$131: School snack saga

N-son came home from school Wednesday and said, "my teacher says I have to bring a bag of potato chips to school on Friday.  We're having a party and I have to bring potato chips."

Call me a horrible mom, but we don't have any potato chips in our home.  Haven't for years.  Call the authorities and report me for abuse, but there it is.  And I'm not about to go out and buy some expensive, processed fat-and-sodium-delivery system that comes in non-compostable wrapping just because my soon-to-be-13-year-old tells me his teacher says I should.  Pencils?  yes.  Paper?  for sure! Potato chips?  No way.

N-son was obviously anticipating that his teacher's say-so was something like a papal dispensation, so he was a bit crestfallen when I delivered the bad news that, no, we were NOT going to go to the store and hunt for salty snacks for his class.  Instead, we looked through our cupboards and whipped up a batch of homemade granola.  I put it in a cardboard container (previously containing grits), that we redecorated with the name "Great Granola".

And then I sent N-son off to school with his granola, and waited to see what happened.

Now, you might love potato chips, and I'm not going to say you shouldn't.  But there are probably things that you do that many other people don't; or else there are things that other people don't do, that you do do . . . and so every once in a while you butt up against popular expectation.  Potato chips are just one of those thing that I don't do, and here was someone who didn't even know me assuming that I'm a normal potato chip person.  But I'm not; I just think they're vile  ---  but that's not the point of the story. The point is that I sent a mildly nervous N-son to school with granola instead of potato chips.  It was a lesson in bucking expectations.  And he wasn't sure what would happen.

And here is what happened:  his teacher loved the granola.  In fact, his teacher had fifths of granola.  In double-fact, N-son called me on my cell phone during the middle of the day to see if we were allowed to leave the container at school so his teacher could have more.  The granola was, in triple-fact, great.

Which goes to show, sticking to our values and sticking to our guns and being just a little bit different from the rest of the world doesn't have to be the end of the world, even for a susceptible almost-13-year old.

****
The flip side of the granola story is that this week turned into a huge grocery shopping week.  We bought more than 100 lbs of food from Millers (50 lbs of regular flour, 10 lbs of rye and wheat flour, 40 lbs of potatoes, 10 lbs of nuts, plus some apples).  From the regular grocery store, we bought coffee, and lots of peanut butter, and a few assorted odds-and-ends.

And, just in case you're feeling too bad for N-son, we also splurged on 3-dozen chicken wings, per his request.  (This was our first chicken purchase in over six months).  We splurged because today is his 13th birthday, and chicken wings was his request for a special birthday dinner meal.  Two of my three older daughters will be back from Virginia to help celebrate.  One of my students who has become close to the family will join us.  As of today, all of my kids are teenagers or older.  I'm feeling just a tad proud and nostalgic.

We spent $223 on food (mixed in with some cleaning supplies) this week.  This brings the 35-week grocery average back up to $131/week.  131 is prime -- indeed, it's a Sophie Germain prime, named after the french mathematician Marie-Sophie Germain, who was, herself, willing to defy societal expectations.  Back during the time that society figured that women couldn't/shouldn't be interested in mathematics, she made huge contributions to an area of mathematics called "number theory", so much so that there are whole sets of numbers named after her.

And I'm guessing (though I don't know this for a fact) that Sophie Germain liked granola, too.

Black Friday and black hearts

A week from today, so everyone tells me, is the biggest shopping day in the U.S.of A.  A shopping day so popular that people camp out overnight by their favorite stores.  A shopping day so momentous that the media is deployed for live coverage.  A shopping day so portentous that economists sharpen their pencils in anticipation of analyzing this year's spending data.

Not my holiday; but mostly because it's more like my every day.

And in another corner of the world, frugalistas and eco-nuts like me get ready for the yearly rant against corporate greed and personal materialism.  The shopping starts on the sacred Thursday this year!  For some stores, it even begins on Wednesday!   A rant would be therapeutic, perhaps even appropriate, for people like me.



But this year, I declare pax.  Peace.  A truce.  I shall remain rant-less.

It's not that I'm planning to go mall-diving myself, mind you.   I don't go to the mall on the other 364 days of the year, either, so I'm certainly not subjecting myself to the cacophony of a Black Friday Mall Experience.   But I'm not going to let myself get myself het up over what the commercial world or my neighbors decide to do.

For one thing, giving into a rant against this day this is damaging to the eternal soul.  Pride (in the sense of superiority complex) is the most vile of mortal sins, after all, so feeding the old "I'm-better-than-those-losers-who-go-to-the-mall" ego trip is my own quick One-Way Ticket to Eternal Damnation.  (I mean, if you believe in Eternal Damnation, which I do*).

* My own current belief is that E.D. is best summed up by John 3:19, which describes "the condemnation" as knowing what we're supposed to do (e.g., love our neighbor) but choosing to do the opposite anyway.  That is, virtue may or may not be its own reward, but sin becomes its own certain and terrible punishment.  I'm not a theologian, however, so this is probably far from correct.

Even if you're not a believer in E.D., though, you have to admit there's something troubling about acting as though life is like Disney movies, where some people ( = Belle and us) are virtuous and act entirely for noble purposes, motivated by the higher good . . .  while other people (= Gaston and those shoppers) live entirely on animal impulse, motivated by greed and power and conquest.  Well, I'm not a fan of Disney movies, and I don't believe that all black Thursdays participants are pawns of an evil corporate empire.  We're all more nuanced than that.  And I'll admit that some of my friends actually like the shopping experience, and they have decent reasons for going that I don't entirely understand, but I trust them.  (Sort of).


In fact, I have managed to make it through an election season relatively sane, despite folks from "my" side of the fence accusing my Republican friends of being heartless (47%, anyone?) and brainless (knowing no science) dolts, and despite folks from the "other" side accusing hippies like me of being leeches who prey on hard-working tax payers.  Enough, I say.  I'm not ready for another Us-vs.-Them, Good-vs.-Evil division.  Finger pointing is so yesterday.  I'm ready to find that ground that we have in common.

But even if you believe that you are right and the Black Friday tradition is an embodiment of all that is wrong-Wrong-WRONG with our corporate/consumerist/materialist culture [hint: I agree with you], then I share this wise parenting advice:  Any attention, even negative attention, is a reward.  Any rant you dish up is an excuse for the other side to defend its position.  Any argument you give is an opportunity for the other side to refute you and misrepresent you.  How much more devastating it is to ignore the event and to focus, instead, on the people and things that really matter to us.  To give a mere, "how nice for you" response before turning to our gathered family and saying, "Now, boys, do you want to wrassle in the living room, ride bikes, or rake leaves with me today?"

We all agree: let's be grateful for those gifts we've already been given, as well as for those gifts we may someday receive.  Black Friday is no excuse for a black heart. 

Pesto and Pasta (no pests allowed); luscious lentils.

A simple joy:  cooking with kids.

Earlier this week, J-son asked to be allowed to make Pesto for dinner some night.  But of course, cutie!  He needs a bit of help in the focus department (no, you can't go wrestle with your brother while the water in the pot is boiling), but aside from that, he can go it solo.

Earlier in the week K-daughter and I made lentil burgers that turned out surprisingly spectacular.  Having had bland, mushy lentil burgers in the past, I was totally surprised at how enthusiastic the kiddos were about the meal.   N-son took me aside later to say, "when I grow up and move out on my own, I'm going to make lentil burgers for my kids, because they're delicious and cheap!".  [Here's the recipe that I sort-of followed].

A 21-Trash Can Salute

We're 45 weeks into 2012.  My family has put exactly 21 garbage cans at the curb this year.   (For those of you who really like numbers and measurement, those were 32-gallon cans).

The cleaning/purging that our family went through during the summer contributed a bunch of those garbage cans; so I think it's safe to say that we're in a comfortable holding pattern of producing just less than 1 garbage can every other week now.  Getting to this point was one of my "industrial resolutions" that I made last New Year's.

On the one hand, I'm proud at how low we've gotten our trash output this past year.    On the other hand, I'd like the amount of garbage we throw away to be lower yet.  But since the blog is winding down, slowly-but-surely, it seems like as good a time as any to share some of the stages of our trash-reduction journey.

One week's worth of kitchen trash.

Stage 1:  Recycling for beginners.
When I was growing up, all trash that left our home did so in one big (actually, 3 big) garbage cans.  But nowadays, recycling isn't just for hippies like me: it's everywhere, often mandatory.  The trick, many studies have shown, is to make recycling easy by having a recycling container next to each trash can.  If you have to walk each tin can or plastic bottle out to the garage (or even across the den and into the kitchen), you're less likely to recycle it.

But even so, a bit of brain power is needed -- you can see the above trash pile has a recyclable plastic container that my kids put in the wrong bin.  So practice doing recycling right.

Stage 2: Compost.  
Choose a spot out in the yard for food scraps and yard waste.  It can be as simple as just a pile on the ground, or a bin made from wooden slats, or a circle of chicken wire.  Do NOT do what I first did, and pile it up next to a fence you actually like, because the pile is going to rot, and it will rot the fence, too.  Indoors near the kitchen sink, keep an easy-to-carry container where you toss all food scraps (vegetable peels, scrapings from the dinner plates, etc), and when that container gets full/stinky, empty it out onto that compost pile.

Our compost pile reduces the amount of trash that goes in our trash can by a little bit.  But it reduces the stinkiness of the trash can A LOT!  To illustrate this (literally), take a peek at the picture above.  I took my family's kitchen trash can that had been filling up for an entire week, and I emptied it on my dining room table.  It's clearly a pile of trash, but it's clean trash, if that makes sense.  Not stinky at all.  I stuck it all back in the trash can after I took the photo; we probably won't empty that can for another week.

Food that rots outdoors (mixed in with leaves and grass clippings for good luck) eventually turns into dirt.  Really nice dirt, in fact.  Gardeners call it "black gold".   My daughter once told one of my friends, "My mom has a PhD and a compost pile!".  That's how proud I am of mine.

Stage 3: Stop buying things that you're just going to throw away.
Break the paper napkin habit: use cloth napkins (with different napkin rings for each member of the family, so you don't have to launder as often).

Once we'd mastered cloth napkins, we went for these other switches:

• cloth rags instead of paper towels.
• thrift store plates and mugs and flatware, instead of the disposable tableware.  (Imagine, we had  a trashless party!)
• cloth bags (made from t-shirts?) instead of plastic grocery bags.
• jars and other reusable food containers instead of plastic bags or aluminum foil.

Stage 4: Recycling for experts.

We started carrying our home office paper to work, where I can recycle it.  But the truly huge trash-reduction breakthrough for our family came when we found a place 2 blocks from our home where we can recycle cardboard.   That one change alone cut our garbage-can-output by almost half, mostly because cardboard in a regular trashcan is bulky.   You can see from the pile above we're not perfect about that -- the milk carton and chinese food carton both can go in the cardboard bin.

Around the edges we recycle scrap metal (a guy from our church makes money by disassembling electronic items and selling the scrap metal).  And we dispose of hazardous waste like lightbulbs, paint, and batteries with our local waste authority.

Stage 5:  Reduce the amount of packaging your stuff comes with.
I'm guessing for most people, this will be the hardest thing to deal with, because it usually means changing the stores you go to and the way you shop.  But packaging accounts for the largest volume of household trash -- if you look at my own pile of trash above, it's a collection of bags, boxes, and containers.  So reducing packaging is essential to reducing trash.  Here are some ways I reduce our packaging load (although, as the pile above shows, I haven't come close to eliminating it).

• Yard sales.  Sing that yard sale song!  Frugality and ecology go hand-in-hand when we buy used clothing/housewares/etc.
• Instead of buying processed food, we buy ingredients (in bulk) and cook from scratch.
• Organize a baking center, so it's easy to make a quick breakfast.
• Buy from a farmer's market or roadside stands, instead of getting your fruit and vegetables packaged in plastic and on styrofoam trays.
• Find places that allow you to trade in/refill jars.  (Our spice stand at Market refills my glass jars directly; our dairy stand uses glass jars that they can sterilize and use over again).  
• Freeze or can summer produce in reusable containers.

Stage 6: Reduce the amount of trash people give you against your will.

This stage is a pain the tuckus.  But I've taken to calling catalog companies, waiting FOREVER on the phone line, and finally reaching a live human, so I can ask to be taken off their mailing list.  I've done this with almost 30 different companies now.  And we don't get nearly as many catalogs as we used to.  But I'm not convinced the payoff is worth my time.  

Similarly, my newspaper box has reduced (but alas, not eliminated) the plastic bags that come around my newspaper.

****
And that's that.  As I said, we have a way to go.  But for a household of five people, four of whom aren't nutso about garbage like I am, this is probably a good start.

Moving the Normal Needle

You know how you get into the mind-frame that everyone who does less than you do is lazy or ignorant, but everyone who does more than you is a nut or a zealot?

Okay, maybe you don't get into that mind-frame, but I do.  People who exercise less than I do, I'm all too ready to dismiss as lazy or out-of-shape.  On the other hand, people who exercise more than I do are clearly fitness freaks.  People who shop in malls are obviously spend-thrifts, because I myself live a perfectly happy mall-free life.  But the people who raise their own chickens?  That's too much work (I know, because I don't raise my own chickens).

Completely aside from the moral/spiritual/jerk-i-tude aspects of carrying these values around in my head is the challenge this creates for me when I want to change myself.  Sure, I'd like to throw away less trash, . . . but buying things that come with packaging is just the way things are; that's normal.   Sure, I'd like to train more for the triathalon, . . . but I don't have time to do that now; my current schedule is normal, and I'm not sure I'm ready to be one of those fitness freaks.

I've heard the reluctance to change as "not wanting to move out of our comfort zone".  But I've done enough different things in my life to know that just about any zone is as comfortable as any other, once you're used to it.

• Back when I was learning math, word problems were really really hard.  But now, I love the puzzle aspect of a good math challenge.
• When I married my husband, I was a pretty ordinary consumer who fed my kids hot dogs and mac-n-cheese.  After a bunch of financial pressures and some awesome tightwad inspiration, I've converted into the most frugal, least packaged-food-person in any circle of friends I could gather.  
• Three years ago when I started running again, I did part of a trail run with some folks and I was sore for days.   But now that I run regularly, it's a joy to head out for a long jaunt with the girlfriends.
• Twenty years ago, I was happy as a clam to be a single mom, and determined as all-get-out to stay that way.  Now I'm a married mom of many.

Not all shifts in my life have been so inspirational:

• Back in the day, I used to read books like crazy.  I'd have as many as 8 books in progress at a time, and I could wolf them down like  J-son wolfs down pizza.  Now, the books are on the shelf and my laptop is my bedside companion.  Now I'm an e-mailing, blogging, internet woman.

So, I think for me it's not so much a question of comfort zones as identity zones.  Do I want to be one of those eco-nuts who carry cloth napkins around and refuses paper napkins?  (Well, nowadays I actually do that, and I no longer think it's nutty.  In fact, I think you should do that, too!).  Sitting on my . . . um, on my desk chair . . . all day has been pretty comfortable for me.  But it's also been my identity, my persona, the place that "normal needle" points on that scale of personality.   Do I want to be one of those exercise freaks who does push-ups in her spare time?

I'm starting to realize that maybe, I do.

Is that normal?

$128: War-n-peacenik

The average food costs in the Miser Mom household continue to fall as predicted.  My guy spent $76 on assorted frivolities (peanut butter, ice cream, and such).  I spent $18 at Market, mostly for dairy products, but also for a bit of splurge on some post-election Pretzel Doughnuts from the Achenbach stand --- Amish donuts are a treat for the kids.  This brings our weekly grocery costs down to $128/week.  

****

The weekend was a weekend of juxtapositions.  Such as, J-son deciding to brush the dog's teeth, and the dog (sort of) allowing this to happen.

Such as, K-daughter, N-son, and J-son performing the closing song at a long evening gala of music at my college.  It was a gala that one of my students put on to raise money for children in Rwanda, a country we hope to visit 3 or 4 years from now.  Most of the evening was GREAT.  My kids were the last of many performers to take the stage, and they . . . well, they were cute.  And not quite professional.  But they got a standing ovation because of the cuteness, and they're still abuzz from that.

I rode the Sudden Painful Death Machine (my new bike) for 15 miles.  Only 97 more miles, and I've got the bike portion of my impending triathalon covered!  So it looks like I'm just about as good on my bike as the kids are at music, but I don't get the standing ovation afterwords.  I'm not as cute, apparently.

Speaking of cute, it was veteran's day this past weekend.  I got to hug a soldier.  And my soldier got to hug a hippie peacenik.  We're good for one another.

Furnace explosion!

My furnace did not explode.  The title is overly dramatic.  But I did run into a snag when I tried to get more bang for my buck (so to speak).  And the amount of money we expected to spend spiked dramatically, too.

I wrote a while back about how we'd looked into converting our oil boiler to a gas burner with a simple conversion kit (professionally installed).  After a bit of back-and-forth, my husband and I agreed to pony up the money and go ahead.

Our heater guys showed up right on time,
with lots of equipment.

Taking a peek into our oil boiler.

Our conversion guys came over right on time on the expected day, but about an hour into the project, they ran into trouble.  The chamber in our oiler boiler had a hole in it.  For reasons that I don't understand (I'm a theoretical mathematician, not an applied mathematician), our oil boiler is still on the verge of safe, but converting the system to gas would cause leaks (at the least) and explosions (at the worst).  We could all die.  So we stopped the project, sealed everything up, and regrouped.  Here were our choices:

• We could fix the chamber on this 25-year-old boiler and proceed with the conversion.
• We could replace the oil boiler with a regular gas boiler.
• We could replace the oil boiler with a high-efficiency gas boiler.

Looking into the chamber:  the inside is crumbling.

We chose the last option.  I am, after all, an eco-nut.  And  the eco-option isn't that much more expensive than the other options, given the decrepitude of our current system.

Looking closer into that hole.
 It looks like . . . a messy hole.

Then we faced questions of who should do the replacement.  Our current oil/gas guys -- the ones who found the hole in our chamber -- gave us a quote of $10,000.  That seemed high from what I could read on-line, but all the other people we brought in seemed so very smarmy that I had to wash my hands with extra soap to get the grease off once they left.  (That's figurative, not literal).

So $10,000 it is.  Plus $81 for the building permit from our County Municipal Office.  Plus a few hundred bucks for carbon monoxide detectors in every bedroom and landing.




This is a lot of money for heating a home.  But I think it makes sense to spend money to conserve heating fuel.  As much as I love pretending that my fuel-efficient Prius is the miserly way to conserve a planet's resources, I know that the true fuel user isn't the car I choose to park in my driveway; it's the house that the driveway leads up to.

 In theory (say the guys who are doing the work), this gas boiler will reduce our home heating bills from their current level of $2000+/year to about $600/year.  Time will tell if this holds true.  Work is scheduled for December 10 and 11, just after the semester ends.