Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Keep? Or Take It Back?

by

So late last week I schlepped to Tempe, there to meet with my friend Tina for lunch and then to get my hair done by a reasonably trustworthy stylist. What I hadn’t counted on: The Mill Avenue Crafts Fair.

Augh! This annual event has bloated into a huge affair that calls vendors from all over the country and shoppers from all over the state, to say nothing of every tourist who’s in town during the high season. Driving around it and getting a place to park is a freaking nightmare.

However…it is kinda fun to stroll around. I like to buy my jewelry (when I buy it, rather than making it myself) from crafters who show up at these fairs, and yea verily! Who should I stumble across but a couple of Polish jewelry-makers who specialize in amber and silver. Aren’t these pretty?

Photo’s not too great—my camera was running out of juice and I got in a hurry. Oh well. Anyway, I needed a new li’l cross for choir, since I gave my good silver and topaz cross to my best friend on the choir at the time I walked away after a visiting cleric remarked that if we didn’t support George Bush’s war in the Middle East and the Israeli agenda, we weren’t good Christians.

Love the design of the earrings, and the cross is kind of unusual but not strange.

These little fellows set me back about $120, which was not a problem because I have plenty in diddle-it-away savings to cover that. Indulgences like this are exactly what the diddle-it-away sinking fund is for. So, no, the baubles are not the issue.

The issue is these…

Naot_Shoes

Yes. I’m afraid so. As long as I was wandering around Mill Avenue, I could hardly not pay a visit to my favorite purveyor of pain-free shoes, the cutesily named Shoe Mill, especially since I happened to have a $20 off coupon. Lo! They were having a 50% off sale!

Nothing that anyone would like to wear in public was part of this sale, and the Naots pictured above were decidedly not on sale. Nooo…. With the $20 off, the tab came to around $160.

Good God! So now I’ve spent something in excess of $300, by the time you figure in the bottle of leather lotion I picked up to treat the outrageously expensive purse I bought there shortly after Canning Day.

Still. I can afford it. Despite last month’s excesses and unexpected expenses, it looks like I’ll end this month about $350 in the black, an amazing feat made possible by a state income tax refund. That money would normally go into the diddle-it-away fund, easily making up for these two little extravagances.

However… My son’s birthday happens in a few days. I would like either to buy him an expensive electronic doodad or to give him the amount it would cost and let him buy whatever doodads he pleases. Or just cash the check as ones, scatter them across the living room floor, and roll in them.

If I keep the shoes, forking over several hundred bucks for a birthday present is going to be a stretch. The Shoe Mill has a generous return policy, and so I could burn a quarter-tank of gas to trek back out to Tempe and get my money back. On the other hand, I need a pair of summer shoes. My favorite summery shoes are an old pair of Naots whose cork soles are crumbling and shedding little pieces. And the new Naots would look awesome with this dress from J. Jill:

I want that dress. I don’t have any light-colored shoes to go with it. So of course I need the silver Naot sandals. Don’t I?

I could take the shoes back, refrain from buying the linen summer dress, and save about $280, which could then be expended upon my son. Or not.

It should be borne in mind that the feds owe me $3004 for the 2010 tax refund, which should be dropping out of the ether into my checking account pretty quick now. So really, I could pay for all of this out of savings and the refund without draining diddle-away savings to naught. On the other hand, that would leave significantly less than $3000 to put into the short-term survival fund, which is supposed to carry me through until the end of 2012 without taxable drawdowns from investments.

Realistically, between now and then I probably could scrounge $280 from various frugalities to replace the money in the survival fund. Assuming I remember to do so, and assuming I work that hard at pinching pennies. Or maybe not so realistically: pretty soon the Dog Chariot will need a new timing belt: $340.

So...what to do, what to do?

What say you? Return the shoes? Or indulge?

“Healthy” Junk Food: We spend MONEY on this?

by

Ewwww! One of the door-to-door litterers hung a bag with two minipackages of Quaker cereals on my front gate. I don’t eat processed junk cereals, and so was about to throw them out when I thought…wait! Maybe this is something I could eat between classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

There’s no decent food on campus (decent by my lights, anyway—I don’t eat junk food, and that’s about all that’s sold in the student union, except for a few pathetic attempts at salads). The stretch from 7:00 a.m., when I have breakfast, to 3:30 or 4:00, when I get home, is a long one, and I get awfully hungry. So hungry that the instant I get into the house I fix a big dinner and then overeat. The overeating at mealtime is what keeps the weight on, I suspect.

So, I go to look at the ingredients in the minipackage of Quaker Oatmeal Squares:

whole oat flour, whole wheat flour, brown sugar, sugar, maltodextrin, malted barley extract, molasses, salt, and then a list of the same ingredients that appear in a bottle of multivitamins.

Maltodextrin is a form of sugar. Malted barley extract is a type of sweetener which also contains a form of sugar.

Sooo…what we have in this little box is some ground oats and wheat (very cheap), five doses of sugar(!), and some spray-on vitamins. Oatmeal Squares, sold as “heart-healthy” and so by implication good for you, is largely, if not mostly, sugar.

Yuck! Why do people put stuff like this in their mouth?

Well, the answer is probably that they think it’s good for them (“2 grams of soluble fiber from oatmeal daily in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesteral may reduce the risk of heart disease,” it says here). And they probably think it’s inexpensive food.

What does this stuff cost? At the Safeway, with the Red Card membership discount: about $2.50 for 12 ounces. That’s twenty-one cents an ounce, which at first glance seems pretty cheap. But really. It’s an awful lot for a vitamin pill sprinkled over some heavily sugared grain.

You’d do a whole lot better to buy a box of real, actual oats. Takes about five minutes to cook them, and when you pour the stuff in your bowl, you get the whole three ounces (or more)…not the one ounce that resides in a single serving of Oatmeal Squares. If you like your cereal sugared up, at least you know how much sugar (or honey, or maple syrup) you’re putting over the stuff.

Is there any question why Americans are overweight?

Time to Buy a Big-Ticket Item?

by

Yipes! Inflation is about to rear its hideous head, or so we’re told. Manufacturers are threatening to raise prices as much as 15 percent between now and this fall. The reason for yet another kick in the ribs to folks who are unemployed, underemployed, and furloughed is the rising cost of commodities from cotton to copper to foodstuffs.

Well, if that’s the case, now may be the time to buy pricey goods such as appliances, especially if you’ve been putting it off until you can afford it. In another couple of months, you’ll be able to afford it even less. 🙄

My dryer has been dead for so long I’ve lost track—running safely only on “Air Dry” for the past year, anyway. Haven’t replaced it because I quickly learned that I’d just as soon hang the clothes on the line. But before I put away the comforters for the summer, I will need to wash them, and that is the one chore that will require a fully functioning dryer. The comforters need to be batted around inside a warm dryer to fluff them up.

At least…umh…I think they do. Maybe I’ll try it on Air Dry before springing for an $850 dryer.

Meanwhile, though, the washer is also about to give up the ghost. It no longer will spin the water out of a load of laundry. Last night I pulled out a wad of sopping wet jeans. Stuffed them back into the washer and ran the spin cycle again, to exactly zero avail.

Annoying.

Think of it: eight hundred and fifty bucks for a $325 appliance! What a flickin’ outrage. Every time we get another energy-efficient, green “improvement” to our lives, it ends up either costing us through the wazoo or, like the infinitely plungeable toilet, just flat not working. According to that article, we can expect Whirlpool (which makes most Sears appliances) to jack up its prices by 8 to 10 percent, as of April 1. That would be a price increase of 68 to 85 dollars, plus the 9.3 percent tax extortion: $74 to $93 all told…before the delivery charge.

That’s probably enough to justify accelerating the purchase of a washer, rather than waiting until the thing stops dead.

I’m thinking I’ll buy the dryer through Craig’s List, since it looks like I’ll hardly ever use it. But the washer is something I’d like to have for its entire lifetime (especially since they’re now designed to crap out in seven years). So I guess I’ll buy that new.

But it frosts my cookies.

How about you? Will you consider buying a big-ticket item sooner than later, knowing the prices are about to jump significantly?

Coupons for Sale or Rent…

by

Did you know you can sell coupons—the kind of stuff that comes in junkmail—at online sites? Saturday’s PlayNooz reported on a New York postal carrier who was arrested for the sale of coupons he’d ripped off from residents’ mailboxes and peddled on eBay. A commenter observed that some coupons, such as the ones that come from Penny’s, are worth ten or fifteen bucks. Or more…one shoe store here routinely sends out 30%-off coupons, and all its stock is in the $100-plus range.

Turns out this enterprise is not very difficult. You simply collect coupons, organize them in some intelligible way (such as by category or by likely frequency of purchase), and advertise your stashes on eBay or Craigslist. You can even consider collecting coupons that are listed online. I have found that you can go here for Amazon coupons and a ton other top retailers. Apparently you can get as much as 50% to 75% of the coupons’ savings.

There’s actually a site that will let you resell coupons from sites like Groupon, Living Social, or Tippr. How exactly you’d make a profit on coupons you have to pay for is unclear, unless you could charge a premium the ones that sell out fast.

What a hoot! Talk about your passive income…just let that junk mail roll in!

Image: Ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola, ca. 1888; believed to be the first coupon ever. Scanned by uploader from Wired (Nov 2010), Vol. 18, No. 11, p. 104. Public Domain.

Cranky Old Bat vs. Newfangled Junk

by

You know you’re getting old when (among other things) you begin to feel that none of the gadgets, doodads, gizmos, and minor amenities that made your life comfortable exist anymore. Or if they do, the darn things don’t work anymore!

Case in point: The potholder.

What is it with those silicone things that the young pups think is so great?

These little frauds are a total mystification. They’re clumsy. They’re ugly. They won’t wrap around a hot pan handle. And contrary to what their admirers say, they don’t protect your hands from heat any better than a real potholder, which is to say, “a potholder made from several layers of heavy terrycloth.”

One consumer effuses, “I absolutely love these potholders!!!!” Exclamation point. Then she goes on to remark, “You need to be aware of the location of the hole in one corner of the potholder. I didn’t pay attention one day and got a nasty burn pulling a very hot pan out of the oven. If you are a bit of a klutz, like me, best to keep 100% aloe in the house just in case you do what I did.”

Uhm…. Doesn’t a hole in the potholder defeat the purpose of a potholder? The whole idea of using a potholder is to keep from getting burnt so you don’t need to have a bottle of aloe vera cluttering up your kitchen counter.

Another burbles, after allowing that they are a bit stiff and difficult to use, “They have a bonus use, as a very good way to get a grip on jars or similar items that are hard to open. (I use mine to unscrew the faucet water filter when it needs to be replaced.)” So…the tradeoff for the aloe on the kitchen counter is a hot pad that doubles as a rubber gripper. Why not just get a rubber gripper for those hard-to-open jars and opt the burned fingers?

Well, we—or more likely, a coalition of manufacturers and marketers—have decided that the silicone things are so wondrous that real potholders are getting very hard to find. The last time I searched in Williams-Sonoma, Bed Bath & Beyond, Sur la Table, and Target, I couldn’t find a real, terrycloth potholder, one that’s terrycloth on both sides, not one with a decorative scene stamped on useless cotton or one with a shiny, fake asbestos backing. All I want is a terrycloth potholder, terrycloth through and through. And I’d kinda like it not to be ugly.

After some traipsing through Amazon, I came across these Gourmet Classics terry Potholders, which look like they might do the trick:

Red is the only color that’s not plug-hideous. They also come in pea-soup green, dungeon black, and apartment-house beige. What recommends them is their size: they’re 8 by 8, the size of a normal potholder.

However, here’s one that purports to be 8½ x 8½. It comes in blue, red, and yellow, and not only that, but it’s a few cents cheaper than the “gourmet” variety.

That Wedgewood blue doesn’t match the blue trim in my kitchen’s Mexican tilework, but what the heck. The things hang inside a cabinet, so no one’s going to see them when they’re put away. Truth to tell, with some exploration you discover that this model comes in many colors, from day-glo red to cobalt via moss green.

If nothing will do for your kitchen but metaphorical greenness, believe it or not they make an “organic” potholder.

We’re told these things are made of cotton “grown without the use of harmful chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers. The methods, materials and dyes used in organic cotton have a low impact on the environment and are certified by Skal International.” The only colors available are earth-tones. In addition to the brit-shindle above, there’s a kind of pinkish terracotta, a leaf green that verges on the minty, and maize yellow. That’s a better selection than any of the other offerings. This potholder, though, is an odd shape: 7¾ x 9 inches. But that might not be a bad thing.

Isn’t it ridiculous that you can no longer buy an ordinary, functional potholder at the corner grocery store or even at the mall kitchen shop? Well. If all else fails, you can make your own:

Do-it-yourself_potholder

What products from the good old days do you miss the most?

Canned Dog Food: Anyone Tried This?

by

Has anyone tried Hill’s Science Diet Canine Mature Adult 7+ Savory Chicken Entrée Canned Dog Food? If so, do you know how many cans come in a case?

La Maya and La Bethulia’s aging dachshund has now lost even more of his teeth, so they’re going to be reduced to feeding canned dog food. They’re interested in ordering, since this looks like about the best price on the Web, but it’s unclear how much you get for the price. The can looks like this:

Let us know if you have a clue about the quantity!