modern life

Quarantine soup.

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I don’t like to waste food, especially since it’s been harder to find lately. It’s not that we’re food insecure, but that we could be.

Pandemic-related shortages have been reported in stores nationwide, and meat-processing facility closures have led some producers to slaughter animals rather than wait out the pandemic.

In addition, an expert I interviewed for a recent COVID-19 article noted that there will likely be some food shortages in the coming year. Mostly those would be specialty items, or high-maintenance crops that farmers aren’t sure they will have the manpower to nurture and harvest. (It can’t all be done by machine.)

Too, some farmers are plowing crops under right now because their biggest-ticket buyers – hotels and restaurants – aren’t buying. An analyst quoted by U.S. News & World Report notes this could lead to shortages (and higher prices) in the supermarket.

Not wasting food has always been a goal. But now it seems more important than ever.

 

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Scenes from quarantines, Part 1.

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The times in which we live are not just potentially deadly. They’re psychologically and emotionally exhausting.

People are dealing with not just varying degrees of isolation but also variables like:

– The fear that loved one (especially elders) will get sick and they won’t be allowed to visit

– Unemployment (or having to keep working without reliable child care and/or proper protection)

– Food and household product shortages

– Generalized anxiety, which can mean existing in fight-or-flight mode 24/7 and can also make the simplest tasks of daily living feel insurmountable

– Being full-time parents in a pandemic, i.e., trying to explain the new normal to housebound kids who can’t quite grasp why they can’t visit friends or go to the movies

– Maybe being not just full-time parents but also homeschool teachers who are still expected to put in a full day’s work from home

Yet among the ever-more-horrifying news articles and social media posts, I’ve also read some  pretty funny scenes from quarantines. Moms and dads talk about all the math they can’t remember, or moan that the math they do remember has been replaced by Common Core.

People who wear glasses joke darkly about their masks’ effects on their specs. (I’ve had some fairly foggy vision myself on our weekly trips to the Outside World.)

Work-from-home* parents report the mortification of having pants-less offspring run through the room during video conferences. Once-tight couples realize that their SOs have some Really Annoying Habits, or at least habits magnified by enforced togetherness.

I laugh at these things, sometimes harder than the actual humor warrants. We need laughter right now, to offset the daily horror show that is the 24-hour news cycle.

Hence, this article – not intended to make light of a very real public health and economic crisis, but rather to provide what we hope will be a few much-needed laughs.

“We”? Yes, we. The first part is running here and the second is over on my daughter’s site, I Pick Up Pennies. We’ve recorded a few random observations about the new normal.

 

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Sheltering in place. Just not MY place.

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Well, another 17 days have gone by without a post. This time I’m gonna play the C card.

A couple weeks ago I took the calculated risk of flying to Phoenix because isolation was not playing well with my daughter’s bipolar II and depression. Initially she rejected my offer to fly down if things got really tough. Her response was “thanks, but I’m okay” due to her fear that I might become infected.

To be honest, I was a little worried about that myself. After all, I’m in my early 60s and have asthma. But when you hear phrases like “suicidal ideation,” you get on the damn plane.

Was it ideal? No. Was it necessary? Yes. And it turns out that social distancing was a snap with fewer than two dozen passengers.

The decision was snap, too: When she called and said, “Yeah, I really do need you to come down,” I checked the Alaska Airlines website and discovered I could get a nonstop-to-Phoenix flight at 11:55 p.m. that very night. The hardest part was telling DF that I had to leave, and leave soon.

 

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Go win these contests.

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I enter contests all the time, in real life and on the Internet. Sometimes I even win them.

Most recently it was for a prize I didn’t really need, but figured I could sell. The guy running the contest offered me the $250 cash equivalency. Right before the holidays, too. #christmasmiracle

Once you enter, you’re on their mailing lists for future contests. Lately I’ve been seeing a steady stream of gift cards for Amazon, Target, Walmart and other retailers.

A couple have been for computer and gaming items, from monitors to chairs. Again: Don’t need, but could gift (one of my nephews is a major gamer) or sell for a little extra cash.

Lately a lot of people could use a little extra cash. Thus I’ve decided to group together the contests I currently know about so that you can enter them, too. Even if you don’t shop at those retailers, you could sell the cards on the secondary market.

Here’s what I’ve currently got:

 

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Coronavirus: An object lesson.

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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.

 

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Moose on my phone.

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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.

 

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“The Walking Dead” and THAT SCENE.

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Spoiler alert: This post reveals crucial plot details from “The Walking Dead.” Read on at your own risk.

The Internet imploded last night with the winter opener of Season 10 of “The Walking Dead.” Not because a beloved character was killed (although two were put in dead-or-not?* peril), or because a villain got one over on the good guys (that had already happened, at the end of the fall season).

Much worse than that, apparently: Two arch villains (#NeganandAlpha) were shown about to have sex. Specifically, we were treated to a wide shot of the two, naked except for black socks, embracing in the woods.

Social media rang with screams of outrage:

“Whoever thought that last shot of Alpha and Negan would be a good idea should be fired.”

“My eyes. I will never recover.”

“And I thought the zombie in a well scene was nasty.”

“Negan and Alpha getting down and dirty was more disturbing and disgusting than Negan killing** Glenn.”

(The socks were mentioned, too, especially on the post-game wrapup on “The Talking Dead.” Hey, at least they weren’t wearing them with sandals.)

Here’s my admittedly biased theory: A bunch of these folks just can’t handle the idea of middle-aged, physically imperfect people getting it on. One Twitter commenter moaned, “It was like watching my parents have sex.”

Guess what, Kevin: Your parents probably do have sex. A lot of middle-aged (and older) people have sex.

And guess what again, Kevin: We’re probably better at it than you are.

 

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A blogger at rest.

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(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.

 

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Should you ask for money at Christmas?

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Recently I interviewed Melissa J. Ellis, a certified financial planner from Kansas City, for an article about medical debt. One potential tactic I’d asked her about involved holiday and birthday gift-giving. Suppose when relatives and friends ask for gift ideas we were to say, “Help paying my bills”?

Ellis thought this might work for some people. But some people are embarrassed to ask for money outright. It seems gauche or greedy. The CFP suggested framing it this way:

I really appreciate that you want to give me a gift, and here is something that I could really use. It will help relieve my stress and help me feel better than a new sweater ever would.

Is that gauche? Or greedy? Personally, I’m torn.

Part of me thinks it’s not polite to dictate a gift and that it’s particularly squicky to ask for money. But the rest of me thinks some people wouldn’t mind being misdirected. If your parents want to spend $100 on a sweater and some frou-frou bath bombs on your b-day, they might find it more meaningful to send that money toward your co-pay.

After all, they’d be helping their beloved child pay less interest total on the obligation. If other relatives/friends did the same, you could see some real progress on the debt. Besides, how many sweaters does one person need?

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In hot water.

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About a week ago, DF decided that a sauna would be a lovely way to soothe the aches associated with some yard work. When he opened the door to the basement, though, he immediately sensed a disturbance in the force: Instead of dry, chilly air he got a blast of humid, warm air.

Yep: The water heater was in its death throes.

His first move was to turn off the water source to the heater. Although he didn’t say so, I expect his second move was to curse heartily and creatively. It was a Sunday evening and this was an inconvenience rather than an emergency, so he didn’t start looking for a plumber until the next day.

The actual replacement didn’t happen until midday Wednesday, after an attempt at a long-shot DIY fix suggested by his son, who’s in the plumbers and pipefitters union (and currently working out of state).

And of course we did it the frugal way: I cashed in for a $50 gift card from the MyPoints rewards program to add to about $40 worth of gift cards we already had, then DF shopped for a replacement and muscled it down the narrow cellar stairs with help from his other son. Since the plumber didn’t have to shop for and bring along the new heater, or carry away the old one (DF and his son got it into the Subaru and to the landfill the next day), it made for a much faster and cheaper fix.

In all we spent about $575 out of pocket. That sure beat the $1,600 quote DF got from the first plumber. We were pleased that it cost us so much less.

But boy, did I not like getting my hot water from the slow cooker.

 

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