Half Changed World

This week we did only one shopping trip, spending $58.56, to bring us to a total for the month so far of $286.95.  Then we went out of town for three days, taking the bus to New York.  I don’t know how to account for that in this experiment.  On the one hand, my brother and parents fed us several meals, which helped out the budget.  On the other hand, we spent about $60 on restaurant meals… 

So why are we finding it relatively easy to stay within the Thrifty Food Plan, when by all accounts, people on Food Stamps are struggling badly to cope with rising food prices?  My guess is that there are several things going on:

• First, most people on Food Stamps are working, and thus receive less than the maximum monthly benefit.  In theory, Food Stamps aren’t supposed to pay for all their food — they’re supposed to use some of their cash income for food as well.  But low-income families have many other demands on their income (if I remember correctly, about half are spending 50 percent or more of their income just on housing).  Food is the easiest part of the budget to squeeze, particularly if you’re willing to invest the time in going to food pantries.
• Second, we have a car, and so can travel to low-cost supermarkets and warehouse stores.  And we can have enough cash to buy large quantities when they’re on sale.
• Third, we’re eating very little meat, and relatively little processed food.  We often make a big batch of pancakes or waffles on the weekend, and reheat them for breakfast all week, which is a lot cheaper than breakfast cereal.

My current dilemma: if we let the kids stay up late because they don’t have to go to school in the morning, the window of time between when they go to bed and when I fall into bed becomes increasingly narrow.  When am I supposed to blog?

Just before bed, D showed us the digital slideshow of the first grade year. Overall, I’d say he had a good year.  I don’t think he was challenged, but he didn’t seem to be bored either.  He made friends, improved his self-control, decided that he likes science, and improved his writing.

The school said that you can submit letters about your child’s "learning style" to help them make class placements for next year.  We’re not sufficiently hooked into the parents network to know who the second grade teachers are, and if there are code words that we should be using to try to avoid certain ones.  (And yes, I sometimes think that I’d be more hooked in if I were the at-home parent, but I’m not sure that’s really true.)  So, I guess we’ll have to actually write about his learning style. The main thing I’d like him to learn is persistence through difficulty, and I sure don’t know how one goes about teaching that.  So far, video games seem to be our best bet.

We lost power in yesterday’s storms and didn’t get it back until this afternoon.  We’ve got a big branch down in the back yard, but since it didn’t hit the house, we’re grateful. 

This did show me that we’re not as prepared for "disaster" as I’d like — while we had lots of candles and flashlights, we didn’t have batteries for our big lamp, and this morning, we couldn’t find our battery operated radios to find out whether the schools would be opening on time.  (Wound up sitting in the car to listen to the radio there.)  We have lots of supplies, but I’m not quite sure where they are…

Didn’t want anyone to worry — I’m still alive.  Just decided that I needed to prioritize things like getting a reasonable amount of sleep for a while…

One of the sections of The World Without Us that caught my attention is the description of the gigantic collection of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific ocean.  It was running around in the back of my head last week when I read the NY Times article about how Ireland has essentially stopped using disposable shopping bags, driven in large part by a 33 cent per bag tax.  Meanwhile, D has been learning about recycling at school, and I’ve been trying to use that as a starting point for a broader lesson about the environment (and turning off lights when you leave the room, please).

So we’ve decided to see if we can break the plastic bag habit.  We’ll keep track of how many we take in each month, and see how low we can get the number.

I understand that giving up plastic grocery bags isn’t going to save the world.  And there are plenty of things that involve plastics that I have no intention of giving up.  But it strikes me that using disposable plastic bags in no way improves my quality of life.  It’s just a habit.  And one that we can choose to break.

We’ve got some canvas bags already, and I went ahead and ordered some folding ones that I can keep in my purse so I always have one with me.  We’ll see how it goes.

Updated:

So far, so good.  We’ve had some slip-ups, but have been using them more often than not (and often forgoing the plastic bag even when we didn’t bring the grocery bags).

Jo(e) has a great post up about reusable bags.  She argues that the problem is that they’re so convenient that they get used for everything BUT groceries.  But if you buy enough of them, they become ubiquitous, and you stop having to worry about what you did with them.

The new Apple laptops sure are gorgeous.  I can’t justify a new laptop right now, but they’re sweet enough that I may finally make the jump over to the Mac world with my next computer. Of all the computers I’ve owned, I’ve never had a Mac, although my first computer was an Apple IIc.

In general, I don’t think of myself as an early adopter. I can (and do) ooh and ah over the iPhone, but my actual cell phone is about 4 years old, and running on pre-paid minutes from t-mobile — $100 buys you 1000 minutes, which lasts me for about a year.

But we did get a Wii the first day it went on sale. And we were early adopters of TiVo — although we got it because a friend
had bought it, and was then moving to Ireland, so he sold the machine
to us.

I think the distinction for me is whether a new gadget does something fundamentally new and different, or if it’s an improvement over something I already have.  If it’s the later, and what I have is working, I find it hard to justify forking over the money for the latest and greatest…

That said, our big family holiday gift this year was that we upgraded our tivo to
HD.  TiVo successfully hooked us by allowing people to transfer their lifetime plans to a new machine — but only for a limited period.  I feel manipulated, or something. 

So, are you an earlier adopter?  Or do you never pay attention to the hot new thing?  For everything, or only some things?  And if you’re selective, how do you decide?

T and I were astonished last summer to notice a "made in China" label on a bottle of bubble solution.  This is a statement about how mindbogglingly cheap international shipping is, given that even in the US, it can’t cost more than pennies to make a plastic bottle, put a label on it, and fill it with water and soap.

Given that, how on earth is an American manufacturer supposed to compete?  I want to talk about the couch that we just bought, because it offers one answer to that question.

The couch is made by Carolina Chair.  This is a small, family-run company.  (Seriously, when I asked Cathy in customer service what something would cost, she said "let me ask my brother and get back to you.") They’re surviving in the era of globalization by:

• making a high quality product
• cutting out the middleman — they only sell direct to customers
• cutting out inventory — every piece is custom made, and they don’t start making it until you place your order.
• providing incredible customer service — truly friendly and helpful — they even emailed us a photo of our couch in their manufacturing plant. 

I found them via googling for a love seat/chaise combo because the ones we were looking at from Pottery Barn were really just a bit too big to fit in our living room.  When I emailed them, they were quite happy to make one just the right size for us, in the fabric of our choice.  (Ours is the 3rd one down on this page.  Yes, it’s very red.)  It made me a little nervous to order something like a couch online, but this Wall Street Journal article reassured me.  So we went ahead, feeling good about supporting an American company.

And we’re really happy with the couch.

Happy New Year!  I was offline for a while because we took the boys to Florida to see their grandparents and aunt.  Only had dial-up access, so I didn’t even keep up with the comments, let alone try to post. 

The drive was hard, but the boys were very well behaved, and overall it was a good trip.  The weather was perfect, we didn’t try to do too much, and D was even adventurous enough to go boogie boarding.  (Remember, this was the kid who once refused to even walk on sand.)  We spent one fun but exhausting day at the house of the Mouse, but also spent 3 hours playing around at Sugar Sand Park (highly recommended if you’re in the area) and hunting for the letterbox in the nearby nature trail.

The grandparents were somewhat more restrained than in previous years on the gift-giving front, but the boys’ rooms still look like a toy bomb exploded all over the place.  I had a blinding flash of the obvious insight this afternoon that while their rooms have a good bit of storage space, most of it is too high for them to reach.  So I think we need some more low bins.  And we’ll encourage them to have a yard sale in the spring to clear out some of the stuff that they don’t play with any more.

Alison Bechdel has a new DTWOF strip up about the solstice and I may never be able to complain about a dark midwinter again without thinking of it.

Hanukkah is early this year, and I’m not quite mentally ready for it.  I’m looking forward to our annual latke-fest on Saturday, but haven’t done much in way of prep.  Hopefully the snow we’re supposed to get tomorrow will be gone by then — our house is on a quite steep hill, and it’s already getting a little treacherous with the leaf piles everywhere.

We’ve got almost all the gifts for the boys, although I’m going to be late sending most of mine to my family.  For the first night, we gave D a guitar (and the promise of lessons in the new year) and N a Super Fort. These are their big presents from us; for the rest of the holiday, they’ll be getting things ranging from books and gardening tools to slippers and umbrellas.  And we’re following my family’s custom of having one night’s present be for tzedakah — I’ll have them make a selection from Heifer‘s catalog.  I got T the Switzerland expansion of Ticket to Ride.

Since I’m sort of frazzled, blogging is feeling more like another thing on the to-do list than something I’m really excited about.  So I’ll post when I’m in the mood, and not when I’d rather veg out and do something mindless.