Who The HELL is BITING my CARROTS!!!

I've been thinning the carrots in my garden so those remaining will hopefully grow bigger but ...
(insert dramatic music)

Oh wait...I can insert dramatic music:



Some bastard* has been BITING my goddamn carrots!  Not eating significant portions, just taking a bite and moving on.

I didn't take a photo because I was too ticked off.


The garden is a raised bed so someone must be coming over the edge and tunneling through.  I thought perhaps I'd put in a bunch of cayenne pepper, but that will hurt the worms too...don't want to hurt the worms.  They help things along.  They've seemed to leave the radishes alone.  I've harvested several of those and all were fine.

Any ideas for mystery-tunneling-carrot-biter-control methods?

Waste Through Pour Menuing

OK, I made up that last word.  But seriously people...put the main ingredients on the menu and I won't be wasting so much money.

I had a working lunch today at a restaurant.  I carefully looked for a reasonable dairy-free and cost effective option.  We had to pay for our own lunches.  So, I got some basic burger with a side salad and a vinaigrette.   The salad comes not just TOPPED with grated parmesan, but bottomed with it as well.  There was cheese laced throughout.  What the hell?   I hadn't said "no cheese on the salad" because this was a GARDEN salad and I have never picked a head of cheese in my garden.  Also, I've had it before WITH NO FREAKING CHEESE.  I was really pretty pissed.  Probably too much so.  I tried for a second to pick the cheese off, but there was no hope.  It was everywhere.  If it weren't allergy season I'd cheat a bit but not right now in pollen central when I need to mow the lawn.  Dairy gives me sinus infections and makes my allergies much worse.  So it wasn't like I'd die.  But really, I was already going to waste the bun, and the money spent no the bun, because it was fried in butter and then apparently re-buttered.  I knew that so I pull the burger off the bun immediately.    Without the salad, it meant that I got to eat a naked burger with 2 slices of tomato, 4 pickles, and some ketchup.   Not really worth 9 bucks. 

I have sent an email to the restaurant, via one of my aliases, that it would be nice to know when there are common allergens like dairy on things where they aren't expected...say "garden" salad.   I realize I'm too pissed off about this.  More than it deserves.  It's just that I don't understand when cheese became a default ingredient in everything.   I've had it show up on club sandwiches when it was not listed in the ingredients.  If it ever appears on a BLT I will not be responsible for my actions.

Woohoo Craigslist!

I don't know if I've blogged about how much I hate mowing lawns.  Probably.   Here's a short review:
I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate mowing lawns.  I don't get it.   Why cultivate something that you cut, fertilized, cut, water, cut....etc.  Anyway, there you have it.

And yet...as a renter, that's part of the deal.  I have a reel mower like this:











Actually, that might even be the right brand.  I've had it for 15 years and maybe use it 5 times a year.  

The current lawn generally gets too tall in the spring to make any progress with that type of mower and I have to hire it done:  40$ (and the person may or may not show).  I hate that.
Sometimes, like say this year, the landlord concedes defeat and hits it with his riding lawn mower.   He did that last weekend.  The damn lawn already needs mowed again!   It hasn't even rained.

So, in the quest to be a decent tenant I've been scanning craigslist.  Once upon a time I had use of an electric mower and liked it better than gas.  1) quieter  2) no fumes 3) works good enough.   So I thought perhaps I could try that again.

Sure enough, there was an ad for this mower:


It retails for about 240$ to 260$.   Slightly used on craigslist:   $40.
And it came with a heavy gauge cord (which you need unless you want to start fires all the time......hmmmm......no, burning grass off just makes it grow better).


Good deal.   I may try to mow a bit tonight to keep ahead of the stupid lawn.  I'm sure I'll fall behind again but I think getting a more effective mower shows good faith on my part.

Movies worth owning

I was listening to the radio (remember that?  like TV but without pictures and it comes through the airwaves for free...unless you're one of the schmucks who pays for it) and heard a show where film makers talked about movies they can watch over and over.

I have many of those.  Some I own and some I don't.  When I do own them it's usually because I got the flick as a gift or from a thrift store.  I can't remember the last time I paid full price.  There are a few that I check out from the library over and over.

Here are a few favorites:

Escanaba in da Moonlight.  Very funny take on hunting camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  I own a thrift store VHS copy that is dying slowly.

Kitchen Stories.  A scandanavian film about anthropologists studying the kitchen habits of Norwegian farmers.  Very amusing in a slow depressing way.  Library checkout...repeated.

Grey Gardens.  The ORIGINAL documentary NOT that HBO tripe with Drew Barrymore (who is a fine person as far as I know but that movie should not have been made and adds nothing to the story).  Got the DVD set as a gift.

Kinky Boots.  Cute story of a shoe factory in England that struggles to stay open and keep its staff employed.  I own it.  Don't remember if it was a gift or thrift.

My Name Is Joe.  The story of a scot getting sober and trying to stay that way against some serious odds.
I bought a VHS off the internets used...it's very hard to find this movie and I love it.

There are more but I'll stop now.

Paying Off That Mortgage

This post, on The Dollar Stretcher (excellent website for thrifty types), does a better job than I have in explaining why I think it's pretty much a good idea for almost everyone to pay off their mortgages.

http://www.stretcher.com/stories/04/04apr12c.cfm#.UWQynKw86So

The tax write off is not enough motivation since you only get 25-30% of your interest money back.  In the long run, paying off early, even just over paying a bit each month, can save you more than 25-30% of that interest.  

And think about what you could do with that money WITHOUT a mortgage payment.   Save it.  Pay off other debt.  Improve you health insurance.  Travel.  Buy better food.  Quit your job in a huff.   Avoid losing your house if you lose your job.   Less debt means you are less of a wage-slave.


So, that sort of logic is why I'm saving saving saving and hope to buy my next home without a mortgage.  If I pay cash, I'll save a TON on interest.  I already did that by paying cash for the car.  My interest cost was exactly $0.00.   Nice.

According to an online interest calculator, if I'd gotten a 4 year loan at 5% interest I would have paid nearly $2000.00 in interest.  Instead, that money is in the bank.  I also paid no loan fees or costs. 

I should look back at my old mortgage papers and see what my closing costs were.  I know the interest, if I paid the loan off in the 30 years with no over payments or pre-payments, would have been pretty much 2 times the cost of the house...yikes. 

End of today's rant.

The King is Dead...

Sad news today.  I'm not sure if it's frugal or not but I wanted to comment on it.

Roger Ebert just died.   The film critic and author.

His writing had gotten much more interesting since he'd lost the ability to speak a few years back.  He wrote about how he was left out of conversations even when he had a computer that could produce speech.  By the time he typed in what he wanted to say, the conversation had moved on.  He seems to have also had more time to think.  Some of his reviews and columns were much more philosophical than in the past.

He'd recruited and mentored a crop of new film critics.  They'd been doing most of the reviews since he broke a hip a few weeks ago.  He announced that the break was not related to cancer.  Alas, it was.  And now he's gone.

I agreed with most of his reviews, though not all.  And his website has been a great resource for finding great old, and new, movies as well as figuring out what was coming out on DVD.  I hope "they" keep the website going, whomever "they" happen to be.

I checked his site each week to see what was coming out that I might want to see.   I also read his cookbook, and got a library to buy a copy.   That was pretty thrifty...making soup in a rice cooker.

He'll be missed. 

Ebertfest, his film festival in Illinois will start soon.  I'd always wanted to go.  I wonder if that will continue.  He chose the films himself.  They were often not "new" but always overlooked gems that didn't get enough screen time in regular theaters.   One of the main films this year is Days of Heaven.   It's been a favorite of mine for years and years.   It think it's the first time I realized how important cinematography is, not just plot and dialogue.  Also, how quiet a movie can be.  It's wonderful.  I think I'll watch in in memory of Roger.

How Big Is Your Wardrobe?

Mine is way too big.  

I'm trying to get rid of 1/2 of  my crap right now.  I'm starting with the kitchen and my wardrobe.  More on the kitchen later.

To get going on figuring out the balance between need/want in the wardrobe, I interviewed my Gramma.  She's in her 90s, not very far in, and lived through hard times before the Great Depression, and then the depression.  She grew up in a tiny town in Iowa on the Mississippi river in the 1920s.  The 20s may have been "roaring" elsewhere,  but she says that for rural people, they were tight financial times.

I asked her how many outfits she had as a kid.  She said her family was better off than most in the clothing department because her grandmother (my great great) in South Dakota was a dressmaker.  Gramma's mom would get the kids' measurements, send them out in a letter.  Then, their gramma would make clothes using material from the old clothes given by some of the ladies in town.   She made dresses, shirts, pants, coats and  underwear.   As a result my gramma said she often had 6 or 7 outfits.  This was quite a few.   She said that the other better off families in town, like the people who owned the store, had 2 or 3 outfits per kid.   The poorer had one outfit and one Sunday outfit.  The very  poor, and she said that was quite a few, had one outfit per kid and no undies.  So they were cold. 

She had 2 pairs of shoes.  One for school and one for Sunday.   Her father took all the kids to town each fall and got them shoes and they each also got to pick out a new cotton blanket.   She said it was a big deal to have your own new blanket each year.   Many families had one pair of shoes per kid.  Others had zero.

I asked if her family was rich.  She said she didn't know if they had more money or if her dad was more likely to spend his money on his kids.  Maybe both.

When she got to high school, which was in another town so she worked for her room and board there, she only had one pair of shoes and fewer clothes.  I think this was after the depression had begun.  Also, her gramma wasn't making her clothes anymore.  I don't know if that gramma had passed away or just gotten too old to do it.

She also told me about farming out kids.  Her siblings weren't farmed out that I know of, they had gardens and a milk cow and bees and other things to do at home.   Other kids, especially in poor families, were.  She told me about Lyle.   I knew him when he was an adult and I was a little kid.  He was farmed out when he was 6 years old.  He was sent to live with a farm family and help out.  He went home on the weekend.  She said that the family he worked for was very good to him which was not always the case.  He went to school and they fed him and clothed him.  I think he's the one she said got underwear from the wife of the family he worked for.  When he went home on the weekend his mother would take the undies and put them on another kid before she sent him back to the farm.  This way she ended up with underwear for all the kids.  Undies are apparently a big deal.  They were for warmth as well as hygiene.  I can imagine your pants and shirts get quite a bit stinkier faster without undies than with undies.

So, back to my quest.  6 or 7 outfits seems reasonable.   And yet...I think I'll shoot for 10 per season for the moment.  I consider an "outfit" to be the pants/shirt combination and I wear my jeans multiple times between washings, fewer times in the summer or when doing fieldwork.

I think I could get by with 3 pairs of jeans (I've made do with 2 in the past but sometimes you have to wear damp jeans when it's that tight) at a time.  For summer 1 or 2 pairs of lighter weight field pants and a pair of jeans.   Right now I've been rotating 3 sweaters (those Norwegian ones from the thrift store) and 2 or 3 shirts for my winter work wardrobe.  No one has said I look unprofessional, in fact I've gotten compliments on every outfit.  I do need turtlenecks or mock turtle necks under these and I think I've been rotating about 4 of those.  In summer I usually end up rotating 7 or 8 buttondown shirts.  Let's go with 8 to make this less painful at the outset.  Easier to donate another shirt than to buy it back from Goodwill.  On the weekends I wear t-shirts or a t-shirt with a sweatshirt depending on the season.  T-shirts are also important for fieldwork and gardening.   Let's say 10 t-shirts for the first cull.
I have one formal event outfit and 3 scarves that go with it (Thanks for the scarves Chris!)

So that comes out to:

Winter
3 jeans
3 sweaters
3 shirts
4 turtlenecks

Summer:
1 jeans
2 field pants
8 shirts

Non-work wear:
10 t-shirts
2-sweatshirts
1 formal outfit (in case of weddings or a friend being inducted into some hall of fame)

I do have the occassional conference or meeting requiring a bit more spiff than my regular work days.  For those it would be nice to have 2 decent shirts and one nice sweater.  I wear either black or brown pants with these.

Conference wear:
2 shirts
1 sweater
1 black pants
1 brown pants

Then there are shoes.  While 2 pairs, or 1....or none, may be a livable situation, it isn't practical for me.  Right now  I probably have too many partly due to my reluctance to get rid of those that are worn out.

For hazmat fieldwork I need one pair of old hiking boots and a pair of rubber knee boots.
For non-hazmat fieldwork I have a pair of "good" hiking boots (not as worn out)
I wear the good hiking boots to work most of the winter.
In summer I have a pair of brown walking shoes and a pair of black walking shoes.
For formal events I can use one pair of brown and one pair of black boots (non-hiking).  Right now I have 2 black and 1 brown pair, but none of my "formal" (like for conferences) boots is less than 10 years old so I think I'm OK there.

And then there is the winter weather gear.  I'll save that for another post.