Category: Uncategorized

I had a problem with my website and was not as vigilant about backups as I generally am with my laptop.

It is going to take some time to get this site back up to speed – time I really don’t have. So, this is like a third level priority. Goodie.

I was reading a discussion board recently where someone was complaining how expensive knitting was as a hobby, and quoted a price of $75 in materials for a sweater, saying that was really an expensive sweater.

Retail? Not really. At least, not for the good, well-constructed stuff of good materials. Hell, a Dale of Norway authentic Norwegian sweater costs over $300, and I have never spent anywhere close to that in materials for a garment I’ve made.

That being said, I’ve also never walked into a department store and dropped $75 on a sweater in my life!

So, is knitting an expensive hobby?

Certainly it can be. If you’re buying the Martian spidersilk yarn dyed with crushed rubies, yeah, it’s going to be expensive. Me? Wool of the Andes for many of my projects. Or even Lion Brand’s Fisherman’s wool for bulky projects. You’re still looking at way under $50 for most sweaters. Since I expect at least ten years of wear out of a sweater, I don’t feel like that’s really a poor investment.

And the perception that acrylics or acrylic blends are automatically cheaper is quite inaccurate. Wool-ease, a common alternative to 100% wool yarn , is actually a bit more expensive than my usual Wool of the Andes. In doing the math, Wool of the Andes is actually cheaper. $2.26/100 yards for Wool of the Andes v. $2.29/100 yards for the Wool Ease acrylic blend. That’s a no-brainer for me, who actually prefers to knit in 100% wool. A sweater for me runs around 1350 yards, so you’re looking at a little over $30 for a sweater.

Me? Since it takes me a bit over 40 hours to make a sweater, you’re looking at less than a dollar an hour for entertainment, and I get a garment that I can expect to last me into my mid-fifties that fits me better, is unique, and costs me less than I am likely to find in a department store.

For me, it’s worth it and then some. I assure you I drop many times the amount I spend on knitting materials for books, audiobooks and my Netflix account! You who have cable TV with its millions of channels? I bet your spend even more than I do on other forms of entertainment that do not give you anything tangible at the end.    

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* I could count Internet with some legitimacy, but I don’t. It’s a necessary business expense.

I used to shop at warehouse stores more often than I do these days. I’d let my membership lapse. But when I got into bulk cooking again, buying in bulk started to make more sense, so the family renewed the membership. I’d gotten used to one-stop shopping for a lot of stuff, and there are things that warehouse stores are great for. Meat is usually multiple dollars a pound cheaper. That alone makes it worth it to me to have the membership, even if I don’t buy anything else there.

Of course, I do buy other things there, but it does drive me a little crazy that there are definitely things warehouse stores aren’t good for at all. If you cook from scratch, eat anything even vaguely “ethnic”, or don’t eat a lot of junk food, you’re not going to be able to do most of your shopping there!

This is a list of things I regularly use that I can’t/shouldn’t get at my local warehouse store:

Produce – Now, I do eat a lot of produce. But my household only has three people. Three pounds of grapes is going to go bad before we finish them. Ditto lettuce or any of the more fragile veggies. If we had more people in the house or more than one fruit addict, it would be different.

Spices – You’d think things like spices would be an ideal thing for a warehouse store, but unless you can find it in an Italian mix, don’t count on being able to find it there in my local store! I mean, nutmeg? They didn’t have nutmeg??? Honestly! I get that they might not have a good garam masala, but not nutmeg? Psychos…

Pasta – Another thing you’d think would be awesome for a warehouse store. It’s $0.17/lb more expensive in the warehouse store than it is in my local grocery store.

International-type food – Coconut milk? Green chilies? Refried beans? Forget it.

Dry beans – This is where I roll my eyes and say, “Come on, people!” You’d be hard put to find something more shelf stable that sells well in bulk. (Yes, yes, I know, convenience food makes more profit for them, and there are plenty of people who find cooking with dried beans too damn much trouble)

Old-fashioned Oatmeal – I think the instant stuff is nasty and mushy, but that’s all they sell there, and even the oatmeal is hard to find.

Seltzer water – Yes, yes, buying fizzy, flavored water isn’t exactly frugal. But a majority of the household likes it better than soda. It was available in the warehouse store, but more expensive than we could get in the grocery store.

Short grain rice – I like rice you can use to make onigiri. Since even most grocery stores in my area only carry it as expensive “sushi rice”, I don’t sweat this much. There’s a co-op that sells it in bulk and sells it as inexpensively as bulk rice is often sold in other stores. (Other forms of rice are quite a good deal, and their variety actually wasn’t bad otherwise).

Plain yogurt – Everything they had was flavored and sported pink ribbons. ‘Nuff said.

Oddly enough, they do carry flour and even the brand of flour I insist on using. They also carried the yeast I prefer. Canned goods were indeed cheaper, and though we don’t use a lot of them, I do at least buy crushed tomatoes. Paper goods, plastic bags and many other things were also cheaper to get there, so we did.

The point is that while you could argue that warehouse stores are awesome and cheaper than regular grocery store, it’s easy to get caught up in the greed and buying in bulk. So, how do you work a warehouse store to truly save money?

• Keep a price book

  You can do this in several ways. I use a shopping database on my phone (does anyone but me mourn the loss of the PDA Handishopper? That was awesome) and keep the price I can generally expect to pay for items in the database. This means it’s easy for me to tell whether or not a particular item is a good buy or not. Some people just remember that sort of thing, but I don’t, hence the database.

  If you don’t use a handheld device, you could make a price book in a spreadsheet (I’m presuming you have a computer if you’re reading this, and there are free spreadsheet solutions out there. Google Docs and Open Office both have spreadsheets that can more than handle this) for items you usually buy and print out the prices along with the items you want to get on that particular shopping trip.

• Shop to a list

  Impulse buys are Satan’s own toenails when it comes to warehouse stores, as you’ll have all sorts of gadgety goodness and gastronomic greed pushed at you when you are in the store. Resist! Think about what you want and need in advance and stick to it!

• It’s not cheaper if you’re not going to use it up/will have to overuse something before it goes bad.

  You know how I don’t buy produce at a warehouse store? Throwing away lettuce mush isn’t saving any money, but neither is eating a whole box of Clementines in a couple of days, or using way too much dish detergent because you have that huge bottle of it. If buying in quantity has you being careless about what you use because you have lot of it, you’re probably spending more money, not less.

The real takeaway? Warehouse stores are an awesome savings tool if you show self-discipline. Otherwise? Forget it. They’re not worth it.

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you” – Henry Rollins

I had someone say that they wished they were like me, self-employed, so they would have time to write a novel.

Now, I agree that in many ways I am not as time-strapped as some.  I have a child, but that child is man-sized and as capable of doing anything that needs doing around the house as I am up to and including shopping for food or cooking.  I have a husband who also believes in streamlining household routine so that it doesn’t interfere with his projects, either.  I am self-employed, but it doesn’t exactly give me the extra time to work on stuff for which I have no direct client or market.  I mean, bills do need to get paid, and to date I’ve earned enough writing fiction to buy one pizza.  But, the last time I wrote a novel, I had a full-time job in an office I had to commute to.

More than that?  I know for a fact my current favorite writer (she’s won Hugos, gotten on best-seller lists and all that smack) has a “real job” in an office that she has to commute to.  Chances are good that many of your favorite writers have “real jobs”, too.  At the midlist level, writing doesn’t pay all that well, especially if you’re worried about having health insurance.

But it’s more than that.  There was a time when I had all day, really, no-kidding, the whole day to write.  I often didn’t.  I balanced the checkbook (this was before we had an internet connection), I did origami (my husband could always tell a bad writing day because he’d have to wade through origami figures to get to my desk to say hello), and oh my word the house was never so clean as when I just didn’t feel like writing (this is still true.  I use cleaning house as a procrastination method more often than I like to admit).

Later on we had a kid, and after that, the household living situation changed so that I never had all of any day to do anything, ever.

It was then I learned that a certain level of “now or never” was a great boost to productivity for me.  I needed to schedule time.  I needed to threaten the household that I was writing and if they disturbed me for anything less than blood or fire during that scheduled time, the fangs were going to come out.

I learned to take myself, my goals and my writing a little more seriously.  I could not make my household respect my writing time if I, myself, did not respect my writing time.

I learned not to be such a damned special snowflake artiste about writing.  During my origami period, I had to have my perfect little routine before I could write.  I would arise, make myself a mug of espresso, turn on my writin’ music on the CD changer, and go to the computer (an Apple IIe at the time) and write in perfect, blissful solitude.  A knock on the door would throw me.  If my husband had a day off for some reason and spoke to me before I got to the computer, it would throw me.  Knowing I had an appointment in the afternoon would throw me.

You get the point.  I permitted the situation to be far too fragile to bloody well get anything done.

Oh sure, I still like to have a mug of something hot when I write.  I still hate it if someone tries to talk to me while I’m writing.  I like to have my writin’ music when I’m working.  But I can write on a plane, or on a train.  I can write in the morning when I first get up, or in the evening before I go to bed.  I’ve trained myself that routines and locations to create the mood are so much frippery.  As Gurney Halleck would say, “Mood is for cattle or making love…”  Writing is work time.

It doesn’t even need to be a lot of time.  I don’t write for hours without getting up.  For the most part, I write in 20 minute chunks in hyperfocus, get up, wander around, check my email, lather, rinse repeat until I’ve made my daily word count.  While I have more time than some, 20 minutes a day of hyperfocus writing still gets stuff done.  Maybe not as quickly as one would like, but if the writing is the important part, at least you spend a chunk of time really practicing your art.

‘Course, writing is no more compulsory than knitting or weightlifting.  If it’s not really important to you, it isn’t.  But if it is respect that and give yourself at least a little time even to write something utterly awful.  Hey, if musicians are allowed to be crap sometimes when practicing, so re writers!

Okay, some follow up. I had to go question by question to tabulate the responses as Survey Monkey doesn’t let you filter responses on a free account.

Out of 100 people, 18 people self-identified as a Christian.  11 of them had read the Bible in its entirety, giving us an approximate “Yes” percentage of 61%.

Now here’s the funny part:

A slightly larger percentage of non-Christians who took this survey had read the Bible in its entirety.  However, if you take a look at the bar chart from yesterday’s post, you’ll notice a lot more people claimed to be non-Christian than Christian.  I am not a statistician, and the survey population was only 100 people, but I am wondering how statistically significant that 5% would be considered.   I am genuinely surprised at how close the responses are.

First off, this is an almost textbook example of a poorly-written survey that does not actually answer the question asked, even though it does give some interesting data.   Kiddiewinks, spend more time in the design phase!  (I’m always telling my students this in various classes, and here I am not doing it.  I hang my head in shame).

Some friends of mine and I were discussing religion when one of them mentioned that he had never met a single self-identified Christian who had read the entire Bible.  I found that such an odd thing to say, since we were both reared in the same denomination and the practice was encouraged in the church I attended as a youngster, that I started asking around.  The answers I got became a little complex, so I designed this rather simplistic survey.  Unfortunately, as designed, it cannot answer the question originally discussed:  Is it really unusual for Christians to read the Bible cover to cover?

Even though it doesn’t fulfill the original intent, the answers are interesting nonetheless.  It does seem a lot of non-Christians have indeed read the entire Bible.

Curious, that…

Michigan is proposing a law that says that foster children can only have clothing bought from second hand stores.

I get that the intent is to save money during budget cuts. I totally get that one needs to save money. I bought second-hand clothing for my children on a pretty frequent basis, and it’s an order of magnitude cheaper to do so.

Here’s the thing:

Buying clothes from second hand stores, while something I’m utterly in favor of on principle make a lousy mandate. You cannot count on getting something the right size in good enough condition when you’re shopping there. You have to have time and be patient. Oh, and shoes that fit properly and are in good enough condition? Forget it. Outwear? When you’re lucky, and you plan ahead to get the coat in June, it can work out great. I got my son a great down jacket for less than ten bucks that way once. In October? Fuggetaboutit.

Foster care situations are urgent situations. The child might need clothing right away. The child might be of a size that one can rarely find second hand clothes for. There might not be the necessary outerwear available.¹

The individual proposing the bill comments that he wore lots of hand-me-downs, so what’s the beef?

Well, Sen. Caswell, I wore hand-me-downs from time to time, too. I was even pretty fond of some of them and excited to get them because it they were kinda cool. That doesn’t change the fact that mandating used clothing, while cheaper, has way too many gaps in the system where kids who are already falling through the cracks are going to fall harder.

I’m all for encouraging it as a principle, don’t get me wrong. But if I have a child in my care that needs a warm coat, that kid gets a warm coat no matter where I had to buy it. Just sayin’.

¹ Being expensive and long-lasting, really good outerwear often goes first at second hand stores in cold climates like Michigan.

I got kicked out of the pool today. Lightning. It was about five minutes before I would have gotten out anyway, so I called it good. I might have gotten in as much as 800 yards. Maybe.

It wasn’t a hard-core workout today anyway. I lifted yesterday. Remember how I was in that room of big, beefy men and feeling self-conscious about it? Well, true to Noël form, I lifted far too heavy to compensate. I’m very, very sore this morning.¹

Oh, and it’s chilly and damp, so it’s the joint thing on top of muscle soreness. No, today was not a day I’d be getting my orca on.

Here’s where the whole “gotta improve all the time” would be kicking me in the ass right now. Today was not much of a workout due to several factors. If I were completely focused on constant improvement, this workout would have been discouraging to the point of upsetting. I don’t like being thwarted in my goals. I’d be plotting how to make up for the bad workout, and making myself nuts about it.

The reality is that Life Happens. It is less important that each workout be a linear improvement than it is that I show up consistently. I have other things in my life that deserve more intense focus than lifting heavy stuff sometimes, or getting my heart rate up. I mean, really, it’s on par with evaluating bowel movements! They need to happen, yes, but past that? Unless it’s a serious factor in an illness, you don’t need to give it that much attention.

¹Yes, I broke Rule One.

*Ellie was my maternal grandmother, and paid an odd amount of attention to bodily functions.