Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Pound-wise, Penny-foolish?

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A new J. Jill catalogue arrived the other day. I’ve been planning to buy another of their sleeveless short dresses in the “Wearever” line, since they’ve finally come out with an actual color—blue. Well, they had an actual color last year—old-lady mulberry—and I bought one of those. So now I have two: the regulation black and the mulberry number.

They’re incredible pieces for women who resent having to have decent-looking clothes dry-cleaned and who also resent having to spend an hour fiddling with their grooming before they can get out the door. All you have to do is pull the thing over your head, throw on some jewelry and a decent pair of shoes, and voila! You’re dressed!

So while I was leafing through the catalog, I came across this hobo bag:

Exactly what I’ve been looking for to replace the pricey bag I bought in a fit of depression, when my dear boss invited me to an expensive luncheon to celebrate my longevity at the Great Desert University a few days after she informed me that I and all five of my staff were to be canned. I’ve been carrying that purse about every day for almost two and a half years, and it’s only just beginning to look a little tired.

The red bag I picked up in Yarnell earlier this year, which was relatively cheap, is already acting like it’s about seen its duty, and I’ve only carried it a dozen times—if that much. The faux leather is starting to sag, and where the purse is supposed to stand up, it flops over. Still fine for casual wear, but it’s not a purse you can carry with you everywhere, in every venue but the ballroom.

Well, so I filed the existence of the J. Jill purse away in the labyrinth of my mind, figuring that if I went out to Fashion Square in hopes of finding a sale there over the Labor Day weekend, maybe I’d buy the purse along with the dress. Especially if they’d give me a break on the price.

But…fortunately before I could get myself to a brick-and-mortar store, I made a little discovery.

Poking around a closet in search of a light bed throw that might be a little less linty than the one I’m using just now, what should I come across but this:

CoachBagWhaa? I’d forgotten I still had the thing. It’s amazingly aged. But y’know what? It’s a Coach bag.

It was covered in dust. I’d stashed it on the top closet shelf because its rolled edges were getting a little worn, and as I recall I’d decided to switch over to another purse. Yea verily, probably the exit-party purse.

After a good dusting and thorough oiling with leather conditioner, what you see above is what I got. Looks an awful lot like that J. Jill bag, doesn’t it? Matter of fact, I like the design a lot better.

I think I paid about $200 for it, so long ago that the Memory of Person does not stretch back that far. Quite some time ago I quit buying Coach bags, to my regret. They got rid of their beautiful classic styles—no doubt because when you have a classic purse that never wears out, you don’t keep coming back to buy more purses. They started plastering their logo, Gucci-bag style, all over their products. And I just hate that. My feeling is that if you expect me to be your walking billboard, you pay me, not the other way around. But they think otherwise: in exchange for the privilege of hauling the Coach corporate logo everywhere you go, they expected customers to pay even higher prices.

Nine West, Fossil, and J. Jill produce comparable bags for a lot less money, without the requirement that you provide free advertising, so I said good-bye to Coach.

Luckily, though, I hadn’t said good-bye to this particular pricey Coach bag. That’s $149 that I will not have to pay to J. Jill for a new purse.

My point here, money-wise, is that sometimes it’s worth spending what seems like a lot to get an item that you use all the time and that will hold up under that kind of wear. The purse I bought over two years ago has been dragged from pillar to post and back again. It’s been used to carry computer gear. It’s been sat upon. It’s been rained upon. It’s been threatened by a chewing puppy. It’s been hauled through the desert. It’s been set on the floor in public bathroom stalls where the management has removed the coat hooks. It’s been searched by security guards time and again. And when I put it away and forget about it, two or three years from now it will be resuscitated and hauled around for another two years.

Same thing with the dresses. J. Jill’s Wearever line is not cheap, and the stuff hardly ever comes on sale. However, the little dresses in that line cover my paunch so I look nowhere near as fat as I am. They’re easy to wear. They wash like a charm and come out looking brand-new. They’re ideal for church, they’re perfect for teaching, and—accessorized properly—they’d probably work for a job interview. I wear one of them at least once a week.

When you’re going to get a lot of use out of something, in my opinion it’s worth the extra money to get something that will last. Cheap junk, like the red purse from Yarnell, wears out long before its time. If you have to replace a $60 item in a year or less, you’re a lot better off paying $200 for something that will last longer than three years.

 

End-Times Bargains! (End of season, that is)

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So this weekend I decided to act on my new vow to loosen up on the frugality and get a life. Or at least get a few things to make it look like I have a life.

The set, about $540 at Amazon

For quite some time I’ve been craving some of that fake-wicker outdoor furniture—you know, the stuff that looks like wicker but really is some sort of extruded plastic woven on steel frames. These combine the design look I favor (OK, I know: it’s not a “look,” it’s just bourgeois) with some resistance to Arizona’s ferocious elements.

Right now I have two beloved white real wicker rocking chairs on the westside deck. These things came with me from the old house, where they resided for some years after I bought them at Cost Plus (World Market). Once every few seasons (used to be every season, but I got lazy), I drag them out and apply a new coat of spray-on white enamel paint.

Despite the paint, though, rainwater is singularly bad for them. Plus the wind really howls through the side yard during a good storm. The damn things kite and sail off the deck. So far they’ve landed in the yard rather than crashing through the Arcadia door, but in either event, it’s a mess. So I’ve taken to hauling them inside the house every time the sky so much as hints at rain.

Then there are the four wooden chairs I bought at Cost Plus a couple of years ago, to arrange around the back patio table. Not a terrible choice, but an inconvenient one. The chairs are attractive enough and they’re very comfortable (given a cushion). But they are unfinished wood. I’ve never gotten around to sealing them, and…well, when a hard rain falls the back patio can flood right up to the back door, two or three inches deep. Not relishing the thought of having those things soaking their legs in three inches of muddy water, I invariably haul them inside the house every time it rains, too.

This has become a real nuisance.

I wouldn’t mind cluttering the dining room with a couple of sailable rockers during monsoon season. But filling up the dining room, family room, and living room with six scruffy outdoor chairs every time a fluffy little cloud appears in the sky? Enough, already!

Then we have four clunky old metal and aluminum-strap outdoor chairs given to me by a friend as she was moving out of her perfectly affordable home into a bottomless pool of debt. They were, when new, very expensive. When she let go of them, they weren’t new; and price or no, the things were never to my taste. Particularly noxious is the circular tube base on which each chair assembly rests. This object collects trash. Lots and lots of trash. Every time a light wind blows, leaves, pollen, and twigs dune up inside the circles that are the chairs’ bases; don’t ask what happens when a stiff breeze comes up. The duning phenomenon means that every time I or Gerardo tries to blower off, sweep off, or wash down the deck, all four chairs have to be dragged around the KoolDeck. Drag them back, drag them forth, drag them around some more because every time you run a blower or squirt the hose anywhere near the things, more debris catches in those damn metal circles. Beyond enough!

So on Saturday it was off to Pier 1. No longer do I shop at Cost Plus/World Market: they’ve started demanding that you give them give them private information so you can get a “shopper’s card,” without which you pay a premium price. With the exception of Safeway, whose employees think I’m my dog and that my phone rings at Safeway’s local business offices, I do not shop at businesses where they pull that stunt on customers.

For all of these gigantic chain stores, the end of August signals the end of the outdoor season. Never mind that it’ll be another month before Arizonans can venture into the backyard; never mind that when we do, we’ll be out there for nine or ten months straight, every day. Despite the fact that people here are hotly in the market for outdoor goods, Pier 1 and its ilk have got everything that smacks of backyard living hugely on sale!

mwa ha hah!

And did they have fake wicker furniture on sale? Holy mackerel, did they ever have fake wicker, and was it ever on sale! Everything was marked down significantly from its original price, and then marked another 20% off the mark-down.

I found this nice fake wicker rocking chair in white, practically identical with the beloved real wicker rockers. Just as pretty as the numbers available through Amazon, pictured near the top of this post. Couldn’t believe how close this comes to the chairs I use almost every day when the weather’s good, out in the Leafy Bower. And the darn thing is just as comfortable.

Ordered up two of those.

And they had a rather attractive and amazingly comfortable stackable chair, perfect for sitting around the big glass-top table in back. I loved them: the’re ideal. Could not be better for the purpose! Fortunately the fake wicker weave also came in a kind of tan straw shade, much more convincing than the sort of brindle effect pictured here. So that’s what I ordered.

The cushions I got two years ago are still perfectly serviceable. They’ll probably last another year or two. So: all told the tab for SIX FAKE WICKER CHAIRS came to $500.

When you consider that Amazon’s $500+ tab for just two chairs and a tacky-looking table is relatively cheap for this stuff, five C-notes doesn’t seem so bad at-tall. Amazingly some places sell pieces like these for upwards of $200 apiece.

They’ll be in late next week. Yay!

So:

The hideous plastic-strap chairs will go on the curb, there to warm the cockles of some metal scavenger’s heart.

Two of the Cost Plus wooden chairs will go outside the bedroom door, taking the place of a pair of hideous plastic-strap numbers. They’ll get rained on and will weather to the classic silver outdoor wooden chair look, but since water doesn’t pool up there, they’ll never actually be standing in a puddle.

The other two will be offered to M’hijito, who could in theory use them on his front porch. Or stash them in back to accommodate friends during his many parties. The little twins will soon be big enough to sit in chairs, and so these could come in handy. If he doesn’t want them, I’ll either fob them off on some other friend or put them in my own front patio. Or someplace.

Ditto the white real wicker chairs. They could in theory, be repainted and parked inside M’hijito’s house, giving him a couple more chairs in front of his giant computo-television monitor. Or they could go to the Salvation Army, I suppose. Hate to give them up. But…they need to go now.

Now it will be much, much easier to clean up outside. The chairs themselves can be washed down with a hose. A blower or broom will scoot the plant debris and dust out from under the old wooden chairs, which have no weird circular footprint to collect trash. And though I may need to bring the rockers in when the wind comes up, those nesting chairs can stay on the back porch through all but a high gale.

Five hundred bucks is a chunk I don’t like to part with. But I’ve got the money, thanks to teaching two sections in the summer, and thanks to my fourth course making this fall. It it’s not like the purchase was a whim: this is something I’ve been thinking about for over a year. I’ve wanted to upgrade to fake wicker out there, and I’ve also known I couldn’t afford to do it at regular retail prices.

The end of a season is the best time to look for sales like this. Especially when someone else’s end of season is your beginning of season.

🙂

 

 

What Price Gasoline?

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Like everyone else in town, I’ve been putting off buying gas until the last possible minute. Wednesday evening, the Dog Chariot had what looked like a quarter of a tank left. Figured I could get to my Scottsdale breakfast meeting and back to the in-town Costco (cheapest known source of fuel in the city), and so at 6:30 headed east. Interminably east.

By the time I got to lovely mid-town Scottsdale, the gas gauge registered 1/8 of a tank. But the road was slightly inclined, and sometimes (I hoped) the unlevel miniscus in the tank would warp the reading. As I turned onto Scottsdale Road, I noticed a Sinclair station in the AJ’s shopping center at Lincoln and Scottsdale.

Once sprung from the breakfast meeting, I stopped in to pick up a gallon (worth 18 miles), which I knew would carry me into town, where I could fill up at the ghetto Costco.

Pulled up to the pump behind some rich guy who wasn’t even paying attention to how much gas was blasting into his tank, viewed the amazing prices (in Scottsdale gas station owners are not allowed to flaunt their prices with gigantamous roadside signs), backed out, and drove away.

I should’ve known. Sinclair????? There are no Sinclair stations in Arizona. This is some sort of artifact. And what do artifacts cost?

$4.50 a gallon, that’s what artifacts cost.

{gulp!} Could I be reading that right? Surely not. But I wasn’t sticking around to find out.

Drove west, drove west, drove west, drove…until the red idiot light came on, along about 36th street. Spotted a Chevron station at 16th street. Darted in and pumped 1.5 gallons of $3.79 gas. This would suffice to reach the pore folks’ neighborhood.

Drove south drove south drove south drove west some more.

At last I reach familiar territory and whip into the Costco gas station off 19th Avenue and Bethany Home, the lot nearly empty because the store isn’t open at this hour. Usually the line is halfway out to the road.

Hot dang: $3.67!

So it was that, compared to what I would’ve paid if I’d lived in lovely uptown Scottsdale, I saved $12.03 on 14.5 gallons of red-blooded Arabian gasoline.

I reflect: If I had a car that made 35 mpg, such as the Hyundai Sonata, I’d only have to fill up once a month. That would save me $58.72 a month.

Maybe it’s time to trade in the Dog Chariot. Whiz-Bang Financial Manager, having calculated my Vanguard Funds’ cost basis according to my father’s date of death, says I should have to pay zero taxes on the short-term corporate bond fund that was my car-purchase savings while I had a job. He thinks it’s stupid to pay $350 for a new timing belt on an 11-year-old junker (he predicts + + + operating costs). Accountant thinks it’s a toss-up: buy, don’t buy, do what you want…probably doesn’t make much long-term difference.

Hmmm… $58.72 a month = $704.64 a year saved on gasoline.

Cost of new Sonata less trade-in on the junk = around $20,000; 4% of twenty grand (allowable drawdown from invested retirement savings) = $800. Not exactly a toss-up, unless you factor in the $350 for the timing belt plus God only knows how much for other repairs.

Cost of 2011 second-hand Sonata through the credit union’s car-buying service, 22,000 miles: $19,900 – $3,000 = $16,990; 4% of $16,990 = $680. Very probably a positive. It’s not the color I want. It doesn’t have the interior trim I covet. But…there it is.

Still thinking…

Images:

Sinclair Oil advertisement, Menard, Texas.Billy Hathorn. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Hyundai Sonata. Shamelessly ripped off the Arizona State Credit Union‘s car-buying site. Click on this and a whole bouquet of pop-unders will populate your computer monitor.

Sticker Shock at the Grocery Store!

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So after class yesterday I made a quick run on the Safeway, figuring to pick up enough to tide me over for a week. Not figuring to damn near faint dead away at the price of groceries!

Paid $60 for about $30 worth of food. Only food: no cleaning goods, no paper goods, no personal products, no wine, no beer, no coffee, no tea, none of that. The checkout guy was actually about to charge me $80, until I produced the Safeway red card, by which Safeway promises to give me a fair price in exchange for the personal disinformation I enter on an application form. We could say, actually, that Safeway charged my deceased German shepherd, whose telephone number (oddly enough) is the same as that of Safeway’s regional headquarters, a mere $60 for $30 worth of food.

Two and a half bucks for a head of romaine. Yea, verily, $2.50 for a head of any kind of leaf lettuce, including the pricey hydroponic stuff! After some cogitation, I realized that a large package of prewashed baby lettuce was cheaper by the ounce than a tough old head of clean-it-and-cut-it-yourself romaine. A dollar sixty-nine for a pound of apples (I got one, count it, (1), Jonagold apple at a bargain price of $1.49.

For Cassie, I found chicken hindquarters at 99 cents/pound, no “EXTREME VALUE!” since they’re full of bones. I’ll use the bones to make stock, of course. But still… Also got a package of “EXTREME VALUE!” boned pork for $1.59 a pound. These were the two cheapest items on the meat counters.

The pork, actually, looks pretty nice: it’s good and lean. Tonight I’ll cook it all up, have some of it for myself, and cut up the rest for Her Dogship. These two packages should last her about ten or twelve days. Assuming I refrain from eating much of it.

What sixty bucks bought was…

1 box of lettuce (large!)
1 bag frozen spinach
1 bag frozen mixed veggies
1 bag frozen bean/veggie/rice mixture
1 pound bacon
1 bunch fresh asparagus, about a pound
1 bunch green onions
1 head cabbage
3 bananas
1 cucumber
1 apple
32 ounces plain yoghurt
4.4 pounds pork
4.9 pounds chicken
1 package baking chocolate

Exclusive of meat for the Queen of the Funny Farm, this stuff is gonna last about a week or ten days, with luck. I have some fish and a couple small pieces of steak in the freezer, a lot of beans on the shelves, and enough cleaning supplies and toilet paper to last six months. If I don’t buy any more bacon this month, I might manage to go as much as two weeks without another grocery-store run. But I seriously doubt it.

My plan for this budget cycle is to wait until about two days before the cycle ends before making the monthly Costco run. Normally, I raid the Costco in the first day or two of the budget cycle. Because I’m about out of food and household supplies by then, I often spend upwards of $250 on this junket. Invariably some unexpected zap occurs shortly after that, making it difficult or impossible to stay on budget for the rest of the month. What I’d like to do this time is scrape along until the end of the month and then head for Costco, knowing at that time how much remains in the budget to spend. Otherwise, don’t go into Costco at all.

The theory, such as it is, proposes that one may be less likely to run out of money at the end of the month if one holds off on large routine shopping trips until the close of the budget cycle.

Now, it remains to be seen how well this theory does when tested by reality. However, I think I can eat out of the freezer and from relatively inexpensive purchases until pretty close to the ending day of this month’s budget cycle, which will be May 20. Today is April 28, a week into the current month, and this is the first grocery purchase I’ve made. Two more supermarket junkets would carry me through to the proposed month-end Costco run.

An end-cycle Costco spree would stock the larder for a good two to three weeks, delaying the need for much grocery shopping until more than halfway through next month. Thus that retiming of the Costco run could set me up to save a little on groceries, because I’d make fewer trips to supermarkets than I’m having to do this month. The problem is, I’ll be very surprised if, in a month when housekeeping supplies run low, it would be possible to stay much under $380 at Costco.

Just now I have $501 left in the cycle that started April 21. Assuming the two projected grocery-store trips also cost around $60 apiece, I spend another $55 or $60 on gasoline, I don’t get my hair done, I don’t go out to eat, and no little surprises pop up, that should leave around $321 for the proposed May Costco raid.

Sounds like a lot, eh? But last month I spent $362.10 at Costco, not counting the gas purchases. The previous month: $394.70. The month before that: $399.43. So, if that expenditure drops to $321, it’ll be a noticeable improvement.

Can it be done? Sure, if I don’t buy any booze. I buy almost all my wine at Costco; by the time you factor in a tax rate of almost 10 percent, that comes to around fifty bucks a month.

$362 – 50 = $312

Well within the desired range.

😀

If you don’t want to spend money in stores, stay out of stores!

Image: Store aisle. No artist given. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Joy of Ethnic Markets

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Lenten thanks, Day 34

Great idea, God, to make us all different. Thanks for all the differences that human beings come in. Wellllll…except maybe for Them Republicans. 😉

Mwa ha ha! Calm down, little heffalumps: it’s a joke! Even God has a sense of humor. Oh, what the heck: maybe especially God has a sense of humor. She’d have to…it’s the only explanation for life on earth.

Yesterday I went up to the Ranch Market, an ethnic grocery store that replaced the old, crummy Fry’s, which some time ago fled the threatened lightrail construction. It’s a nice, compact supermarket, unabashedly Mexican. Walk in the front door and you’re greeted by light-hearted, catchy salsa music; check out and all you’ll hear in line is Spanish.

I love stores like this. Perused the fine selection of peppers, plantains, pork cut especially for posole, fresh-made tortillas, open bins of red, black, peruano, and pinto peans…yeah! Their pasillos were gorgeous. Definitely will be back for some of those. In the meantime, though, I went there specifically in search of some inexpensive meat for the little dog. As grocery prices have ballooned, the chicken and on-sale beef I’ve been buying have gone way out of reach, so I’ve begun looking for ways to get a grip on the food bills. One way is to buy cheaper, lower-grade meat for the hound.

In fact, they had rather little “lower-grade” meat. Most of what was on offer looked fresh and of fairly high quality. And cost. Finally I came across some skinned, boned chicken thighs: $1.99 a pound.

Not great, as prices go, but better than anything else I’ve seen lately.

Well, I just opened up the package to set the meat on the grill, there to cook over the lowest heat possible. What came out was not little three-bite pieces of thigh meat, but great big chunks of dark meat. Each piece is as large as a small steak.

Whaaa?

These aren’t thighs. What they’ve done is they’ve boned and skinned an entire leg plus most or all of the back quarter. Each piece equals most of the meat on a dark-meat quarter-chicken!

Yum!

That dog isn’t getting all of this. Whipped up a nice garlic vinaigrette with a bit of anchovy, rubbed that over the surface of one piece, and topped it with some herbes de provence. The whole mess of meat—enough to feed Cassie for almost a week and me for tonight and maybe tomorrow noon—is now slowly grilling over 200-degree heat.

How convenient to have this nifty Mexican market within walking distance!

Way over on the west side there’s another great ethnic store, the westside outlet of Lee-Lee, an awe-inspiring Asian market. Asian and Pacific, actually. This outfit organizes its aisles by country of origin: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Arabic, Hawaiian, Latin American… OMG! This is the place to buy curries of any and all descriptions. The produce department defies belief. And you can pick out a live fish for your dinner. Prices are far lower than ordinary supermarkets, and you’ll find foods you never even heard of.

If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with some ethnic markets, don’t be too shy to check them out. And if you’re even more lucky and have a friend of that ethnicity, don’t go alone!

🙂

Images:

Banana flower. Derivative work: Muhammed Mahti Karim. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Mangosteen. KayEss. GNU Free Documentation License.

Keep? Or Take It Back?

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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?