It’s hot just about everywhere but here, apparently. At my nephew’s Little League game yesterday it was in the low 50s and so super-windy that I was actually cold.
Not to rub it in, or anything.
Everywhere else, it’s hot. Too hot to play sports. Too hot to watch sports. Too hot to lie by the pool (the sun’s out there, remember?).
This grimy little guy is my great-nephew, who’s almost 9 and the luckiest kid I know: His mom lets him play in the dirt. Or, in this case, the mud.
They’d gone to Kincaid Park, where Malachi and some other kids thoroughly immersed themselves in play on the muddy beach. Alison brought along dry clothes so he wouldn’t wreck the inside of the family car.
“I did have to hose off his hair at the house, before his shower,” she said.
Playing in the dirt is truly frugal fun: Give a kid a spoon and some old plastic containers and watch her go to town. What’s more, science seems to indicate dirt is literally good for our kids.
I recently attended a barbecue that was wryly dubbed “Grill, baby, grill!” by its hosts. As I was leaving they gave me a small sack of newly cut rhubarb. Alaskans are nuts about the stuff. In the old days, rhubarb was the first fresh food of the year. To the pioneers it must have tasted positively ambrosial after a winter of sourdough bread and boiled beans.
Modern-day sourdoughs can get all the fresh produce they want at Costco, yet they maintain an ancestral fondness for this vegetable that masquerades as a fruit. Even people who don’t eat it grow it, probably because it takes no horticultural talent at all. Stick a rhubarb root into dry cat litter and by morning you’ll have enough stalks to bake a pie. (Stick it in used cat litter and you’ll have enough for two pies.)
Here’s the only thing I learned this week that’s worth remembering: If the sun is out, mow the damn lawn. I was so embroiled in deadline that I somehow felt I couldn’t take 45 minutes off to cut the grass at my house-sitting job.
“Later,” I kept saying, until “later” turned into “tomorrow.” Except that it rained that day.
And just about every other day, until the house was the only one on the block with a prairie view. At which point it rained again.
Of the more than 350 entries in the $100 Amazon.com gift card giveaway, only one could be a winner.
Gina was chosen and she’s very excited. Five weeks ago she had a baby — funny how expenses go up at such a time.
Congratulations to Gina, and thanks to everyone else who entered. It’s a tough act to follow, but at least this week’s giveaway is both cute and attitudinal.
Last week’s giveaway is a tough act to follow. What could possibly be as good as a a $100 Amazon.com gift card?
Good question.
Hmmmm.
Dang.
I’ve got it: A cute puppy!
Here’s a recipe for frugal fun: Go watch some “coach-pitch” Little League. Go even if you don’t have any kids. And go to the bathroom before you leave for the game, or you will almost certainly wet yourself laughing.
Coach-pitch is like an extended bloopers reel on YouTube, minus the annoying music and captions. Think “The Keystone Kops,” only shorter, and with bats instead of billy clubs:
Recently I flew to Anchorage, Alaska for a 10-week housesitting gig/visit. I generally go with just a carry-on bag, but my new neck-supporting pillow takes up a big chunk of that bag. I couldn’t stuff much Stuff into the small space where the pillow wasn’t.
A real frugalist just hates to pay checked-bag fees. Were this to have been a short trip I’d have simply used a rolled-up towel under my neck. But 10 weeks is a little long to subject my creaky neck to a tube o’terrycloth. Into the bag went the pillow and into another bag went a bunch of my stuff.
Plus some birthday presents, and some mayonnaise.
I miss the Fly By Night Club, a proudly sleazy Alaskan bar that served up Spam and satire in equal doses. Nine months a year the club presented “The Whale Fat Follies,” a musical revue that skewered local and national politics, Martha Stewart, wildlife management policies, the Neiman-Marcus catalog, the official state fossil (that’s the woolly mammoth, not Sen. Ted Stevens), money-grubbing evangelical ministers, opera, squid, Bill Clinton and just about anything else that club owner Mr. Whitekeys figured could get a laugh.
The slide shows usually included at least one naked backside. The male cast members enjoyed the cross-dressing skits just a little too much. Some shows featured the world’s first tap-dancing outhouse, a performer introduced as “the happy tapper in the snappy crapper.”
I’m getting ready to go to Anchorage, Alaska for a long trip, house-sitting and hanging out with family and friends.
Anybody want a postcard?