Williams-Sonoma is having a 20%-off sale on All-Clad. The 1.5-quart saucepan, which I’ve been coveting for awhile, is marked down from $109 to $87. Add the Arizona sales tax of almost 10% and you’re back at $95, not that big a deal.
Cookware & More has a 1.5-quart irregular for $71.40, but they’re not tellin’ what the shipping charges are until you actually order the thing up. That suggests shipping is pretty high.
Over at Wealth Informatics, proprietor Suba has posted a great article on her struggle to manage time and work. This, it develops, is a function of procrastination. Suba is a fine artist of procrastination, and what she describes as going on in her self-employed worklife is exactly what’s going on here. She kept track of how she was spending her work hours, much as a lawyer filling out time sheets would do. The result was enlightening. A huge amount of time was absorbed with e-mail, cruising the Web, writing comments on other people’s sites, and participating in social media. More was taken up by unproductive breaks that devolved into TV watching.
If someone were to hover over my shoulder, they’d find the same thing happening here. I don’t watch TV much, especially not doing the day (on the broadcast spectrum there’s just flat nothing to see). But I do pass unholy amounts of time on e-mail, reading websites, and adding comments to news reports and bloggers’ posts. Most of this is an absolute waste. And I’ve got a bad feeling that the sense that I’m working way too hard is aggravated by the fact that I’m not working very productively. Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer. But…to what avail? How much am I really getting done?
Suba has come up with three interesting strategies to deal with this issue:
1. Ditch the “to-do” list and create a “NOT-to-do” list, designed to deflect the time-suckers. 2. Physically leave the house to do work. Suba has taken to going to a library to work. 3. Use an add-on such as LeechBlock, StayFocused, or Nanny for Chrome to block time-wasting sites during work hours.
LOL! I’d have to register an awful lot of sites to to make those blockers work!
The idea of going someplace else for actual work, however, is a great one. As I noted last week in a comment on someone else’s site (where, I no longer recall…tellingly!), the advantage of going to an office is that you don’t have all the work that needs to be done around a house nagging at you.
When I’m in my self-employed mode (I’ve swung back and forth between wage slavery and self-employment all my adult life), a fair amount of each weekday is taken up with household chores: water plants, clean the pool & balance the water, take a swipe at cleaning the bathrooms, notice that I can’t stand the dust on the furniture so wipe that down, run to the grocery store, get gas on the way home, throw a load of laundry in the washer, fix a toilet, wash the dog…every one of those antics takes up a chunk of time. To make up for it, I work later at night and over the weekends. The advantage of being at an employer’s office is that it forces you to focus your attention on the work at hand.
Those of us who work out of our home offices might spend a lot less time “working” if all we did was work.
Speaking of the self-employed and those who wish they were, our PF blogging friends have been active of late.
At Dollars and Deadlines, Kelly describes a simple marketing strategy that we all can and should do regularly.
The Financial Blogger has a nice post on building a money-making blog, with some fresh ideas that go well beyond the usual pabulum on this well-worn subject.
At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal and Mr. BFS have found something real to absorb their time: a brand-new, very swell home! The excitement knows no bounds.
While we’re on the subject of housing, over at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander, eemusings has an entertaining history of her life in renting.
Revanche has two posts describing her strategy for promotion and a pay increase, which, after an amazing amount of effort and stress, worked.
Evan reflects on his five-year tenure at his job—a sixth of his lifetime! Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near…
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail frets about the cost of having the in-laws occupying their backyard studio. This is likely to be a challenge facing thousands of youngish Americans, as the Baby Boomers age and discover that between the cost of Medicare and the rising cost of living, too little is left from Social Security and savings to support them without help from the kids.
Those of us who don’t yet have to move in with our sons and daughters might take a look at Boomer and Echo’s post on turning 50. Best way to stay out of the kids’ backyard is to plan ahead. Way ahead.
At Money Crush, Jackie grumbles about the implied jealousy (and laziness) of the “wish I could do that” set.
And speaking of self-employment, have you ever heard of a financial dominatrix? Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Amazing! Once again I was born forty years too soon…
Nicole and Maggie, over at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured, are talking about cutting back on blogging. And at Not of General Interest, Undine notes that quite a few other academic bloggers have had the same idea.
At Free from Broke, Miranda holds forth on the recent flap over HR departments and prospective employers asking people for access to their Facebook sites. That falls into the “wonders never cease” category.
Money Beagle posted a thoughtful piece on the way some seemingly expensive costs are offset by various side benefits of the expensive service or thing.
Frugal Scholar asks if you can bargain on furniture. If Blogger would let me comment on FS’s site without having to sign up to create a Blogger blog, I’d have commented that you certainly can. Many furniture stores will come down on the price if you ask nicely. I once got a Stickley table that was already on sale simply by asking the salesperson if he could do any better. At Crate & Barrel, about which FS wonders, sales staff don’t seem to be empowered to give discounts; however, they will tell you if they know a piece will go on sale in the near future, and one person there offered to call me and let me know when a coveted item was scheduled to go on sale.
Time to go sing. Have a happy weekend—what’s left of it.
If you’re planning to dive into the Black Friday maelstrom, you might want to think about turning off your cell phone before you walk into the mall. That is, if you’re the type who passionately values your privacy.
In the latest encroachment by the quasi-government that is Corporate America, a couple of malls will experiment with tracking people’s movements as they wander from store to store by tracking radio emissions from their cell phones. This will be a lot subtler than some of the earlier strategies, which have even included hiring employees to stalk you through the mall. Forest City Commercial Management, which runs the malls in Southern California and in Virginia, claims this is not an invasion of your privacy because supposedly they can’t personally identify you without a court order.
Well. One man’s “not an invasion” is another man’s “get out of my face!” And as one reader pointed out, eventually computerized face recognition programs will make it easy enough to connect the image gathered as you enter the mall with the image you posted on Facebook. Nor is it impossible to imagine hackers breaking into the system and identifying users. If a hacker can do it, big business or government can hire the hacker to do it.
The only way to stop this intrusion is to turn off your cell phone before you enter the mall. Of course, that defeats the purpose of owning the cell phone, for which you pay a pretty penny: you wouldn’t have the thing if you didn’t want to be jangled up at every hour of the day and night, no matter where you happen to be or what you happen to be doing. But nevermind.
Hmm. Actually, this could be a good thing: wouldn’t it be nice to shop for a day without having to listen to people yapping on the phone?
While we’re in the silver lining department, this sort of news invariably makes me glad I can’t afford a cell phone and I can’t afford to shop in malls any more.
😀
Image: Appraiser, Escalator at Edmonton Mall. Public domain. Edmonton Mall is NOT one of the properties reported to track customers’ cell phones.
The other day Costco was selling fresh turkeys for 89 cents a pound. Turkeys with no weird chemicals injected into them! Personally, I deeply dislike “Butterball” turkeys, which have been infused with fluids deemed to taste “buttery” and to keep the bloated bird nice and juicy while it spends untold hours in your oven as you try to cook 20 pounds of meat. Flavorless is bad enough; fake flavor surpasses bad enough.
Anyway, no weird gunk in them and under a buck a pound! Hallelujuah: just what Cassie the Corgi needs to feed her for the next three months!
So I grabbed a 20-pounder, and Thursday it went into the oven to roast slowly, unstuffed, at 325 degrees, for five hours. After La Maya and I returned from an outing, I hauled it out. Beat back the pup, who was driven mad by the aroma and a larger pile of food than he ever thought could possibly exist in one place. Because onions are poisonous to dogs, I’d cut up a big onion (also purchased at Costco for considerably less than the buck apiece Safeway is now charging) and put it under the bird, which I set on a rack over a roasting pan. Planned to make an onion-flavored gravy to pour over whatever part of the meat I chose to eat myself, hoping to make it taste like something.
Unlike last year’s fiasco, this turkey did not exude something over a quart of water. The pan contained mostly actual pan drippings, which cooked into a nice gravy when some wine and flour were added.
The meat…meh! It came out of the oven moist and nicely cooked. It didn’t taste as bad as last year’s turkey dog-meat experiment, but it still had some of that unpleasant chemically flavor that seems to permeate all modern turkeys. Guess that’s just what you get from factory-farmed birds.
Anyway, it’ll do to feed the dog, and since I can no longer afford beef, I’ll have to eat some of it, too, like it or not.
And what an enormous amount of meat! Two plates laden with it, plus a gigantic carcass with which to make enough turkey stock to last a year.
We ended up with enough turkey to fill six large Ziplock bags and two plastic refrigerator containers. This will last Cassie for a long time. It definitely will carry her through the holidays, when I invariably run out of dog meat the evening before Christmas or New Year’s. Supplemented with an occasional purchase of chicken or pork, which can still sometimes be found at an affordable price, it should keep the little dog in business for quite a while.
The other day at the Safeway I went to buy a couple of yellow onions. Bounced off the onion bin like it had a forcefield around it. They wanted 99 cents apiece!
A dollar for an onion? One ordinary yellow onion?
Really? Really????
So I walked around the bin to see if they had any smaller, punier numbers they might be trying to get rid of. Found one narrow shelf that at one time had these, which the Safeway was peddling for 49 cents apiece. All the half-dollar onions were gone but two, each of which was bruised and starting to rot.
I could not freaking believe it.
So left the Safeway onionless, figuring to pick up some onions at a more reasonable price at one of the ethnic markets. My schedule being what it is, though, of course I never made it to Lee Lee’s or El Rancho. The larder is empty of onion.
Maybe I should plant some in the back yard. Wonder if they’ll grow here in the winter?
I’m wearing second-hand hats,
Second-hand clothes,
That’s why they call me
Second-hand Rose…
In the fading upscale shopping center across the street from the restaurant where my business group meets for breakfast each Thursday morning, you’ll find a wildly successful thrift shop called My Sister’s Closet. Yesterday I decided to drop in and see if I could find a decent-looking suit, of which I have had none. Not for decades.
Working at the Great Desert University’s scholarly editing office, we had no contact with the public. And before that, in the classroom…well, there’s no need to dress to the nines to teach undergraduates. So for the past 20 years, give or take, I’ve dressed like a graduate student. I live in Costco jeans. Occasionally I would go out and buy an Eileen Fisher outfit—it’s one of the few brands that fit around my fading body—but there’s not much call for clothes like that around here. However, now that Tina and I have decided we need to market The Copyeditor’s Desk aggressively as a business-to-business service, it looks like I’m going to need something acceptable to wear in public.
Problem: I can’t afford to buy expensive business suits.
As an aside, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., which receives the proceeds of Funny about Money as well as the editorial enterprise, did pretty well last month. Thanks to Funny’s new ad agent, Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, total revenues from blogging and from editing grossed about what I would earn teaching four sections. That’s still a very modest amount. But if the business made that much all the time, 12 months a year, it would come to significantly more than I earn as an adjunct, where I’m technically allowed to teach only three sections a semester—providing income only nine months a year. If we could permanently ratchet up the editorial income by landing a few business clients who would hire us on long-term contracts, I wouldn’t have to teach at all. Or, if I taught one or two classes on top of that dreamt-of income, I’d have enough to pay the bills without worrying much.
Hence the project to acquire a credible-looking business outfit. We’ll be joining more business groups and looking for other ways to peddle our wares to companies and medical practices that need business or technical editorial services. To succeed at this, we need to look like we’re already prospering.
I’ve never shopped much in second-hand stores, mostly because I truly dislike plowing through acres and acres of ugly junk clothes in a (usually futile) search for something that looks decent and fits. However, Scottsdale is filled with the sisters of Mrs. Gotrocks: ridiculously upscale or aspiring women who either have high-powered jobs themselves or who support their husbands’ careers by appearing conspicuously at public functions brought by groups of society matrons. These women wear outrageously expensive clothes, and they don’t wear them long. If you have something striking, about the third time you put it on all the other hens start to cluck, “Doesn’t she have anything else to wear?” So, I figured, a place like My Sister’s Closet, right in the heart of darkest Scottsdale, would have plenty of their leavings.
And yea verily: I was right, in spades!
The store organizes its gleanings in two categories: designer fashions and all the rest of the junk. They have entire racks of St. John separates, suits, and dresses.
St. John, for the uninitiated, designs clothing that fits women d’un certain âge: like Eileen Fisher, the company targets well-heeled women over 50.
Not many designer clothes come in size 12, today’s equivalent of a real-life size of about 14. So fat have I become! My mother wore 14s and 16s in her old age, and I’m beginning to look just like her. But lo! among the “S” and “XS” tags, I came across a gorgeous amethyst knit skirt and jacket in a fatlady size.
Normally I can’t wear knits: they display every ripple of cellulite on my body. But, drawn by the color, I hung it on the shopping cart rack anyway. Back in the “business attire” section, I found more normal manufacturers: Banana Republic, Talbot’s, and the like. Picked up a few skirts, pants, and jackets there, too.
As usual, not one of the mass-market costumes fit around my capacious rear end. They made me look like a beer barrel with feet sticking out.
(The shoulder pads don’t have bumps in them. That’s the skirt-hanger clips showing through; soon as the photo was snapped the two pieces were hung separately.)
I finally tried on the St John suit, as a last-ditch effort.
Astonishingly, the skirt fit! It hid the paunch and made me look almost human! The jacket fit pretty well, too. That’s just amazing!
The skirt and jacket came to a hundred and a quarter, more than I expected to spend on second-hand clothing, but both pieces were impeccably clean, no stains, no sign of wear—the thing looked brand new. So I grabbed that.
But that’s not all. I also stumbled across this incredible Coach bag. It really is, I think, brand-new. Not a scratch, a smudge, or a sag to be seen, anywhere! It’s exactly the right size–holds the iPad, a wallet, and a few pieces of junk with room to spare—and the handle will go over one’s shoulder. And, astonishingly, the cream color exactly matches the dressy Naot sandals I bought last spring. Voila! Shoes and a purse to go with the swell “new” suit!
So, I spent a little over $200—about what I’d spend on a normal trip to J. Jill or B’Gauze—and came away with something that looks a great deal dressier and more professional than cobbled-together sportswear coordinates. And that actually fits. And to boot, I got an apparently unused used Coach bag!
Yesterday afternoon I wore this costume to a meeting with a prospective client. Hope he was duly impressed…
Can that be? I bought $1,670 worth of overpriced clothing for $125???? Or, to put it another way, to get a suit, new, that doesn’t make me look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I have to pony up over fifteen hundred bucks?
The sales clerk told me that if you consign, they’ll give you credit toward their clothing purchases. So you could, in theory, get even better deals. Or take the money and run.
Unfortunately, they don’t accept things like Costco jeans. Except for the surviving Eileen Fisher skirt and tops (one of which, BTW, is perfect with the “new” St. John suit), I don’t own anything worthy of this outfit’s elevated taste.
But I do own the occasional discretionary $200. 😉
Lyrics: Grant Clarke, James Hanley, “Second-Hand Rose.” Performed by Fanny Brice and later by Barbra Streisand.
