Bulk Buying

All right, that’s it. I just read the umpteenth item about people rushing out to bulk buy everything from rice to peanuts, and I’m afraid we’re going to have results similar to the tremendous waste of beef during the beef shortage back in the 70s – it was caused by people buying unfamiliar cuts in attempts to still have their beef in spite of skyrocketing costs. “Hey, this has all these weird bones in it…and is it supposed to taste like liver?!”

I’m going to do my wee little part to help here. You want to buy bulk? Keep the following in mind:

Price book: A Bulk Buyers Best Friend

A price book is a simple tool that can really help you figure out whether a deal is awesome!, or smoke & mirrors!. You do not have to keep track of every single item in the entire store. Only things you buy frequently, with special attention paid to items you buy in varying sizes in an attempt to save money.

Let’s take cocoa powder for an example. Who has the best deal on cocoa powder? Is that sale price actually your ‘best possible’ price? Is the bulk purchase best?

Store	Item	Date	Units	Price	Cost / Unit
Safeway	Scharffen Bergerpowder Cocoa	4/25/2008	6	$8.54	$1.42
Safeway	Hershey's Cocoa Powder	3/24/2008	8	$4.35	$0.54
Penzey's Spices	Dutch Process Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	16	$7.90	$0.49
Safeway (Sale)	Hershey's Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	8	$3.50	$0.44
Penzey's Spices	Natural Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	16	$6.80	$0.43
www.BulkFoods.com	Natural Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	80	$11.25	$0.14
www.BulkFoods.com	Natural Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	400	$53.15	$0.13
www.BulkFoods.com	Natural Cocoa Powder	4/25/2008	800	$87.78	$0.11

Note that by calculating it by units, you level the playing field. It can be hard to compare a six ounce container to a one pound container – but by calling that one pound bag a sixteen ounce bag instead and figuring the price out in ounces rather than by the bag, you have a better chance of figuring out whether or not you’re getting a great price.

Looking at a price tag of almost ninety bucks is enough to make you just say, “Uh, no, that’s too expensive!” on face value. But look at that price-per-ounce! A third the price of the supermarket sale price!

Where’s it gonna go?

If you’re going to buy bulk, think about storage before you get home with a 50 pound sack of flour. You can’t open that bag, then stick it out in the garage and hope for the best. Moisture will make it rot, weevils will infest it, you will be very, very sorry. You need a dry, cool storage space and air-tight containers. If you have concerns about weevils or other varmints, put the food into your freezer for 24 to 48 hours.

Personally, I use food-grade containers like these. Mine are square, though, which I find stack with more stability and also make best use of my (ahem) square garage cupboards.

Check them regularly. I keep a smaller Tupperware in the kitchen, and each time I refill it I make sure I stir up the contents of the larger containers. Sometimes, varmints and wetness (and the mold it can cause, ew!) will gather only on the bottom, with seemingly innocent and clean stuff on top. Giving the stock a good deep stirring will expose any nastiness that might be happening.

If you use the stuff briskly you won’t have this problem. I go through that 50 pound sack of flour each and every month – sometimes, in less than a month. I haven’t seen a weevil in my flour buckets in years. But if you’re buying a two-year supply of rice this weekend? Make sure you keep an eye on it.

Expiration

Before you buy, check the ‘use by’ dates. Yes, many things will actually survive long past their technical expiration date – but some things don’t, and sometimes the bulk items have been languishing longer than you might expect. There could be several months difference between the use by on the cases at the front of the shelf, and the back.

The freezer does not equal suspended animation

The freezer will significantly extend the life of things. But it is not, NOT, NOT!, equivalent to a complete halt of the decaying process. Things will lose moisture and texture over time, and honestly if you’ve got a self-defrosting freezer – they may desiccate faster than you expect.

As a general rule of thumb, your vegetables will last about 3 to 6 months, depending on what they are and how they are prepared. Nuts will keep about 6 months. Meats…meats are tricky. The larger the cut, the longer it lasts – up to a year for large roasts. Ground meats 3 to 6 months. I’ve had really rotten luck with really thin things like deli ham, no more than a month before I’ve found it just doesn’t taste right.

Does this mean they will have to be thrown away? No. Not at all. I actually do use vegetables that are way past their prime in stocks, and sometimes will take meat that not even the dog would eat (well, if we had a dog, anyway…) due to texture and/or appearance and use it in soups. But if you were planning to grill those luscious steaks you bought last year when they were on sale?

They…uh…may not be the same filets you knew and loved.

Know What You’re Buying!!!!

Read the label very, very carefully. Take my cocoa powder up there: I’m buying natural processed powder. It is not like Hershey’s! It is like the difference between semi-sweet (Hershey’s) and unsweetened (natural process). If I use it in recipes without acknowledging this, whatever I make will come out on the ‘bittersweet’ side. (This is perfectly OK by me, actually – but not everybody likes chocolate that kind of bites you back!)

If you pay $80 for a box of cocoa powder you then despise, well, you haven’t actually saved money unless you force yourself to choke it down anyway.

Invest a little money in a smaller package if you can. As fresh milk prices continue to rise, it may well come to pass that dry milk will become economical again. Right now, a gallon of fresh 1% milk is $2.99 (actually, it’s $3.59 a gallon, but two for $5.99). The cost to make a gallon of nonfat is $3.50 if bought in extreme bulk.

If the price of a gallon of milk crept over about $3.75 around here, I’d consider buying the milk powder. But before I ran out and got three cases of #10 (enough for roughly 86 gallons of milk) cans of the stuff for the best price-break, I’d “waste” money (paying about $4 a gallon) on a single can to try it. If I loathe the brand, if it adds a nasty taste to my breads or I can’t get a white sauce to set using it – I’m not going to spend $300 only to find out it is not going to work for me!

Got Friends?

I know. We all live on little islands, we talk to nobody, we know nobody, and the last thing we want to do is go to the neighbors (who are, like, not from around here? And also they dress funny? Plus I think they might be {Catholic, Hindu, Baptist, Unitarians, Satanists} or some junk?) and say, “Heyyyyyy…wanna buy some beef with me?!”

But I think we’re going to have to get over that. Normal people simply aren’t going to be able to use an entire cow in six months.

But four families just might – and each family will enjoy the tremendous cost savings associated with going direct to the ranch and buying an entire steer. (The rancher will be happy too, because in spite of giving you a price as much as 50% less than the Costco price he still makes more selling directly to you!)

If you can force yourself to take that tremendous risk and get to know your neighbors, all sorts of things become possible. Their backyard garden has zucchini, tomatoes and lettuce…you’re growing corn, sunflowers and broccoli. Let’s make a deal!

You couldn’t possibly use 50 pounds of flour in your lifetime…but if five neighbors each take ten pounds, well. Ten pounds at my supermarket would cost $6. Fifty pounds is (was last time, anyway) $14.50 - $3 per ten pounds, or half price.

You’re brilliant at sewing, I can bake. Say, could you put a new zipper in Eldest’s dress? I’ll give you four loaves of bread for it…dude, mow my front lawn for me and I’ll give you a fresh apple pie (you would not believe how strong a motivator apple pie can be for red-blooded young men)!

You can even divvy up the cost of the club warehouse this way. Everybody puts in their requests, one person has the membership and does the shopping in bulk, and the members of the neighborhood club pay the shopper when they pick up their stuff.

The benefits of bulk pricing, without the pain of throwing away the food you just didn’t manage to eat in time – and possibly the even greater benefits of putting together a group with a wide variety of talents to offer.

The eye passes over…

As recently whined about, the Crazy around here got to a level where I was starting to wonder if perhaps a little happy juicy medication was in order.

Because, gracious knows, I don’t have enough chemicals in my body at any given time.

I’m in the eye of the storm at the moment. Strange, eerie calm. That place where you dare to look up, to see just how bad the destruction has already been, to think about a mad dash for a safer hidey hole, to ask yourself if you are insured for this precise manner of storm and also, did I leave the gas on in the kitchen? Then, just when you’re saying that things aren’t really all THAT bad and perhaps it’s just going to blow over and maybe it’s actually already all done and perhaps I ought to poke my head up and see if the fence survived…the thought hits you: The worst damage usually comes in the second half!

Comforting thought, huh?

So. What all has got me all riled up?

First and most of all, there’s this. I’ve been working on a book-as-such, which has been an astonishing journey into the minute I have a deadline, I suffer immediate and crippling writer’s block and would rather play my video game for 46 hours STRAIGHT.

But my editor (eeee! I can haz editor!) has already given me some really good feedback on my first draft and promises a little more guidance, so there is hope that it will actually a) happen and b) not suck.

Which of course means I need to get back to being busy on it. Ahem. Yes. Welllllll…in other news…

I’ve been looking at a variety of schemes opportunities suitable for someone who both wants and could really use a paycheck, but has Certain Conditions (cough-*horde-o-kids*-cough) which make it very difficult to commit to showing up every day at a certain time, and staying until a certain time in the evening. Because let’s face it, I’m not going to be able to do that for the foreseeable future. Been there, done that, got in trouble for excessive sick days.

So, yes, I need freelance work. A term which here means, “Work I can do on my own terms when I’ve got a minute, work that does not have day-to-day deliverables but a flat ‘due by’ date preferably with a weekend between receipt and delivery…and we must have a clear understanding that I may be rather difficult to reach especially during the afternoon hours and that any conversations we have may have so much tumult in the background that you will suspect I am at the tables in Vegas, when in fact it just my charming offspring bouncing and jiving and demanding cookies and milk, because, well, they do that.”

As unlikely as it seems, I have some nibbles. Enough of them that I am in that wonderfully awkward position of having to decide which line(s) to tug, because I can’t possibly tug all of them and remain anything resembling sane. Each thing is different from the other; some are completely unrelated, some could be kissing cousins, each one has its own benefits and drawbacks. Some make a ton of money but require a ton of time, others make just a little bit but can be done on ‘whenever’ minutes.

Also, I’m trying to decide whether I want to go W2, 1099, or sole proprietorship. Employee, Independent, or Business Owner? Again, benefits and drawbacks to each one. Some are less flexible, some are more profitable, balancing headaches with tax breaks and accountability with deniability. “I have no memory of the meeting of which you speak, sir…”

Sigh. Sometimes, I really wish I could just be like everybody else about money and opportunities, and spend both as fast as I get them (possibly a little faster) and not have to think so @^*&@ing much.

As the dust is beginning to settle and things are becoming clear (which means that I’m about to jump up and bring on the second half of the storm by implementing Changes to the Status Quo), spring is working its Wicked Wiles upon us.

My charming daughters have all developed a life-threatening homework allergy. Seriously. If they are made to do homework? They might D-I-E, die! It is only because I never did actually love them, and don’t care about their happiness, and am otherwise a really bad person that I force them to continue risking their short existences by insisting – nay, demanding! – that the homework continue to be done. Which I am doing because all three teachers approached me this week saying, “Um…she didn’t turn in her homework last week? Or this week? Hello?”

Hell hath no fury like a mother embarrassed. So I’m riding them like crazy until we get through the rest of this school year. If I’ve gotta work, you’ve gotta work.

Meanwhile, it’s IEP (Individual Education Program) season! Yes, that’s right, it’s time for me to start attending whackity-majillion meetings at which Highly Educated People will tell me that they have absolutely no idea why my son, who turns four in July, communicates at roughly a twelve to eighteen month level!

It’s so nice to know that the people with the impressive titles after their names are likewise bemused. It makes me feel less stupid. Or at least, I wish it did.

The feeling of waiting continues. Even as I’m running from fire to fire, stomping and stomping and stomping for all I’m worth, the helpless sensation of just having to wait it all out sits on me like a hair shirt.

And speaking of waiting…there’s a kid sitting at the school doing so right now. Time to start practicing my pickup speech: “Do you have homework? How much homework? Is it due tomorrow? Have you started it already?”

La-la-la-la-la-la-laaaaa! Ho-ho-ho-ho-home-wooooorrrrrrrrkkkkkk…!

Addendum: Eldest came home with an assignment to write a Three {ugh} Hundred {groan!} Word {eh-heh, eh-heh} Essssssssss{gasp}ay {gaaaaaaaaak}! Her wake will be held on the afternoon of April 27...

Earth and Sun

This morning, Eldest informed me that it was Earth Day (no, really? because I’d only gotten five hundred emails from assorted companies saying, ‘EARTH DAY IS TUESDAY, SHOP EARLY AND OFTEN TO SAVE THE PLANET!’, so really, Earth Day arrived completely without warning this year) and asked if we, you know, did anything around the Den to, uh, save the Earth, or something like that?

It’s funny how much of ‘green’ stuff is…boring. Especially the stuff that has the best impact. Fluorescent bulbs? Replacing a pathetically inefficient heating/air conditioning unit with a best of breed new one? The new water heater? The front-load washer/dryer?

Yawn.

Reducing the amount of packaging we buy, reusing things, patching rather than replacing jeans, avid (rabid) recycling procedures, producing so little waste that we can use the smallest trash tote the city provides, using reusable containers in our packed lunches, all of that…big yawn.

Bake bread in a solar oven in the backyard, an act which saves all of thirty cents off the electric bill, using a $240 Sun Oven?

Coooooooooooooool.

OK, I admit that I, too, find the Sun Oven to be cooooooooool. It’s a fairly new toy and is fun to use. It sets up ridiculously easily, and gets not only hotter than your average homemade type – the hottest I ever got with one of my aluminum-foil-and-plywood endeavors was well under 200 degrees, while this particular model has shot right up to 350 degrees in twenty minutes – but stays there for as long as I can keep the sunlight focused on it. It has enough room on the cooking surface for two bread pans side-by-side, or a good-sized casserole dish. Yesterday, yes, I did indeed bake two loaves of bread in roughly an hour using nothing but the Power of the Sun.

Ooooooh, aaaaaaaaah.

There is no discernable difference between the loaves I baked in the Sun Oven and those I baked in the electric one. Their taste, appearance and texture are identical. The only real difference was in baking time – the electric oven takes about 40 minutes, the Sun Oven took a full hour.

Last week, it made a wonderful ‘crockpot style’ chicken stock (allowed to simmer for five hours) and a chicken and rice casserole – it would have taken about 40 minutes in the kitchen, it took an hour and a half outside.

Eldest took her backyard-baked bread to school in a reusable sandwich box, in her lead-free insulated lunch box.

It isn’t Grand or Glorious. It is, in fact, rather like tossing a grain of sand into the scales. There you go, my weighty contribution to Saving the World. That much less energy used for cooking, and in the coming dog days of summer, to removing the heat that energy generated inside the Den.

But it’s a start, anyway. Even small steps take us that much closer to where we want to go – far closer than we’d be if we just sat on our rumps thinking about doing something.

Someday, I hope people will look back on all these machinations and say, "How cute! But of course, that was before we had Eterna-Energy packs and Carbon-B-Gone..."

It's the one you don't see coming that gets you

I went wine tasting with a gaggle of girlfriends this weekend. Now, wine tasting, for me, must be a carefully planned sort of adventure, due to the fact that I take some medications that do not mix well with alcohol.

So, as I sat down Saturday morning after a sleeping-aid free night (ugh) to breakfast sans anti-muscle-spasm pill (think calm muscle thoughts), I was giving myself the old pep-talk.

“Self!” I directed firmly, as I tucked into a hearty breakfast of bacon-cheese omelet, side of bacon, potatoes sprinkled with cheddar cheese and a dotting of sour cream and buttered toast. “You have to be careful today. You don’t want to be throwing up. That would be bad. Watch how much wine you drink, and if you do take any of those medications, it’s sip-sip-toss, OK?”

I agreed with me, finished breakfast, and headed out to meet the girlfriends. We started with champagne and things were going well…except that the back muscles were tightening ominously and I began to feel that weird tingling thing in my legs – spasms are usually not far behind when the legs start tingling. Spasms suck. They’ll stop me dead in the water. Sometimes I’ll have to lie down and whimper quietly to myself for half an hour while waiting for the medication to kick in, so I prefer to head them off rather than wait to see if they actually develop. Especially when I’m in public. Because lying down in the parking lot of a winery going, “Owies! Owies! Owies!” is just really not cool.

We stopped for lunch. As I chewed on my BLT with avocado and greedily slurped down a chocolate mousse concoction and felt the first painful flutters back there, I told myself that OK. It was obvious I wasn’t going to get through this day without a Lortab. So. It is what it is, I said and took the pill.

You cannot imagine how sad I was, when I had to pour absolutely delicious merlot and cabernet sauvignon into the old spittoon. I consoled myself with cheeses brie and blue, soft and hard, and slightly more than my fair share of chocolate kisses.

In the car, I drank my water and felt very proud of myself for my obvious maturity. At the next two stops, I sipped and tossed. It was good stuff, and oh, I wanted to pound it back! But I was firm with myself: Behave! I hissed, when I tried to say, How much could just ONE MORE SIP possibly hurt?

You took a Lortab a few hours ago, I said. I can already feel the pain creeping back – you will need another before you go to bed tonight. Sip, and toss. That. Is. FINAL.

Sadly, I sipped; grieving, I poured out.

But, when we stopped for a Thai dinner, I was pleased with myself. No nausea! No whirling head! Granted, the Lortab alone gives me a buzz so even small sips of wine made me one VERY happy camper, but I was not driving (thank you, Terena!) so hey.

I was delighted that I hadn’t overdone and ruined a marvelous day.

However. I was thinking back over what I had eaten. It was a little fuzzy, but I was counting up the fat (those of us without gallbladders have to do these things), and I had the vague notion that perhaps I ought to tone it down for dinner.

So I ordered a vegetarian curry with rice. And vegetarian egg rolls. Because, after all. Egg rolls are an absolute good. And besides. We’d be sharing. One egg roll, c’mon. Can’t possibly hurt.

Yeah, well. Nobody else really wanted egg rolls, having chosen other appetizers instead, so I ate three of the four.

Then we went back to our rooms. And I sat around talking for a while. And then we went to bed.

I was just starting to drift off when my intestines said, “Ahem.”

Every half hour, all night long. Did I have any Imodium with me on the trip, perhaps in the grab-n-go bag I keep stocked with the essentials required by the weekend traveler? Even though I have this come up so often that I buy the stuff at Costco? Even though it happens to me almost every single time I go away for an overnight trip, due to the fact that eating out more than one meal tends to cause a tremendous spike in my fat consumption?

No. No, I did not. See, if I had had the stuff in my bag, well. Things would have been different. I would have slept, for one thing. I am reaching a point in my life where not sleeping is just not something I can do. I cannot pull “all nighters” as once I could.

It was not really the intestinal distress that caused my Issues the next day – it was the utter lack of sleep.

The next morning at first light, I crawled out of bed and made a mad dash for the nearest supermarket for an emergency supply of Imodium. When I got back to the room, my roommate took one look at me and said, “Why don’t you try to nap for a little while. I’ll go get some coffee.”

“Yeah, OK.” Imodium works fast. I climbed back into bed, free at last from the cramping and distress, and began to drift off. To sleep, perchance to dream…I had a couple hours before we were supposed to meet everybody for breakfast. A few hours sleep would do wonders…zzzzz…

And then, the fire alarm went off.

I kid you not. The @*^&@ing fire alarm? WENT OFF. Right over my head. WHEE! WHEE! WHEE! {pause} WHEE! WHEE! WHEE! {pause} WHEE! WHEE! WHEE!

Had there been an actual fire, I probably would have died. I responded with all the speed and agility of a turtle mired in peanut butter. Blearily, I got out of bed. Grudgingly, I put on my shoes. I looked around for my purse.

See, I was waiting for the hotel to realize there was no fire but that somebody had thought setting off the fire alarm would be a funny way to wake up their Sleeping Beauty. Any second now, it would stop. Any second now. Aaaaaaaany second now…sigh. I gathered up my bag, walked to the door, felt it, peered out the window, saw no smoke, felt no heat, and opened the door.

It was only as I stepped across the threshold into the frigid Napa morning that the damned thing stopped screaming about the END OF THE WORLD. I muttered words unbecoming a lady and headed downstairs for a cup of nice mint tea and a lazy conversation with my roommate.

We were supposed to meet the rest of our group for breakfast. Needless to say, the idea of breakfast made me want to just simply die. Even though I was feeling moderately better by the time I had sipped down a large cup of tea and sat warming my sore bones in the morning sun for an hour, food?

Not. My. Friend. Right. Now.

Whenever I am sleep deprived, I feel nauseous. The idea of food just horrifies me. Ugh. No food. Don’t want to look at food. Think about food. Acknowledge food exists. No. No food. UGH.

I was also supposed to drive up to Ukiah to pick up a cat we are adopting. Yeah. Listen, I barely made it home. I had to pull over for a little walk three times, because I was nodding off. I made it! But only barely.

I walked in, grunted at the family (they all asked about the cat, even Captain Adventure), and went to bed for a power nap. Ate some plain white rice and a piece of toast. Played a video game for a little while. Went back to bed.

The next morning, I popped out of bed ready to go.

The first thing I did? Tuck a fresh supply of Imodium into my grab-and-go bag. And I had to laugh: There was a time when the stuff in there was limited to a change of clothes and the bare hygiene essentials.

Now, slowly but surely, it is filling up with a day’s worth of medications. This for sleeping, that for back pain, and of course the stuff for intestinal distress. My purse is a walking pharmacy, with the emergency ‘dissolve under your tongue’ stomach cramp pills and the Lortab in case of crippling back spasms, the allergy pills and the regular old Tylenol.

And I’m only 40. I shudder to think what things will be like by the time I’m 60.

Although with any luck, some bright young whippersnapper will have invented the Hover Purse by then, so at least I won’t have to worry about throwing my back out lifting it all.

Hairy situation

I am having hair issues. Not merely bad hair days (which have been, like, every day for the last six months), but troubles with whiskers popping out of my chin (ew!) and then yesterday I realized that the last time I shaved, I did both legs, and my right armpit.

The left one, however, apparently was either not with me that day, or had a no-cut order posted to protect the forest.

I know. You could have gone your whole entire lives without that particular insight into my personal grooming habits. Although in case you were wondering where my kids get their ADD tendencies? Yeah. That about says it all, huh?

ANYWAY. I have been considering getting a hair cut.

Actually, I’ve been considering putting out a contract to have my hair whacked. Right now, it comes to just below my shoulders and looks like holy hell most of the time. This is because I have all these grand and glorious intentions around my personal appearance that simply never materialize.

Every few years, I decide that I am tired of looking tired and trashy all the time, so – and this time, I really mean it! – I am going to make myself over.

I usually buy girl-clothes and dig my ‘cute’ shoes out of the storage shed and pick up $50 in makeup and rush into Supercuts clutching photos of trim, attractive 20-somethings with cute little pixie cuts and say, “Yes! Just like this!”

I usually love the cut for a few weeks and then hate it and let it grow out again, cussing all the way as it goes from ‘perky’ to ‘shaggy’ to ‘seriously, you should have somebody look at that’ to ‘heh heh heh…lookit that, it’s like she’s got a goat on her head or something!’ to ‘almost manageable’ and then finally, glory hallelujah, I can put it in a ponytail again.

The makeup eventually goes in the trash and the dresses into the back of the closet for a while until one day I say, “Why am I wasting all that space with those things? I never wear them!” and send them back to Goodwill.

I remember this cycle for a year or two, and then I look at myself in the mirror one morning and think, God. I look all…tired…and kind of trashy…you know what? I think I need A MAKEOVER!

This is because I never – and I mean never – learn.

This morning was going to be Hair Cut Day. I had picked up a Short Styles magazine and selected a few styles that showed the general idea. My favorite Supercut stylist had returned from her vacation. I was ready.

My hair didn’t help its case this morning. Oh no, it did not. First, it felt sticky. Then when I washed it, it went all bushy. Then it tangled itself all up and hurt like the dickens when I went to brush it. When put into a ponytail, it began pulling on my scalp and giving me a headache. @*^&@.

I dug into my drawer and found my box of hairpins. It took forty-eleven of them, a bit of water, and almost ten minutes (which is, for me, a helluva long time to be futzing with my appearance in the morning) but! Clean living prevailed, and my hair was caged into a bun-like thing.

Up off my neck, not looking stupid, perhaps even looking (dare I say it) like I had given a cuss that morning.

Which was appropriate, because I had given a cuss. Many of them, in fact.

I then descended into my usual morning routine of slamming food around, yelling at the children and trying to remember what it was that I was forgetting (oh yeah, to speak ‘calm, supportive words’ encourage them to do well on that stupid State testing thing today).

And then I came home, flopped onto the sofa and tried not to fall asleep. Not only am I still recovering from a weekend in Disneyland with two ten year olds (I was alone with them, and we arrived home at midnight – on a school night) (“pooped” does not begin to cover it), but I’ve been doing battle with a cold all week (it showed up Saturday morning as we were getting ready to go into the park: Gee, why is my throat so sore this morning? Did I not brush my teeth last night? {hack hack} Oh…that was NOT a cough…).

Of course, the minute I sat down, Captain Adventure came over to jump on me. He settled into my lap and put his arms around my neck to begin his morning monolog – a listing of not only what HAS happened, but what WILL happen and what he’d LIKE to have happen.

“Hi, mommy! Boo Bug go school today? Danger Mouse go school today? Eldest go school today? Oh! Captain Adventure go school today? Nooooooo…ee go later today. I haf…EGGS today…I haf…MILK today…I haf…mmmm…I haf park today! I haf…river today! I haf…cupcake today…I haf…”

The abrupt silence startled me into cracking an eye open to see what the problem was. He was staring at me with the strangest expression on his face. I could feel his little hands patting the back of my neck.

“Uh oh!” he said, then got up to look at the back of my head. “Uh oh! Mommy? Mommy! Where hair go?! Mommy? MOMMY! WHERE HAIR GO?!?!”

“I put it up, baby,” I said. “See? It’s in a bun today.”

His eyes were burning coals in his head.

“Where hair go, mommy?” he asked in a broken little voice. “Mommy…where hair go?”

“Honey…it’s just up, baby. Look. See? See the little pins?” I pulled a little hair out to show him.

“No, mommy,” he said. “Put hair down.”

“I want it up today,” I replied testily.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“NO!”

“YES!!”

Stalemate. He was angry. I was getting there. Then he started to cry, which, I mean really – low blow!

“Hair down, mommy…”

Oh, for the love of…

I took the pins out and shook the dreadful mane down on my shoulders. It hung damp and lifeless on my neck. Hot. Sticky. Ugh.

I need a makeover…

He stood up and pressed his face into it. Snuggled down against my shoulder, wrapping his fingers in it, petting it.

He has always done that, since he was mere months old. For months, it was part of his going to sleep ritual, stroking my hair as his breathing grew steady and noisy in my ear.

“There ‘ee go,” he cooed happily. “There mommy hair. Mommy? I haf mommy hair today!”

Oh, gag me. And if you think, kid, that I am going to leave it all messy like that just because you like it…no. I’m getting a haircut today, and That. Is. FINAL.

I am a strong-minded, independent woman, dammit. I do what I want to do, when I want to do it! ROAR!

So I marched into Supercuts. I waited for my stylist. I sat down in her chair.

“So, what are we doing today?” she asked. I took a deep breath, and let it out.

“Just even it up for me and nip those bangs out of my eyes, OK?”

Can't type...laughing too hard...

This just really sums up my whole life right now...courtesy of The Bitter Pen.

I want this on a t-shirt. Seriously.

Swirl…

I feel right now as though I am in a hurricane. Perhaps it is obvious from the lack of posting lately, but Things are going on behind the curtain here at the Den of Chaos. I am so far behind on email that I have half a mind to just delete them all and start over.

So what’s going on? Nothing really huge, I suppose. I mean, nobody’s getting married or divorced or having a new baby or anything like that.

Yet somehow…the Chaos has kicked itself up a notch. Not necessarily in ways that are obvious, but in subtle, irritating ways that really get into your underwear and itch.

The feeling of one thing too many has been growing, and to be honest I’ve been responding in large part by goofing off. I have a list of things I “should” be doing, and instead I’m doing “other things”.

Like sorting through our financial papers from 1996 to 2000, hauled forth from the tomb in the garage and dumped onto my bedroom floor. For the love of God, why right now, when I’m already complaining about not having enough hours in a day, and looking for things to cut out?!

I also spent a considerable chunk of time cruising the thrift stores this week. I’ve re-outfitted the whole family for $65, which is awesome. But did it have to be done right immediately now?

Uhhhhhhhh…I’m going to plead the Fifth on that…

The Big Project needs to be finished and handed off. But I’m having trouble letting go of it. I keep thinking of just one more thing I want to add to it. A different color here. A different graph there. Maybe this could be said better. Did I already say that? Shouldn’t I have something about…did I mention…hmm…

I feel like I’m twelve years old and having to turn in that big English essay again. Let Teacher see what you’ve written, honey… No! NO! IT ISN’T READY YET!!!

I have so many half-formed ideas and other projects in the pipeline and things waiting on other things, and bubbling puddles of resentment, anger, frustration…not a whole lot of positive feelings right now, frankly.

And over it all, a curious sensation of waiting. I’m in a hurry and running late – but I’m taking the train. It will arrive when it arrives, and not a moment before. No matter how hard I strain my brain trying to make it go faster.

It’s a big, sullen storm. It has a lot of weight behind it. It’s on the move. I’m not sure where it is going – or even if it has any intention of going anywhere in the first place. Sometimes, storms bring changes great or small. Most of the time, they just blow over. We talk about them for a few days and then they fade away, joining a thousand other storms just like them as a collective memory of ‘all those times it stormed around here’.

But in the meantime, this feeling of Impending Something Or Other is about to drive me insane.

If the children don’t do it first.

Why did it take so long?

This morning was an interesting departure from routine. It was a pretty normal morning, with a lot of scrambling and carrying on and the short people having to be asked fourteen times to put on their shoes.

We skidded into the school parking lot with five minutes to spare, ejected the three older Denizens from the van and began the return trip to the Den. I had a list of stuff I thought I ought to get done – my new little friend wasn’t coming today (praise be) and I had thoughts of dirty kitchen floors and clothes needing putting away and ancient folders with receipts for meals long ago turned to dust needing their final closure.

As we pulled into the driveway, Captain Adventure voiced his opinion: “NO, Mommy.”

“No?” I parroted automatically. “No what, honey.”

“No go home. Go-go-go! Go van! Go out!” he enthused. Hmm. Problematic. But then, I did have some errands I’d been putting off, a deposit to make at the bank, and he needed t-shirts.

“Hmm, well, I need my glasses,” I prevaricated. All business, he unsnapped the top of his seatbelt and fussed with the bottom part.

“Go get glasses. Then go van!” he declared decisively.

He is a Leo. They are often bossy like that.

Anyway, we went into the house and I went into my bedroom and began to putter a bit. I put away a book that was on the floor, and I made the bed.

And then I turned around to find him thrusting my glasses at me (what the- where on earth?!), his eyes snapping and twinkling and a grin across his whole face.

“There ‘ee go!” he rejoiced. “Glasses! OK! Go van now!”

Uhhhhh…right. OK. Well.

OK.

So we got in the van and we headed out. The bank wasn’t open yet, nor was the thrift store. Hmm. Well, what the heck. Live dangerously. I headed for Starbucks, got myself a mocha and Himself a Snickerdoodle and a child-sized apple juice.

And then suddenly…I had the strange sensation of Responsible Behavior simply taking a hike.

We drove out toward Sonora, into the hills, looking for something interesting. A little over an hour and one sudden turn off the highway later, we were pulling into a little place called Knight’s Ferry, on the Stanislaus River.

Captain Adventure was entranced by the whole experience, which consisted of getting out of the van, greeting the local seniors having their lunch at the picnic tables and accepting their accolades about his Cuteness, and then exploring a tiny area of no more than a football-field. Blackberry bushes, he discovered, gave boo-boos. He didn’t like the look of the algae waving from under the deceptively mellow water at the edge of the river. He did like the way rocks splashed into the water, and thought mommy was the cleverest person, EVER because she could make them skip.

“Oh, dat wah-der!” he yelled, gesturing at the swiftly flowing river.

“It’s a river,” I corrected.

And then suddenly, it hit me. He’s never seen a river.

We took him and his sisters to the beach, once; I have the gray hairs to prove it. I cast around in my mind. Had I taken my son to Lake Tahoe? Had I ever taken him into San Francisco? My mind scrambled through my memories, looking for when he had been on a ferry, when he had eaten dim sum, when he had felt the icy grip of Lake Tahoe on his toes. I knew he’d never seen Yosemite – two of his sisters throw up from motion sickness no matter how straight the road or what medication we give them, so making the winding journey to that stunning display has been out of the question for years.

He’s never watched water flow like this. He’s never seen a blackberry bush. He has no idea that he should watch out for snakes in that growth, that on hot days rattlers like to curl up for a nap in the relative safety of their thorny embrace. They don’t like being abruptly awakened by a hulking creatures with appendages that look like another snake striking right above their heads. (Who would?!)

He doesn’t know that the juiciest berries always seem to be on the water-side, and that a kayak is great way to get at them – highly maneuverable, and not generally made of stuff that will pop if it encounters a large thorn or sharp rock.

He’s never slept in a tent, or gotten up in the dead of night to walk out into stars that seem so bright and so close you’d swear you could reach out and touch one. He’s never seen real snow, never had the dubious pleasure of hiking through it and finding patch after patch where a wee bit of snow is covering a big old hole.

So many things he’s never done, never seen, never tasted, never heard, never felt.

“Do you hear it?” I asked him. He was snuggled up in my arms, watching the water ripple and flow, the constant changing-sameness. He laid his cheek against mine and said, “Yeah. Hear it.”

The birds sang songs gentle and rough. Jays were scolding. Crows were cawing. Smaller birds chirped in the gaps they left. The water rippled and sang. Our rocks ploinked and plopped and skipped.

He learned that throwing a rock was better than tossing a handful of sand, especially when the wind is blowing toward you. He spit, rubbed his face, and laughed. “Oh no, mommy! Captain Adventure get dirty!”

Far too soon, it was time to go. I grieved. It seemed so unfair, to wait almost four years before showing him a river and then yanking him away before he’d even begun to become accustomed to its shapes and sounds and scents.

But we had to go. He had school to attend, and shortly after he started sisters would begin getting out. Even if I decided his chances of attending Yale wouldn’t be too badly damaged by missing a day of preschool, we still couldn’t stay much longer.

We had to go.

Why did it take this long for my boy to see a real running river? Why did I have to snatch him away from it so soon? Why is it that even when I’m being irresponsible, I still have Responsibilities?

I eased his outrage with a dum-dum and an in-flight movie. We pulled up to the park by his school for a little more running before he had to go serve his time, one last "hurrah!" before serving his time for the day. It was a mixed experience: he loves to run and play in the park, but it makes the whole going to school thing that much harder to swallow. In the end I had to sling him like a sack of potatoes and haul him, yelling and protesting, all the way down the block to school.

He wouldn’t look at his teachers or say any of the words he had been so gleefully shouting a few minutes before. But when I picked him up a few hours later, he ran out yelling, “Mommy! Mommy! I HAF RIVER TODAY!!”

Tonight he lay in my arms drifting off to sleep, one hand curled in my hair, the other grasping my arm firmly – it is important to make sure The Woman can’t sneak off, even though she always somehow manages it.

“I haf…river today…” he told me softly. “I haf…rocks today…I haf…birds today…I haf…ah-weh-nuh today!”

It took me a while to realize he was saying adventure.

Oh, baby. So many adventures still to have.

Just you wait, my little Captain Adventure. Just you wait, and see.

And touch.

And hear.

And taste.

And feel.

Fatigue

Suddenly, around 5:30 this evening, just when my boyfriend Brian was starting his newscast, It hit me.

Fatigue.

Not just tired, not just feelin’ the burn.

I mean, I was bone-achingly, irritably, eyes-burning, stomach-churning, my-legs-can’t-take-me-all-the-way-upstairs exhausted.

A few moments before, I was getting to that point in the evening where I start barking, “Stop that infernal racket!” at the children, who are so terrified of my wrath that they immediately continue banging on the pots with the wooden spoons while singing GOD BLESS AMERRRRRICAAAAAAAA at the top of their lungs.

If they pause at all, it will be to say something like, “But mommy, we need an audience!”

Oh. Well. By all means, please do continue to disregard the way my face is turning red, the disturbing way my eyeballs are beginning to protrude from my head and, should you see any steam curling out of my eardrums, please take it to mean that I am just that much excited by your outstanding use of the flat AND edge of the spoon on that damned pot.

Because I think too much inquiring minds want to know, I began questing back through the day for the Cause.

As is occasionally sometimes nearly always the case, I’ve simply got forty-seven things too many on my To Do List.

I have an amended tax form to file (I received a Miscellaneous Whatnot form two weeks after I filed) (we are owed an additional $1,000 from Uncle Sam, which is much better than having to return $1,000 to him I suppose except that on the whole, I’d rather have NEITHER be the case).

The same Project I was bitching about some time ago is still itching at me. But I can have courage because it is nearly done. Soon it will be somebody else’s problem for a while. I only hope we will still be friends after this thing is put to bed.

I have a massive donation to pull together for the Veterans, who are coming next week. (The Veterans are coming! The Veterans are coming!) There is a pile of clothing and Whatnots assembled on the rocking chair in my room, which gives the entire room a feeling of clutter that irks me.

Also, there are files all over my bedroom floor. Files reaching as far back as 1996. Ah, the memories! I’ve found financial statements from the height of the Really Stupid Years! Good times, yessir, goooooood times…(Although I have to say, it is making me feel a lot better about my I Ain’t Going Into Debt For That stance on most non-essential things. Sometimes, I do feel kind of left out when other people, people relatively close to me, are doing downright idiotic things with their money while I’m refusing to spend money I actually could spend if I weren’t so uptight about things like college funds and early retirement.)

I was talked into babysitting a four year old (brother to Eldest’s Best Friend Forever, who is rapidly turning into my fifth child) while his grandmother is away. He is cute as a bug, but he is also four. He talks constantly, and I can understand about every sixteenth word. I thought it was for about two weeks. I just learned Grandma is away for six months. There will have to be discussions, here.

Speaking of six months, guess how overdue for dental exams the children are?! I got my hokey dental benefits card last week, and today interviewed six local dentists who are “in network”. Mommy and Daddy will probably go to one of them. The Denizens, on the other hand, will be seeing their Very Expensive Pediatric Specialist dentist in a couple weeks. If I want the children tortured, I will do it myself thank you. There goes another $725. When is that tax rebate arriving, again…?

The entire Den is in need of a good cleaning. Which would be easier to do if there wasn’t a solid layer of crap all over every surface. The husband cleaned out the garage, which naturally means that a whack of stuff migrated into the house and is now watching me expectantly all day long – waiting for its new home, inside. Oy. Do you think he’d notice if I started sneaking it back out to the garage again…?

I fixed one (1) of the three (3) broken strings on my largest harp today. It has been so long since I did this that I was all dyslexic and dysfunctional and otherwise doin’ it wrong. There is this Certain Knot Thing that you do when putting a new string on a harp? And I used to be able to do them blindfolded in a dark restaurant while giving tourists from Minnesota detailed directions to the nearest BART station?

Yeah. Can’t do that any more. In fact, I couldn’t do it in bright sunlight with my full attention on the task at hand. I broke the string and was out of 0.025mm nylon but I knew I had another bag of strings…somewhere…and then it was twenty minutes of looking and OH CRAP, it was time to run a kid from Point A to Point B and now, at 10:00, I am remembering that I only did one (1) of three (3).

And one of them is the High C, which should have a red string. Feck . If I were a red 0.025mm string…where would I be?!

I need the strings fixed because I have lost my mind utterly agreed to play for some upcoming events. And, see, I need to fix the strings so that I can fix my performing, which at the moment is complete ass. Fortunately, the harp is a very forgiving instrument to play and honestly I have often wondered if I could just sit there and bang on random strings and still have people wandering up saying, “Oh, wow, that is just, so, like, beautiful and peaceful…you are sooooooo talented!”

Swear to God, someone actually said that while I was tuning the harp before a performance, and then asked me what the piece was called. I told him it was an original piece called Simple Arpeggios in C Minor. He believed me.

Meanwhile, it has been suggested that I could help ease a certain workflow issue for some folks who could surely use the help if I would consider working for a company on a purely hourly, as-you-can 1099 independent contractor basis. Now, I think we all know what happens next: Tama says she’s going to work just a little, maybe a few hours on weekends and three or four midweek.

And promptly begins pulling down 65 hour weeks.

Because she is incorrigible, can’t resist “easy” money, and definitely can’t ever seem to say, “I can’t, I have knitting to do.”

Which, by the way, I do. I finished the second sleeve on Lillehammer, which means that what I need to do now is set up my sewing machine, run a couple lines of stitches around where the sleeves are to be sewn in, then cut the steeks (eep!) and sew in the sleeves and then pick up the forty-eleven stitches around the neck and do that and then I’d be done with the sweater. Just in time for the temperatures to hit the 80s around here.

Naturally…I am working on a sock instead. Which has the marvelous quality of being fast knitting. I turned the heel on the first sock tonight while my boyfriend was being devilishly handsome and intelligent telling me about important things like the economy and maybe something about bowling. I don’t remember, really. I was too busy castigating myself for taking on way too many Things, again.

Film at eleven.

There is no cure for Dufus

You know, you run into someone you kinda know (but can never remember the name of) at the supermarket and they’re all, “Oh, hey! How are you?!”

It’s fine if things are fine, right? But as I think I’ve confessed in the past, I am possibly the World’s Worst Liar©.

I am also a Dufus.

I mean, seriously. You’d think that answering, “Fine thanks, how are you?” would be something that, you know, well. It hardly counts as lying, right? It’s just a social nicety. Hello, how are you, fine thanks and you, couldn’t be better, we kiss we dance we schmooze we go home happy, deal?

But oooooooooh no. Not me. I can’t manage to just say “fine” and onward we go. No.

“Oh, hey! How are you, how are the kids?!” she says. I open my mouth to spit out fine thanks and how have YOU been, and what happens?!

My brain goes, Actually, I’m kind of craptastic and the kids are definitely Satan Spawn, thanks for asking.

And then it splits into two and begins arguing with itself.

Light Me: Oh, come now. It’s not that bad! The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the kids are happy and healthy, come on, now! It’s all good!! Tell the lady ‘fine’ and let’s hear about how her children are out there learning to make solar panels out of Pepsi bottles, maybe we could pick up some neat tips! Oooooh! You could tell her how well the children behaved when you took them for haircuts yesterday!!

Dark Me: I hate her and her children with all the perky little crafts. My back feels like someone parked an RV on it last night. My head is pounding. The children are going feral on me and if I have to pry Captain Adventure off something even one more time, I think my spine is going to peel itself out of my body and take off for Florida. It is not all good, it is craptastic. Why can’t I just say ‘craptastic’? She’ll probably just laugh. She’s a mom. She’s been craptastic, I’d bet cash money she has!

Light Me: Now, I think we just need to turn that frown upside down, missy-miss! {Dark Me sticks her fingers into her mouth and feigns retching right about now.} There are forty-two bazillion people in the world who have it SIX MILLION times worse! Why, didn’t we just read the other day about that poor, poor woman who had that surgery? And then had to lift her shirt in the airport to show her scars to God and everybody when the metal tubes in her chest beeped during her security screening? SEE HOW GOOD YOU HAVE IT?

Dark Me: I hate you. I really, really hate you. Have you seen our house? Have you? What did I do, for eight straight hours yesterday? Clean. And what does the house look like? Complete. Ass. Those children go right behind me and rip apart anything I do, and then Captain Adventure got hold of the one (1) marker in the WHOLE HOUSE that wasn’t washable and decorated the entire hallway AND his sister’s room, the one we just painted!!! with it, and I’m suppose to figure out how to get it off and you know what? I’d like to take a Vicodin now. Get me a martini, so I can take a Vicodin right now, at 10:00 in the morning…because this whole week, IN FACT, I’m thinking this whole DECADE, is crappity-crap-crap-CRAPTASTIC! {Begins singing ‘crap, crap, crappity-crap, crap, crap, crappity-crap’ to self, giggling somewhat insanely.}

Light Me then goes into a euphoric song about hills being alive and mountains being climbed, and then just as the violins are really swelling in the background Dark Me produces a handgun and shoots her dead, the end.

Meanwhile back in the Real World…the other mom is looking at me. The silence has officially passed the ‘I just had to swallow some spit, be right with you’ pause and into the “awk-WARD” phase.

Coolly, I issue forth the Socially Correct Response in my usual calm, deadpan way, the way I always do when I am lying through my many teeth : “OH! Fine, yes, fine, yessir, just abso-frickin’-lootly peachy-keen, Ima Dean! Heh heh, yeah, GREAT. Spring break, hooooooowhee, yeah! It’s just GREAT. Great. Heh heh. WE GOT HAIRCUTS!”

New awkward pause. Now she’s staring at me with eyes like saucers. I can feel my face blossoming red. Red like beets, red like sunset, red like the blood pounding through my head. The heat of my embarrassment is causing my scalp to itch. Oh, Jay-sus, Mary and Joseph, I am SUCH A DUFUS! Quick! Maybe you can still save this whole encounter…

“SO! How have you been?!” Smooth.

She’s been fine, thanks for asking. Over these last four days of spring break, her children have solved global warming through cunning use of recycled truck tires, and are currently working on a cure for cancer using aspirin, bicycle hoses and bottle caps.

I refrain from asking if they couldn’t work on a cure for Dufus, instead. It would sound too much like begging, and I am above that.

Sticks and string

Well, I bought a new battery charger for the camera (sigh), and hey! It worked!

So, without further adieu ado…(does anybody but me find it funny that I would Freudian ‘adieu’ instead of ‘ado’?):

The Sweater



This is the Dale of Norway Lillehammer. I finished the one sleeve and cast on the next one; I just finished the ribbing for the cuff on that one and am about to start the color splash at the bottom. I have forgiven the sweater for not speaking up sooner when I was doing the increases wrong, and it has forgiven me for being so childish.

The Socks

I always have a pair of socks in my purse, to whip out whenever I have to sit around waiting for something. These just got finished last week:



They are your basic stockinette sock in Claudia superwash, ‘Circus’ colorway. They are very bright and happy, and I like them a lot.

I’m tearing out the Girlie Girl socks in the Schaefer Anne. I’m just not feeling the love for the look – that yarn wants to be knit on smaller needles. Instead, I think I’m going to try (warning! This will open a PDF of the pattern!!) Dublin Bay Socks, which pattern was pointed out by Bells Knits. Not only do I like the look, but the lace pattern is extremely simple. This is important for those of us who are highly distracted most of the time.

The Shawl

I joined a (somewhat) local Prayer Shawl group, and have dutifully cast on a shawl.



Eventually, it will be the Stora Dimun shawl from Cheryl Oberle’s Folk Shawls. At the moment, however, it is just a big purple squiggle. This is one of those shawls that hits you hard at first (“cast on 449 stitches, loosely”), but gets faster and faster as you go due to decreasing eight stitches every right-side row.

This is Good Old Red Heart, in a really vibrant purple. Machine wash and dry, no special care required.

So, there you go. Pictorial proof that knitting is still happening in the Den. Although not at the rate I'd like, frankly - life has gotten waaaaaay too busy lately. I hate these 'busy' cycles. In the car! Out of the car! Back in the car! Drive here! Drive there! Pick up this! Drop off that! Lessons! Field trips! Doctor's appointments! ARGH!!!

Oh well. Eventually, it will settle down and we'll be complaining about how boooooored we are...

Apparently it is a trend

Stop copying/nagging me, Daily OM!

But we can make certain that our homes truly feel like our sanctuaries by taking the time to tend to them like gardens, which need care in order to offer us the beauty of their blooms. When we take the time to treat our homes like beloved treasures, we can shift their energy from being merely places to being wellsprings for the replenishment of our energy…Organizing and cleaning is a no-cost way to remove chaos from our homes and introduce more calm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m on it, I’m on it…geesh…

I don’t care what happens tomorrow…

…I am not leaving this Den!

A tornado has spun through this house. There can be no other explanation for the accumulation of crap on every surface, in every drawer, the crud on the bathroom counters, the laundry (dear God, the laundry), the bills that have not been paid, the invoices that have not been mailed out, the marks on the walls and the solid-crumb flooring we have apparently permanently installed in the kitchen.

I am two seconds from hiring a cleaning service.

Yesterday, I was going to deal with Things, but it was that early release day thing and I ended up ‘out’ puttering around dealing with Stupid Crap instead of the house. Meanwhile, the Den was cheerfully piling up crap upon crap on every surface.

Today, though, was going to be Different. I had no errands that needed running, nothing needing to be bought, sold, traded, or otherwise dealt with…

...oh…except for dropping off cupcakes at school for Eldest’s tenth birthday, which OH YEAH was today.

And getting the sutures removed from the Space Formerly Known As Tooth #3.

Also, having an impromptu meeting with a teacher about a child who is driving us both crazy.

Then, it was remembered that I hadn’t yet picked up a birthday present for Eldest.

And the sutures reminded me that I had wanted to open a token account at a local credit union because they have a member benefit providing discounted dental and vision – two things the current employer does not offer. Also two things which are killing us dead. Have I mentioned that Tooth #3 has thus far cost me almost $3,000, and I still have a $700 crown to go? Or that one uninsured trip to the dentist simply for x-rays and cleanings for the three female Denizens costs us $750?

@*&^@.

Sooooooo, I went to open the token account and then they had a 7% offer on a one year CD, and an 8% offer for minors, and then there were transfers made and savings accounts earning 3.25% were moved to the 8% deal and I’ve deferred my own wild-eyed spending for a year to get 7% and HOLY CRAP, it’s WHAT TIME?!?!

THEN I had to come home and put together the Birthday Dinner of steak, mashed potatoes and birthday cake which, by the way, still had to be baked…

Meanwhile, the Den had called a dump truck and invited it, and a few of its buddies, to come on over and off-load an entire landfill worth of trash-trash-trash all over itself.

I am officially not going anywhere tomorrow. I am doing nothing else, NOTHING I TELL YOU, but finding the conflabbed floor in this wretched excuse for a house. Also I am getting those invoices mailed out (the bills, however, can wait).

I am also going to spend some amount of time calling up cleaning services and getting quotes. I know what they are going to tell me: Something around $150 a week, or $280 every two weeks, or $450 for monthly. I already know this. And that I will recoil in horror and, for a few weeks, have tremendous house-cleaning energy.

It would probably save time to just skip right to the chase, recoil in horror and get the energy.

But where would be the fun in that?!

Seriously, though. I don’t care what the problem is. I don’t care if we’re out of oxygen, I am NOT! going to any store, ANY STORE, tomorrow. I am staying home, and taking care of home-centric business.

Hallelujah, amen.

Weird Knitting Space

Well, I’m slugging away on the husband’s Dale of Norway sweater. I finished the first sleeve and started the second, and all is going well. But this morning I was overwhelmed by a sense of semi-desperation, because I’m starting the second sleeve which means the whole sweater is “almost done” except that I then have to do the steeks and place the sleeve and then pick up and knit around the collar AND ALSO there is the small matter of approximately sixty thousand ends that will need to be run in.

So I am overwhelmed with the desire – nay, the need – to work on a pair of socks instead.

Except that I want to do the Girly-Girl socks from that Spin-Off sock book, and I want to use the Schaeffer Anne to do them? But they don’t want to make gauge.

Argh. A more rational knitter would move on, perhaps choose a different yarn or (dare I suggest it?) another pattern.

Oh no. Size 2 needles are too small, and Size 3s are too big, but UNDAUNTED, I’m trying to decide which is better: socks that are a quarter inch too big, or a quarter inch too small. Hmmmmm…

OH. And, in other news, there is a prayer shawl knit-together Wednesday. This is the first time I’m attending this group.

I can’t decide what to bring.

I have some acrylic I bought a while ago to make a shawl with, acrylic being what the hospitals and nursing homes request. But, pattern? I don’t want to walk in and say, “Yes, hello, I’m going to be doing this Incredible Complex Thing out of Lace That Will Kill You Dead, Volume XIV”, and then find out that nobody in the group has even learned the purl stitch yet (oh, don’t laugh, I’ve had it happen – the entire crowd just sat around me breathing in silent awe as I carried two! whole! colors!, at the same time, OH MY GAWD IT’S LIKE A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!).

Awk-ward. Like when a teacher ran up and asked me if I would do a spinning demonstration for her class because she had heard that I DID THAT (in related news, kids talk too damned much). My spinning is beyond pathetic, and the idea of trying to show a group of fifth graders how to…wait, OK, well, not like that, obviously, you put the, DAMN! Why is that…oh, OK, right. OK! So, you put the thing in this other thing? And then you spin the…@*^&@, that stupid drive belt! Right, so, first you have to get the…@*^&@ing drive belt, ARGH! over the UGH! WHEEL! There! Lie there and be damned, you…heh heh. Nevermind, kids, moving on…

But I also don’t want to take on a(nother) project that is going to make me all itchy because it is so.darned.boring.

It is just a weird knitting head space around here right now.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pretend I’m actually getting 13 stitches to 2 inches on the Schaeffer yarn…

Good to know I’m not crazy

Some time ago, I had a bit of a sticker shock at Costco. I had calculated out the cost of a dozen eggs to be around $1.30; suddenly, I looked at the price and said, “Waitasecond, WHAT?”

The same five dozen eggs I used to buy for $6.49 had shot up to $9.49. What the hey?!

Well, time passed and I got used to paying $1.90 per dozen for my eggs. Then a lady started bringing her farm-fresh eggs to the farmer’s market, and I got used to paying $1.50 per dozen.

Then her hens needed a month off to molt, and I ran out of eggs, and I thought, “Supermarket here I come!”

And then I had a heart attack and died because eggs were $3.50 a dozen, the end.

Just kidding. I didn’t actually die. But I was absolutely floored.

THREE DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS. For a dozen eggs.

Guess what? The government announced Friday that the cost of food had gone up yet again. (Source article here: Costs Surge for Stocking the Pantry , with thanks to Boston Gal’s Open Wallet for pointing it out)

With a few exceptions, nearly every grocery category measured by the Labor Department, which compiles the official inflation numbers, has increased in the last year. Milk is up 17 percent, as are dried beans, peas and lentils. Cheese is up 15 percent, rice and pasta 13 percent, and bread 12 percent.

No food product has gone up as much as eggs, jumping 25 percent since February 2007 and 62 percent in the last two years.

AH-HA! So, I’m not crazy! (hush!) I had started to wonder if maybe I had simply been wrong about how much a dozen eggs cost ‘back in the day’.

But I wasn’t.

They really have gone up that much.

Dang.

I was kind of hoping it was a pre-Easter scam, you know? And that after Easter, they’d be all, “Just kidding!” and bring the prices back down?

Guess not.

Hold onto your wallets, kids, 2008 is going to be a bumpy ride…

The Coin of the Realm

I thought long and hard about the whole “allowance” thing. So many Expert Opinions™. So many ways of thinking about the whole issue (which I didn’t even know was An Issue until I started wondering how much the average nine year old gets these days)!

Finally, I settled on a commission basis for the Denizens. I structured it so that, with almost no effort at all, they can earn $1.25 a week; if they really apply themselves, they can actually make upwards of $20! (Thank $DEITY they don’t often apply themselves…)

I went to a local school supply store and got somewhat realistic play money – it is the wrong weight paper and the colors are ever-so-slightly wrong, but otherwise quite faithful to the real deal; the coins are plastic, but exactly the right size and color. Then I made up a little grid: Six rows (categories) with seven columns (one for each day), one section for each Denizen.

Make Bed / Tidy Room: Every morning after I’ve dropped them off at school, I walk down and peek in their rooms. If I see a reasonable attempt at making the bed and a space that doesn’t strike terror into my heart, I’ll give them a check in the ‘make bed / tidy room’ category. That’s worth a quarter.

Homework: When they show me that they’ve done their homework for the night, I give them a check. Have you ever heard a child whine because they didn’t have any homework to do? It is a truly religious experience…

Perfect scores on tests / classwork: When they bring me their graded papers, I give them a quarter for each perfect score. It is astonishing the difference this has made in at least a couple little minds. One little mind, however, really needs to quit daydreaming about fairy unicorn princess dragons and stay on task a little better. Ahem. Moving on…

Citizenship Bonus: The Citizenship bonus is my way of rewarding Model Behavior. Children who show respect to themselves and each other, children who go out of their way to make my life easier, say, clean up after their brother when he’s been on a tear, who win awards for being good citizens at school, or who finally get an actual cartwheel at gymnastics, get a check or two.

Other: We often strike deals with the kids. “I’ll give you a buck if you’ll keep your brother out of my hair for the next hour!” or “Two bucks to weed the backyard, and that’s my final offer!”

Deductions: Yes, there is a category for ‘deductions’. Deductions can be for things like…wanting a candy bar before we cash out on Friday (you have to pay an extra $0.50 if you insist on doing that). It can also be for extraordinarily bad behavior, and I have to wonder what people around me have thought when I’ve been stalking through a store with a whining Denizen in tow snarling, “If you ask me for a cookie one more time, I’m putting a check in your deduction row!”

The kids usually make about two bucks with their efforts; sometimes they really put forth the effort and have windfall weeks, other times, well, they put forth negative effort and get nada. There was even one week when Eldest had to pay me money. Not her best week ever…

So, what do they do with their earnings?

I have a Rewards Book. It is quite lengthy and changes frequently.

They can buy things like…candy bars ($1.25), or a trip to the ice cream store ($3.00). They can buy an extra hour of video game time for $5.00 (they usually get one (1) hour each, weekends only, timed - with this, they can buy an hour ‘after homework’ during the week, or, get a two hour turn on a non-school day). They can pick what’s for dinner, right down to the side dishes and dessert, for $5.00. (Hey, if you’ve been revolted for three weeks straight by the glop Mom’s been serving up? $5.00 to choose spaghetti NO MEATBALLS and buttered toast NO GARLIC and NO GREEN STUFF and then ice cream for dessert is a small price to pay.)

You want Chuck E. Cheese’s? $25.00, please. Build-a-Bear? Groovy! $30.00! You want to go to the mall and pick out a Brand!New!Outfit!? Who doesn’t?! Forty bucks, kid, and you’ll be stylin’!

There’s other stuff, too. Trips to the Lawrence Hall of Science, or the Monterey Aquarium, trips on a train, trips to local “fun zones” – and of course, the Holy Grail: Disneyland. Two Hundred Smackers, and I will pack you up and drive you down for a weekend with the Mouse.

They can also make a case for other things. For example, Eldest is going to Disneyland for her birthday soon, and she asked me if she could “cash out” her savings for a Disneyland gift card of equal value from the Scrip table at school. At first I balked, because she was talking about cashing out $100 and, well, uh, I’m on a budget and some junk? But, she made a good case for why it was fair and pointed out that her classroom will get $8 from the Scrip program for the card, sooooooo…OK. She’s getting a $100 Disney gift card to use on whatever she wants while we’re at the park.

I’ve tried to keep the prices more or less in line with reality. My hope is that my children will begin to understand that if you want something !AWESOME!, you may have to save for it. You may have to say ‘no’ to smaller things. You may have to work harder. Also, I’m hoping that the idea of consistently putting out a good effort, both with the small stuff (making your bed) and the biggest stuff (acing the test), has its rewards.

So far, it seems to be working really well. Their work in school has, overall, improved (with a few notable continuing issues); their beds are almost never made, but! Danger Mouse has been making a concerted effort this week, so I’m sure there will be demands for a beach trip coming up soon.

Also, I have to say that on a note of pure, unadulterated selfishness, it is wonderful how much more help I get from the children. Boo Bug will clean every mirror in the house for $0.50, and Eldest will empty all the trash cans for $0.25. She’ll keep Captain Adventure amused and occupied and out of my hair for a buck an hour. It is a small price to pay, people.

However, I got a clear warning that one day soon, I’m going to be busted on that $1.25 for the candy bars – Eldest went with me to WalMart recently, and pointed out that a HUGE box of Nerds cost $0.88. She said musingly, “Huh, mommy, check it out, that’s a good deal…‘cause, we pay $1.25 for a regular box, right? So…are those…on sale?”

“Uhhhhh, yes! YES THEY ARE! See the sign? ‘Rollback prices’, yup-yup-yup, hey! WHAT A SALE!”

“So, can I give you $0.88 when we get home, and get the Nerds now?”

**sigh**

Not a stupid kid in the whole bouquet…

I think perhaps she didn’t grasp the concept

I went to the 99 Cents Only store today. I love that store. I picked up two huge cheap vinyl tablecloths to drape over my equally huge kitchen table whenever the Denizens are doing things I’d rather not have to scrub off the wood (finger painting comes to mind) – I get about ten uses or so out of them before they disintegrate, which I feel is a darned good deal for ninety-nine cents (plus tax).

I also found plastic sandwich boxes. Now, I was using these Ultra!Cool!Wrappers! (Wrap-n-Mats, and they ARE awesome) for the Denizen lunches, but! The Denizens kept losing the durned things. At $6.50 a pop, that gets hurtful in a hurry.

Sooooo, I picked up eight of those cute little sandwich boxes for 99 cents each. Also I restocked the Den candy bin, which is very popular around here on Friday when the girls cash out their commissions (they get quarters for chores, homework, perfect classwork and like that).

I buy the stuff 3/99 cents. I charge them $1.25 for it.

They do not need to know this, people. Someday, I will use it as a business-learning experience, an example of how the middle-person makes their living. Meanwhile, I will be grateful that they have a limited grasp of ‘deferred gratification’ and blow their $1.25 on a 33-cent Fun Dip instead of saving it up for Disneyland, which! If they saved $200, they could choose as their reward.

ANYWAY.

So I went up to the front clutching my basket of items and unloaded it onto the conveyer belt. The twelve year old obviously old enough to be working without a permit lady began ringing it up, and I began digging in my bag for my wonderful, ecologically responsible canvas bag, which miraculously naturally I had thought to bring with me into the store instead of leaving it in the van like I normally do as I’ve heard people say they often do.

As I triumphantly whipped it out of my backpack, I realized that she had already tossed all my items into two plastic bags. Straight from the scanner into plastic, in one smooth motion.

“Oh, actually? I brought my canvas bag,” I blurted out, and handed it over.

Without missing a beat, she took ten cents off my total bill (five cents for each plastic bag).

And then?

She put the two plastic bags full of junk food and recyclable #1 plastic sandwich boxes into my canvas bag and handed it back to me.

I.
@*^&@.
You.
NOT.

“Uh,” I said cautiously.

“OK, thanks, have a nice day” she replied briskly, giving my bag an extra nudge to make it absolutely clear that it was time for me to get going now. “Hi! How are you today? Find everything OK?” she continued, already scanning and thrusting the next order into plastic.

I may be a tad on the ‘socially awkward’ side of the scale, but even I know when I’ve been dismissed. I was tempted for a moment to unload all my things out of the plastic and leave it behind, but I could feel the hysteria building (curse my overactive sense of humor! CURSE IT I SAY!!) and beat a hasty retreat to my van.

There, I dissolved so thoroughly into laughter that I was crying. And also invoking the name of the Almighty over and over and over again.

Methinks she may be missing the point, just a tad.

Owies

OK, now I really need to curl up with my yarn. Remember Tooth #3? Of course you don’t. Please. Ancient history and all. Anyway, that was the tooth that was all infected and cracked-of-root and I had it yanked out and then we had to wait for the bone to heal up enough so I could get me one of them-thar fancy implant deals?

Yeah, well.

I just got back from having the implant shaft screwed into place. And yes, it was about as fun as it sounds.

Owies. Hot holy carp on buttered rye toast, the throbbing started within half an hour. Yeah, I left that office all, “Yo, I’m tough, I can take it, I ain’t using that stinkin’ Vicodin, I’m gonna be back in my minivan pickin’ up my kids by 2:00…”

I may have actually made body-building poses while I said it, too.

Fast forward 45 minutes and I’m diving on that bottle with trembling hands whimpering, “Open, open dammit c’mon I’m dying {sob sob sob}…hoooonneeeeeeeee, I neeeeed you to pick up the kiiiiiiids today….{whimper, sigh, sob}”

Dental surgery, I hates it.

But, it went super-well and the good doctor is very pleased by the bone mass and the way it went in, so! He’s happy, I’m happy, we’re all just so @*^&@ing happy around here!!

I’m one step closer to having a full set of teeth again. Once the bone heals up around this shaft, I can get the crown put on it and that’s it. No bridges to maintain, no having to mess with the perfectly healthy teeth on either side, no sitting up excitedly in my chair whenever a commercial for New!Improved!Fixadent comes on…it’ll be a good thing.

Eventually.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cuddle with my stash. I’ve got a couple skeins of Atacama hand-dyed alpaca that promise they can make things all better.

Resist…resist…resist…

I am lusting after new yarn.

I don’t care what yarn.

I’m just in the mood to buy the stuff.

People. I think I need some kind of 12-step program.

Let.
Us.
Review.

I have way more than enough yarn. I have boxes of it. Baskets of it. Shelves stuffed with it. Drawers packed with it. I have a major project on the needles right immediately now. I have a beautiful sock in my purse. I have cotton, wool, acrylic, alpaca, just about everything except cashmere. (Hmm, that is a serious hole…perhaps I should…no! no! resisting…resisting…)

I even have some mohair.

I have lace-weight. I have worsted. I have bulky! I have my very own homespun, which looks like complete ass has the most striking and also unique characteristics!

SABLE? People, I am beyond SABLE. Stash Acquisition Beyond Great-Grand-Children’s Life Expectancy, that’s what I have over here.

Please. Please.

Somebody must tell me: How can I put up a firewall between me and Webs, KnitPicks, Rabbitch’s place (I even have a skein of deliciousness sitting beside my knitting chair, where I can fondle it and promise great things once I have finished the Claudia Circus socks), AND WORST OF ALL, eBay!?

eBay…with its tempty auctions of HUGE LOTS MIXED YARN…

I am so low sunk that…oh Lord, the shame…well. It was like this. I was cleaning out my minivan? And I found a receipt? From the D&D store? Where my Husband went this weekend, to pick up some miniatures?

And he had spent $120 of his own allowance money on miniatures to paint?

And…I immediately thought…

Wow…that’s, like, a whole sweater’s worth…

And then I started thinking it would only be right that I head over to the LYS to see what I might be able to get with my $100 allowance (which has actually built up to almost $1,000 on account of because I have been that holy for that long).

Because, you know.

HE spent $120 on HIS hobby.

Ergo, ipso-facto…well.

I think I need professional help, is what I’m saying.

I have no room for more yarn.

I have no need for more yarn.

What I need to do is quit @*^&@ing blogging about yarn-lust and go make something with yarn, thus opening up more room for yarn in my bedroom.

Yes.

That seems like a sound plan.

And I will do that.

Right after I check out just one more LARGE MIXED LOT ASSORTED YARN NICE!!! auction…

(GodHaveMercyOnMeASinner, I just remembered I have forty skeins of light and dark blue and gray Red Heart under my bed…) (I remembered this because I was looking at a lot of forty skeins of assorted Red Heart and thought, Oooooh, I could make a cool afghan out of that!)

Finished!

Oh, I am pleased. I am so very pleased. This afternoon when I should have been doing other things (like tending my pathetic excuse for a garden), I charged through the i-cord on the top of the Pacific Northwest shawl. I’d finished the last of the Endless Edge Scallops over coffee this morning (they actually started going pretty quickly by the end, there), and thought I had hours and hours left because of the i-cord.

Oh, the whining! You would not believe how much whining I did over that i-cord…it looks awesome, though, makes for a very nice, finished look at the top.

Once I got started on it, it went by in a flash. Seriously faster than I expected – in about an hour, I’d finished the whole thing and it was taking a quick ride on the ‘silk’ setting of my front load washer.

And then, the blob became this:



The magic of blocking strikes again.

The only thing I’m not 100% delighted with is that the patterns don’t show as nicely in “real life” as they do here. The variegated yarn kind of makes them vanish – I don’t think the ‘seagulls, pine trees, silver dollars, waves, bubbles and fish’ thing is going to be that obvious when it’s being worn around town. If I do this again, I’ll try a solid color.

But frankly, the colors are not being done justice here, either. They are rich purples, surprises of orange and red, flashes of yellow, some rich royal blues…gorgeous, gorgeous colors.

I’m in such a happy knitting-head space that I took Lillehammer out of the penalty box and got back to work on it. Pulled out the sleeve back to where I messed things up and started fresh.

I think we’ve forgiven each other. Or at the very least, when I took the main sweater out of my knitting basket and looked at it, I found myself saying, “This really is a stunning pattern, and how lovely that dusky green is at the hems…”

And then the wool obligingly frogged and gave me two inches of quick sleeve-growth while we watched the new Spongebob episode (sadly, I was not forced by the children) and the news.

This is the knitting equivalent of kissing and making up.

Hopefully, I’ll have some progress pictures to post on that project soon…

Current Favorite Bread Recipe

I have a new favorite bread recipe. This produces a bread with a dense crumb, which means that it stales slowly (not that this is usually a problem around here) and slices evenly – excellent for sandwiches and toast.

The second rise makes all the difference – it does add an hour to the total time, but I think it’s worth it!

3 teaspoons (~ two packages) active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water, in a small bowl
Pinch sugar
6-7 cups flour
1 cup milk
1 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
2-4 tablespoons butter / margarine
1 tablespoon salt

Sprinkle the yeast into the warm water, add a pinch of sugar and stir gently. Leave it alone for about ten minutes, until the yeast is nice and frothy.

Meanwhile, warm the milk, water and butter to just above body temperature. It should be warm, not hot – the butter should barely melt in it. Add the sugar and salt and stir to dissolve completely.

Put two cups of the flour into the mixing bowl of your stand mixer (if you have one) or a large bowl (if you don’t). Add the milk mixture and stir thoroughly, then add the foamy yeast. (Thanks for catching that, Hilary! You know what's funny? I have actually forgotten this step IN PRACTICE, more than once!!!)

The recipe splits here. If you’ve got a stand mixer with a dough hook, add four cups of flour to the bowl and turn the mixer on ‘low’. Watch the dough – you want that ‘elastic ball’, one that begins to pull cleanly away from the bowl. Not “and then I could use it to make a soufflé” cleanly, by the way – cleanly as in, “there is more dough staying with the ball than clinging to the sides of the bowl”. Add flour in quarter-cup increments until you see this. The amount of dough you need is going to change from season to season. On rainy days, you might need more than on dry days – I have as much as a full cup difference in the dead of winter compared to the height of summer.

Once you’ve got that elastic ball thing going, tidy up the kitchen for five to ten minutes while the stand mixer does all the work. Try to look exhausted as you then turn it out into a greased bowl, flip the dough over to coat the top (it keeps it moist as it rises and prevents that nasty, cracky not-really-a-crust-but-pretends-to-be-one crust from forming on the top).

Put a clean towel over it and let it rise for about an hour in a warm place. I often use my oven – I turn it on briefly, then set the dough in there to rise. It rises evenly regardless of season, and more importantly, no Unauthorized Personnel are able to stick their fingers in it and then yell, “Uh-oh, Mommy! Is YUCKY!!”

If you do not have a stand mixer, you will add as much flour as you can mixing with your wooden spoon. When it becomes too much to bear, turn the dough out on a well-floured surface and knead it by hand. Continue adding flour until you’ve got that same elastic ball thing going. Once you’ve got it, keep on kneading for about ten minutes. What you’re doing is breaking down the gluten in the bread so that it gets “stretchy” – it’ll start capturing the bubbles from the yeast and make it rise.

I tell you this so that you have a goal, because kneading bread can either be tremendously therapeutic or thumping annoying, depending on what kind of day you’re having. If it is annoying you today, remember that you are making a difference with all this kneading!

Same deal with the greased bowl – flip it over – cover with towel – ignore for an hour thing. It should rise to about double the original mass over this time.

After an hour, turn it out of the bowl, knead it a couple two-three-five times, then put it back in the bowl, cover it with a towel and leave it alone for thirty minutes to an hour – until it has doubled again.

Turn your oven on to 425 while you shape your loaves. Punch down the dough and cut it in half. Make a rectangle out of each half, then roll it up like a jelly roll, pinch the ends and tuck them under. Roll the log back and forth, smoothing it down and making it lovely.

Then put it into a greased loaf pan, cover with the towel and let rise for between 20 and 30 minutes, depending. Sometimes my loaves are perfect in 20 minutes, sometimes it’s been 35 and I’m getting impatient. When they’ve risen up over the edges of your pans – but before they are ‘blossoming’ up over the top – slip them into the 425 degree oven and set the timer for ten minutes.

In ten minutes, turn the oven temperature down to 350 and set the timer for another 20 minutes. They should be getting nice and dark on top, and sound hollow when you tap the tops of them.

Let them cool in their pans for about five minutes, then pull them out of the pans and set them on wire racks to cool the rest of the way.

You can skip that ‘knead and let rise again’ step if you’re short on time – but I find that the ‘sandwich’ qualities are greatly enhanced by it.

You can make this without the milk (substitute equal volume water) and butter (olive or vegetable oil). It makes a very light airy bread with a flavor I call “Italian” because it reminds me of pizza dough. (Add some dried oregano to it and shape in sticks rather than loaves and you’ve got yourself a real party.)

Confession: I used to burn water

OK, roll up your sleeves, kids. Let’s talk about cooking.

I am not a natural-born cook. I know that when I start casually tossing off that I baked bread the other day, and fed forty-eleven people on nine minutes notice and oh yeah, I spent sixteen minutes in my kitchen and made 3,527 meals for $0.80 and then went to yoga class before drafting a new peace treaty for the warring nations in Kahplutiburg, you might think that I’m one of those people who was born with a copy of the Joy of Cooking in my wee, oven-mitted hands.

I was not.

When I was first married, I couldn’t make tea without burning the water. A large driving force behind our $65,000 in credit card debt was incessant eating out – in a stroke of coincidence, there is an article about Stop Eating Your Way into Debt! on the Dollar Stretcher today. Actually, it makes me feel better, because I always thought the fact that we had racked up a ton of debt eating out was an example of my personal, private stupidity.

Nice to know I have company.

ANYWAY. I’m going to quote Jill, because she says it quite succinctly. Among the list of excuses:

“I don't know how to cook." So learn. Start simple. Even my 9-year-old grandson could boil himself a hot dog. You don't have to produce a gourmet meal to make your family happy, and in most cases, they would prefer you didn't.

I understand that man can't live on hot dogs alone, but after a week or two of simple dishes, you can move on to more complicated things like frozen French fries and frying hamburgers.

You know what? It really is that simple.

I had a few…uh…well, let’s call them “less than wonderful” meals along the way. The meals I produced in my early days in the kitchen were way less than spectacular.

But they got better. Slowly. The hardest part was getting over…myself. Mankind has been cooking meals for centuries – am I retarded? Am I, like, some kind of monkey-throwback? I can’t figure out how to make rice, for Pete’s sake?

People in the freakin’ Stone Age knew how to make stew and flat breads. C’mon. You can, too, cook.

Here’s one. Meatloaf. Do you know how to make a basic meatloaf, that staple of the red-blooded American family?

2 pounds ground beef
1 large egg
1/3 cup milk
1 cup bread crumbs
1-2 teaspoons onion salt
3/4 teaspoon pepper (more or less as you like it)
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

FANCY ALTERNATIVES: put in 1/2 cup of diced onions and two or three cloves of fresh minced garlic. Add a chopped bell pepper. I like to use a dollop of Pepperplant hot sauce (it isn’t “HOT” sauce, it’s actually fairly mild with a nice bell pepper flavor).

Smoosh it all together, put it into a loaf pan and bake it at 350 for about an hour.

Hard? Naw. Buy yourself some potato buds and make instant mashed potatoes, open a can of green beans and viola. You’re eating a decent meal for a fraction of the cost at Applebee’s.

Start with the easy stuff. Yes, the frugal community yelps and screams and carries on about the “high cost of convenience foods” – but if you are comparing eating at Outback with grilling a store-bought steak, whipping up some potato buds and following the microwave directions on the package of Birds-Eye ‘steamers’?

You’re saving money even with convenience foods.

OK, you’re really at a loss? Look for places like My Girlfriend’s Kitchen. Per serving, they are still cheaper than eating out, healthier, AND! MOREOVER!! They can get you started. Pretty soon, you’ll start figuring out how these things go together. You’ll get bold! DARING, EVEN! And before you know it, you’ll find yourself saying, “I could do this at home. I don’t know why I’m paying them to cut up an onion…”

Taken one step at a time, getting into the kitchen really isn’t that hard. Sometimes I wonder if Food Network isn’t doing us some harm, frankly – we watch these shows where Rachel pops out some forty course thing in thirty minutes and it’s all fabulous!, and we feel like if we don’t do the same thing, well, it just isn’t worth doing.

So we don’t do it.

And then we never do get to the level we’d like to be.

I think cooking is a lot like learning to play the piano. You don’t just sit down and do it, no matter how good the instruction book may be. You sit down and fumble a bit. You start simple. You practice, practice, practice. You get good at the simple stuff, and start pecking away at the harder pieces.

Just get in there. Just do it. Don’t be afraid of your kitchen. Keep it simple, and honestly if your choices are ‘eating out’ or ‘Eggo’s’?

Take the Eggo’s. They are still cheaper than McDonalds.

You can work your way up to homemade waffles. Which, by the way, you can make on a lazy Saturday, freeze, and then pop into the toaster just like the frozen version…

One Small Change

Welcome to March! Well, I was looking at last month’s spending compared to February 2007, and holy smokes, what a difference! Even without really getting seriously serious, just by moving to cash rather than the credit card for the day to day purchases, we’ve sliced our spending on things like groceries, clothes and the infamous ‘household’ bucket by almost two-thirds!

It made me stop and think about how small changes add up. You think you’re going to eliminate your debt or get your early retirement together by doing some Big Huge Enormous Thing. You’re going to find a way to save $15,000 a year, or get that huge promotion, or whatever.

While keeping your eyes open for those big things is never a bad thing…there really is a great deal of truth to the old adage, Watch the pennies, and the pounds take care of themselves.

Small changes add up. They aren’t nearly as hard as we tend to make them. Yes, we’re all tired. We’re overworked. We don’t want to futz around “endlessly” to save a stupid $3.

But the truth is, it’s seldom as hard as we want to make it.

I made it “impossible” to cook breakfast on a weekday for years and years. Even when I was staying at home, I was just waaaaay too busy. Baking muffins was a Saturday kind of thing. Sometimes. Except not this weekend, because we slept in. It’s really more of a brunch, well, lunch…thing. {pause} So! Warmed up leftover pizza, anyone?!

Anyway, I bought pre-made waffles and boxes of cereal and NutriGrain bars and called it breakfast for a long, long time – I paid the ‘convenience food’ premium for it at the register, and yet oddly, my mornings were no less hectic.

You’d think being able to shove a cold ‘breakfast cookie’ (a.k.a., NutriGrain bar) into the kids’ hands on the way to the van would buy some extra time, you know?

Now, a box of 8 NutriGrain bars runs around $4.65, right? And when you’ve got six people showing down on them, it’s a box a morning. Convenient, and a lot cheaper than pulling through McDonalds, right?

OK, but. I can make toast, eggs and bacon for six people for $2.07, and it takes me about ten minutes from the time I come downstairs from rousting the kids out of bed. Granted this is homemade bread at about a nickel a slice, but even if I bought your basic Homepride bread it’s still under $2.50. For the six of us.

And instead of a cold breakfast (or “nothing”, which seems to be pretty common with their schoolmates), they get that oft-eulogized “hot breakfast” Denny’s is making an entire advertising campaign around. For just $5.99, you too can have a couple eggs, a couple slices of bacon, some toast and coffee.

Or come to my place, and have it for $0.40. Fall in love with breakfast again!

The point is not to brag about my Kitchen Diva status. Because that would be silly. You are not going to see me on Food Network any time soon, folks. I’m more determined than slick in the kitchen.

The point is, this was not hard. It was inconvenient at first, and I didn’t wanna…but it was a small change that saves us around $670 a year. A couple weeks in, it was no longer any kind of bother – it had become the new normal.

Switching from buying a lunch for $8 a day to bringing one for between $1.50 and $2.50 saved me over $1,000 a year. Was it so hard to add lunch meat to my shopping list? Naw. No more than it was “impossible” to spend five, ten minutes putting together a lunch bag for myself. And I had more time at my lunch break, having been freed from the need to stand around for twenty minutes in line at the burrito stand waiting for my Guacamole Special. It was nice to skip that step and get straight to the part where I was sitting down with a book to eat my lunch.

Not allowing myself to buy something that wasn’t already on my list. Not letting things go on the actual shopping list until I had slept on it. Never permitting myself to buy something I could not pay for with cash-money. Shopping at the thrift stores first, and saving retailers for a last resort.

Small things. Little steps. All I had to do was overcome my emotional resistance to the idea, and I was able to save thousands – with minimal extra work.

So as we head into March, I’m looking for small things I can do to further refine our spending. I’ve got a few things in mind that would be relatively easy and painless…but which I’m not doing because, well, I don’t wanna.

I could, for example, start walking at least one of the three daily trips to and from school. Eliminating just one would save $0.30 in gas and get me that 30-45 minutes of cardio my doctor keeps harping about. (And who knows, maybe if I actually did it I could eliminate $8.75 a week in pain pills!) (not, uh, that I’ve sat around calculating how much my prescriptions cost me per pill or per day or anything…) (because that would be compulsive, which I am not).

On a related note, if I could manage to bend over and reach my toenails long enough to keep them tidy myself, I could save $20 a month on pedicures. See? The walking thing just keeps getting better and better…maybe…

(Y’all laugh, but my ‘condition’ has gotten to the point where reaching my own toes, while possible, is torture, not only during the action but for hours afterward. It does not match my Inner Vision of Self, which is a bit more robust and also bench presses Volkswagons, ya know?!)

Plus there is always recycling to be picked up along the way. It’s a good back exercise, keeps the neighborhood tidier, and scores me a nickel each time. GOOD LORD, IS THERE NO END TO THE BENEFITS?!?!

But seriously – look around. Take a deep breath. Pick one thing you don’t wanna do because it’s {insert excuse you know is kinda lame but that’s all you got so you’re going with it}. If you need suggestions, may I recommend The Dollar Stretcher? Or try Get Frugal. Or shoot, just type “frugal tips” into your favorite search engine.

Buckle up first, though. You’re going to get hit with a tidal wave.

Give it a try this month. Give it the whole month. It will undoubtedly be annoying at first. You will growl that it is stupid and also dumb and that you can’t believe you let that idiot blogger talk you into this.

But you may well find it isn’t so bad after all. Many of these things actually are ways you can express your love – for yourself, for your family, even your community. When I send my kids to school with bellies full of good, wholesome meals I made with my own hands that very morning and set before them, salted and peppered to their precise liking, I tell them how much I love them.

When I make myself a sandwich at home to take to work, I’m giving myself a lunch that is healthy for my body and my financial future. I’m saying that I’m worth the effort. I’m worth the trouble. I value me, thank you very much. And also, I prefer a little less mayo and little more mustard, ‘kay…?

When I shop at thrift stores, the money I’m saving is going toward our retirement and our children’s college funds. The money I’m spending is going into our community, to the hospice or the family shelter or the programs of Goodwill or the Salvation Army. The clothing I’m buying is given one more life before it hits the rag bin or the landfill.

It makes me feel good. It feels worth doing.

Give it a try. You might be surprised, both at how much you actually do save, and how good you feel while you’re doing it.