Experimenting with expiration

In my ongoing experimentation with "expired" milk, this morning I ate a bowl of cereal with milk that is six days past its expiration date. I drank a little in a cup beforehand, so I wouldn't ruin the cereal in case the milk was sour. But it wasn't.

Reducing complexity, reducing price

After assembling candy bags for 38* kids’ birthday parties over the years, I‘ve finally figured out a way to simplify the process: I buy exactly what I need for each treat bag from the bulk candy section at Meijer. For our son’s 12th birthday last weekend, I filled 14 treat bags with eight pieces of candy each for a total of 112 pieces. The cost: $6.61.

I’m fairly certain that’s less than what I usually spend on bagged candy, though I don’t have enough data for a direct cost comparison. But in this case, I’m more excited about reducing the complexity than I am about reducing the cost. I’ve always hated standing in the candy aisle, studying how many pieces were in each bag, trying to come up with a workable configuration.

The breakdown:**
28 holiday peanut butter cups (2 per bag) .... $1.37
14 Smarties sweet tarts ...................................$.32
14 Laffy Taffy .................................................$.61
28 small Hershey‘s candy bars (2 per bag) ...$2.29
14 Tootsie Pops..............................................$1.21
14 gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins .............$.81
Total cost ........................................................$6.61

*This figure would be substantially higher, with three of our four kids now in the double digits age-wise, but two of our daughters usually have a combined party because their birthdays are only two days apart.
**I bought one extra piece of each type of candy, just in case I miscounted or otherwise came up short. So the $6.61 figure is actually for 126 pieces of candy.

Stretching our food-drive dollars

Thanks to my artificial generosity generator (see also known as our charity fund, see "The Generosity Generator," posted Nov. 25), we now shop for food-drive items rather than simply scanning the pantry for cans of vegetables no one likes. It’s a liberating feeling we‘re still getting used to, and my daughter Rowan and I on a recent food-drive hunt found ourselves drawn to the antithesis of the dented and the dark: a sunny yellow box of Cheerios, a cheery package of Kraft mac’n cheese.

We kept our price-conscious lenses on -- we want to be good stewards of the charity fund, after all -- and in looking over other sale cereals at Walgreen’s that day we found
a bright yellow box of Golden Grahams that came with the possibility of a $5, $10 or even $20 cash card inside.

We were loving the idea of converting $2.50 into a fun food source that might then yield its own cash donation. It reminded me of the time we bought chicken dinner tickets to support our son’s baseball league, and then, not wanting to deal with all those yucky chicken bones, donated the tickets to a food bank.

Or pledging to public radio when there‘s a matching campaign going on. (Though because that‘s a normal feature of that type of fund-raising, it’s not nearly as satisfying as crafting your own charitable twofer.)

See, it really can happen

So a few hours after I wrote that last post about keeping money from falling out of your pocket, I reached into my coat pocket at Dollar General only to discover the two dollar bills I thought I’d crumpled up in there were missing. When I went out to the van afterward, I found one of them just inside the van door, waiting to tumble out onto the ground. The other one was, inexplicably, lying by the gas pedal. I guess I’d been shoving both my cell phone and my change into my left jacket pocket, and at some point when I pulled out the phone, I dislodged those bills.

‘Stripped’ tips No. 1 and No. 2

Anyone who’s read these blog entries is likely to notice that I tend to ruminate on the hidden meaning of even the smallest actions. (See yesterday’s post). I don‘t apologize for that, because I believe there is something to be gleaned from even the thinnest slice of the most ordinary life. But just to break things up a bit, I‘m going to try to force myself to offer some tips that are stripped of excessive commentary.
So:
1. Don’t carry change in the same pocket as your car keys. You’re likely to spill a coin or two in the process of pulling out your keys.
And, conversely:
2. A good place to find coins (and even, occasionally, folded-up paper money) is along the yellow lines in parking lots, near where the driver’s door would be.
I once challenged myself to “find” money every day for a month, and it wasn’t as hard as you might think. I didn’t change my routine; I just paid more attention to my surroundings.

Is there beauty in thrift?

I think I may have found a symbol to represent this blog.

It’s an image from a moment of desperation far too insignificant for a screenplay, or even the most tedious memoir. Yet I can’t get it out of my mind. I like to think it’s an example of the beauty that can sometimes be found in thrift.
Let me connect the dots as briefly as I can: We were hosting a yard sale several weeks back, and managed to stay fairly busy despite the fact I hadn’t gotten around to putting up any signs. (I had, however, put an ad in the paper, and our three-tent circus was easily visible from the highway.)

Around midday we had a lull, though, and this made Uncle Rick, who was out of work (and had hauled over three trailer’s worth of “inventory”), understandably anxious. He began to follow me around, fretting about the sign problem, as I located cardboard and a couple cans of spray paint that were too far gone to be of any use.
Finally I found a squirt bottle of the kids’ craft paint and a brush. I was poised over the cardboard, brush in hand, when I realized I didn’t have anything to squirt the paint onto. I dribbled some paint directly onto the cardboard, but it was clear that wasn’t going to work very well. A ruined sign would only extend Uncle Rick’s misery, not to mention my own. Without really thinking about it, I picked up the only thing within reach: a large oak leaf. It held the paint perfectly, as if it were designed for just that purpose. More importantly, it provided an exit to that particular microdrama.

It was, at that moment, the perfect fusion of form and function.

Uncle Rick and I didn’t discuss the aesthetic merits of the leaf, mostly because he was in such a hurry, hustling the signs away before the paint was dry. I tend to think he appreciated the concept, or would have, if he hadn’t been distracted. He’s the sort of guy who’s always coming up with unusual solutions to real-world problems -- a skill that was no doubt enhanced by growing up in a family that didn’t have much money. (He’s currently incorporating this skill into a home-based repair shop; Uncle Rick is not one to stay idle, or unemployed, for long.)

This doesn’t mean that the next time I paint something I’m going to track down an oak leaf as part of the process. (Though I would love to find some use for all the leaves we have around here.) Besides, it wasn’t even an act of frugality so much as desperation.

But I like to think that a frugally trained mind is better able to spot solutions like that one -- to perceive that a coat hanger can be untwisted into a piece of wire, if you happen to need one, or that the plastic mat for the kids’ Twister game could be (and has been, in our house) used as an emergency birthday-party table cloth.

Minds trained to look for solutions in stores have a harder time envisioning paint puddling in a leaf like so much dew.

A solution to a coffee conundrum

So the other day I’m at work, and as usual I’ve drained the coffee in my travel mug and want another cup. Maybe two. So I go over to the office coffeepot, only to discover we’re out of coffee filters.

I was checking my pockets to see if I had fifty cents for a cup of vending machine coffee when I noticed a roll of industrial-grade paper towels on the counter. I tore off a couple of pieces, nestled them in the filter basket, and in the time it would’ve taken me to walk downstairs to the vending machine I was pouring myself a better tasting brew at a fraction of the cost.*

*The “cost” amounts to contributing a can of coffee every so often.