frugal | The Practical Dilettante

Might Be Good For Something-itis

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Seonaid

The handle came off the kettle this morning:

My husband said, “Maybe this would be a good time to get that electric kettle we’ve been talking about [for the last several years, on account of electric kettles are more efficient, I've heard.]“

“Sure,” I said. “But I think I’ve got a handle that will do the job around here somewhere.”

And I did:

The reason that I had this spare handle is that when I put new handles on my dresser, I accidentally ordered two extra. The rest of them are being used thus:

So I showed it to my husband, said, “Ooooh, ahhh… isn’t it pretty? Now it matches my dresser.”

There was a moment of self-congratulation on my resourcefulness, and the fact that I had managed to put my hands on the spare knob, on account of it’s been sitting on top of my dresser for the last several years while I figured out what to do with it. And then I sighed. “You know that this is going to make things worse, right? Because now every time I try to get rid of something, my mind will throw this at me: Oh, but what about that knob? That turned out to be useful eventually. Better hold onto it, just in case.“

But it really does look nice on the kettle.

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Good With My Hands, Home Skills | Tagged: frugal, repair | 2 Comments »

Faster Food

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Seonaid

Feeling contrary and sick, I don’t want to talk about the election or Osama bin Laden today, so I’m going to talk about food instead.

Here is my strategy for using convenience foods that don’t have extra ingredients to put dinner on the table in under half an hour. These are not gourmet meals, but they are faster, healthier, and cheaper than take out.

Choose one from column A, one from column B, and one or more from column C. Seasoning variations to follow.

Column A: Proteins	Column B: Starches	Column C: Veggies
Red lentils Tofu Eggs Cheese Canned beans Frozen shrimp Salmon Chicken legs	White rice Whole grain pasta Quinoa Barley Millet Potatoes Whole grain tortillas Bagels Already made bread Already made brown rice Biscuits, if you are feeling daring!	Broccoli Cauliflower Pepper strips Baby carrots Cucumber The veggie your kids will eat Frozen mixed veggies Frozen stir-fry veggies (best convenience food of all time!)

Apart from the chicken legs, the starch almost always takes the longest to cook, so my process goes:

1. Decide which protein and how you are going to cook it.

The oven tends to be the slowest, but salmon will be done in about 12 – 15 minutes at 350. Extra firm tofu, cubed and seasoned with soy, garlic, ginger, and whatever else you like also takes about 10 – 15 minutes. However, unless you are baking chicken legs, move on to step 2 after you make this decision. The chicken legs are the only thing on this list that takes the whole 30 minutes (or even 40 if they are very large), so season them and put them in the oven before moving on.

2. Pick starch and get it going.

Potatoes can go in the microwave and will be done in under 10 minutes. If you have the time, or want them mashed, you can peel or wash and chop them, and put them on to bring them to a boil. Turns out that you can turn off the heat when they come to the boil and leave them on the burner. They’ll be done in about 10 minutes with no more heat. This might be useful when camping, or if you have to run the A/C to take away your extra kitchen heat.

Rice, millet, quinoa and barley all take about 20 minutes, so put the water on for them first.

3. Now that the starch is cooking away, deal with the protein

Chop and season tofu, or crack and beat eggs (for omelette, scrambled eggs, or frittata). Put the lentils on to boil (5 -1/2 cups water to 2 cups of lentils). Season the salmon. Grate the cheese. For quesadillas, mash the beans. Don’t take more than about 2 minutes on the prep work! Keep moving, we’re on a deadline, here!

4. Move on to the vegetable almost as soon as you are done with the protein.

In case this is all too much to take in at once, let me give you a couple of examples. I managed to put together a complete meal of rice, dahl, and steamed broccoli in 22 minutes the other day. I know ’cause I live-tweeted it. It looked like this:

Put on water for rice and lentils at the same time. (2 pots of water!)
While those are coming to a boil, chop an onion.
Put rice and lentils into the boiling water. Cover the rice, don’t cover the lentils, because they always boil over.
Chop broccoli and place directly into steamer
Put steamer over another pot of water, although you might be able to get away with putting it over the lentils.
Fry the onion with curry powder over a medium heat while everything else finishes cooking. After the lentils are cooked, put the seasoned onions into the cooked lentils.
Voila!

Another version: Black bean quesadillas with raw veggies

Oh! Tortillas don’t need any prep unless you want to heat them. Yay!
Mash beans with salsa that you already have and add grated cheese to taste
For each quesadilla, spread bean and cheese mixture over a tortilla and cover with another one (or fold in half). We used to fry these in a pan, but discovered that they only take about 3 minutes under the broiler, flipped once. The only delay here is that you can only do one cookie sheet at a time. Make liberal use of the timer, because you are going to be multi-tasking to chop veggies while you are tending the quesadillas.
Serve with baby carrots, sliced cucumbers etc.

Third option: The time-consuming one

Slather the chicken with soy sauce, rub on a large quantity of grated ginger and put it in the oven at 375. It’s a little hotter than normal, but you’re going to add baking, so the higher temperature is a compromise.
Mix up biscuits and cut them into rectangles. You can have a pre-made biscuit mix if you really want to, but you can make biscuits completely from scratch in about 3 minutes. Skip the fussy cookie cutter and you’ll save re-rolling and picky cutting out time.
Throw the biscuits in the oven on the other rack. Probably the lower one, since they want a slightly higher temperature.
Stir fry the frozen veggies on top of the stove and add whatever your preferred seasoning is. OK. The biscuits aren’t quite aligned with the rest of the meal… rice would be more normal. Really, the biscuits are just showing off, because I have discovered that you can cook almost anything at 375 if you are desperate.

This approach gives nigh-infinite variations, and for picky eaters, it can also be tailored by adding the seasonings (soy sauce, salsa, garam masala, dips and sauces) at the last minute, or to half of two trays in the oven. Using this strategy, (and having had a fair amount of practice), I generally can make dinner in less time than it would take me to argue with the kids to get them into the car in the first place.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: food, frugal, PostADay2011 | 6 Comments »

The Vital White Sauce

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Seonaid

I have been teaching my children to cook since they were very small. It is one of the greatest gifts I can imagine giving them, since it is a skill that leads to cheaper food, more control over their preferences, and healthier eating. Even if they cook something high in fat and sugar, it won’t begin to rival most prepared foods in potential health damage. I’ve been thinking about what constitutes basic cooking skills, and I think that we need to reach higher to reintegrate things that are currently considered advanced, and bring them back to the daily kitchen.

For example, I have frequently claimed that making a white sauce is the only useful thing I learned in junior high. It’s not quite true: I can think of two other things I learned in junior high, and they were both from Home Ec as well. I’m sure I learned other things in those three years, but these are the skills that I remember learning. (The other two were 1. not overmixing muffins, which is also useful for pancakes and biscuits, and 2. taking in a ruffle, which is good for seam easement, joining curves, and setting in sleeves.)

I’m not going to give a guide to making white sauce, because there are many other places to learn that already. For example, there is a very nice video here that demonstrates the basic technique:

Now that you know that, you’ve got limitless potential. Because you can substitute, add, season, and make all kinds of other sauces starting with that skill. Here is a list of 5 variations on a white sauce:

A la vongole (that’s clams for the English among us): Add garlic to the butter before the flour goes in and fry it briefly, not to brown, just translucent. If you are using canned clams, use the juice from the clams in place of the first portion of milk, and add milk to get to the right consistency. After the sauce is complete, add the clams. If you are using steamed clams, use the steaming water/wine, as long as it isn’t sandy.
Cheese sauce: After the white sauce is complete, add enough cheese to make you happy. This can be poured over macaroni or used on cauliflower. Use straight up or bake until bubbly.
Mushroom wine sauce: fry mushrooms until soft in the butter (again, before you add the flour). You can either use a small number of mushrooms, or increase the amount of butter and take the mushrooms out while you make the sauce. Here’s the beauty: you can use red wine entirely in place of the milk and get a completely different sauce, but the technique is exactly the same.
Garlic (as in 1). Parmesan (as in 2). Dash of cream if you want to boost the fat content. Yum. Alfredo sauce.
Vegan: You can start with olive oil and flour to make your roux. It will still thicken. I have made sauces with veggie stock, and with soy milk, and they come out fine, but different. The stock makes a translucent sauce, but it still tastes great and makes a good base for pasta toppings, or casseroles. Don’t use vanilla soy milk by accident. Trust me, it’s weird. Although you could probably make an interesting dessert sauce this way, starting with something blander than olive oil and adding a bit of powdered sugar or cocoa… ooooh. Now I’ve got a whole new batch of ideas.

See? The options are limited only by your imagination. Most useful cooking skill, ever!

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Recipes | Tagged: children, food, frugal, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency | 3 Comments »

Paying Attention for $$$!

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Seonaid

(I’m going to tell you how much I spend on utilities, in real dollars! Eventually.)

This is a part of my daily life that has been growing for years, so I think it deserves a mention. It’s partially frugal, partially environmental, and partially an exercise in testing limits – how little can we use? It probably started with reading Your Money or Your Life, which I have never managed to implement for the simple reason that I can’t do the necessary accounting. Nonetheless, I took the message to heart that you give up your life energy for the things that you buy, so you should make sure that you are getting your life energy’s worth. In more typical language, this means: don’t spend your life earning money to buy things that you don’t value. After years of reflection, I can say that I resent every single penny I spend on non-sustainable electricity and fossil fuels, no matter how much pleasure or convenience I get from the heat, light, and travel they provide. I. Hate. Those. Bills.

One of my great points of pride is that while we lived in a gas-heated house during the ’90′s, we put so much insulation into it each year that the heating bill never went up in 9 years, while the retail price of gas nearly doubled. (Hey – we take our accomplishments where we find them.) To put that another way, we cut our use of heating gas by nearly 50% over that 9 year period, primarily by insulating and weather proofing. We also made the house significantly more comfortable in the process, but it was starting at an appalling state, with no insulation in some walls, and curtains that blew in the breeze. Fortunately, our current house doesn’t have those problems, but that makes the savings less immediately apparent. Being fiercely stubborn (and cheap), I have continued on the path of energy savings for my pocketbook (OK, imagine one of those cheesy superhero voices…) and the world!

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that my life has been partially deautomated. By that neologism, I mean that in our quest for power savings, we actively manage the temperature of the house. This is usually accomplished automatically through set-back thermostats and the like, but we want more! (Actually, eventually I want to eliminate those bills completely, but that is a much larger project. So far my computer, camera, cell phone, and MP3 player are solar. The fridge is next!)

We have a fairly large house with a wide bank of south-facing windows, which, when appropriately covered and uncovered, can provide a significant amount of our heating, even on very cold days. However, the key fact here is that they must manually be covered and uncovered, opened and closed. There is an art to managing the temperature of the house, because the heating “system” (and I use the word loosely) includes the solar gain, baseboard heating, and two woodstoves.

As anybody with a hint of interest in saving money or power knows, baseboard heating sucks. It costs a fortune, it is an energy nightmare, and the heaters themselves get so hot that they burn things… like wayward blankets, pillows that fall off the bed, lego that gets dropped and bounces into the heater, stuffed animals… I hate the baseboard heaters, and I think that they are so dangerous that it isn’t clear to me why they are still legal. However, ahem… it is what we have. Retrofitting for forced air or hot water is probably more difficult than just tearing down and building a new house, since we would have to live in the house while renovating, and I’ve Been There Done That. Unwilling. Besides that, the natural gas all goes through Nova Scotia on its way to somewhere else, so we can’t even get gas. This is the system we have to work with: Windows, wood stove, baseboard heaters.

I was going to claim that keeping the baseboard heaters from coming on is the highest priority, but in fact, the first priority is keeping ourselves warm. We live in a grey, windy, damp climate, so getting cold can be depressing. (This is not a clinical statement about the causes of SAD. It is just that when I get cold, I fall asleep, drag myself around, and become lethargic and mopey. My mammalian status is sometimes in question.) Keeping the house warm enough to keep me functional matters, especially since I’m home all day most of the time.

The second priority is keeping the baseboard heaters from coming on. We do this by keeping the thermostats set to 15 degrees (in rooms we aren’t using) and 17 – 18 in rooms that we are in. The intent is not to keep the rooms that cold; it is to make sure that we bother to keep doing the other things necessary to keep the house warmer than that. It is warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and warm enough that it doesn’t take several hours to reheat the thermal mass in the walls, but cool enough that we notice.

I realized the other day that there was an art form, or at least a craft, to managing the house’s temperature. The actions are different on a sunny day than they are on a cloudy one. When it is windy, we need to keep the woodstove running all day. On clear cold days, we need to make sure that the woodstove is lit about an hour before sunset, or the bedrooms will get too cold. During the cold seasons, we cover the largest windows with rigid panels of insulation at night, because they lose so much heat that it is uncomfortable to sit next to them. On hot days, we cover the windows in the day time and open them in the evening. A couple of times a day, I wander the house turning off lights and unplugging neglected vampires. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get used to it, it amounts to a couple of minutes here and there, and I think it saves us money. Let’s put it this way: our annual power bill is about $1650 (heat, hot water, cooking, lighting, computers and all, for 6 people in a 2400 square foot house) and we spend another $700 on wood. I did an extensive search trying to find out how much it costs to heat a Canadian house (which usually results in “varies widely”), but our total bill is comparable to what CMHC lists for NS, excluding space heating. So I think it’s worth the effort.

What do you do to keep your energy consumption down? Does it work? Is it worth it? How do you know?

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Home Skills | Tagged: environment, frugal, PostADay2011, power, SolarPowered | 1 Comment »

The Price Of Gas!

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Seonaid

Oh! It is time to run in circles and flap our hands! Gas is going up! Food will cost more! Who could ever have predicted this???

Here is one of the places where the division between structural analysis and the personal impact becomes glaring. It has become apparent to me over the last few years that I cannot actually afford to run a car. I certainly can’t afford to run two cars. And I really can’t afford to run a minivan which now costs $8 in gas alone every time we decide to go to town. Just to clarify the costs, gas is now (as of this morning) around $1.29 per litre, or about $4.87 per gallon. The van runs about 12 L per 100 km on average, but the starting, warming, and going up hills that we do around here takes a little more, so we basically go through 6 L every time we start her up (the round trip to town is about 30 km, so as soon as we do any scooting we’re up to 50 km by leaving the driveway). Then the two vehicles ran through about $4000 in repairs between December and February.

No. I cannot afford to keep doing this. We cannot afford to keep doing this. And by “we” I mean, “our entire culture,” not just my immediate family.

The price of gas is a shake up: we are not going to spend or subsidize our way out of peak oil, international conflict, and suburban sprawl (in which I am participating.) Even we in North America, even in the ostensible middle class, are going to have to spend a higher fraction of our budget on food. We will not be able to buy stuff, because we will need to feed ourselves. Our houses are too big; we will not be able to afford to keep them as warm/cool as we are used to. Our ability to isolate ourselves from the environment, and manipulate the world around us through the liberal application of fossil fuels is coming to a close. Probably. A miracle may occur. But we cannot bank our futures upon technologies that don’t yet exist. We must work sideways towards solutions, change our ways or perish. (I got that from a comedy routine(1), not a sign on a street corner.)

I look at my own situation, and the car problem in particular, and I come up with these possible solutions:

Move to town. Give up chickens, gardens, greenhouse, land, swimming, canoeing, apartment, garage, writing studio, and dreams. Break my children’s hearts (and my own) to be more fiscally responsible in the short term. Abandon hope for sustainability, buy back into the rat race. Give up… Wait. That doesn’t sound like a solution. (Yes, I know about Urban Homesteading. To get within walking distance of the university would cost me the same amount as we can sell the current house for, and would result in a reduction of about 3.25 acres of land.)
Strictly ration driving for “necessary” trips. Give up swimming lessons, meditation, tae kwon do, orchestra, drama, and social life. Resort to a utilitarian life and hope for redemption in the afterlife. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that I’m getting a reward at the end of all of this, so it doesn’t give me a lot to go on, other than a vague sense of moral superiority, which is just not enough to run a life on. I’m going to need more payoff than, “My life sucks, but at least I’m not fucking it up for everybody else.” Also, that’s not a solution that has much to sell it, and what I’m really looking for is scalability.
Get rid of van. Give up cargo space and the ability to spontaneously take other people places. Still need to purchase a replacement, because otherwise we will be giving up everything in number 2 as well. Also requires us to take two vehicles if we want to take our entire family somewhere. Probably can get $7000 for it, which could be rolled over to “new” smaller vehicle. Would need to replace the functions of the van by renting truck from time to time. The van was supposed to be a temporary solution, to be disposed of when we no longer required 3 car seats. We’ve been down to two car seats for about 2 years, but now the kids are starting to get big. Just last week I had to put my oldest in the front seat for the first time, since he no longer fits between the two seats in the back of the Echo. Can a family of 6 get around with a Honda Civic and a Smart Car? (Three adults, three kids, one about to go through his first teenage growth spurt.)
Get our friends to move closer so that we can still do everything in #2, or replace with equally fun activities. Ha ha ha. Rural village full of interesting, intelligent, and healthy people: good idea. Intentional community with people we already know? Pipe dream. But not one that I am alone in. Maybe it is the goal we secretly all yearn for. It is probably the solution for what ails us, culturally. Urban villages, probably, with walkability thrown in and a reinvention of The Commons. Transition towns for the Long Descent. (I haven’t read it. Have you?) But how to get there? How to get there? There’s the rub.It’s not going to work this way, one house at a time, one family (or two) at a time, with all of us tied to the places we happened upon. It certainly isn’t going to work with temporary jobs, no stability, and a constant threat of layoff hanging over our heads. We’re part way there, but of the four adults who live on our property, only one has been able to parlay his skills and knowledge into a paying full-time job. The rest of us patch things together, start micro-businesses which lose money (but only a couple of hundred dollars at a time), and pick up part-time teaching gigs when possible. We can’t save the world, or even ourselves, running scared.
Ah: here’s a bit of my own structural analysis. (Remember, structure does not imply intent or conspiracy.) It happens to have been beneficial for a large group of people/organizations to keep us “running scared,” making sure that we never feel like our “needs” are met. Keep up with those Jonses: if you let them get too far ahead, you will be so ostracized that your very survival will be on the line! This is a tremendously powerful message. We are tribe animals, we need belonging the same way that we need air and food, albeit on a slower scale. A solitary human being is actually in jeopardy, isolated from access to basic support systems for food and shelter. There is no such thing as true self-sufficiency, there is only interdependence.

But a truly functioning community of interdependence, working to meet its needs and trade the excess? One that includes a sense of personhood for its youngest and its eldest? One that values the life-supporting work that is traditionally done by women, and expects its men to contribute to the private sphere so that the women have enough space in their days and intellectual life to participate fully in the public sphere? There is a foundation from which we can start to rebuild a society that can deal with the price of gas… without flapping our hands and running in circles.

Too bad it doesn’t solve my immediate transportation problem.

1. Kevin and God. Radio Free Vestibule

Filed under: Essays and Musings, Family, Rural Living, WorldView | Tagged: environment, frugal, peak oil, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency, social commentary | 4 Comments »

Who Wants to be a Billionaire?

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Seonaid

I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I went dancing last weekend: (Contains the word “fuck” a couple of times. Visuals completely acceptable in public.)

I started off thinking, “But, I don’t want to be a billionaire.” Now that I’ve read the lyrics, and watched the video, I’m smitten. Love the song, love the video – hey, music is music still. Who knew? But I still don’t want to be a billionaire. A hundred-thousandaire, I could go for. But billions? I’m not equipped.

I watched a documentary called Born Rich a few weeks ago, made by Jamie Johnson, (of Johnson & Johnson.) Due to inherit a millions on his 21st birthday, he turned a camera on himself and a handful of his very wealthy friends to find out what they thought about money. As a result, he produced a very interesting movie about money and how it works in a world where nobody talks about it, but where the bar bill on a Saturday evening can easily run into the thousands of dollars.

I am prejudiced to think of the super-rich as a symptom of All That is Wrong in our culture, so I did not hold out much hope for this movie. This movie did nothing to change that opinion, but it did humanize these extraordinarily wealthy people for me.

Caveat: unless you can dig deep into your wells of compassion, this movie will probably make you mad.

It would be easy to fall into the trap of assuming that just because they’ve never known the stress of just plain making ends meet (never mind actual poverty,) that they have never had any problems. I found myself spluttering at a few points over the excesses. It is hard to see past the thousand dollar handbags and $800 bottles of champagne to see that several of these young people are every bit as much adrift as our normal middle-class kids. Not only do they not know what to do when they grow up, they have no Needs to kick them into action. I will grant that a couple of them are aristocratic SOB’s, who think that they are actually better than the rest of us, in one case because of the height of his lapels. (I tried to find some compassion for him, but my well had run dry.) On the other hand, some of them are aware that they didn’t earn this place in the world, and that it is unfair, and that the world is unfair… but they are at the top, and they don’t know any other way of life.

And that is something I just don’t want to buy into. Pema Chodron tells us to be grateful for our middle births, in places and times when we are neither caught up in the struggle for survival, nor so far above it all that we can’t relate to the average human being. I don’t want to be so wealthy that the other thing I can think of to do with $800 (if I passed on the champagne) is buy another pair of jeans. I don’t want that sort of distortion in my world, no matter how much good I could do with the money. Because I’m pretty sure that if I did the things necessary to be a billionaire, I’d lose sight along the way.

(There is also a follow-up movie by the same director, The One Percent. Apparently Milton Friedman got so mad that he ended his interview. I’m looking forward to seeing that.)

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: frugal, good-enough, music, PostADay2011 | Leave a Comment »

Costuming my Life

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Seonaid

I spent the morning at the mall. There is no place quite so effective at bringing out my internal war over frugality (and the economy of my home) and responsibility (and the economy of the world). This is the site where these two things come into conflict. My usual solution to this conflict is to avoid it: dress in used clothing, repair, and make do. This only gets me so far, though, and sometimes I have to confront reality. Sometimes I need, as Amber Strocel put it, pants I love, not just the ones that will make do and not alarm me too much. I did this through consignment and thrift stores for 15 years when we lived in a major urban centre, but it doesn’t really work in a community of 30,000. There isn’t much high quality stuff flowing down through the pipes, because it doesn’t get here to purchase in the first place. The stuff at the thrift store is the same as the stuff at the mall, only older.

Today, I was on a dual quest, for both a winter coat AND a pair of boots. I was exceedingly successful with the coat, finding one that had long enough sleeves, and even made me look smaller after I put it on. This is a very strange feature in a piece of padded clothing. What is more, it was on the clearance rack, bringing it to just under $60. This is where things started to get strange. (Only in my head, mind you. The mall was exactly as it had been before I arrived and started imposing my absurdist worldview on it.) $60. For a designer wool knee-length coat? Are clothes getting cheaper? I don’t buy new very often, but I had been noticing an awful lot of $10 price signs, or 2 for $40 pants, or final clearance pieces in the single digits. So I put the coat on hold and wandered the other stores, keeping an eye out for boots, but also taking a good look at what it was that this mall thing contained. And the set fell away (as it often does) leaving me looking at the racks of costumes. This is what you wear to be a proper older woman in our culture. This is the store you go to for Young not-quite-professional but office-worker costumes. This coat is appropriate for me, but not for my friend’s daughter. Too old. Too young. Too cheap. And that was what I noticed most. The fabrics are thinner. All the fabrics are thinner, even on these functional coats for a windy northern market. The look of the thing has become so important that it’s function has been stripped away to the bare minimum. (You can see that it might not be much fun to go shopping with me, eh?) But when you get too close, the fabrics feel cheap. They look cheap. I don’t know how I can tell, I just can. We seem to have passed some point where we are so focused on the costume that we are no longer even pretending that it is otherwise.

Standing there in that mall, I found myself holding ostensible boots in my hand. They are too thin. They feel like they are made of paper. I was pretty sure that they will be neither warm, nor waterproof, and they will only look good for a couple of months. But they were the only ones that didn’t hurt my feet, so I bought them. Even as I did so, I knew I was purchasing a costume. This is the ‘woman goes to the theatre in her new coat’ costume. Accessories: $65. [I will note that even while I was standing there, I realized that this is exactly the scenario that the author uses to introduce the problem in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.]

Why is this woman wearing fuzzy boots? It is beyond me.

When I got them home, I took them out and looked at them. “But,” I thought, “I don’t need a costume. I won’t be wearing these in a fashion shoot [like the woman to the left], or on a runway, or even at the mall. What I need is boots that will actually do the job of boots… that is, keep the feet warm and dry.” So the costume boots will be going back to be replaced by something with a little more heft, even if it doesn’t look right with a skirt. I’ve proven I can costume myself to my own satisfaction. Now Sensible Seonaid gets to run the show for a few more days.

… Actually, her boots look like they might do the job…

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: cheap, frugal, PostADay2011, social commentary | 4 Comments »

Everything I need to Know I Learned from My Mechanic

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Seonaid

Today, my mechanic added a useful skill to my repertoire. Specifically, he taught me how to start a car with a burned out starter motor, and it does not involve hotwiring. What is more, he did this over the phone, thus saving me the $50 tow fee to get my car from my back yard to the garage. It is good to have a mechanic.

I’m going to go so far as to say that my mechanic matters more to me in my day-to-day life than my doctor does. That is almost certainly because I and my children are rarely ill and have no serious chronic problems. My car, on the other hand, is getting to a certain age. Most unfortunately, my partner’s car is getting to a certain age at about the same rate. The age of the two cars can be measured in the following ways: 1) I know my mechanic by first name even though we have no social contact, 2) the garage has done the last two minor repairs for free, and 3) my mechanic recognizes my voice on the phone. This is not a good sign.

Here is where I get to be practical for a few moments. If your car is also of a certain age, but you don’t have a mechanic who will help you diagnose and repair over the phone, I will do my best to ‘splain. Or at least sum up.

So, here’s why I suspected the starter motor. When I tried to start the car, there was a click. That was it. I checked that it was in Park, and that the gear shift was actually working, and that the connection between the ignition and the gear shift was behaving properly. All the lights were on, and the dashboard lit up properly, so we were pretty sure it wasn’t the battery (which also eliminated the alternator, and fan belt as problems). Since it didn’t turn over at all, it was more likely to be an electrical component than the engine-y parts. (I believe that is the technical term, but I wouldn’t actually say that to the mechanic, because he might suspect me of being a girl.) Just to be sure, though, my husband tested the battery with a multi-meter, because we know how to replace the battery ourselves.

Anyway, when I told the mechanic that I was pretty sure that it was the starter motor, he asked whether I had tried to turn it on a few times. I said that I had tried three or four, and it definitely wasn’t starting. “No, no. You have to turn the ignition on and off a bunch of times. It should catch.”

I admit it. I was skeptical. But I went out and turned the key back and forth about 8 or 10 times, and then it caught. The car didn’t start, but it made that little cough that says that the engine is getting a warning at least. Unfortunately, I was so surprised that I turned it off again. I did this a few more times, and got the hang of it… there’s a rhythm to it. It’s like pumping a swing: you’re giving the motor a little kick, and getting it going a little faster, and once you’ve done it a few times, the motor kicks the engine. The key to this technique is to listen really carefully so that you don’t miss the engine catching. I think it took about four tries, but darned if the thing didn’t start??? There might have been some babying with the gas pedal, and I might have done a little cheerleading, but it started!

This is the point in the story at which I pat myself on the head for realizing that I shouldn’t turn the car off when I go back in to call the garage. Also, at this juncture, I dance one of those football-touchdown dances… to celebrate my mechanical aptitude and close working relationship with my car that allowed me to figure out what was wrong. When you have a car of a certain age, it is good to have car-empathy. Yes, I’m totally bragging. Because I’m that sort of woman.

Filed under: Good With My Hands | Tagged: feminism, frugal, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency | 1 Comment »

Greener Potatoes

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Seonaid

I am in the middle of reading a book on greener cooking. I’m finding it a difficult read, as it is mostly composed of lists, I can’t tell which “tips” are the most important, I’ve found a couple of glaring errors in the scientific analysis, and the prose is chirpy. All in all, it is unlikely to become one of my favourites. I’ll keep hacking away at it over the next few weeks, though, because I’ve found some useful information in the midst of my struggle. (I hate saying negative things about somebody else’s work. Especially when they clearly have put so many years into learning it. Oh, phooey. I wanted to like this book. I’ll just distill it as best I can.)

Best tip I have found so far: you don’t have to boil your potatoes. Or your pasta. I tried out her strategy last night, with some doubt. Here is how it goes:

Put potatoes in pot just like normal.
Bring pot to boil just like normal (with lid on)
Turn off the heat and leave them for about 15 minutes.

That’s it. After 15 minutes, I poked them with a fork and was astounded to find that they were perfectly done. Then I drained the still-hot water over the green beans, slapped a lid on, and left them for 10 minutes. Everything was cooked with only the power needed to bring a pot of water to the boil.

Apparently you have to agitate the pasta a few times to keep it from sticking. I’ll give that a shot, too, and let you know how it goes.

If you want the original book, because it really DOES have a lot of good ideas, it is Cooking Green, by Kate Heyhoe.

Filed under: Recipes | Tagged: environment, food, frugal, PostADay2011 | 7 Comments »

Car Makes another Play for the Bank Account!

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Seonaid

Last fall, I went to purchase a mattress for the youngest member of our family. I went to the furniture store, gave them my number, and then realized that I had left my wallet at home, so I said I would come back for it the next day. I went out, got into my car, and it was making a new and horrible crunching noise. Naturally, since my car gets all my money, I drove straight to the mechanic and discovered that the money I had just agreed to spend on a mattress needed to go on car repairs instead.

Today, I went to the same furniture store, finally purchased the same mattress, and put it into the van. And lo, did the vehicle not start making a new and horrible crunching noise? “Don’t even think about it, you,” I said to the van. “You’re not getting any $800 repair today, so you just behave yourself.” The crunching noise stopped and I continued on my way to the next task. When I started again, the crunching noise resumed. I tapped the brakes and it stopped. Brakes. Not a good sign. One more errand, one more round of crunching, and I drove straight to the mechanic. “You. Car. Don’t be after any $4000 jobbies. Not gonna happen.”

Well, I don’t know whether the threats worked, but the mechanic pulled out some shield from the wheel area that was rusted through and folded in half. “Think that might be your problem.” “Oh,” said I, “d’ya think?” He topped up the fluids, allowed as how it does need $800 or so, but not today, and sent me on my way with no charge. This round: me. But I’d still bet on the car in the long run.

Filed under: Day-to-Day | Tagged: frugal, PostADay2011 | Leave a Comment »