Donna Freedman

Heat wave? It’s all relative.

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The mercury edged over 80 degrees yesterday, the second or third day of the heat wave. Anchorage residents moaned and sighed and even jumped into local lakes. For my great-nephews that meant Jewel Lake, whose waters are somewhere between 50 and 54 degrees.

By comparison, the water off Cape May, NJ, averages 73 degrees in July. No swimmer’s itch, either, although there might be jellyfish from time to time.

I grew up in a hot, humid place, and remember lying awake wishing that the box fan in the window would magically find cool air and send it my way. My jobs in that region – a commercial greenhouse, a bakery and a glass factory – were not terribly comfortable, either.

In hot-and-humid Oak Park, Ill., our place had two air conditioners: one in the bedroom and one to cool the rest of the apartment. The bedroom cooled off just fine when the door was closed. The other rooms were never really cool, though. They were just a little less hot.

When I lived in Seattle the temperatures went over 100 from time to time (and my south- and west-facing windows grabbed every available ray). I’ve spent time in Phoenix in the summer, and last year encountered both dehydration and, I believe, a touch of heat stroke. (Thank goodness for air conditioning, tile floors and that jug of iced tea.)

I’ve even been in Death Valley in the summer. On purpose. Even so, I have to admit that an Alaska “heat wave” is startlingly uncomfortable.

 

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Enchilada sauce and the domino effect.

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On Sunday I finally cooked the red enchilada sauce I’d been planning to make for ages. Generally I do a double batch and freeze half, because the recipe calls for three ounces of tomato paste and the cans are all six ounces.

Make ahead and save, right? Especially when you see how much you save: The red enchilada sauce at the store cost $2.79 to $4.49. By comparison, this recipe cost me maybe 50 cents (and probably not even that much) for more than four cups of the stuff. In part that’s because I used clearance-rack tomato paste (29 cents a can) and cumin and chili powder from Costco-sized jars.

Better still: I can control how much sodium goes in, and I can tinker the recipe a bit. For example, I added a little unsweetened cocoa powder for richness and replaced the water with broth made with chicken bouillon. But since both these additions had also been found on the clearance rack, they didn’t boost the total cost by much.

Naturally the flavor of the homemade stuff is so much better than the canned variety. No preservatives, less salt and it’s amazingly easy to make. We’re taking 10 minutes, start to finish. The recipe is from a delightful cookbook called “Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.” (You can also access it at the BB website.)

Bonus: Finally making time to do the enchilada sauce led to all sorts of shenanigans. In a good way.

 

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Alaska’s worst garden pest? That would be moose.

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Gardening where I live, part 117: Last night I was  reading at the kitchen table when a brown blur crossed my peripheral vision.

A moving brown blur. A really big brown blur.

Turned my head to the left and yep, a cow moose was walking into our yard, followed by a tottery little calf. Right toward our garden full of young quinoa, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, strawberries and other plants.

 

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September. Orlando. Come see me!

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Nope, I’m not dead. Just…absent.

It’s been a busy and fairly stressful couple of weeks, which is technically no excuse for not posting. Lots of people – for example, my chronically ill daughter – are busy and stressed, yet they still manage to blog at least a couple of times a week.

However, the past couple of weeks included far too many occasions of writing all day and well into the evening. After a dozen or more hours at the keyboard the last thing I want to do is write, even though I love it.

Put another way: I used to love doughnuts. When I got a job at a bakery, working with crullers and long johns – and smelling 120 dozen of them frying – changed my opinion. We were permitted to take home half a dozen doughnuts each shift. I’d walk into the house, toss the bakery bag at my brother and head straight for the shower to (try and) wash off the greasy, glazed smell.

But that’s not what I came here to write about. I came here to write about .

 

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Calling all Sue Grafton fans.

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Yesterday I pulled a T-shirt out of my “play clothes” pile, i.e., the stuff that’s too faded/holey to wear in polite company but just fine for slopping around like a freelancer. It was my old Alaska Sisters in Crime T-shirt, from way back in the 1990s.

In case you are unfamiliar with that organization: SinC is made up of readers who enjoy mysteries and wish to support and encourage those written by women.

The shirt our chapter made up bore the slogan: “Sisters in Crime Alaska: Where the trail is always cold.” Which is a lot funnier if you’re a fan of mysteries, thrillers, whodunits or police procedurals.

(I’m proud to say that I came up with the slogan myself.)

What does this have to do with the late writer Sue Grafton? I’m getting to that.

 

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Welcome, NerdWallet readers! (Here’s a coupon.)

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Thanks for finding your way to my site from Amrita Jayakumar’s article, “These young adults are debt-free – true story.” I’m not exactly young, but I was broke when I was very young and again when I was middle-aged, so I was thrilled to chat with her for the piece.

My goal was to share some of the tactics I used as a teen-ager running a household of three on a very thin margin, and later as a woman furiously treading financial water during a protracted divorce. You could say I took what I learned at age 16 and embroidered on it.

If you’re new to the site, here’s what I learned about being broke: You can make a good life on the money you currently have, without losing your dignity or your hopes for a better future.

And if you’re new to the site, let me tell you about the two books I wrote on that very topic. (Also about a way to get a free PDF of the “stealth savings” chapter from the first book.)

 

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Back in South Jersey.

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I was having breakfast with family at a diner in Elmer, NJ, when my aunt asked the table at large, “Is that lipstick on my coffee cup?”

Everyone peered her way and agreed that yes, that was a faint pink smooch on the mug.

My aunt paled a little. “I had my mouth on that.”

When we asked for a clean cup, one of the waitresses explained the reason: “It’s these new waterproof lipsticks. It can be hard even for a dishwasher to get them off.”

You learn the darnedest things in South Jersey diners.

 

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7 money lessons from “A Quiet Place.

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Linda B. and I went to see “A Quiet Place” recently and it was as frightening as I’d expected it would be – even though I already knew a couple of major plot points, due to having read a couple of spoiler-filled articles. (Will I ever learn?)

Even when I knew what was going to happen, “A Quiet Place” genuinely scared me. That’s because these weren’t jump-scare moments or, worse, the torture porn that passes for suspense/horror these days. The underlying emotion was fear.

Fear that we can’t protect our children, or teach them enough to survive in the world. Fear that we won’t have enough to eat. Fear that we’ll lose the ones we love.

Those are some grade-A terrors, all right – and given all the recent bluster about nuclear weapons, they’re not exactly unfounded.

I, of course, also found personal finance lessons in the movie. That’s how I roll.

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College is optional. Education is not.

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(FinCon and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are sponsoring the #FinHealthMatters writing/podcasting contest. Here’s my entry.)

A recent Facebook post about college featured a couple of 20-somethings. One was a slacker dude lamenting, “I spent $60,000 on a worthless degree and no one will hire me.”

The other was a clean-cut young man happily announcing, “I spent $6,000 at a trade school and make $85,000 a year.”

Obviously things aren’t that simple. Some high-cost degrees immediately lead to high-paying jobs, and not every skilled tradesperson automatically rakes in the bucks.

But its core message is one I’ve been espousing for years:

There is more than one road to postsecondary education.

If you’re unsure what you want to do with your life, college might not be a good fit. And even if higher education is in your future, it might not look the way you imagined.

 

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April is the cruelest month.

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What the poet says, but for different reasons. For me, April is the month with the most unpleasant associations.

Tax day, for sure; I always panic come IRS time, even though I haven’t done anything wrong. (My tax guy at Block Solutions says his experience is that the honest people are the most nervous, whereas the push-the-envelope or outright sleazy types are completely fine with the annual forms.)

But April is also the month of my ex’s birthday and also our wedding anniversary. His birthday is April 1 – insert your own punchline here. (I certainly have.)

Our anniversary is much more troubling. That was the day I entered into what would become 23 years of gradually unfolding torment. As I was getting dressed for the wedding, my sisters and my mom joked that there was still time: They had fast cars and could sweep me and my daughter out of there.

Now I think maybe they weren’t joking.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t married him I would never have made it to Alaska – which changed my life on several levels.

 

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