modern life - Surviving and Thriving

Got a credit card? Get another one.

January 23, 2016December 21, 2013 by Donna Freedman

In the past month or so I’ve had four credit cards compromised. Notice of the latest breach came via e-mail this morning: Some thieving bastard(s) purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff from Walmart.com and then tried to spend hundreds more at a different online company.

The other three credit cards weren’t part of the latest Target breach, in which as many as 40 million people had their data stolen. But that theft should help convince people to come around to my way of thinking: that you need at least two credit cards. Suppose you were on vacation or traveling on business and found your plastic didn’t work?

Which is exactly what happened to me: I’m currently in Phoenix, about to celebrate Christmas with my daughter and son-in-law. The card that got hacked is now kaput. What if I wanted to go shopping, or needed to pay for a van ride back to the airport?

Money that would otherwise have been lost.

October 6, 2015December 15, 2013 by Donna Freedman

After our Thanksgiving dinner one of my great-nephews counted up my found money. In the past year I found $13.81, considerably less than in 2012.

That doesn’t surprise me, since I spent a fair amount of 2012 traveling and moved to Alaska for the last three months of the year. I walk a lot less up here than I did in Seattle. That’s due in part to scary-icy conditions and also to the fact that I no longer live within strolling distance of shopping, banking and the like. While living down south I took a long walk most days, for health reasons but also to buy a bunch of bananas or take advantage of great deals on toiletries.

These days if I need to hit the library, the post office, the drugstore or the supermarket I either go with DF, borrow his car or take the bus. That means considerably fewer chances to find coins on sidewalks and in shopping centers.

Even so, I wound up with:

Four $1 bills
16 quarters
38 dimes
Seven nickels
166 pennies

In 2012 I found $21.31, which I rounded up to $50 as a donation for a local food bank. Due to the late unpleasantness at Microsoft I can’t afford to be quite that generous in my math this year. Thus the $13.81 will become a $20 donation. But since I have an automatic monthly donation to the food bank I don’t feel too bad about the pinch.

Slip-slidin’ away.

November 24, 2013November 23, 2013 by Donna Freedman

The smart money would have been on skipping the movie. Instead, I found myself in the car with DF, creeping toward the Century 16 on roads as glazed as a fresh Krispy Kreme. Freezing rain had been falling for about an hour – maddening, really, since the temperature at our house was 22 degrees. Shouldn’t that have been snow?

Blame the “blast of mid-winter moisture (that) blew north from the tropics,” according to The Anchorage Daily News. My friend Linda B. and I were determined to see “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” on Friday morning and that’s what we did.

It helped that DF is the calmest driver I know, and that Linda B. shrugs off all crappy weather with, “Hey, it’s Alaska.”

He dropped me off on his way to work and she and I enjoyed the film (even though I hadn’t seen the first one I was able to follow along). When we left the theater it was snowing sideways, so we crept carefully over to the Table 6 restaurant and had lunch.

Then came the slippery part.

When is a toy not a toy?

June 23, 2014November 20, 2013 by Donna Freedman

Last week DF and I had the chance to watch his granddaughter for a couple of hours. The baby, whom I’ll call “Rose,” recently had her first birthday.

Her dad brought along a couple of stuffed animals but no other playthings. That was fine, since I’d prepared for her visit by pulling together a few things.

Technically, none of them were “toys.” Here’s what awaited her:

A clear plastic jug that once held eight pounds of popcorn
A small dough scraper
Some metal measuring spoons
Two canning-jar rings
A large kitchen spatula

For the first 15 minutes or so Rose sat on the couch like a very small queen with a very large diaper butt. She stared all around her, checking out the scene and fingering the textures of the afghans beneath and behind her.

When I gave her the plastic jug with the kitchen items, the fun really began.

Snowbound, on purpose.

November 12, 2013November 11, 2013 by Donna Freedman

Snow finally fell in Anchorage and we’ve had 24 hours of bliss. Not because we’re avid skiers or because we plow driveways as a side hustle. It’s because we intentionally stranded ourselves.

Only about six inches of snow fell here in West Anchorage, starting on Sunday afternoon. But each year the streets (and highway medians) fill up with people who forgot how to drive in the winter.

Thus we decided to stay home and let everyone else play bumper-cars. Although DF did have a work-related assignment that afternoon, he managed to keep it between the ditches coming and going.

Once he got home we stoked up the fireplace insert and turned off the computers. We enjoyed a long evening of piano playing (him), a New York Times crossword puzzle (me), sharing the meal prep and cleanup, listening to music, reading and talking. For a time we turned on the outside light and shut off the inside ones, the better to watch the snowflakes swirl.

He’d once mentioned the John Greenleaf Whittier poem, “Snow-Bound,” a memory of how the poet’s family endured – and enjoyed – a particularly harsh spell of winter weather. It seemed appropriate to our situation so I asked if he would read it to me. Since he couldn’t find the book that contained it, my computer got switched back on.

We discovered the actual title is “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl.” We also discovered that a room lit mostly by firelight and perfumed with supper fragrances is a perfect place for a recitation of that particular poem.

21 uses for a dead gift card.

November 7, 2013 by Donna Freedman

In the past week I’ve gone through several discounted gift cards, i.e., used them up and asked the cashier to “recycle” them. Wonder if they ended up in the circular file rather than the “clean this up and reload it” bin?

Probably the latter, since the ones in the typical “gift card mall” look utterly pristine. You can’t really say that about the cards I use and toss – not only were they secondhand when I bought them, they’ve suffered tremendous indignities in my wallet and purse. (Hint: In both those locations I also carry keys, paper-clipped items, a comb and the occasional gleaned My Coke Rewards.)

Maybe you, too, buy from the secondary market and thus aren’t interested in reloading them. Or maybe you get gift cards to places you don’t generally frequent and thus have no interest in adding more dollars to the scrip once it’s depleted.

What do we do with all these plastic rectangles, especially since the impending holidays probably mean even more gift cards coming our way?

Coming up: The Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition.

November 28, 2013October 28, 2013 by Donna Freedman

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Come up and join us at the Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition and you’ll dine out on those stories for years.

True, it’ll be winter* — Dec. 7, to be exact — and that means it’ll probably be cold. But that’s the whole point! You’ll be in Alaska in the winter.

You’ll survive. I promise. There’s a bonfire at which to warm yourself during the competition, and the auction and after-party are actually pretty warm due to the hootin’, hollerin’ and dancin’.

Besides, Talkeetna has a doctor.

I wanted to link to my first-ever article about Talkeetna, published in 2010, but my site was migrated to a new server and that first piece doesn’t seem to have made the jump from hyperspace. So I’m excerpting from that piece to explain the absolute hilarity of the event:

Living in the quieter spots of life.

October 8, 2013October 5, 2013 by Donna Freedman

After my recent personal economic downturn I went through my monthly expenses to create an essentials-only budget. The most obvious trim was one I’d been planning (and failing) to do for months: getting rid of the monthly cellular bill in favor of a burn phone.

Due to my job I couldn’t drop the cell without having a replacement in hand. But researching the best options was just one more chore on a to-do list as long as my leg.

The layoff got me off my dime, as it were, and within a few days I’d canceled the old cell service (which had long since gone month-to-month) and bought a pay-as-you-go.

Compared to my old metal flip phone, the new model feels like it’s made out of potato chips. Yet the flimsy little plastic thing could save me as much as $70 or more per month.

Just as important: The new phone is changing the way I live in the world.

Let your geek flag fly.

August 29, 2013 by Donna Freedman

My friend Linda B. is a major genre fangirl. There was a time when she could be spotted at MediaWest conferences, dressed as a middle-aged Corellian spice trader* and participating in blaster battles all over the conference hotels.

She and other fellow geeks would see plays and skits, admire others’ costumes, buy fan fiction (including some rather startling “slash” fiction) and, yeah, shoot at one another.

She and several other middle-aged women would share hotel rooms and at some point conduct readings of abysmally written fan fiction. A particular “Star Wars” story always brought the house down with the line, “Han spurted into the room.”

Good times, despite the expense of traveling from Alaska to Lansing and the “con crud” that she always seemed to catch.

These days she’s staying closer to home – working, writing plays, making jewelry and doing free-form bead weaving – but she’s still a geek. Or maybe she’s a nerd. Probably both.

Either way she’s a fangirl, which is how she came to send me the link to this Wil Wheaton video, “Why it’s awesome to be a nerd.” This is the kind of thing that slips over her transom on a regular basis, along with things like song parodies based on characters from “The X-Files” or news about the latest Doctor to play “Dr. Who.”