Alaska

Coronavirus: An object lesson.

by

This isn’t a post about or whether our country’s belated reaction to the coronavirus is in fact an overreaction. I’m not writing about whether or not we should self-isolate*,  or whether schools and public venues should have closed, or whether we’ve lost our collective damn mind in terms of toilet-paper hoarding.

I just want to point out that frugality (or intentional living, or whatever you want to call it) positions us to outlast both minor and major emergencies. Personally, I think that the coronavirus is both minor and major.

It’s minor (thus far, anyway) in that relatively few people are actually sick. If the epidemiologists are correct, “flattening the curve” may keep the medical system from being too overwhelmed to provide care for all.

It’s major in that many people’s livelihoods (both regular jobs and side hustles) are being hammered. When your finances are already chancy, losing a couple of weeks’ worth of work doesn’t just hurt – it might actually take you down.

Which brings us back to intentional living. If you were able to reduce/pay off your debt and build an emergency fund, then you are now better-equipped to handle the coronavirus troubles.

Facing reduced hours at work or even outright layoff because customers have disappeared? No longer able to pick up those extra 10 hours a week walking dogs or selling hot dogs at the basketball arena? Or maybe your job hasn’t gone away, but you now need to pay for weeks of childcare due to school closure.

That stinks, to be sure. It won’t be fun to use some (or all) of your EF to make up the difference. Instead, try thinking of it this way: I’m very glad I took the steps to build this cushion. And when this is over, I’ll get back to rebuilding.

 

Read more

Moose on my phone.

by

This particular moose was eating dried leaves from our clematis vine, which shows you just how nutrition-desperate Alaskan ungulates are at this time of year. Her nostrils were probably fewer than six inches away from me when I snapped the picture.

The amazing part isn’t the proximity, however. It’s the fact that if I call up the photo on my phone and press the image lightly, it starts to move.

And emit sound: I can hear the rustling of the clematis vine. All I can think of are the magic photos from the “Harry Potter” books.

(For the uninitiated: In the HP  universe, people in the photos can wave and smile.)

This moose wasn’t smiling, though. She eyed me narrowly and the hair on the back of her neck stood at attention. “This far, and no further, hooman.”

In other news: Yes, I finally got a smartphone. After years of using a dumbphone (pay-as-you-go flipper), I bit the bullet and joined the 21st century.

Frugally, of course.

 

Read more

Found money 2019: Not a banner year.

by

As found-money totals go, it was pretty dismal. The take was two $1 bills, seven quarters, 20 dimes, 7 nickels and 75 pennies, for a total of 6.85.

Last year’s total wasn’t much better: just $8.80.

Maybe it’s because people are using credit or debit to pay for their purchases. We’re not a cashless society just yet, but more and more people are opting for plastic. (Some people no longer carry any cash at all, which astounds me.)

Could be that people are experiencing personal economic downturns and thus picking up anything they drop – and anything that other people drop, too.

Or maybe I’m just not going out as much. In the past year I rarely walked to the post office due to weather (read: icy paths), busy-ness (not wanting to give up 40 minutes of a work day) or the fact that DF is now retired and makes a trip to the P.O. one of his daily chores.

I’ve found a lot less in Coinstar machines, too. Perhaps folks have wised up and are checking the coin slots when they run their change through – or perhaps other people have caught on and are checking the machine as they walk by.

 

Read more

7 ways I know I’m not in Anchorage.

by

Chief among them: Sidewalks. Sidewalks I can see!!! No snow, no ice, no worries about slipping and falling. No problem.

I’m in sunny Phoenix, visiting my daughter for a little over a week and I’m really starting to understand snowbirds – especially since it was below zero pretty much nonstop for most of January.

While the time difference is just two hours, it’s a big ol’ world away from not-so-warm-and-sunny* Anchorage, Alaska. And as usual, it’s a non-bacchanal visit:

I write. Love, love, love my work-at-home gig because it doesn’t matter whether it’s my home or someone else’s. Seriously: The flexibility of being able to visit Abby vs. having to request time off far outweighs the occasional self-employment hassle.

I visit friends, including Funny About Money, an old college pal who happened to be RVing in the area, and the blogger formerly** known as A Mom, Money and More.

I clean up*** a bit. She’s pretty much stayed ahead of the cleaning. Roomba + no dog and husband going in and out + no clutter thanks to the disappearance of said dog and husband = a place that’s much easier to keep tidy.

But I’ve got a few specific projects like mopping the floors, tightening loose doorknobs, and scooping the catbox. Speaking of which: I also plan to empty and scrub the box with vinegar and water, let it dry in the sun and refill it with some of the litter I helped her lug home the other day. Yeah, I party hard.

I hang out with my daughter. She also works at home, so sometimes the hangout is in the living room, both of us tapping away on our laptops. The rest of the time we’re either reading (occasionally sharing particularly well-written or funny stuff out loud) or viewing programs she thinks I’d like via Netflix and Hulu. It’s likely that I will watch more TV this trip than I would in a couple of months**** in Anchorage.

To some, all this might sound pretty dull. To us it’s pretty satisfying – and at this time of year, when I can go outside and use Nature’s S.A.D. light, it’s fairly great.

What are some of the other ways I know I’m not in Anchorage any more? So glad you asked:

 

Read more

A blogger at rest.

by

(Surviving and Thriving has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Surviving and Thriving and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses and recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.)

It’s been a while. A really long while. I wish I could say that I’ve been off saving the world, or crafting a best-selling novel, or doing anything else that might justify a 33-day vacation from posting here.

What’s actually been happening is a mix of the usual reasons (holidays, winter challenges, the chance to do extra work) plus an end-of-life situation affecting a family member (and, to some extent, me).

The cumulative impact was that my off-duty writing slowed to a trickle (18 posts in three months) and ultimately stalled.

The longer I didn’t write, the more anxious I became that:

  • I’d run out of things to say, and
  • That I’d need to come up with a super-skookum topic in order to justify the lengthening absence.

Which, of course, led to performance anxiety. I can’t think of anything interesting to write about my own life, and no money-related topics are speaking to me right now.

To paraphrase Newton’s first law of motion, a blogger at rest tends to stay at rest unless it’s acted upon by an outside force. In my case, a pair of forces finally came into play:

My own conscience, and

Comments from readers, both here and on my daughter’s site.

 

Read more

Don’t throw it out until you’ve smelled it.

by

(Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy Throwback Thursday! In honor of all the food that will be prepared — and perhaps wasted — over the next few days, I’m republishing this piece from May 12, 2012. It’s my hope that a little judicious leftover prep and/or freezing will cut down on waste.)

I didn’t get to the supermarket for a few days after my arrival in Anchorage. Until then, I used the milk and oatmeal my hostess already had. When I mentioned that I’d be replacing what I used, she looked surprised.

“Uh, that’s really old milk. I meant to warn you off it,” she said.

It had tasted fine to me. That is to say, it tasted about as good as nonfat milk ever tastes – like the water they used to wash a cow. All that mattered to me is that it loosened up the oats in the bowl.

I nearly changed my tune when I checked the “sell by” date: April 5. It was then May 6. I was drinking milk a month past its prime.

Read more

A festival of pie.

by

Tomorrow we’re attending a Thanksgiving celebration hosted by DF’s son and daughter-in-law, and we’re not going empty-handed. He’ll be doing a turkey in the oven plus prime rib on the Weber, and I’m bringing three pies.

Not just any pies, mind you. These are Alaska pies, made with fillings grown less than three miles from where they’ll be consumed.

Specifically, they were grown in our own dirt. The apple pie filling was made mostly by DF over many days in August and September. He sliced the Norland apples and mixed them with sugar, cinnamon, and a dash of ginger and nutmeg, then froze the result in pie-sized portions.

Lots of pie-sized portions: We have enough filling for more than two dozen desserts. Although the trees are less than five years old, the weirdly warm summer had them producing like gangbusters.

The second pie will be raspberry and rhubarb, with a hint of cinnamon. The berries went nuts this year, too, producing nearly three dozen quarts for the freezer, a bunch eaten fresh, and still more picked by family members. (Especially DF’s granddaughters, who love eating a path through the patch.)

And the last pie will be the best pie: pumpkin. It’s one of my favorite flavors anyway, and this one is special because it was the first year we tried to grow pumpkins. Although it was a jack o’ lantern cultivar rather than a pie pumpkin, that didn’t seem to matter much. Frankly, I had my doubts when I made a test pie a couple of weeks ago, since the pulp was a bright yellow. (See the illustration above.) But apparently it’s the cinnamon, ginger and cloves that are mostly responsible for the orange/brown hue of pumpkin pie filling.

 

Read more

When the frost is on the punkin.

by

Before I went to bed last night I felt a sudden disturbance in the force. Although I’d checked the weather forecast – twice! – and it predicted a low of 40, the word “frost” flashed into my brain.

I checked again, and still no suggestion of anything cold enough to kill an outdoor plant. This morning I opened my eyes to sun bracketing the blackout curtains in our bedroom, and vowed to pick the peas. Even though it had been cool and very rainy all week, surely some of the last stragglers of the season would be ready to go.

And then DF came home from church. “Frost,” he announced.

It was 38 degrees at the time, but apparently it’s possible for frost to form even when the temperature is technically above freezing. (This short piece by Tom Skilling explains how.) At the time, I wasn’t interested in an explanation – I just wanted to see if anything in the garden was still alive.

Specifically, I was wondering about the pumpkins.

Just for fun we put two pumpkin seedlings into the ground in May. After a slow start we got exactly one fruit, which turned orange surprisingly fast. Ultimately we wound up with four more, two of which also turned orange. Two of them were latecomers and had only begun to turn orange (or so we thought) when the temperature changed.

Every day DF and I would go out to take a look at the garden in general, but our favorite part was the smallish pumpkin patch. The bright orange shining through the leaves, and the steady growth of the green ones, filled us with inordinate happiness. We anticipated letting his granddaughters choose their own jack o’ lantern material, and to invite Orion, the free-range kid to choose one as well.

And now a stealth frost might have ruined that.

 

Read more

The first fire.

by

I got home at 3 a.m. Saturday from the trifecta trip: D.C. sightseeing, FinCon19 and a visit to my brother’s. Very little sleep and not much to drink on the long trip, so I attributed my slight sore throat to fatigue and the dryness of airplane air.

After about five hours of sleep I spent a lovely, quiet day with DF, including a trip to Glen Alps in the city’s Hillside neighborhood, for a little fresh air and a short walk to enjoy the view.

When I left everything was still unnaturally green due to warmer-than-usual summer, but there’s definitely an autumnal feeling now: leaves turning gold, a coolness in the air, a lowering angle of sun, the sharp scent of highbush cranberries and dying vegetation.

Our back yard is dying back, too, but a ton of tomatoes still peep out from the tangle of outdoor vines. It’s pretty astonishing that they’re doing as well as they are, given that they’re varieties like Stupice and Czech’s bush rather than Siberian hybrid tomatoes.

The outdoor cucumber vines are yellowing but still producing; also unusual, but welcome, since the greenhouse vines are spawned-out. The pea vines are definitely on the wane, yet I picked enough to yield a full pint of shelled fruit, which will make the coming year’s turkey pies that much more succulent. The pods went into the boiling bag, to yield yet another container of soup stock with a definite sweetness.

And oh, the pumpkins, whose vines started slowly but have now produced five or six behemoths that will remain in situ until just before the first frost. Most will be divided among family and friends, with the proviso that we get the pulp scooped out during the jack o’lantern process. We’ll save a few seeds to plant and roast the rest, and add the squishy parts to the boiling bag.

By early evening I realized that I still had the sore throat, along with some congestion and headache. No elevation in temperature, though, so I figured it was a virus that I could kill with fluids and rest.

Sleeping for about 10 hours didn’t drive it away, so this morning DF bundled me back into bed with a couple of heated rice socks and an Advil PM. For almost the next six hours I slept deeply, and woke still under the weather but definitely stronger, albeit somewhat Rip Van Winkled by the loss of most of a day.

And then DF built the first fire of the season.

 

Read more

Tree music.

by

This morning I awoke to the smell of smoke and the sound of a window closing. Earlier this month a lightning strike started a Kenai Peninsula fire whose smoke has played peekaboo with us ever since.

Today the smolder was so pronounced that for a split second I thought something in the house was burning.

For a few hours I was captive in the house, due to my asthma. During that time I positioned myself close to the ceiling fan because it was Alaska-style hot, i.e., in the 70s.

Ultimately the wind started blowing from the north, which quickly de-smokefied our yard. DF took this as a sign that he should wash the new-to-us fitted sheet* he’d just gotten for $1.50 at his church’s thrift store: Relentless sun + strong breeze = a good wash day.

In midafternoon I spotted DF sitting on our back deck with some iced tea. Briefly debated starting on the next article, then said to heck with it and poured some tea of my own. There we sat in a couple of old chairs, sipping our drinks, looking out over our raised garden beds and listening to the tree music.

 

Read more