Saving Money in a Tough Economy: Tip 37

Kitchen Storage

We're a plastic society. It's time to rethink how we store food. Do you have glass or ceramic bowls in the house? Put the leftovers there, and cover the bowl with a plate rather than using plastic wrap or aluminum foil. You'll save money and have the added benefit of being able to stack more in your refrigerator. A tin foil junkie? Then at the very least, wash and reuse as many times as possible, then recycle. Plastic wrap is an expensive and unnecessary evil. Purge it from your shopping cart. Ditto on zip lock bags unless you're going to rewash and reuse over and over.

Get all 101 tips in 101 Tip$ From My Depression Era Parents (or how to save a few bucks in an economic decline), available at amazon.com.

Discoveries: Columbus and Me

I celebrated an age-old American tradition over the Columbus Day weekend: the yard sale.

My yard sale experiences are along the lines of Mary Tyler Moore's parties in that they never come off quite right. Last year I had one late. In fact, it was so late (in early November) that it snowed. As you can imagine, I didn't get the customer traffic I'd hoped for.

So this year I decided to have a sale on this beautiful weekend, when temps were warm and the sun was shining. Unfortunately, there are rules in the yard sale circuit, the primary one (I was informed by one expert in this area) being that sales are supposed to be held on Friday or Saturday, but NEVER on Sunday. Who knew? I figured with Columbus Day being on Monday, Sunday was the perfect day to set out all that stuff I no longer want and wait for the throngs to arrive.

It wasn't exactly a bad turn out, but it was a weird one. Most of my customers were men, and men shop differently than women. When a woman comes to a yard sale, she drifts. She goes from table to table. She picks up merchandise, studies it, ponders, and maybe puts it back, maybe adds it to her shopping bag. She usually comes with a friend. There is a fluidity to women at lawn sales. Peering through my kitchen window at women in my back fence perusing my now cast-off items is a bit like sitting on a beach watching the ocean: the ladies move in a wave, ebbing and flowing, gliding across the grass. As a woman, this method of shopping makes sense to me. We flit, running inquisitive fingers across old Christmas ornaments, baskets, glassware, and toys in something like a shopping dance. The yard sale is a treasure hunt, and we think maybe, just maybe, we'll come across a painting or a vase that holds value much higher than the twenty-five-cent price tag.

Then there are men. Men park their vehicles and march, determined, to the proprietor (in this case, me). Men don't shop, they arrive with a purpose, and ask purposeful questions:

"Do you have any windows?"

"Any mattresses back there?"

"Selling any mirrors?"

"I'm looking for fishing poles, got any?"

There is no drifting, no flitting, no hopeful expressions that treasure may be buried there under the leopard futon cover and the pile of sweaters. If I answered no to any of the pointed questions, the men, with few exceptions, nodded their heads, climbed back into their vehicles and drove away. Happily, I had plenty of items the men wanted, for the most part practical things like desks and tables. In spite of holding the sale on the wrong day and enticing mostly males into my cluttered yard, I made out okay. The men spent the "big" money: $40 for a lawnmower, $10 for the credenza, $3 apiece for windows. Bills were pulled from manly wallets and passed to my waiting hands. The ladies...well they tended to pay in change, with one nice woman nine cents short to cover the cost of her dollar item (I took the 91 cents and waved her on, wondering about the thought process of a person who goes to a yard sale with three quarters, a dime, a nickel, and a penny). In any case, it was an interesting day that featured drifting change-paying women and strong-willed men who knew why they came. Fascinating, that even in something so benign as the lawn sale the genders are so different. Discovering that, in itself, was worth screwing up and having my sale on the wrong day.

Of course, it wouldn't have been a neighborhood sale without the resident smart alec, who pointed at my sign reading "garage sale" and asked "How much is the garage? Hahahaha!" Even he didn't bother me. Sunday was a knock-out day, I sat on my porch and visited with friends who passed through my yard, drank iced tea, made a few bucks on things I was going to throw out anyway, and observed human nature as defined by the American yard sale. Not a bad way to spend an Indian summer afternoon.

Are They Idiots, or Do They Just Not Give a Damn?

I am truly beginning to think that a great majority of the human race has turned stupid.

I've been having trouble with my eyes lately...red like I've been crying for hours, and blurry vision. Sometimes they even twitch. There have been a number of unofficial diagnoses from well-meaning friends: allergies (hay fever, dog, cat, dust), dehydration, change of season. For a month now I've been struggling with this problem, which is much worse in the morning. Normally I can read without benefit of contacts or prescription glasses, but need either of the above to see distances. For the last four or so weeks I can't see with my glasses on, and can't read without lenses until much later in the day, and even then my vision hasn't been right. The left eye has been distinctly worse than the right.

So today I went out of town on errands and decided to stop in at a local vision place to get a check-up. When I walked in I noticed that a couple of teenagers seemed to be running the show. I went to the desk and asked the girl if I could see someone, explaining my situation. I said in what I'm confident was clear English "I'm having trouble seeing."

"Uh," she said. "Maybe you should go see an ophthalmologist."

"Yes, well, that certainly is an option but at the moment I'd just like to have someone here take a look. Can they determine if I have allergies?"

"Uh," she said. "Yes."

"Is there someone here who can give me an exam?"

"Uh," she said. "Yes."

I raised my eyebrows at her.

"Uh," she said. "Okay, fill out this form."

Whereupon she handed me a clipboard clamped onto a foot-long sheet of paper. On the paper, as far as I could tell, were about 30 questions in tiny little typeface. To my blurry eyes, the type looked like fleas.

"I can't fill this out, dear," I said to her. "As I mentioned, I CAN'T SEE."

She gave me a blank stare, one you might expect to get from a parakeet peering out from a cage. She didn't offer ask me these evidently vital questions and fill the form out herself. She just looked at me, her mouth hanging open in a little "O."

Okay, I'm thinking. I'm dealing with a moron here. So I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question considering I was in a store with about a thousand pairs of eyewear mounted on the walls around me.

"Do you have some reading glasses I can borrow?"

"Uh," she said. "No."

Resisting the urge reach across the desk and throttle her, I set the clipboard down and said "Fine. I'll go someplace else." She didn't try to talk me out of it, didn't say "Oh hey, wait, of course we have reading glasses here," or "I'll fill out the form for you, I can tell by your bloodshot eyes you must be in some discomfort." She simply let me go, not caring a bit that whatever money I was willing to pay the business wasn't happening. I imagine she was shrugging as I turned my back to her and thinking, "Whatever."

Happily, it didn't take long for me to find another place to get medical attention. The nice receptionist there asked me a couple of questions, wrote the answers down herself, and hustled me into the doctor's office. And it was a good thing. I have a viral infection in both corneas which, according to the examiner "look like sandpaper," have been instructed to avoid wearing contacts for at least a month, and maybe for as long as six months. I was given drops and ointment, then scheduled another appointment in two weeks. My vision right now is awful (forgive any typos that I might not catch), but I'm at least relieved to have had the issue identified and that some medical folks are keeping track of the problem. We're attacking it head-on, with treatment and monitoring. 

Maybe I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses (no pun intended), but I don't recall life being so trying "back then." It shouldn't be necessary, when somebody needs medical attention, to fight to find competent people. There's so much talk about unemployment, about throngs of smart, capable folks out of work. So why in the world is this brainless teenybopper in a position to turn someone away and potentially cause damage to a person's vision? Because indeed, had I given up and gone home, or had I been unable to find the competent people I needed, who knows what might have been the result?

Maybe I'm the stupid one to think that life just shouldn't be this hard. 

Luck Was A Lady Saturday Night

I was on my way to dinner over the weekend to a lovely local restaurant called Michael's, in Waterville. There were four of us in the car, all women, two in the front (myself and the driver), two in the back. Now that autumn is edging closer, skies and roads were dark. As women will, we were chattering away about mostly nothing, enjoying each other's company, looking forward to a good meal.

The deer appeared out of nowhere. I've heard people say such things after hitting a deer: "He appeared out of nowhere!" but I think I've never quite believed it. In all the years I've been driving I've probably seen hundreds of deer lurking around by the side of the highway, sometimes standing on the center line, even a few times running alongside the car. Still, I couldn't quite get my head around the idea that something that big could appear quite literally from nowhere and be in front of a vehicle moving at 55 miles an hour. I'm here to tell you. They can.

One minute we were chatting and laughing and the next minute there was a doe in front of us, right in front us not a foot from the hood. It was though she popped up out of a hole in the macadam or was dropped from above, a movie trick impossible to believe. And by some miracle, our driver missed her. We all saw her and gasped, her graceful shape right there illuminated by the headlights. There was a second, truly no more than that, when we all inhaled and said things along the lines of "Oh my God!" and "Watch out!" Within that second I could feel the relief in all of us that we hadn't hit her. The deer immediately on her tail wasn't so lucky. There was a huge thud followed at once by pieces of what turned out to be the grill flying up past and over the windshield. I'm not quite sure what happened next, although I'm told I grabbed the driver's arm (a bad idea). Also miraculously, the car never veered from the road, great testament to our driver's abilities in spite of my claw-hold on her elbow. We slowed and looked back. And again in only seconds, the deer was lying in the road, and when we looked again, she was gone. We don't know if she survived, but we think (well, I think) she did. There was no blood, no carcass, no deer, not even off to the side. The entire event happened so fast it was almost as though it hadn't happened at all.

After, it was interesting to observe how each of us reacted. One person was concerned about the condition of the car (not so good). One was worried that we might not make it to the restaurant (we did, with our trusty vehicle trundling into the parking lot and heaving one last gasp before slowing and rattling into a now smoke-filled spot). One was worried about the condition of the deer. And one announced brightly, "I hit a duck once!"

I so admire the human brain. Each of us had a completely different take on the incident: pragmatism, concern about a safe arrival, empathy for the animal, and anecdotal humor. Why, I wondered later, didn't we all have the same reaction, or at least reactions that were similar? I suppose each of us has had experiences in our life that trigger the processing of anything that happens to us. The driver, my cousin, was the pragmatist. Her mind went first to damage to the car and how much this was going to cost to fix considering she's now, counting this one, hit four deer in her life. My sister spun into take-care-of-immediate-business mode...what if we can't make it to our destination? My friend Liz visiting from the south, ever a glass half full type, quickly realized we were all okay and felt a need to recount her duck tale. I've never been in a vehicle that's hit a deer, either as driver or passenger. My thoughts were for the poor thing we'd just run down.

All this makes me wonder how anyone can ever agree. There's so much going on in our heads, based on our past and our present and our imaginings of what's to come. We all seemed so alike before the deer, verbal and witty and social. We're all successful career people, all in the same age vicinity, have traveled some and now live in smallish towns. Our backgrounds are similar, our lives not all that different in the big scheme of things. Yet in a situation we all shared our brains kicked into completely opposite gears and branched out, feeling around for what, for each of us, made sense and maybe in some way helped us to process what could have been a real disaster. If not for my cousin's superb ability to stay calm and focused, the car might have spun out of control, flipped over and killed every one of us. And if not for that first deer we missed, a flipped-over car might well have happened. That doe was our angel, giving all of us a milisecond to prepare for the one we hit.

The next morning we were all a bit achey...backs and shoulders and necks. The car, which protected us well, got the worst of it (a little nod to the Subaru people here). I don't know what my cousin and sister and friend are thinking about the incident right now, if in fact they're thinking about it at all. But I am. I'm thinking about those two deer, and how I hope they both made out okay. I'm also thinking about their materializing from nowhere, and what a stern reminder it was that life is short. I'm thinking that I'm glad to be home and safe, at least for the moment, and that my being able to take my next breath is pretty much all about luck.

Library Fundraiser for Sherburne Library

Hey locals, Gilligan's is sponsoring a Sherburne Library fundraiser today (Oct 3). Percentage of your order goes to the library fund, so if you have a hankering for ice cream or a great hamburger, please go to Gilligan's today and mention the library!

A Cardboard Fireplace

The temperature has dropped tonight, and it feels like fire season.

My mom, bless her heart, didn't have a fireplace. But she always understood that a fireplace was something warm and homey, so she did her best...with a cardboard fireplace. I guess they were popular in the 1960s, cardboard cut-outs that looked (sort of) like the real thing. The one we had was a corner model, white cardboard brick with a white cardboard chimney. It sat at the base of the stairs, so on Christmas morning the little rotating orange light that was supposed to look like a sparking fire invited us downstairs. I remember my dad waving hands and warning mom that putting real candles on the cardboard mantle was dangerous, but she didn't care. She wanted my sister and me to get it, how wonderful it might be to have a fire, or a pretend one, glowing on Christmas morning. I don't recall that she ever lit the cardboard fireplace at any other time.

When I bought my house it seemed necessary to install a fireplace...actually, two. I didn't grow up with a such luxuries. Yet when I was remodeling, it seemed important to include bluestone and chimneys, things my mom never had but understood.

Tonight a friend from Arkansas arrived. We sat by the real fire, blazing there at the end of the room, using real wood recently delivered. I couldn't help but think of my mom and her cardboard re-enactment. Thanks, mom. Even though you didn't give me an actual fireplace back then, I got the idea. Near October is time for sweatshirts and banana bread, turning up the thermostat, cuddling under quilts. It's time for stray sparks, and a cozy spot by the hearth. Your cardboard fireplace seemed tacky then, but now, so many years later, I'm glad I walked down those stairs and saw its silly fake light. Even now I think I might be able to rub my hands together over the orange light bulb and feel the love and warmth of family, which is really what you were trying to tell me all along.

Bad Luck or Bad Karma?

You know how sometimes you're cruising along in life and don't notice little snags that are actually, slowly, driving you crazy?

I realized over the weekend that I have a problem with remote controls.

First let me admit that I have an overabundance of televisions. Big ones, small ones, flat ones, fat ones. Many are old. In fact, most are. The newest TV I have I bought five years ago, a little flat screen with a shiny new remote. The oldest is a console model that once belonged to my parents, both of whom have been dead for over twenty years. At the moment the console is in the hall, covered up with a tablecloth since its picture tube blew about two years ago.

I mention the console because my earliest recollection of remote trouble started there. When he was ten, my youngest nephew thought it would be interesting to cover the remote with Silly Putty; and when I say cover, I mean jamming Silly Putty into every one of the buttons. From that day forward the remote never worked again.

Of course, as time marched on it was not only the televisions that arrived with remotes. There are cable boxes and VCR players, DVD machines and stereos. If I took an afternoon and gathered up all the remotes in the house I'm guessing there would be about thirty. And at the moment, exactly one works. How is that possible? Well, take for example the remote that goes to the TV in my office. One night I was drinking a beverage (apple juice) while at the computer. I knocked the glass over and splashed juice all over the desk, the mail, the floor, and the remote, the latter of which was transformed into a syrupy mess that I ended up throwing away. Another, the one that goes to the TV in the kitchen, has unexplained issues: only the buttons on the right side work, meaning I can only change to channels containing the numbers 3, 6, and 9. The remote in the library is missing its back. Half the time when I try to turn up the volume I have to crawl under the sofa to retrieve a missing battery. I tried to solve that problem with duct tape, which worked for awhile until I needed to change the batteries. Now I have a remote that sticks to my hand from the duct tape glue that coats both sides. And the batteries still fall out. What about the shiny remote that goes with new flat screen you ask? That one went into the washing machine with a pile of sheets last month.

So I went to the store a few weeks back and bought two universal remotes, which promised easy set-up with the click of a few buttons. I worked on this project an entire evening, mystified by the instructions to first set the TV on channel one. Of course, there is no channel one. So I tried it on channels two, three, and four. And on different televisions. No go. My sister tried to figure it out and failed. Two friends who stopped by on Friday, fine fellows who are handy with most things, insisted their efforts would result in success. After an hour or so, they gave up too. The new remotes now sit on my family room coffee table next to the not-so-easy instruction booklet and a package of new and at the moment useless batteries.

Today I was thinking I'd go back to the store and buy another universal remote because, you know, maybe the ones I bought were defective (not to mention that channel-one business). Then I remembered a universal remote I had back in 2007, which did in fact have easy set-up instructions and that worked just fine for several months. It was on the kitchen counter back then when, while not at home, I had a pipe break in an upstairs bathroom. My entire kitchen flooded, the ceiling caved in, and the large light fixture that once hung over the counter crashed down and smashed the remote into a sort of rectangular pancake. 

All this to say I have finally accepted that I'm a person who isn't supposed to have a remote. I don't know why. Maybe some cosmic master has decided I'll be better off moving my body instead of my thumb to change the channel. Or maybe this master feels I should quit watching so much TV in the first place. In either case, I concede defeat. From the console and its Silly Putty situation, the crushed and unrecognizable pile of plastic on my kitchen counter, and the defective (and foreign-made I might add) universal remotes of last weekend, I get the message. From now until forever, I -- like my television-watching forebears prior to the invention of the remote control -- will pick my lazy butt up off the chair and change the channel by hand. Are you listening Cosmic Master? You win.