Coffee heat rising

Funny is one year old!

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Today is Funny about Money’s first anniversary. I started this blog one year ago today. It wasn’t great at the outset, but I think it’s improved over time.

Because I started itas an idle lark in Apple’s iWeb, it suffered from that program’s weaknesses, one of which is that iWeb doesn’t have an effective way to track traffic and its code is too arcane and inaccessible to allow amateurs to install web-based traffic counters. So by the time I switched to WordPress last August, I had no idea how many people had visited the site and what pages they had seen; all I knew was that the home page had over 9,000 hits. Where visitors went before or after that is anyone’s guess. Since August 7, when the site went live at WordPress, Funny has had 37,800 discrete hits. That’s over 10,600 hits a month, which just amazes me.

Hands down, the most popular post was the one that described how to use olive oil as a hair conditioner. Posted on August 19, it still gets 30 to 40 hits a day! Who knew?

Olive oil is hot. As it were. The runner-up is usually Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser. The one on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out the highlights in your hair also gets several hits every day. Ah, blogger: thy name is vanity.

I don’t know that I could say which were my favorite posts.
Single in a Couples Culture got a lot of good feedback.
So did Is Frugality un-American?
I think Consumer Headaches: 15 Ways to Get Help was one of the site’s most useful posts. Well…except for the olive oil business, of course!
And I like the piece that explains how to make biweekly pay “fit” the realities of a bimonthly world by setting up a “pool” account and using it to fund piggy-banks that cover monthly expenses.
Home Inspections: Hire Your Own Craftsmen also went over well with readers.
Stealing from the Students is one of the best of many rants I published during the year. Later experience—episodes of plagiarism and plumb laziness—demonstrated that students recognize the administration’s cynicism toward them and take the understaffed and often pointless required courses about as seriously as the university seems to take them.
One of my favorite topics seems to be the cost of owning a pet…especially after I figured out that I’d spent over $48,000 on the German shepherd and the greyhound!
That notwithstanding, what did I do shortly after the shepherd’s demise? Oh yes.

Well, speaking of that expensive little friend, it’s after 10 a.m. and I haven’t fed her, nor have I started to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities.
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Adoration of the Wise Men, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Merry Christmas to all of you who observe it. And happy holidays to everyone!

Moments of Fame

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We have a new PF carnival out there and its very first edition is online: the DIY Jubilee at Financial Wellness Project. The carnival is still quite small, but I’m sure it will grow. Funny’s discovery that ashes will polish silver appears among the 10 selections. If you’re craving a big weekend job that will save you some bucks, check out Condo Blues’s elaborate how-to on sealing leaks in your ductwork. On a related topic, Heather at the Greenest Dollar discusses insulating your home. And if all that work leaves you craving some play, check out the kid-friendly DIY Christmas presents at More4Kids Family.

Back in the land of vast carnivals, Andy hosts the 184th Carnival of Personal Financeat Saving to Invest. He’s in Australia just now and kicks off the round-up with a photo of the Sydney Opera House. More pix of that amazing country follow. Here’s a useful reference for those who tweet:at Bible Money Matters, Peter lists 125 PF bloggers who haunt Twitter. Four Pillars has a lively discussion going about a pet peeve of mine, business owners who advertise their Christianity. BripBlap wonders if saving might be stupid…and after losing a fair amount of my shirt (and bra) in the market, I’m beginning to wonder, too. The real stupidity, IMHO, was in not seeing where the Bush Administration’s voodoo economics were taking us and so failing to prepare for recession as soon as Dubya and his puppetmasters took office. Speaking of planned obsolescence (which I suppose is what the two-term limit amounts to), Funny’s less political comment on the same appears in this carnival.

Dorian Wales has posted the 90th Carnival of Money Stories at The Personal Financier, where Funny’s rant about privacy-invading call center employees appears. SVB makes editor’s pick here, with a savvy list of ten things to do when you get laid off. StumbleForward.com writes on a subject that I haven’t seen discussed in any other PF blog: the timeshare scam. Author Christopher Holdheide describes several ways to get out of a timeshare…it ain’t easy! No Debt Plan discusses the comparative advantages of 30-year and 15-year mortgagesand comes up in favor of the 30-year plan.

The Festival of Frugality has jumped the pond for its 157th edition and landed at Miss Thrifty’s site. The highlight here is a gracious and beautiful video message from the Queen of England. After that we turn to the posts, headed up by an extremely interesting list of clues about cell phone usage from MobileMaven. At Budgets are Sexy, they’re figuring how to send the Mrs. through graduate school. Frugal Homemaker Plus is startled to learn that she’s single-handedly bringing down the world economy with her miserly frugal habits…she and all the rest of us cheapskates, eh? Speaking of miserly curmudgeons, Funny’s rant about clutter appears in this carnival.

This week’s Make It from Scratch Carnival appears at Adventures in the 100-Acre Woods. As usual, a lot of dangerously delicious recipes appear in this round-up. Uh oh…check (heh) out this close-to-authentic Czech potato salad. Believe I’ll make some of that today. Mary at Simply Forties suggests trying a duck for your holiday dinner—M’jihito and I did it for Thanksgiving, and I can testify that the results were well worth the effort. Almost Frugal Food posts five wonderful ideas for using leftover cranberry sauce…some of which look better than the original use. Funny’s series of recipes for Christmas dinner appears in this carnival.

The 44th Money Hacks Carnival is up Where Are You Now. Funny’s justification for hiring a couple of cleaning persons surfaces in this round-up. Scott Crawford at DebtGoal has an extremely interesting article about the possible unintended consequences of the pending credit-card reform regulations. Hm. We may all soon be paying for purchases with cash, check, or debit card. Dividends for Life discusses investment in long-term bonds and considers whether this is a good time to buy. Mr. Tough Money Love looks askance (far askance!) at Our Beloved Leaders’ strategy to combat the recession. And at a second site, Go to Retirement, the same author ruminates on the advisability of waiting till age 70 to collect retirement.

Volunteer!

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Lookit this! Among a long and wonderful list of plans to improve life in 2009, Master Your Card publishes a link to this amazing site, a “job bank” for people who want to volunteer.

You enter your location and your skill or your interest, and presto! Up comes a list of volunteer opportunities that look custom-tailored for you.

This is a fantastic tool. One of the reasons I don’t volunteer as much as I would like is that I have no idea who can use my skills or how to access organizations that I’d like to work with. Too often if you cold-call an outfit that’s not actively looking for volunteers, you get a cold shoulder, because they already have everyone they need or limit their choices to an in-group. Here you can find organizations that are advertising for people to join up.

When I entered “editor” and my city, SIX volunteer opportunities came back, two of them very interesting. Enter “gardening” and a long list of neat possibilities comes up, all over the Valley.

Don’t miss the rest of Master Your Credit Card’s piece…especially the video on how the boob tube works on your brain.

Real Wealth II

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Money. It’s beyond my ken today. A colleague who escaped to Maryland—a delightful man born about 20 years too late for me, darn it—sends a beautiful Christmas e-mail in response to the various moans and whines his friends (or at least, I) sent him a week or two ago, when he had the temerity to ask how folks are doing. In it, he suggests, through a Christina Rosetti poem, that although this may be the winter of our discontent, all is not lost. Then he enumerates all the blessings he and his family have experienced over the past year, complete with pictures..

• of his sister’s beautiful wedding
• of his sweetly pretty daughter’s senior-year exploration of the very fine schools to which she has applied
• of his and his wife’s 25th-year anniversary
• of good times with old friends of good times with new friends
• of the outcome of a Presidential campaign

Well, my friends. The world doesn’t seem to be skateboarding toward Hell, after all.

So let us take our eyes off the stock market, forget our job searches or our worry over tomorrow’s pending layoff, mourn not the lost annual bonus and the nonexistent raise and the trashed 401(k), laugh off the absurdity of academic and office politics, do not even think about our credit-card debt or (heaven forfend!) our budget, quit wondering how our nation will clean up the mess left by a decade’s misrule, and instead start counting pleasures and joys.

Today:

At Trader Joe’s I saw a handsome man (he, too, alas, born 20 years too late) and smiled at him. He smiled back, radiance signifying a born gentleman of the genuine variety, and I thought ah! Thank God my father isn’t here to throttle me for smiling at a Black man, and thank God our lives have changed so gloriously that at last a Black man can be President of the United States.

Later, as we all stood in the check-out line, another pale woman remarked on the beauty of his violet shirt, which he wore with a conservative tie, and I said to him, “So! That’s how you get women to smile at you.” He laughed and replied, “Must be! It surely can’t be me!” Confirming, we might say, one’s initial impression.

This month:

• Vicky C got rich on her yard sale and we met some fantastic people.
• I did not get laid off (yet):
• We had a spectacular sunset, which Mrs. Accountability caught on camera a great deal better than I did.

This year:

dcp_1692• My son said he loves living in the house we’re copurchasing. His roommate’s rent goes a long way toward covering his share of the amazing expenses the thing generates.
• Many good times were had with friends.
• An amazing new dog came into my life.
• Many beautiful things grew, all year round, in the desert.

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Tomorrow:

…is another day.

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

—Christina Rosetti

Two DIY mesh bag hacks

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You know those plastic mesh bags used to package some kinds of produce? Around here, lemons often come in this stuff. Potatoes come in a softer nylon-like mesh bag. Here are two handy things to make with the cast-off bags.

dcp_2280The relatively stiff plastic-like mesh makes a fine scrub pad. Some time back, I came across a household hint (forget where—sorry!) to the effect that you can fold or wad the stuff up and use it to scrub pans, including Teflon. This does work, but the pad tends to spring apart unless you take time to sew it together. One day, though, it occurred to me to drop a sponge inside the tube-like bag and tie a knot on either end. Voilà! A DYI scrub sponge!

Sponge-in-bag

The scrubber is a fairly gentle number—nowhere near as ferocious as a sponge with a green nylon scrubber attached. It doesn’t seem to scratch and isn’t great for heavy burned-on gunk, but it works fine for everyday clean-up. I cut off the label end of the nylon bag, shoved the sponge inside, tied knots on both ends, and trimmed off the extra mesh.

My washer drains into a utility sink, instead of straight into a drainpipe. This poses a potential nuisance: dog hair and lint could easily clog the little drain in the sink. You can buy sock-like strainer gadgets that you secure on the hose, but a) they’re kind of expensive given that b) they clog fast and can’t easily be cleaned and re-used.

Well. You know, those strainer things aren’t significantly finer than the mesh on a nylon or plastic produce bag. That’s r-i-i-g-h-t! All you need is a metal twist tie and a throw-away mesh bag to make a laundry hose strainer…for free.

dcp_2283Knot one end (or leave the sewn-on label in place), and thread the metal tie through the mesh near the other end. Pull the mesh “sock” over the end of the hose and secure it firmly with the twist tie.

I find this works well to catch dog hair, lint, and shredded forgotten shopping lists.

Do not, however, even think of putting this lashup on the end of a hose that fits directly inside the drainpipe. No. Only your plumber will thank you if you try that trick.

But if your hose drains into a sink—no problem!