Overbooked and Underpaid: Notes from a Yes-aholic

Curb Combing - Decorating On The Cheap

UPDATE: Now that I have more readers and have learned about dandy things like Pinterest I am going to re-post some things. Most of this post ran 2 years ago but it still applies. I still love to grab things off the curb, repaint them, and re-purpose them. Once I painted a chair, had a bunch of famous cartoonists draw on it and was able to auction it of for charity to the tune of $600!

Here's to curb combing! 

Enjoy the following story of a late night curb adventure:

 

(Rescued, repainted curb find)

 

The secret to my decorating style is out.

My house is done in a style I lovingly refer to as "stuff from dead people".

To date, I have bought exactly one couch, two wing chairs, and a variety of mattresses that were brand spanking new.

Everything else - dead people.

Well - I guess some of them aren't dead. They maybe just cleared out a room.

But many of them are dead.

I don't sweat it.

Any piece I own that hasn't come from a personally deceased family member has come from someone else's departed loved ones via estate sales, thrift stores, or the curb.

So, earlier this week I was driving along my street and there, perched jauntily curbside, was this oak table with an enormous pedestal foot and one leaf in it.

I did NOT happen to be driving my honkin' big Odyssey van. 

Dammit!

I got out and looked at the table. Not terribly great as it was, but some terrific potential if I painted it.

But I didn't really have time in my schedule to go to home and get the van.

And, honestly, my house was getting too full and I didn't even know where I could stash the thing until I could get to refinishing or painting it.

I said my goodbyes and drove off.

But it nagged.

Now the only person I know who has more "projects" sitting around her house optimistically awaiting their facelifts is my friend Phoebe.

Phoebe's garage and basement are a testament to yes-aholic optimism. We're all sure we'll fit everything in somehow, somewhere, someday, aren't we? I mean that's the yes-aholic manifesto "I can do it - I'll fit it in somehow!".

I found myself talking to Phoebe at 10:00 the night of the table incident:

"I thought of you today, there was this oak pedestal table on the street and - "

"Is it still there?!!!!!'

"I don't know - probably - it was still there at five this afternoon with a bunch of other stuff piled on it - "

"Let's go get it!!!!"

"Now?!"

"Yeah - it'll only take 15 minutes - come on!!!"

Good as her word - 3 minutes later she was at my house with her van - man, that woman can hustle when there's free furniture involved! 

Which is how I found myself, in the dead of night, beset by mosquitoes, taking boxes and a microwave and other sundries of said table to get a better look at it.

"Oh, darn it! It's got a fluted edge!"

"This is a problem?"

"Yeah, I hate that kind of edge. And look - it's not old."

"Well, no, probably from the 70s - but it's still solid oak...."

"No - I'm going to pass. It kills me to leave it here for the garbage man though - who does that, I mean couldn't they at least take it over to St. Vincents?"

"Well, we could toss it into your van and you could take it over tomorrow..."

 

And then my friend the yes-aholic took the first steps to recovery. She said no. 

This was such a personal achievement on her part - I decided to let slide the fact that we were going to let the garbage men take the table.

Besides - there were other headlights slowing down.....

 

 

Welcome to "Cheapville" - I've Been Saving You A Spot...

I am not rich.

Neither am I poor.

I'm just economically challenged. 

Which is to say that, while I am not living on the street, I am a member of that tier of the middle class that does not automatically have money for extra things like hotel and resort vacations. (Can you say "Howdy! We're staying with you for a few days!"

And there are times when those extra things I don't have the money for wind up being a little more mundane like "back to school shopping". Then we're lucky we all have perfectly good clothes that are not too unfashionable and too small and will certainly last at least another year.

But my real point is that, it's not just that I currently don't have a lot of disposable income, it's that I never have. I am living exactly the same economic reality as my parents and my grandparents did before me.

Which is what gives me an edge of sorts. Because, being raised by parents who grew up during the Depression and who never made it big, "living on the cheap" is, for me, simply "living".

So I sort of have to laugh as I thumb through today's magazines and newspapers and flip through the TV channels and see all the "new tips" on frugality. So many of these tips are simple common sense and it astonishes me that there are thousands of people out there who haven't been following them all these years. 

But who am I not to jump on the band wagon of helpful advice? 

So, for a while anyway, I will be posting some of my "el cheapo" lifestyle tips here on the blog. You can take them or leave them. I'm not promising they will be things you never heard of or things you're not already doing, only that they will be real ways I manage my budget. 

I will also be sharing stories of some of the "el cheapo" strategies employed by my mother, many of which I hated, but they sure saved money.

To kick things off, let's talk about dinnertime.

An age old strategy for saving money at the dinner table is to make a large batch of something ,(I mean a LARGE batch) feed one batch to your family right away, and then save the rest to be trotted out later.

A couple of points that can mean the difference between failure and success.

1)Do NOT simply serve up the same meal over and over for three days. The family will most certainly rebel. They may even stage a coup wherein your spouse grabs everyone and takes them to McDonalds. I hardly need to point out that this will NOT wind up saving you any $.

2)Saving the food for later should not consist of putting the extra servings in the refrigerator - that only leads to rotten leftovers.

3)Rather, one should plan to freeze whatever is not eaten at dinner number one. 

4)Some meals freeze better than others. An example of a good "freezable" dinner is sloppy joes. Not only can you can make up a huge pot of the meat and sauce and put it in freezer containers, the meatsauce holds up well upon reheating.

Which brings me to a note about what to freeze. Some recipes do NOT freeze well. 

If you ask my siblings for a single meal my mother made that was the bane of our existence, you would get the answer "HUNGARIAN GOULASH!!

Why did we hate it so? I mean, it's a delicious dish when served fresh - what changed?

When you use any kind of sauce made with fresh tomatoes and then you freeze that sauce, the tomatoes break down into a mealy, mushy, unpalatable mess. Add to that what happens to cooked pasta when you freeze it with sauce - again, DISASTER. The water from the sauce and tomatoes first seeps into the pores of the pasta. Add to that the fact that the longer anything sits in the freezer the more likely it is to form ice crystals that will later thaw into more watery mess and Ugh! There is a reason that frozen pasta dishes like Budget Gourmet are full of preservatives. It's to save you from the mush.

And, while we're on the subject of frozen pasta - skip all those "budget" frozen dishes that are pasta based. You spend way more on them than you would for a simple jar of sauce and a box of pasta. And really, fresh pasta takes only minutes more to make than a frozen dinner.

Another item that seldom freezes well is Velveeta cheese. Because it was so cheap, my mother used to buy giant bricks (4x4x12) of Velveeta and freeze it for later use in things like grilled cheese sandwiches. When you freeze Velveeta, it separates somehow and creates little white polka dots throughout the block of cheese. As god is my witness, I was a sophomore in college before I discovered that Velveeta doesn't naturally have little white polka dots running through it.

So - the long and short of freezing dinners is: make a small batch of your chosen recipe and test freeze it before you invest all that time and money into something that will "unfreeze" into an unappatizing mess that your family will refuse to eat. 

Again - you just might wind up with that last minute trip to the golden arches.

A Slightly Preachy Thanksgiving Message

 

I hope this Thanksgiving finds you celebrating with friends or family or both over a lovely home cooked meal.

And, if so, please consider all the folks who will be unable to celebrate in kind, but will be dependent on the local food pantry for their holiday meal. I know there are many, many food drives at this time of year - I hope you have been able to donate. If not, there's still time.

Below is a piece I wrote about our experience giving to the food pantry. I don't know if we'll be in a position to do quite as much this year, but we're going to try.

Excuse me, it's Sunday and I'm going to take a little time to Sermonize.

I don't know about where you live, but here it's cold. Bitterly cold. 

And we have homeless people - many of them families with young children. 

We have several programs for the homeless in our community, both for food and temporary shelter and round about November and December, every time I turn around it seems there is a food or clothing drive for the food pantry and the shelter.

This is a good thing.

But now it's January and the time of year that the eyes of the public tend to stray from such drives. Especially with the crisis of Haiti to take up the media's attention.

Don't get me wrong - I am in no way suggesting that we should not be reaching out to the Haiti earthquake victims in their time of such great need - I am just reminding you that you probably have many many people who need your compassion as well in your own back yard.

 

We are regular contributers to our local food pantry. For years, my oldest son used to have  a carnival in our yard for all our friends and neighbors. He started it when he was 5 with the express purpose of donating the proceeds to the pantry. (I think he got the idea when I told him how, in my childhood, we were always having carnivals for MS) Anyway, every year, he and John would build a contraption for the carnival - there was a complicated "sucker push"  (I can't remember how that one worked exactly), a skeeball, a sponge throw (with a face cut out for the willing victim) among others, as well as a variety of games. 

By the time we shelled out the $ for all the prizes and game materials, I think we were usually about $75 in the hole, but that was beside the point. The neighborhood turned out and had a good time and the pride my son took in taking the proceeds to the pantry was immeasurable.

We stopped the carnivals when he was about 14, I think, and took to just sending a check every November and food to all the church and school drives. And we felt we were doing our part.

But something was missing. That engagement  our kids got from doing something themselves was lacking.

So, a couple of weeks ago, while Alex was still back from college, I took all three kids down to the local grocery store, gave them each a set amount and a calculator, and challenged them to see how much food for the pantry they could each buy. To the winner would go a homemade apple pie. (My kids kill for these pies).

It was interesting to see the choices they made - and how much they've learned from me over the years when it comes to stretching a dollar. While the oldest, had the largest number of items by far - 158 - the youngest easily made the most nutritious choices and the middle one probably won the most points for food homeless kids would like most to eat. Because I set the prize on the amount of food, the oldest won - but I may have to rethink my definition of winning for next time and include healthfulness.

I devised a system where, each kid got their own cart and, as they checked their groceries through and they were bagged, I took a sharpie and put their intitials on the bag so we would be able to compare it all later. I also used the grocery receipts. 

My mother, who was visiting, also got into the act and bought 25 can openers to donate. I would never have thought of this, but she works regularly at the pantry in her town and she said they never have enough can openers.

It was a terrific experience. Not only did my kids get into it, but, as we hit the checkout the employees got really into it. The next time I came in shopping, several people came up to me to ask who won :-)

The thing that astonished me as we did this, was the real amount of food we were able to amass for roughly what I would pay for two weeks of my regular grocery budget. The kids dropped off 399 items in over 70 bags. My van was full to overflowing.

So I'm asking you today to take a little time and remember those in your community who need your help. I know that, in our area, the job losses have more than tripled the number of folks who are using our food bank and related services. 

If you have old coats, gloves and mittens, and you live in a cold climate, take a minute to drop those items off at the appropriate collection site. If you can see your way clear, pick up 10 extra items when you buy groceries and set them aside for a monthly drop off to your local food pantry.

And, if you happen to be a cartoonist, find out if your local shelter needs any artwork for their fundraiser. John currently does not sell original strips but he has donated some to charitable organizations.

Hunger knows no holiday - it doesn't disappear after Christmas.