Pillow Update

This has been on my to-do list for months. I had stuffed two homemade pillows with leftover bits of fabric. This turned out to be one of those times when being frugal has a less-than-desirable results. The pillows were really heavy and lumpy.

Fortunately, my sister Rachel likes really flat pillows, and she had me remove some stuffing from some pillows that came with a couch they bought. So I had leftover stuffing to replace the fabric scraps that weren't working.

It's going to be an immensely satisfying to not have this on my to do list! The whole thing will probably take half an hour, but I just haven't gotten to it.

Garden Spaghetti Sause

Tomatoes, garlic and oregano from our garden--the flavor was amazing!

The last of the green tomatoes from the garden have ripened on the counter and are getting processed, hopefully, tonight. I should have garden poundage totals soon! :)

Belovedest's Latest Hobby: Iaido

Here is my mom, admiring one of his swords.

Never a dull moment around here....

I turned my office at work into a beach retreat!

 The cylinder in the corner is actually a light fixture made from recycled materials.  Sadly, it doesn't photograph well. 

The sarongs (fabric) on the wall were purchased, but pretty much everything else is homemade or embellished.  I even made the window, as, sadly, my office doesn’t actually overlook the beach.

Organizing Christmas Ornaments

This probably not a good option for stuff you have to get into and out of often.  But I think it will work for ornaments because it means that we can easily spread out the box lids to see and select the ornaments that we want.

Here's BEFORE:

 I deliberately made some sections bigger than others, although I wasn't organized enough to actually measure anything!

 There are just big pieces of cardboard in between the box lids.  I didn't measure those either.

 Yes, these are ordinary paper box lids with name tag stickers.  (Name tag stickers are my favorite organizing tool.)

Hope this helps you think about what you might like to organize.

Potato Harvest

Doesn't this one look like a mouse?

The final counts on how many pounds we harvested should be coming soon.  I know we had more than 100 lbs of tomatoes....

Last Rose of Summer

Last week after we finished up in the garden for the year (well, mostly!), my darling husband picked this for me.

Sunday Thoughts: Newman's Canonization Today

Here is a prayer/meditation by St. John Henry Newman, appropriate for this, his canonization day!

I've always loved it and found it comforting.  There are many translations, but I like this one because of the ending.

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have a mission. I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  I have a part in His great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.  He has not created me for nothing. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him.     Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; In perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it.  He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me— still He knows what He is about.

Lord, Let me be Thy blind instrument. I ask not to see—I ask not to know—I ask simply to be used. Amen.

Adventures with Isabel: Lee's Marble Museum

Mom and I hit some of the stops in the Nebraska Passport passport program, and this was one of them.

Lee's Marble Museum is a small, free museum attached to a antique shop.  Lee has more than a million marbles.  He's an affable older gentlemen, who graciously showed us around and answered our questions.

In the photo above, Mom is holding part of a glass cane, which is how marbles are made.  The glass is mostly clear, with layer of colored glass included.  When making a marble, the cane is heated, and a glob of glass is cut off the end of the cane and put into a hollow metal rod.  The glass glob spirals down the tube and comes out perfectly round and cool enough to retain its shape.

Prior to 1935, marbles had traces of uranium in them and would glow under black light.

I'd say if you are headed down I-80 and in need of a quick break, Lee's Marble Museum is worth a stop.  We enjoyed our visit and even did some shopping.  It was a fun little interlude.

Organizing and Progress

I hate that futile feeling that I'm just doing the same things over and over again: laundry, dishes, picking up, answering emails, etc.

So every week I try to do something that will either be a more or less durable improvement in my life or that represents a long-delayed task.  This week, I put stickers on my computer keys.  I didn't know they made such things (they were in a pile from a friend to keep or donate), but I'm delighted because my fingers usually wear the letters off of keyboards.

Here you can see the stickers, some keys without letters and some keys with stickers.

Life, improved. 

Garden Visit from Ann S.

My lovely friend Ann is thinking about starting a garden next year, so she came over to tour mine.  It was a delightful visit!  What gardener doesn't want to prattle on endlessly about her planting and plans? 

Ann helped us harvest.  This photo is from earlier, but it includes some of what we are harvesting these days.... tomatoes, purple beans, basil, chives, thyme, okra, chamomile, and oregano.

I need to let Ann know two more things that I forgot to tell her (despite talking at her for almost two hours!).  One is to get the garden fenced and the beds dug and enclosed this fall.  The other is to save these, since she wants to grow tomatoes:

The one on the right is for planting seedlings (with holes punched in the bottom for drainage).  It is smaller so that the seeds get the heat from a heating pad placed underneath.  The one on the left is for tomatoes after they have enough leaves and no longer need the heating pad. The milk carton is where they will grow until they are transplanted.  Next year's garden is going to be MUCH bigger now that we have a freezer. :)

Hope everyone is having a bountiful harvest!  We've topped 100 pounds of tomatoes already this year, but keep in mind that that is from 12 plants.

Metal Detecting Adventures

The Magician found this little heart when metal detecting in a local park here in Nebraska about a month ago. It is a trade goods token from "Matt's Place" in Grangeville, ID. Here is the front and the back:

As you can see, it is worth two and a half cents. These tokens were popular starting in the 1840s when a shortage of the metals needed for making coins meant that the government minted less of them. This meant it was hard to make change, so stores minted their own tokens which were good for store credit. We are thinking that this is the oldest thing he has found to date, possibly from the late 1800s or early 1900s, as stores continued to make them into the 20th century.

The story-teller in me wants to know how it got to Nebraska.  Was someone just passing through in the 1800s?  Was it a good luck charm that was dropped in modern times?  Did someone from Grangeville go to school at UNL?  I don't think I'm ever going to find out!

Sunday Thoughts

Catholics traditionally celebrate today as Mary's birthday... so Belovedest made gluten-free cookies!

(One of the many things that I love about Christianity is that there is almost always a good excuse to celebrate something!)

Laboring on Labor Day

I am SO proud of this.

Honestly, it's going to make life much easier than having them all jumbled together in a file.

Incoming! (Space for our new freezer)

The freezer is going to be coming in a week or so.  I mostly just want to document that the laundry room was ever this clean....

Remember that it used to look like this and you'll see why I'm so proud:

Garage Sale

I promised AFTER photos so here they are:

We used 15 tables of varying sizes, plus a door placed between two tables, PLUS boxes of books on folding chairs.  And we needed every inch.  We got rid of a LOT of stuff!

The garage sale went quite well.  We made $537, although probably half of the items that brought in big money were from other people.  The dialog went something like this:

ME: "My husband wants to have a garage sale, although I keep telling him we don't have enough stuff."

FRIEND/BOSS/RELATIVE: Oh, I have some stuff I was just going to drop off at the thrift store.  Do you want it?

ME: Sure!  Do you want half the profits?

FRIEND/BOSS/RELATIVE: Nah.  Just keep it.  I was just going to donate the stuff anyway, and garage sales are a lot of work. 

So that's how we got the Wii, the steam mop, the party dresses, and the scooters.  We did have some big things that were ours: the bodhran, the pull-up bars, and the small table.  We probably priced things way too cheap, but, hey, they are out the door.

My biggest garage sale tips are:
1) Join a neighborhood garage sale if possible
2) "All unmarked items .25" - or .50, or whatever.  Saves SO MUCH time!
3) Signs: "All plants $3"  "All books _____" "All fabric = make an offer."
4) Start working on it a few months in advance.  It's still way too much work for the $ you'll get, but you won't notice as much!
5) Try to have at least three people there for safety as well as convenience.  Oh, and occasionally bring the profits into the house in case you do get robbed.
6) If someone does want their profits back (or part of their profits back) then they need to do their own pricing.

I actually rather enjoyed this garage sale.  Most of the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and it felt good to get things out of the house.  We made more than enough to pay for the freezer.  People were quite pleasant despite the heat.  I like sales.  It was all good.

It's still my last one, just because there are other things I'd rather do more.  But it wasn't a bad experience.

Garage Sale

We're having a garage sale.  (Not my idea.  His.  I vowed never again after the last one!)

We're buying a freezer (for garden produce and grocery store deals!) and the best place to put the freezer currently has boxes filled with craft stuff.

I'm never planning to craft for $ again.  It's not worth it.  For fun, yes.  As in, to make our home attractive or for gifts.  And I might try to sell some craft just for fun because I like sales.  But as a revenue stream - no.

So there's lots I can get rid of.

Here's BEFORE:

Here's DURING....

Hopefully AFTER will happen eventually!

Paying Off the House Part II: How We Did It

Warning: This really isn’t all that dramatic.. but it’s not that hard, either.

Here's what we did:

• We paid off our credit cards every month and never had to pay interest on them.
• We lived slightly better than we did as college students.  We avoided lifestyle creep, where you gradually buy nicer and nicer things, go on bigger and better vacation, have to have the latest greatest bill-in-the-blank because you are able to.  I think lifestyle creep is a huge reason that many middle-class folks people don’t save much.  (“Let’s buy it because we can afford it now” is such a bad idea!)   We pretty much do it our way, and spend money where we value it, and not where everyone else says we should.  That is enormously liberating and really cheap.
• A lot of being able to pay off the house early came from a total lack of interest in keeping up with the Joneses.  Our friends are ordinary folk, many of whom are also pretty frugal, usually so that they can afford to have a stay-at-home parent.  I don't try to keep up with our wealthier friends.  It helps that I don't particularly want expensive clothes or electronics — I’d just get chocolate on the clothes and break or lose the expensive toys!  (I’m very fond of chocolate — and really, really clumsy!)

Example: I work in an office with lots of elegantly dressed women. However, I own only two pairs of black shoes, black flats and sketchers.

• We spend money on the stuff we truly enjoy like travel and board games, and sometimes biking and gardening. We don't spend it mindlessly or on autopilot. I have thrift store clothes but I joined my mom and sister on a trip to Europe one year and the next spent five weeks in Croatia, including nine days on an island in the Adriatic with my in-laws.  The fact that I do the one makes the other one much easier to afford.  Plus I don't feel deprived because I get to do want I really want to do.
• What we do to entertain ourselves is more active.  We create things.  We do projects.  A bonus is that that helps us solve problems, like we’ll build our own shelving that is custom-designed for what we want to put on it.
• We don't spend money we don't have. We save up or do without.
• We avoid monthly bills.  I have a smart phone, for example, but it was a gift from a wealthier relation who is upgrading, and I've never gotten a plan for it because I don't want to pay that data plan every month.  We don't avoid monthly bills entirely, of course – who could?  But our little flip phone doesn't cost much.  (Actually, we should probably reevaluate that at some point and make sure that that is still true!)
  
• Leisure doesn't have to be pricey.  We enjoy books and movies from the library, which is free.  My hobbies, at least, tend to be pretty inexpensive like crafting from recycled materials, as opposed to shopping, golf, etc.  We like to geocache, which is free after you've bought the GPS.  (We have had the same one for 20 years.  It still works.)

Example: On Sunday we spent time with our dear friend Anne.  We talked, we went for a walk around a lake, we got groceries and then made dinner together.  After dinner we played a board game. It was a lovely day and far less expensive than dinner and a movie for three people, or chatting over cocktails.

As far as the more extreme things, like gardening to grow some of our own food and sewing to make some of our own clothes, I think those helped more as a reminder of our frugal identity than as a whole lot of actual cash savings.  Yes, making or growing what you want instead of buying it is cheaper.  But it's more along the lines of: "If I'm the sort of person who spends all day Saturday making a skirt, it doesn't make sense to blow $200 on leather boots.” Plus I enjoy sewing and gardening, and I have deliberately cultivated hobbies that save money.

Paying off the house was really slow, really steady, really not all that dramatic.  If it is something you would like to do, you can start the way we did — by putting a little extra towards the mortgage every month.  We made exactly two normal mortgage payments the entire time we paid on the house, and that was because my husband was out of work.  Every other payment was something extra, even if it was only $100.

Paying Off the House, Part I: The Big Picture

About this time last year, we paid off our house!

We purchased it in September 2009 and paid it off in August 2018, which I thought was pretty good.

This is the part where most bloggers announce something dramatic, like living on Ramen noodles and dandelions, or the opposite – they casually mention that they're both computer programmers making big salaries.

Sorry to disappoint you, but neither of those is true.  We lived a pretty ordinary lifestyle which is frugal, but not extreme.  And during the time that we were paying down the mortgage, we never even made six figures… combined.

Happy Easter!

Saturday in the garden

Lilacs are blooming!  Here's a bud.  (Some of the tomato seedlings pictured last month are in the background.)

Accomplished Saturday: weeding, spreading compost, setting up the rain barrels, fixing the wheelbarrow tire, picking up bricks from a coworker, watering strawberries, raking and shredding leaves... and feeling rather sore and tired at the end of the day.

We are putting out rain barrels even though we are not past the last frost date here in Nebraska because temps during the day are high enough that Belovedest thinks it won't get cold enough to freeze an entire barrel of water, which will retain some heat from the daylight sun.  A partially-filled barrel can afford to freeze, as the ice has room to expand without splitting the barrel.  We'll keep you posted....

Here's the long, long tap root of a small and innocuous-looking dandelion:

Hope all of your spring adventures are going well!

Spring is coming!

Hope springs eternal -- these will eventually be tomatoes...

Hey America!

Your food is getting soggy.

This is my home state of Nebraska.  No, sadly, it is not Photoshopped.  This is less than an hour's drive from my house.

Snow Day Pillow

I did this back in February, but I want my readers to know that I do still craft....

This is entirely from recycled materials.

We had a blue pillow that didn't match our living room decor.  Now it's been nicely hidden by the homemade pillow cover made from old T-shirts.

Isabel was in a play!

This is from January, but I thought the blog could use a little cuteness.  :)

Hope = Gardening

I hope for spring!

This is outside:

This is inside:

Yes, we started our seeds today for our smaller-than-usual-but-still-nice garden.  These are all tomatoes.... Amish Paste, Livingston's Paragon, some cherries tomatoes from my husband's late father that he harvests the seeds from every year, and some seeds from these odd, orange-colored cherry tomatoes from the store (thanks, Mom!).

(The grow lights are only on for the photo.  You don't need to turn the lights on until after the seeds germinate.)

Looking forward to playing in the dirt in a few months!

Snow Day Fun - Game design

My husband had a cool idea for a game a few years ago.

He didn't do anything with it.

I started playing with the idea.  I made some cards with index cards (bad idea -- too big) and I've been happily playtesting.  (It helps that the game is designed for solo play, although it can also be multi-player.)

Today I went to www.thegamecrafter.com to do what my husband advised me to do weeks ago: check out prices and file formats for graphics.

The file formats for graphics isn't a problem.  I have a little sticker shock, though -- my initial design would be a $30 game, possibly more.

I'm trying to decide what I think about that.  (My initial thought is: make an initial deck of 108 cards instead of 300 and then do an expansion pack if the game is popular).  If it is just for me and just for fun, that's not a big deal.  But sharing the game with all of my nearest and dearest could get expensive, fast.

I'm also trying to decide about graphics. One of my husband's suggestions was to use The Game Crafter site to prototype the game, then see if I could get a manufacturer interested.  In that case, I just need placeholder graphics.  Nice ones would help, but really, let's face it, they would use their own graphic designers so stick figures would probably be quite adequate.  On the flip side, being able to draw would be good for my other art, and if this is a three-year project anyway.....

Gardening to Save Money?

We skipped gardening last year.

Partly this was because my perfectonistic self couldn't do as much in the garden as usual, now that I have a full-time job, so the 2017 garden was stressful. And part of the decision was because we really need a freezer before we do a big garden again.

I also wanted to compare grocery budgets for a garden year and a non-garden year.  I did that today.  I totted up the totals for July, August, Sept, October and November for 2017 and 2018, and compared them.  We spent $135.51 more on groceries in the year that we didn't garden.

That's not much.

But that's not the whole story, either.  First, we currently don't separate out food from other stuff we buy at the grocery store like contact solution, dish soap, toilet paper, etc.  Someday we will make those things a separate line item, and someday will we buy them someplace other than the grocery store wherein they will probably be cheaper. 

The other factor is my head and my husband's vacation.  Gluten Boy adds a LOT of $ to the grocery bill, and he was in Germany Sept 1-21.  I got a nasty concussion on September 12. For the next few weeks while waiting for the love of my life to return home, I was in survival mode. I could barely keep myself fed and clothed.  I cooked up some potatoes and ate those for days. The grocery bill was not exactly normal in September.  In fact, is was dramatically lower than normal because for half of September, I spent every available moment in the dark.  After the concussion, I went to the grocery store exactly once, and that was for absolutely necessities.  (Specifically: Food that can be easily prepared and probably isn't very healthy!)

This year we are planning to do a moderate garden.  Just tomatoes, lettuce, beans, and maybe some basil.  My husband wants to try corn, which we don't usually bother with, but now we will have plenty of room.  It probably won't make much of a dent in the garden, but homegrown tomatoes taste amazing, and we do eat at least a tiny bit healthier when we say, "We went to all the trouble to plant, harvest, and clean these -- might as well eat them!"