Today is my birthday and I am officially old. Not because of my new age, but because of how I spent my day. Some highlights:
Relax: My day sounds a lot worse than it actually was. In fact, it’s been pretty great. For starters, there’s the obvious reason: I’m still on the right side of the grass.
For millions of people, Amazon is a way to get whatever they need, whenever they need it – and wherever they are. (More on that in a minute.) That’s why the rebranding of the “Prime Student” program is worth noticing. Amazon is offering six months’ worth of Amazon Prime for free to people aged 18 to 24, plus half-price Prime after that.
That means not just free parcel delivery, but also:
(In honor of Labor Day, I decided re-run this post from Sept. 5, 2010.)
When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to earn money. Penny candy was only part of the reason. Working was a sign of being grown-up. I’d already figured out that being a kid was for losers. Adulthood was where it was at.
That’s why in elementary school I would pick and sell flowers and strawberries. It’s why I rejoiced when it snowed — the local doctor would pay a dollar to have his steps and sidewalk shoveled. It’s why I started baby-sitting at age 11, when I was hardly older than some of my charges.
It’s the only possible reason I could have enjoyed my first “real” job, at age 13: Picking tomatoes in a greenhouse that felt like an incinerator. It was a half-hour bike ride away, through temperature and humidity that raced each other into the high 90s. The plants were taller than I was and their leaves brushed me on all sides. I came home slimed with sap; the shampoo bubbled green when I washed my hair.
But oh, the joy of making $1.35 an hour.
The German language has the best words. Kummerspeck (“grief bacon,” or the weight you put on from eating your feelings). Sehnsucht, or the deep and emotional craving for something far away or unattainable. And frühjahrsmüdigkeit, which I’ve been experiencing lately.
Frühjahrsmüdigkeit is translated as “spring lethargy,” the fatigue that some people feel in the springtime, particularly after a hard winter.
We’ve had two particularly crummy winters in a row, and a lousy spring/summer in 2023. For the most part, spring 2024 has been cold and cloudy.
Sure, we’ve had a few spectacularly sunny days – the kind that make me think, “I can live here despite the winters.” Mostly it’s been…frühjahrsmüdigkeit.
(Happy Throwback Monday! It would have been Throwback Thursday per usual had Earth Day been responsible enough to occur on a Thursday. This post originally ran on Earth Day 2023, which was April 19.)
Everywhere I looked online this morning were reminders of Earth Day 2023. My initial reaction was to remember my high-school Ecology Club. That’s when I believed, truly believed, that we’d have this all figured out pretty soon.
Boy, was I young.
That thought was followed by this one: Frugalists are eco-warriors.
Because we are. We really are! Although our goal is to be good stewards of our finances, we wind up being good stewards of the Earth. The steps we take to save money help us ameliorate our impact on the environment.
Here are seven ways we do that. Note: These aren’t universal. Few people likely do all these things or even most of them, but I know that my regular readers do at least some of them.
Yet another reason to be delighted by my partner: He reads the Bible in Yup’ik, the language spoken by indigenous folks in western and southwestern Alaska (and the Russian Far East). That’s because DF has been doing home visits for his church, and one of the parishioners is an elderly woman who is much more … Read more
(Happy Throwback Thursday! Today I am having my every-five-years colonoscopy, so it seemed like a good time to re-run this piece from Dec. 5, 2018.)
Some people throw parties on their birthdays, or go out to dinner. This year I went with a butt camera.
It’s not that “colonoscopy prep” was high up on my birthday bucket list, but rather that the appointment was the first one I could get.
Lucky for me that it hadn’t been scheduled first thing on Nov. 30, when we had a nice big earthquake. According to a staffer at the doctor’s office, they’d just finished one procedure and were beginning to sedate another patient when the 7.0 temblor hit.
That poor guy had to reschedule – which meant having to re-do the colonoscopy prep. Ack.
For the uninitiated, colonoscopy prep is a full-scale cleanout of your colon: a combination of light diet, then liquids only and finally a seriously effective cleansing solution. Apparently one brand of industrial-strength laxative is available in tablet form, but the doctor I visited won’t prescribe it. He says the results aren’t always optimal.
(Eeeewww.)
This time around I was offered the option of a relatively new product called Plenvu. It’s so new, in fact, that my insurance would not have covered it. However, the doctor’s office had some samples to give and I accepted one upon hearing the regimen: two 16-ounce doses of solution over two days, each dose followed by 16 ounces of your clear liquid of choice. (Mine was iced tea.)
Previous preps had required two 32-ounce doses of solution followed by two 16-ounce glasses of clear liquid. No wonder Plenvu’s slogan is “success with less.”
As regular readers know, I’m always on the lookout for lost change. All year long I save what I find, and the following January I count the found money, round up the total and donate the funds to a food charity.
This wound up being a decent year. In addition to the specie, I found a $10 bill and DF contributed $8 from his occasional survey-taking with the Nielsen* Company. His theory is that as a retiree, he isn’t looking for work. But occasionally work looks for him, in the form of surveys. Therefore, it is “found” money.
Whatever works. I just want to plump up the total, because it’s getting really scary out there, food-wise. As all of you already know.
For years I’ve donated the found money to Feeding America or to the Food Bank of Alaska. More recently I’ve been sending the dough to the church I grew up in. That’s because the Fairton United Methodist Church, like so many other houses of worship, is making food baskets for locals who have more month than money.
Early Wednesday afternoon, DF went to the medical center for a stress test. Generally, a Christmas miracle story doesn’t start that way but bear with me.
Lately, he’d been plagued by serious fatigue and breathlessness, and working his way through medical testing (blood work, EKG, etc.). The stress test was just the latest arrow in the quiver. Or would have been, if they ever did it.
But before they could get started, the medico noticed that DF’s heart was beating as few as 20 times per minute. The average adult’s resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 BPM. Into a wheelchair and off to the ER in the adjacent hospital, from whence he called to report that nurses and doctors were “swarming him.”
Soon after that, he called to say they wanted to implant a pacemaker –and they’d given him the option of doing it then and there, so he could sleep in his own bed that night.
We found chicken for less than 12 cents per pound yesterday, a discovery too good to keep to ourselves. Instead, I did what I always do: Texted my niece and my neighbor to see how many packages they might want. While I never wanted to be a personal grocery shopper, I can’t keep deals like that to myself.
Those poultry deals were five-pound-plus packages of chicken drumsticks for 64 cents, and boneless, skinless, organic chicken breasts (2½ to 2¾ pounds) for $1.28 apiece.
We left the store with a lot of chicken. It helped them, and it helped us reach our goal of getting a free turkey* through a store offer.
Sharing deals is a sort of frugal ministry for me. Maybe it could be for you, too.
I’m not saying you must do this every time you hit the store. Or maybe at all, if it doesn’t fit your current life. But given how expensive food is getting, think what a gift this could be to others.