Educating the Wheelers

I love a big, roaring thunderstorm like the one we are having right now.  It brings home the true meaning of "shelter" in the cliche of food, shelter and clothing.

My dogs definitely understand it.  They were adult strays at the pound when we adopted them, and while I may be guilty of anthropomorphism here, Sammy and Pippin both seem to appreciate even more than I do the value of being in a warm, dry, stable home when they look out the window and see the wind and the rain and the lightning.

I love to go into the garage when the weather is this crappy.  The sound of the rain and the thunder is much more intense, and I feel even more blessed to not be standing out in the middle of it.

I can be pretty tight-fisted with money.  But there are some things that I am totally not price conscious about.  Number one with a bullet on that list is scorpion control.  Just a few days ago, I had the hubris to comment on How to Be Poor’s blog that I hadn’t seen a scorpion in quite some time.  In fact, it had been several months since the last sighting.  

So you know darn well what was waiting for my padding little feet this morning as I went down to the kitchen.

Our current pest control service is pretty good — hey, once every few months is better than one or more per day! — but whenever I think there’s a limit to how much I would pay for 100% never-see-another-scorpion-again, another little evil guy comes into my life and obliterates that ceiling.

It’s unfortunate that short of a solution that would probably wipe out all life in my neck of the neighborhood, there does not seem to be any 100% never-see-another-scorpion-again solutions.  But if there were, I would pay dearly for it.  I don’t think there’s anything else in my life that can work up the same heady mixture of rage and fear as those little bugs.

For various and sundry reasons, it’s going to be a tight grocery week. [Not the least of which is our impending 7600 dollar check to the IRS — thank you again, emergency fund!  Though it’s getting a little cold in there … Heh.]  We will be relying very heavily on the freezer and pantry.

Monday: African Safari Pilaf [No purchases necessary.]

Tuesday: Black Bean Soup and Tofu/Veggie Pasta Salad [No purchases necessary.]

Wednesday: Tunisian Vegetable Stew [All I need to buy is cabbage.]

Thursday: Tomato-Feta Stuffed Sweet Potatoes and Blueberry Cornmeal Pudding [All I need to buy is sweet potatoes]

Friday: Taco Soup [No purchases necessary]

Saturday: Roast Chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy and broccoli [No purchases necessary.]

So, a week’s worth of dinners [and lunches with leftovers] and all I have to get is a head of cabbage and 4 sweet potatoes.  Breakfasts tend to take care of themselves with homemade yogurt and granola.  I also have smoothie makings in the freezer.   I’ll have to pull out 2 lbs of ground beef or turkey from the freezer and a frozen chicken.  I got the chicken a few weeks ago when it was 39 cents a pound, and the ground meat was on sale for 99 cents a pound a while back.  Not too bad.

My dad always likes to talk about the concept of "secret economies," or the strange little frugal/cheap practices that we practice, even if they don’t make sense in our overall money handling schema.  Even non-frugal [especially non-frugal?] people have secret economies.

My father’s personal example is paperclips.  Whenever he sees a loose paperclip, he grabs it.  Whenever he can salvage one, he goes for it.  He started his own business 20-some years ago, he bought a 20-box pack of paperclips.  Nineteen of those boxes remain unopened.

Now, my father is not a particularly frugal man in many ways.  He’s a busy guy with his business, and will often eat at least two meals in a restaurant per day.  A very small tweak in some other aspect of his life would more than cover the paperclip expense, and yet he still does it.

My mother saves napkins.  If she goes to a fast food place or restaurant that gives out napkins, she folds up the extra and puts them in her purse.  Her napkin holder at home is a cornucopia of different colors and sizes.

Since I’ve taken a decidedly frugal turn, I’m not sure what my secret economies are anymore.  I suppose in the case of an actively frugal lifestyle, you can count things that you are driven to do, even if they are of dubious thrift value.  For instance, I am very weird about air conditioner use in the car.  Even in Texas, even in the summer, I turn it off while going up inclines or any time I have to accelerate.  And then I turn it right back on again.  [Yes, it drives my husband crazy.  No, I don’t know why I must do this.]

My husband and I both have birthdays in April so it’s time to start thinking birthday gifts.

I have always hated gift buying because only about half of the time do I find something I really think the person would like, and the other half the time I’m having to scratch my head and waste money on something, anything. 

My family used to have the habit of pinning a gift label on someone.  This may have happened to you.  Someone buys you something one year and, not being a total jerk, you end up saying, "Thanks for the frog towels!  I love frogs!"  Well, then word gets around to the rest of the family that you "love frogs."  You will be getting frog-themed gifts from everyone from then on.  I was tagged with frogs, my grandma with owls [and then lighthouses], my mom with pigs, etc.  I had almost ten years of frog-themed gifts.

And then came the Internet.  Sweet, sweet internet.  I made an Amazon wish list as soon as they made them available, and have actually received gifts from my family that I like and are useful  — albeit not exactly a surprise — ever since then.  Even my non-computer-using relatives just give my mom a check and she orders something in their name.  [Now if only they would make their own wish lists, I would be set … ]

In the handful of years that my husband and I have been married, we seem to have settled into our own routine.  If we find something we really, really think the other person would like, we get it for them.  If not, we ask them what they want.  Or tell them to find something that they really want that they probably wouldn’t be able to normally justify spending the money on, and order it themselves.

For instance, today I just ordered my own birthday present, and I know I’m going to love it.  I got two dvd sets from The Teaching Company — their new on the history of the Popes and the Papacy, and another series on Herodotus, the Father of History.

It’s not exactly the height of romance, but it’s a bit more satisfying.  I suppose it would be much less so if you didn’t budget and already always bought yourself whatever you wanted.  But since we have tightened up the budget more and more over time, it’s become more fun to try to decide how to spend my birthday/Christmas/etc "mad money" on myself.  [Last Christmas, I got myself the complete Backwoods Home Anthology sets, and my last birthday, I got myself a year long British Literature course that I’m still working through.]

Yesterday, I was looking out the window while Audrey and I were sifting together some flour, salt and baking powder.  We were assembling some homemade Bisquick-style mix.  Out the window, I could see the team of about 10 guys and their 6 or 7 vehicles laying down our new driveway.

I’m going to be writing a 3741 dollar check for that driveway.  I only saved about a buck by making the baking mix myself.

There’s a money cliche that people will drive 20 minutes out of their way to save 5 dollars on a 20 dollar item, but won’t do it to save 5 dollars on a 500 dollar item.  And yet five dollars is five dollars.  Yesterday felt like it could be the inverse of that cliche.  Should I have just gone outside and asked the foreman if he’d take a check for 3740 dollars instead and just pick up some store brand bisquick?

My mom called later and I asked what her thoughts were.  She pointed out that one of the reasons that we could write a 3741 dollar check instead of putting it on the credit card is because we make our own Bisquick.  Oh, that single dollar doesn’t mean too much in the scheme of things, but the mindset that drives you to do it saves money everywhere and adds up.  Additionally, it was kind of fun.  I have about 11 hours a day alone with Audrey, and that time has to be filled, preferably with something that’s remotely educational or otherwise beneficial.  If I had made the mix myself, it would have taken less than 5 minutes, instead we had about 40 minutes of pouring and sifting and fiddling with flour.  And laughing.  It’s a mess, but is a lot of fun with a two year old.

We got a Very Important Looking mail from our mortgage holder recently and I just love it:

Your Account Has Been Reviewed And We Would Like To Speak With You.

A recent review of your account indicated that your home may be carrying up to $large_number in equity.  This amount is very important because it is the number that can help determine how much cash you may be able to access by refinancing, blah blah, blah blah blah, etc.

It goes on in this vein for the rest of the page, implying that they’re going to do us a favor by letting us take out our equity, and reset our mortage at an interest rate over 2 points higher than what we currently have.

As the movie SuperTroopers once noted, desperation is a stinky cologne.  It couldn’t be that we have such a large equity amount because we’ve been aggressively trying to pay down our mortgage for the last 3 years, could it?  It couldn’t be that with the recent and upcoming spates of ARM adjustments that our mortgage company — who has been on the forefront of exotic and risky mortgages and refis — really wishes that we would stop squeezing their profits on our own mortgage, which is one of their least likely to default, and get back on their cash cow wagon?

 They Would Like To Speak With Us, Indeed.

[updated 3/21: formatting changes - agw] 

Monday: Thai Roll-ups 
Chicken in a peanut sauce with red bell pepper and cream cheese on a tortilla.  Uses up last of leftover chicken from last week’s roast chicken and everything else is fairly cheap.

Tuesday: Roasted Red Pepper, Feta and Bacon Pie
Using up some feta I bought on sale a long time ago.  Red peppers aren’t cheap — $1.43 a piece this time of year, even at the local Walmart — but they’re a family favorite food, and I try to use them all over the place.  A made from scratch Bisquick replacement is cheap, but turkey bacon isn’t.  This recipe was handily the biggest grocery expense for the week, but hey, it looked good.

Wednesday: Tomato Mac and Beef
Ground beef from the freezer, everything else from the pantry.  Cheap cheap cheap and easy.

Thursday: Hungarian Mushroom Soup
Mushrooms aren’t necessarily cheap, but it’ll be the most expensive thing in the recipe.  Earlier in the day, I’ll make the stock out of the bones pulled out of the freezer from last week’s aforementioned roast chicken.

Friday: Southwestern Hot Dogs
Uses up the remaining polish sausages from the last time we barbequed.  Cheap as all get out and criminally simple to prepare.  Hey, it’s Friday and I’ll need the break.

Saturday: Chicken Tacos
I’ll pull frozen chicken breast out of the freezer, thaw a few days and put it in a crock pot with some homemade taco seasoning all morning.  We’ll have tacos that day to use up Monday’s tortillas, and any vegetables that are just hanging on then use the leftover chicken in salads and probably a mexican lasagna next week.

- 

I checked the sales circulars for the three main grocery stores near our house, and nothing looked particularly good.  So this week, everything is coming out of the freezer and pantry for the most part.  I went grocery shopping this morning and hardly had to buy anything but the produce and dairy perishables.  Leftovers will be packed up for Andrew to take to work for lunch.  As for breakfast, I’ll have homemade yogurt and granola all week, plus leftovers and sandwich fixings.

Unfortunately, I don’t know offhand exactly what I spent on groceries this week since I went to the local SuperWalmart and had large amounts of non-food items to get, as well.  But it wasn’t much, that’s for sure.

[Update 3/21:  cleaned up the formatting a bit - agw]

To go with the new blog, we also have a new feed URL .  If you subscribe to our blog, or would like to, then click the link to subscribe to our new feed.

We’re using FeedBurner - a (free) web service that can tell you how many subscriptions you’re getting & such.  Don’t worry, they don’t put ads in the feed or anything!  (I think they can if you  ask them to, but that’s not an option we’re interested in.)  If you haven’t subscribed to a FeedBurner feed before, then the link will bring you to a page where you can tell FeedBurner what kind of feed reader you’re using, and assist you with subscribing.  My wife and I were both surprised by this the first time we saw it, so hopefully no one else finds it difficult…

 …I’d run with my hammer, and trip in the pile of leaves!

(Anyone know how to get pfblogs.org to not aggregate personal posts?  )