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Frugal habits

How to Talk to Your Hair Stylist

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Bear with me, gents, while us chicklets indulge in some Girl Talk.

wook! See update, below!!!

Over at Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability discovered a cool gadget to allow a woman with long hair to create a DIY bob at home. She tried it, and it turned out looking pretty darned nice.

This led to a rumination on the cost of hair maintenance, something I’ve held forth about, too. For years I wore my hair at shoulder length, partly because SDXB liked long hair, partly because I enjoy the sensuality of long hair, too, and partly because it saves huge wads of money when you don’t have to traipse into a salon once every four to six weeks. But eventually I got it cut short. It looked a lot better, and the effect on strangers, who had been given to taking one look at me and dismissing me as poor white trash, was marked.

When I got laid off, I could no longer afford Shane the Wonder-Stylist, and so he and I parted ways. For a while I was going to a woman in Tempe who did a good job, but that’s a long drive, and besides, just the site of the GDU campus gives me a flinch reflex. Once my work there ended, I started looking for people in town. Have been through four of them; one was very good, and the rest…well…

Last time I went in to the newest stylist, she cut my hair so short you could see my scalp through what remained! Since my hair is very thick, that’s telling. She cut off all the natural curl, so I could no longer scrunch it into a cute style and I had to stand in front of the mirror dorking with a hair dryer to get myself presentable enough to be seen in public. I hate that.

Since then I’ve been trying to let it grow out, figuring when there’s finally something to work with again, I’ll go back to the Tempe stylist. It’s been weeks and my hair is still too short to work with. And it just looks terrible.

The problem is, it’s very hard to describe to a stylist what you want, especially if you want something nonstandard like not having bangs flopping down on your face. “Please cut it short, go with the natural flow of the curls and waves, and don’t leave bangs falling in my eyes” doesn’t seem to register.

However, recently I found this handy site, which reveals the specific stylist-speak names of haircuts and coloring patterns. It’s kind  of cool, because…mirabilis! It gives you a way to talk to your hair stylist! The drawings give you a clue to what each style should look like, and the names attached to them apparently are standard names for specific styles.

The site not only gives you the names of popular styles, it suggests what to say to the stylist to communicate what you have in mind: “Keep layers long in back and choppy all around. This cut is all about movement. Add heavy, uneven bangs. They can be tucked behind ears or left in front of face.”

If you google the style names given here, most searches will bring up photos showing what the cut looks like on a real (or nearly real) human being. Google “short bob” hairstyle (with short bob in quote marks), and up come a number of sites with images, some of which suggest my trashed hairstyle may be no worse than anyone else’s…

At any rate, it gives you a starting point for talking to your stylist: at least you can know what the style you think you want is called!

Update:

Mrs. Accountability reports that she did not use the bob-making device to get the cool hairstyle shown on her site. In fact, that style was created by a living, breathing, paid stylist.

Je m’excuse!

God’s Free Carwash

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So…you think you’re frugal? See if you can top this one. 😉

It’s off to choir tonight, there to rehearse various songs of praise to the deity. While we’re inside the choir room singing, it is pouring in the parking lot.

Conveniently, just as practice breaks up the rain stops, after having chased most of the traffic off the streets. Cruise home, detouring through the neighborhood to gaze at the Christmas decorations. Our little corner of the city is so beautiful at this time of year. Everybody goes all out with the lights, and the rich folks leave their living room drapes open to display not only their spectacular Christmas trees but also their elegant interiors. I was going to walk with Cassie tonight, but she hates water, so decided to take advantage of being out in the dark in the car.

This tour completed, it’s time to tool into the garage, grab a dry microfiber rag from its table-top basket near the dryer, and wipe all the clear, fresh, soft-water rain off the windows and then off the top, doors, hood, and bumpers. Voilà! A clean car—free! As we scribble, it’s glowing in the dark.

How many people wait until it rains to let God run the carwash?

Unfortunately, She’s planning to leave the faucet running tomorrow, so I expect between here and Scottsdale, whence I have to hie myself for breakfast, the Dog Chariot will get its share of road mud. Oh well. At least for the time being it’s clean and dry.

I made a little discovery some weeks ago: a microfiber rag is ideal for cleaning the inside of the Chariot. If you use just plain microfiber cloths—either dry or very slightly moistened—to dust your house, the next most logical thing is to amble out to the garage after you’ve finished cleaning the furniture, dampen the cloth if it’s not already that way, and use it to wipe down the dashboard and door panels. If the outside of the car is free of gritty dirt, you can then get your dustrag good and wet, grab a second microfiber cloth, and use the wet one to wipe off the paint and the other one to dry behind it. Clean house once a week, and you can spin off a quickie weekly carwash, too, without ever moving your bucket of bolts out of the garage.

The car ends up looking nice and clean—to finish the job, all you’d need is to vacuum it, but that’s usually beyond my ken.

Don’t try this impromptu wipe-down on a new car, or on any car with a brand-new finish. But when your vehicle arrives at the grand old age of 100,000 (miles, that is), its finish is already a little scratchy, and so any light grit you might have picked up by dusting—or coarser grit from the road—just adds to the patina.

So, have you got a cheaper frugalism?

Images:

Trees and Snowman, by Mike Spasoff, Granada Hills, California. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Wollongong Miner’s Cottage Decorated for Christmas, Wollongong, NSW, Australia. GNU Free Documentation License.

A Quarter Saved, a Quarter Earned…

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This morning my friend La Maya and I joined a Starbuck’s drive-through line. Wanting to empty my purse of heavy change, I handed her $2.25 in quarters to cover the cost of a café Americano.

She put the change aside and paid for both coffees with long green.

Why?

Because, she explained, she stashes every quarter that comes her way to defray the annual state automobile registration fee.

Car registration in Arizona is exorbitant—ours is among the highest in the country. Last year, La Maya said, she paid over $140 to register her Toyota. Though she’s not one of those folks who resent paying taxes, she does regard the auto registration fee as a gouge. Which, of course, is just what it is. It’s particularly galling to see that the state has built a huge, expensive bureaucracy for the purpose of collecting this particular rip, especially when our hatchet-faced governor watches a man die unnecessarily for lack of adequate Medicaid coverage and remarks “we can’t afford it.”

La Maya says it makes her feel slightly less annoyed to pay it when she has a chunk of the bill set aside in her small change collection. Last year her quarter stash covered more than half the bill.

Good idea, isn’t it? When I have loose change (not often, because I mostly pay with plastic), I also toss it into a jar. But it’s not dedicated to anything, other than collecting dust and taking up space. This way, once a year you clear the clutter away, and you use it for a specific purpose.

Weird Frugalities

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You have got to run over to Budgeting in the Fun Stuff’s very entertaining post, Going Too Far to Save Money! She’s found the perfect Hallowe’en frugal tip. It’s very strange and very funny. While you’re there, leave a record of your own weird frugal habit.

It reminded me of SDXB, the most accomplished cheapskate I know.

SDXB does not eat in restaurants. The de jure reason he gives is that when he was an investigative reporter he did a series on what goes on in restaurant kitchens, which caused him to lose his taste for eating out. The de facto reason, however, is that he hates, loathes, and despises having to pay for restaurant food and (worse!) having to tip the servers.

So, when he travels—which is a lot, because he loves to travel—he carries a camp stove, a Teflon frying pan, a large aluminum camp kettle, and an array of camp dishes and utensils. As soon as he arrives at a destination, the first order of business is a visit to the nearest grocery store, where he buys a canister of propane and enough food to prepare full meals.

I mean, full meals: typically pork chops, potatoes, and vegetables, with a bottle of wine to go with.

He trots these back to his motel room, where he sets up a “kitchen” on the bathroom counter—or, lacking enough room, in the bathtub or in the middle of the floor—and prepares three meals a day.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you?

When he was in the active duty Air Force Reserve, he would go TDY from one to three months a year—basically, it amounts to accepting a handsomely paid temp job. This supported his Bumhood, which he launched before he was out of his 40s. In addition to a salary and free lodging in the base’s non-com officers’ quarters, the Air Force pays workers on TDY a per-diem to cover food and transportation. The expectation is that these folks will subsist on restaurant food and take-out, and that they’ll rent a car while they’re on base.

But of course, SDXB wasn’t eating out. He was cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner in his quarters! Not only that, but he never rented a car. He’d borrow a bicycle from a friend or pick up one cheap at the base thrift store and ride that around the base. At the end of his tour of duty, he would pocket a nice chunk of change in the form of the unused per-diem. His salary and his per-diem combined helped to support him in full bumhood for the rest of the year.

I once spent an entire month with SDXB at Robins AFB. We never once ate in a restaurant or mess hall. No, I take that back: one evening his colonel took all the office staff out to eat at a nice place in Macon.

Weird…like a fox.

Yard Sale FAIL!

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We thought we’d make a few bucks for groceries. Empty out the closets, haul the most egregious dust-catchers out to the driveway, and watch the junk fly out the door and the dollars fly into our pockets.

Down at the store

So KJG made the long trip in from the White Tanks with a carful of valuable, priceless discards. Given the number of burglaries and break-ins we’ve had here in the neighborhood, I asked her to bring and display her doberman pinscher, the mellow but amazingly scary-looking Holly, who happens to enjoy the presence of Cassie the Corgi.

Shortly after the crack of dawn we stuck up our signs along the main drags bordering the neighborhood and planted more signs on the feeder streets directing the hordes of buyers to the site of the Big Sale. Before I could get back to the house, KJG was already entertaining buyers. This looked promising.

Promises, promises…

Those were the first of three or four rafts of lookers, one of whom was the neighbor across the street. Almost no one showed up.

It might have been that a 110-degree day was dawning. Or it might have been that not one dusky face appeared among the throngs of potential buyers. The reign of terror emanating from the nastiness that pervades Arizona politics has cleared out and frightened away the working-class Latino population who made up the majority of yard-sale shoppers here. Demographics in the tenements across the road have shifted from mostly poor-white and Hispanic to mostly poor-white and African American. Yard saling in these parts is a cultural thing, not much shared by the latter two groups.

Executive office

Whatever. By the time it got hot enough to close up shop we each had sold almost nothing. I made $6; KJG made a few bucks more than that. We piled all the unsold merchandise (34 shirts, 5 pairs of pants, 3 sweaters, 2 skirts, 3 pairs of shorts, 1 dress, 12 glasses, 2 mugs, 2 picture rames, 3 seat cushions, 1 Hoover Floormate, 1 shark floor sweeper, assorted motorcycle parts and tools) into the Dog Chariot and carted it off to St. Vincent de Paul. Good-bye to all that!

Afterward, we went to lunch.

I made six bucks on the sale and paid ten bucks for a very nice small meal. Net profit: -$4.00.

Why Eat at Home?

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Check out Richly Reasonable’s small tour de force, In or Out Burger? Cruising the Internet in search of some material for a post, she ran across an article from an apparently disinterested source claiming that a McDonald’s hamburger costs no more than a burger made at home.

Breaking out the calculator, she begs to differ. This lady is an accountant, and so her results are a bit more credible than my English-major math. You need to see what she concluded.

There are many benefits to eating in. IMHO, the financial aspect amounts to the least part of the matter. The fact is, if you’re even a halfway decent cook, home-cooked food tastes better. I like the occasional grilled hamburger, but I can’t stomach a McDonald’s…eewww! A McDonald’s patty doesn’t even taste like meat to me. Put it inside a flavorless balloon-bread bun and slather it with institutional garnish, and what have you got? Not anything you’d want to put in your mouth.

Also, even though you don’t know where your groceries have been before you get them, at least you do know how the food was stored and prepared after it arrived in your kitchen.

My ex- and I used to eat out all the time—three to five times a week. After I left him, I took up with SDXB, who had been a multi-award-winning investigative reporter. He refused to eat in restaurants, partly because he was famously frugal but mainly because he had once done a series on what goes on in the restaurant kitchen. Because of what he learned in that project, he simply would not eat in restaurants.

I spent several years with this man, who loved to cook. The result was that I came to dislike restaurant food. The truth is, it’s not very good! Now I still enjoy eating in a few restaurants, but, with the exception of one family-run Mexican joint, they’re way too expensive to enjoy more than once every month or two.

It’s a matter of breaking a habit. When you start fixing your own meals with real, unprocessed food, you discover that most restaurant and junk food is not very good, just as you realize, six or eight weeks after kicking the soda-pop habit, that sicky-sweet soft drinks don’t really taste very good or, a year after quitting cigarettes, that tobacco smoke stinks.

Once that particular light dawns, the cost is irrelevant: today I wouldn’t drink a glass of pop if it was free and I had to pay for water. Nor, given a choice, would I prefer to eat out than in.