Donna Freedman

Back in Alaska, and gardening.

by

I’m back from my emergency trip to Phoenix, and just off two weeks of self-quarantine. Alaska has had relatively few cases of COVID-19 and the city in which I live requires travelers to stay put for 14 days.

How I’m doing:

Happy to have had the chance to offer some emotional support to my daughter.

But also apprehensive that Arizona’s skyrocketing virus cases are going to continue to erode Abby’s well-being.

Feeling a constant low-level dread about COVID’s physical, emotional and financial impacts on the country.

Also feeling very, very happy to be back with my dearest partner, and back here in the coolth. The temperature in Phoenix was routinely more than 100 degrees, and as high as 113.

By contrast, we’ve had a few fireplace insert nights since I returned, a continuation of our cooler-than-usual spring. (It was 43 degrees this morning.) As a result, the garden is growing rather slowly.

Except for the English cucumbers. When I got back they looked like this:

Read more

Jerry Stiller and me: A minor celebrities story.

by

The recent death of comedian and actor Jerry Stiller made me sad. Most people’s deaths make me sad. But I happen to know that in this case, the cliche everyone spouts is true: He’d had a great life.

How do I know? He told me.

Years ago he and his wife, Anne Meara, were guests of honor at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska. At that time I worked at the Anchorage Daily News, and was given the chance to interview them both before they got here.

Both of them were perfectly delightful. The conversation with Stiller went on for quite a while, and at the end of the interview he said he wanted to send me a copy of his autobiography, “Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara.” I thanked him and said that I appreciated the offer but that it wouldn’t be necessary.

 

 

He sent it anyway, with a personalized inscription, and I still have it.

At the end of the conference there’s always a tour from a glacier cruise company. Stiller saw me come aboard and waved me over. I spent the entire cruise sitting next to him and listening to him tell stories about his beautiful wife and his amazing children (actors Ben and Amy). He told me more than once how lucky he had been in his life, to have had such a wonderful marriage and incredible children plus the chance to do what he loved.

Sniffling yet? I am, too.

But that’s not the only point of this post.

 

Read more

Quarantine soup.

by

I don’t like to waste food, especially since it’s been harder to find lately. It’s not that we’re food insecure, but that we could be.

Pandemic-related shortages have been reported in stores nationwide, and meat-processing facility closures have led some producers to slaughter animals rather than wait out the pandemic.

In addition, an expert I interviewed for a recent COVID-19 article noted that there will likely be some food shortages in the coming year. Mostly those would be specialty items, or high-maintenance crops that farmers aren’t sure they will have the manpower to nurture and harvest. (It can’t all be done by machine.)

Too, some farmers are plowing crops under right now because their biggest-ticket buyers – hotels and restaurants – aren’t buying. An analyst quoted by U.S. News & World Report notes this could lead to shortages (and higher prices) in the supermarket.

Not wasting food has always been a goal. But now it seems more important than ever.

 

Read more

Win a $100 gift card via #MayAtMacys:

by

Win a $100 e-gift card from Macy's.
(Note: As a Savings.com DealPro, I will earn a very small affiliate fee for each person who enters the Macy’s gift card drawing.)

Want to win $100 worth of buying power at Macy’s? Now’s your chance. Savings.com is giving away five $100 gift cards during its #MayAtMacys promotion.

Obviously I can’t win, but maybe you can get a $100 head start on things like:

  • Graduation gifts
  • Baby- or wedding-shower presents (even if the parties are virtual)
  • Buying women’s or children’s underwear and socks to donate to the family shelter
  • New summer clothes
  • A bit of advance holiday shopping (never too early to get started)

This is a fairly quick-turnaround giveaway. You have until 11:59 p.m. PDT Thursday, May 7 to throw your name into the hat.

 

Read more

6 ways to save money on cloth diapers.

by

(Happy Throwback Thursday! A version of this article was originally published Jan. 30, 2014. As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small commission if you purchase using my affiliate link.)

Yesterday I read an article about continuing shortages on things like disinfectants, toilet paper* and diapers. The piece suggested you could make emergency diapers out of T-shirts.

Couldn’t resist that notion, so I watched a YouTube video on how to turn that old 10k shirt into a COVID-19 hack. It sounds counterintuitive somehow, but cloth diapers are made of cotton, too, so it sorta-kinda makes sense.

Note: The diaper “shortage” is likely due to panic-buying rather than a diaper industry failure. Parents see emptying shelves, which makes them fear potential shortages, which in turn creates actual shortages.

It’s also led to a boom in the cloth diaper industry, according to an article in Today. These didies can be super-pricey. It’s a far cry from way, way back in the day, when I paid $2.99 per dozen for cloth diapers. Believe it or not, they were “slightly irregular.” Yes, I swathed my daughter’s butt in factory seconds.

What’s more, after moving to Philadelphia I had to wash the diapers by hand on a scrub-board and dry them on wooden racks. As a broke and exhausted single mom, I could afford neither the time nor the money to go to the laundromat. I hope none of you are ever that hard up.

Cloth diapers really aren’t as awful as people think. These days they’re prefolded like disposables, so you just tuck them into covers (no more plastic pants). In fact, these diapers are so well-made that they actually have resale value after Junior gets toilet-trained.

Yes, there’s a bit of an “ick” factor, but let’s face it: If you have a baby, you are going to have to touch some poop even if you use disposables.

Here’s how to save money on cloth diapers.

 

Read more

Giveaway: $50 worth of gift cards.

by

I haven’t had a giveaway in quite a while, so I decided to put a $25 gift card up for grabs.

Then I changed my mind.

“Why don’t I give away three $10 cards?” I thought. “That way three people can win.”

And then I changed my mind again. Or, rather, the owner of the I Pick Up Pennies website  — aka, my daughter, Abigail Perry — changed it for me.

“I’d be glad to kick in a $20 gift card,” she said. “That way, you can make it an even $50.”

That’s the end of the mind-changing. The first-place winner will get a $20 gift card, and three other winners will each get $10 gift cards.

Even a $10 gift card can be helpful when times are a bit tight, whether you use it to buy rice and beans or to order yourself (or someone else) a little treat to brighten the day.

And if money isn’t an issue right now? Lucky you, and consider passing along the card to someone in need, or in need of a treat.

What kind of gift cards? That’s up to the winners.

Well, to some extent it’s up to the winners. The scrip options are Amazon, Walmart or Target. I can send them electronically or have them mailed. Your call.

 

Read more

Scenes from quarantines, Part 1.

by

The times in which we live are not just potentially deadly. They’re psychologically and emotionally exhausting.

People are dealing with not just varying degrees of isolation but also variables like:

– The fear that loved one (especially elders) will get sick and they won’t be allowed to visit

– Unemployment (or having to keep working without reliable child care and/or proper protection)

– Food and household product shortages

– Generalized anxiety, which can mean existing in fight-or-flight mode 24/7 and can also make the simplest tasks of daily living feel insurmountable

– Being full-time parents in a pandemic, i.e., trying to explain the new normal to housebound kids who can’t quite grasp why they can’t visit friends or go to the movies

– Maybe being not just full-time parents but also homeschool teachers who are still expected to put in a full day’s work from home

Yet among the ever-more-horrifying news articles and social media posts, I’ve also read some  pretty funny scenes from quarantines. Moms and dads talk about all the math they can’t remember, or moan that the math they do remember has been replaced by Common Core.

People who wear glasses joke darkly about their masks’ effects on their specs. (I’ve had some fairly foggy vision myself on our weekly trips to the Outside World.)

Work-from-home* parents report the mortification of having pants-less offspring run through the room during video conferences. Once-tight couples realize that their SOs have some Really Annoying Habits, or at least habits magnified by enforced togetherness.

I laugh at these things, sometimes harder than the actual humor warrants. We need laughter right now, to offset the daily horror show that is the 24-hour news cycle.

Hence, this article – not intended to make light of a very real public health and economic crisis, but rather to provide what we hope will be a few much-needed laughs.

“We”? Yes, we. The first part is running here and the second is over on my daughter’s site, I Pick Up Pennies. We’ve recorded a few random observations about the new normal.

 

Read more

Extreme Frugality: Gardening edition.

by

Note: This is one of an occasional series of articles on saving money.

Renee’s Garden sends me a press kit and a packet of seeds every year. This year’s freebie was a variety of gourmet kale called Purple Moon. Gorgeous stuff, and we haven’t grown kale for several years, so DF and I were pretty excited.

So is everyone else, apparently: Purple Moon is already sold out for the season.

(As a Renee’s Garden affiliate, I may receive a fee if anyone buys seeds through my link.)

It’ll be one of three purple plants in this year’s garden, joining red cabbage (which is actually a maroon so dark it might as well be purple) and purple carrots (part of a four-color carrot mix). Those deep colors are supposed to be full of antioxidants, which is great, but we mostly care about the flavor.

And the cost: It’s hard to beat free. For the first time ever I took part in the media seed program, paying only the postage for English and pickling cucumbers, edamame, sugar snap peas and onions. Will definitely be writing about these; we’re particularly intrigued by the edamame, since we don’t know if it will grow here (DF’s grandkids will be excited if it does, since they love the stuff).

Read more

Sheltering in place. Just not MY place.

by

Well, another 17 days have gone by without a post. This time I’m gonna play the C card.

A couple weeks ago I took the calculated risk of flying to Phoenix because isolation was not playing well with my daughter’s bipolar II and depression. Initially she rejected my offer to fly down if things got really tough. Her response was “thanks, but I’m okay” due to her fear that I might become infected.

To be honest, I was a little worried about that myself. After all, I’m in my early 60s and have asthma. But when you hear phrases like “suicidal ideation,” you get on the damn plane.

Was it ideal? No. Was it necessary? Yes. And it turns out that social distancing was a snap with fewer than two dozen passengers.

The decision was snap, too: When she called and said, “Yeah, I really do need you to come down,” I checked the Alaska Airlines website and discovered I could get a nonstop-to-Phoenix flight at 11:55 p.m. that very night. The hardest part was telling DF that I had to leave, and leave soon.

 

Read more

The low-maintenance preppers.

by

th-2(Happy Throwback Thursday! This article was originally published on Feb. 27, 2014. But the subject matter seems pretty current.)

I just went shopping in our basement, bringing up several items that were missing in our upstairs cupboards: catsup and ibuprofen (both from Costco), a jar of homemade jam, a can of chicken soup.

It always tickles me to see how much we’ve got stored down there, from the kale we grew and dried to bedpillow-sized sacks of dried beans.

Since I live in a really seismic state, the stockpile also makes me feel safe and prepared. Well, as prepared as one can ever be for another Good Friday Earthquake. (And yes, I’ve thought about what might happen if the house collapsed into the basement: Anger, panic and finally rueful laughter.)

That’s probably why an Everyday Cheapskate post called “Don’t be scared, be prepared” resonated so much and got me thinking, once again, about food preparedness.

Read more