home

Ode to the junk drawer.

by

During my recent errand of mercy to Phoenix, my daughter streamed some episodes of the dark and frequently hilarious television show “Speechless.” The program focuses on the DiMeos, a working-class family that moved to a dump of a home in a good school district. The goal was for oldest son JJ, who has cerebral palsy, to get the education and services to which he’s entitled.

Money is short and the family is overwhelmed by just the activities of daily living so, yeah, the house remains a dump. In fact, it gets even dumpier because of their casual attitude about home upkeep. (Hint: A blue tarp over part of the roof is not a fashion statement.)

In one episode, JJ’s personal care attendant sings a song* about the DiMeo lifestyle, to the tune of “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” Among other things, he notes that while most homes have one junk drawer, the DiMeos have multiples. In fact, pretty much all the drawers – like their house – is full of miscellany.

Which got me to thinking about the junk drawer in my Seattle apartment. It held stuff like safety pins, key rings (ever notice how those things accumulate?), USB cords (ditto), bits of ribbon, a clutch of shoelaces (which I saved when I tossed worn-out shoes), rubber bands and a tube of powdered graphite to squirt into balky locks (I managed the apartment house).

Tape lived there, too: Electrical tape, duct tape and a spare roll of cellophane tape. (Do people still call it that? I do.)

The junk drawer was also crammed with hardware and hand tools. A couple of former cream-cheese containers held nails, screws, bolts, brackets, washers and other bits of metal I couldn’t really identify. That’s also where I kept my six-in-one screwdriver, my hammer and the allen wrench I used on garbage disposal units – my own and those of other tenants. As apartment house manager I regularly got calls or knocks about a disposal that quit** mid-chew. Usually it just needed a few turns of the wrench.

My favorite thing about the junk drawer: It saves money.

 

Read more

Marie Kondo minimalists: Don’t give away the store.

by

GetAttachmentThumbnail(Happy Throwback Thursday! This article originally ran on April 11, 2016, but its subject – Marie Kondo –  is hotter than ever, what with her new book and her Netflix series. The piece has been slightly updated to reflect those facts, but its basic theme remains the same.)

Over at the Budgets Are Sexy blog, host J. Money shared a startling fact: He almost gave away his coin collection.

The mohawked numismatist is known throughout the personal finance blogosphere to be someone completely devoted to what he calls “tiny pieces of metal.” Yet he’s reflecting on whether such attachments are entirely healthy.

“That’s right – the guy who only has one main hobby left, and created an entire blog dedicated to these historic beauties, almost gave up collecting entirely,” he wrote in a post called “When it’s time to detach yourself from your things.”

The collection was “the last remaining ‘thing’ I owned that I was still overly attached to and didn’t want to be anymore.”

I get it. Marie Kondo and her “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” is all the rage right now. The underlying theory is good: Get rid of what you don’t use/may never use/no longer matters.

But allow me to point out that fads come and fads go. Minimalism may be one of them, and joining in could mean shooting yourself in the frugals.


Read more

Cheryl paid off her mortgage.

by

When I visited my dad in Tarpon Springs, Fla., last year, he and I met up with a reader named Cheryl. The three of us sat in a Dunkin Donuts talking about life and money. One of the things she mentioned was a rapid mortgage paydown.

Recently she wrote to say she is now completely debt-free, 14 years ahead of schedule.

Cheryl also included a letter she wrote to her niece, a mid-20s newlywed who’s trying to vanquish student loans. While I’m loath to throw around the word “inspirational,” this note fits the bill. That’s why I’m excerpting it:

 

Read more

Fresh air and airports.

by

On Saturday I hung out the first laundry of the year. We’ve been putting the bedclothes out  air all winter long in order to sleep in fresh air, but this was the first time in months that it’s been possible to dry stuff on the line. (It helped that I’d first tumbled those clothes in the dryer for a few minutes.)

Not that it was super-balmy, mind you. This was mid-30s weather, but a nice breeze blew and the sun was strong and constant. By midday the temperature in the greenhouse was in the 70s. Maybe I should have dried the clothes in there.

The next day DF put the comforter, blanket and top sheet out to gain the benefit of the sun and wind. He had to hang the linens lengthwise to keep them from dragging in the snow. Despite steady daytime melt, the drifts are still high near the clothesline because of DF’s use of the snowblower.

Two days after my second cataract surgery we got another dumping of snow, the first in several weeks. About nine inches fell at our place, plumping up what already lay on the ground. I don’t know how much has fallen this year and I don’t know how much of it was still there after sublimation and melt. But the back yard still looks fairly snowbound.

 

Read more

Vinegar is magic. Also: A frugal Swiffer hack.

by

Still visiting my daughter and drinking the weird water of Phoenix. She and my son-in-law cope by using a reverse osmosis system to turn the hard H20 into something approaching potable agua.

Probably I’d get used to it if I lived here; for now, I cope by turning it into iced tea.

What I really resent, though, is the weirdly random stains the mineral-saturated water makes in the toilet bowls. I made it my mission to eliminate them.

And, as Abby noted in “The beauty of a clean toilet,” I succeeded. That’s because I had a secret weapon.

Oh, vinegar: Is there anything you can’t do?

 

Read more

Warmth and plenty.

by

thOh, the breakfast we just had. Perfectly cooked bacon, done in the oven. Sliced tomatoes. The last of the homemade rolls from the freezer, toasted and served with a choice of three homemade (not by us) jams. Tea and coffee aplenty

Scrambled eggs for me and for DF, eggs done “the way Jesus had his.” (See Matthew 11:30 for the punny explanation.) A dish of yogurt with rhubarb compote, both – you guessed it – homemade. The only reason we didn’t add in some of those Del Monte red grapefruit sections was that we forgot they were in the fridge.

The fireplace insert was churning out BTUs, its flames resurrected from the previous evening’s fire that had entertained us and also dried two racks of laundry. While I slept in DF had folded that laundry and put away the racks.

This lazy Saturday morning was seasoned perfectly by gusts of snow blown against the kitchen windows. Not new snow, but slabs of old snow and hand-sized chunks of frost blown off the roof and the neighbor’s giant larch tree. My breakfast sat more snugly and smugly each time snow scoured the panes: It’s out there and I’m in here, enjoying warmth and a leisurely breakfast.

All of which reminded me of a line from Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.”

 


Read more

The scent of home.

by

thMy partner treasures memories of visiting his grandmother, whose home smelled delicious. That’s why DF likes to have the scent of cookies baking when his granddaughter comes to visit. He wants her memories to be quite literally as sweet as his.

For the past two days our home has been grandchild-free but has smelled delicious nonetheless. We roasted a small turkey and canned most of it, simmered the bones for stock, cooked down the contents of a boiling bag, made a batch of zucchini cookies* for me to take to the potluck that precedes “The Walking Dead” at a local bar** and baked a ham (much of which DF parceled into bags for the freezer).

I’ve needed both the figurative and literal warmth of such a setting, since the light is going away, the temperature has been in the low teens, and the election season left me exhausted and depressed. Being in a warm, deliciously scented place with a man whom I adore has been an absolute tonic.

 

Read more

The promise of spring.

by

IMG_20150622_182817When I got back from Phoenix the house smelled like dirt. In a good way: While I was gone DF had started dozens of seeds in egg cartons and repurposed pots.

The containers completely cover a table in the utility room and a three-shelf unit that has displaced our dining table. We can eat anywhere, but baby plants need the south sun.

After a week of seeing flowers and orange trees and fully leafed trees, I came home to a typical Alaska breakup: gray skies, brown lawns and bare branches. The scent of soil helps make up for that.

So does the Renee’s Garden media kit, which arrived shortly before I left to visit my daughter. The 2016 New Introductions Sampler kicked off a response most Pavlovian. My mouth actually watered as I looked at things like Five Color Rainbow beets, Italian Pandorino grape tomatoes, Ruby & Emerald mustard, French Mascotte container beans and Harlequin Mix rainbow carrots.

Read more

When good deals become hoarder bait.

by

thThe other day I had a massage, my last one with this practitioner because she’s moving out of state. On the landing by her door was a small stack of cinder blocks. I asked if she’d found a buyer and they were waiting to be picked up.

No buyers, she replied. “I’d give them away at this point, just to get rid of them.”

Guess who now has eight cinder blocks, even though she has no particular plan for them? Not right away, that is. But I figured you can never be too rich, too thin or have too many cinder blocks.

Part of me wondered whether this were a hoarder’s rationale. It could be.

 

Read more

A robot cleans my floors.

by

thThis is an unsolicited, unreimbursed testimonial for the robotic vacuum cleaner known as the iRobot Roomba. When I first heard the words “robotic vacuum” years ago I made a rude noise with my lips. It sounded like a pricey toy more than a useful appliance.

But DF, that most frugal and practical of men, has owned one model or another for years. When I moved in with him I decided to learn how to use it.

And then I fell in love with a little self-propelled disc.

Roomba delights me when she’s not scaring me with just how much dust and crud she’s picked up on what looked like clean-enough floors. (Yes, our Roomba is female. She makes us think of the robot maid from “The Jetsons.”)

Given that I have asthma, it’s smart to keep the environment as dust-free as possible. But vacuuming frequently hasn’t generally been high on my to-do list, even though I knew it should have been.

Recently I realized my asthma attacks have all but disappeared since I came to live with DF. Initially I thought it was because I was so much happier. Now I think it’s mostly Roomba’s doing.

Read more