flowing.
The open pipe in the middle should stick out a bit above the water (but here, it doesn't).

This time, the problem wasn't a bad-fitting flapper valve; instead, the long stem piece with the arm that goes up-and-down (you can see it I really know my plumbing terminology) didn't shut the water off even when the floater had lifted the arm up.  Hence, trip to the hardware store and nearby print store, where I spent a grand total of $63.44:  $34.34 on printing family letters, $20-ish on a new smoke detector to replace one that wigged out a few weeks ago, and $7.48 on the stem-arm-thingie.

Shopping haul.

Note that this means fixing a toilet yourself can be really cheap: only $7.50.  And I was delighted to find that if I just looked around a little, I could get a new "Toilet Fill Valve" (oh, so THAT's what it's called!) in a cardboard box instead of in plastic fortress casing.

From here, it's just a simple matter of following the directions, which actually are straightforward and well illustrated.  I love plumbing instructions!

There are even more detailed directions inside the box.

Okay, except that nothing is ever PERFECTLY simple when it comes to plumbing repair.  In the case of a . . . what's it called?  Oh yeah, in the case of a toilet fill valve, the hard part for me was getting off the old one.  The difficulty is partly geometry:  there's a "locknut" down under the toilet that holds the valve on, and it's hard to see it, and it's hard to reach it.

The nut that holds that stem in place isn't easy to see or to reach.

 There's also friction (the threads had gotten gunky over time, making it hard to turn the locknut), and there was even more geometry (the other end of this all is the valve itself, which is inside the tank, and you have to hold that still while turning the nut -- and of course, the inside stuff is a bit wet and slippery).

Once I grabbed the stem with the vise grips, it cracked.
No going back now: onward to install the new valve!

Taking off that danged white locknut took about 45 minutes, about 40 of which I futzed about by myself. Then my husband came by to help.  With my husband using the vise grips to hold the valve still, and with me using pliers and a bit of elbow grease to turn the nut, we got the nut the rest of the way off in only 5 more minutes.  So the moral of that story is: big pliers, a vise grip, and two people.

From there, it really only took less than 10 minutes to finish the job -- and that included cleaning up the mess.  And I could tell you how I did it, but the directions are in the box and they're really easy to read, and better than anything I could write.  

What she bought: candy, baking supplies, and tradition

A friend of mine asked me, ". . . but . . . you must go shopping sometimes; you must buy some stuff, right?" And so I figured it might be fun to start documenting actual purchases I make.

Here's the reason for last week's big shopping trip.  Just before Christmas, I realized that I hadn't actually saved up a bunch of hard candy from the previous year.  So my husband and I had a "date", going to the grocery store together, spending a whopping $30.61.  Y'know, if you've got to go to the grocery store in the rain, it's nice to hold hands with a good-looking guy while you do it.

Not pictured here are the eggs ($4.19 for 18 of them) or flour ($2.29).  The remainder of  the money was all completely unhealthy junk:  frosting and candy. It's hard to buy candy without trash attached.  M&Ms are possible from the bulk aisle, but candy canes and smarties?  Haven't figured those out yet.

Why did I need so much candy? Because we are in our second of year of moving gingerbread, eggnog, and cider into the center spotlight of our family Christmas gathering (and thereby gently sliding present exchanges off to a more minor side show).

. . . seven ice-ers icing, six geeks a-playing,
five cooo-old drinks . . . la la la . . .

This year, instead of building houses, we decorated cookies.  Decorating is even more fun than eating:  see how deeply N-son is concentrating?

L-daughter made smiley faces (near plate below).  K-daughter managed to make vertical monstrous master-pieces by stacking candy high-high-high like legos and by planting candy cane forests in a glade of gingerbread soil (far plate).

I-daughter went for variety.

J-son created his own masterpieces, too; but Baby A, my granddaughter, decided she was really into deconstructionism.

And now we still have lots of eggs and flour left that we can use for dinner and breakfast, and we even have a few jars of candy remaining that will be ready and waiting for Christmas 2016.  So that's a shopping trip I won't have to make.   Phew.

What she bought: bags and chocolate

A friend of mine asked me, ". . . but . . .  you must go shopping sometimes; you must buy some stuff, right?"  And so I figured it might be fun to start documenting actual purchases I make.

So, here goes:  Saturday I went to the grocery store and I bought bags and chocolate.   Or, the way I think of it, I bought "bags wrapped in trash, and chocolate without trash".  Total expense:  $9.08.

Cloth bag to canning jar for some trash-less chocolate;
paper bags in a (sigh) plastic bag.

The chocolate ($6.65 for a bit more than a pound), I bought for baking purposes because SOMEONE ate all of the rest of the baking chocolate in the house! It wasn't my kids, and it wasn't my husband, which means it was . . . well, let's just say I felt it was my responsibility to refill the baking chocolate jar. I bought my chocolate pieces in chunks from the "bulk" section of our local grocery. Although I chose the bulk section to avoid garbage, I've found that many candies there (like M&Ms) are cheaper than buying them in commercial bags. I use a technique I learned from the Zero Waste Home: I use my own cloth bags (made from cutting down a pillowcase), and write the code number on the bag in a washable crayon. (Crayola makes those). When I got home, I transfered the chocolate to a glass canning jar.

Well, I transfered most of the chocolate to the canning jar.  But there it is.

I also bought a pile of 100 paper lunch bags ($2.43).  Some of these immediately came in handy when J-son packed his lunch for work later that day.  And yes, I know he could use a reusable lunch box, but he tends to leave things behind -- the amusement park is already richer two canning jars that he's left there, so I don't mind him taking paper lunch bags.


But the real reason I bought the bags is for wrapping presents.  We've done our usual "x-Mass Production" lines, and since then, the boys need to wrap their many gifts for family and friends.  The boys decorate the bags and plop the presents inside.  I get a kick out of the pictures N-son does on his bags (J-son is a little more stoic in his style).

Here's an N-son original for our next-door neighbor, the one with the beautiful garden.   Sweet drawing, right?