Comments (1) On Feb. 22, I planted some seeds in newspaper pots in my living room. I started Bull Nose Bell Peppers, Brussel sprouts, lavender, rosemary and chamomile. In order to have some greens in a hurry, I also started a large porcelain pot with lettuce. Today, March 5, I have noticed that the peppers and Brussel sprouts are up! Yay!
Blurry picture, but I promise that it is leaf lettuce!
Yet another blurry picture, but they are baby brussel sprouts!
I don’t typically type emotional blatherings on this webpage, but I wanted to explain why I haven’t been on in about a week. I find my motivation for many of the things I enjoy starting to slide. However, tomorrow I will share with you things I have gotten done.
I hate my job. No, seriously. I found myself backsliding from apathy to animosity. Here I am, squarely in bitterness land. I don’t think I can continue to compromise my belief structure this way. It’s demoralizing to sell out my values everyday. And for what? A salary? Benefits? It is an abysmal waste of time to keep a job out of fear. To quote Dolly Freed’s father, “Sure, you have security, but the slaves on the plantation didn’t starve either.” Right now, I am supporting a system that is modeled from the Prussian model, designed to create workers and squelch any creative thought. We are schooling our children, not educating them. The length of adolescence keeps expanding, independent of any logical thought on the matter. Why should a parent of a college student think it’s acceptable to call a professor on the student’s behalf? Why would a twenty five year old law school student find it acceptable to renege on a rental contract because he “found a better deal’? Our population is largely becoming infantalized and shallow, only interested in clothing, gossip or sports. And why? Because we schooled them to be this way. A shallow populace is easier to control and manipulate, whether it be employees or citizens. Anymore, our most sucessful inventors and entrepeneurs are high school or college dropouts. Mind you, education is one of the most important processes; however, education is not the same as schooling. In my personal experience, most of the people I know who are intelligent and introspective are not graduates of college; some did not even graduate high school. Now, I do know people who are college graduates and have the aforementioned qualities, but I know many more college grads who are just as superficial and shallow as the “uneducated.” Education is a lifestyle choice which has absolutely nothing to do with school. An educated person is able to self-teach or find his own teacher. He is willing to try things and even fail, then get back up and do it again. Resilience is critical to education and sucess. Really, it’s just a matter of getting up one more time than you fall down.
All of these thoughts have been rolling around in my head for a while now. By and large, I have been rather apathetic to the body politik involved in school. However, I have been moving towards aggression, slowly but surely. For instance, a student threatened a teacher with bodily harm. As is procedure, the teacher wrote up the student, assuming that the necessary steps would be taken to remove the student from school. Nope. The school refused to adequately or effectively punish the student. The teacher had to go outside the school and press charges against the student. Now, the school is targeting the teacher because he “went outside the school.” It’s ludicrious. Teachers’ grades are examined for failure rates, though no one bothers to look at why the students are failing, largely because they refuse to do most of the work. Exclamations of “fuck this class” and “this class is bullshit” loud enough to disrupt the entire class will only get you one day of In school suspension, which by the way, has been reduced from being a full day to ending at 1pm, so that the administration can code the ISS as a time out instead of a full day suspension. It is so they can report to the state that the behavior problems are diminishing. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as it were, explaining my anger which is starting to seep out of my skin.
I am transforming from the cheerful employee to the sarcastabitch from hell. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a referendum, it is a request for higher taxes from our local taxpayers in order to fund projects. While the superintendent was pitching the referendum to the staff, because he wants us to call people to get them to vote for it, he said, “can you hear me?” Without thinking, I replied, “unfortunately.” Apparently, I said it loud enough to be heard four rows up from where I was sitting. I am having a harder time containing my anger at students who absolutely refuse to work, but then apologize for their behavior and want to know why their grade is bad. They will ask for help, after having been complete assholes. Somehow, they have been taught that you can get away with being a jerk, so long as you say “I’m sorry.”
On Thursday, the proverbial straw fell onto this camel’s back. I was teaching “The Speech to the Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry, the one featuring the immortal words “give me liberty, or give me death!” This brought about the concept of dying for honorable reasons. Nope, nothing is worth dying for or getting hurt. They would rather be alive under any circumstances, even slavery, because at least they would be alive. My hope for our country took a serious blow and is currently on life support. I know that it is popular these days to say that they are “just children,” but I don’t believe that for a second. They are from the ages of 15-20 (yes, I have some twenty year old juniors); they are adults by most generations before. I was so depressed, that I went home and did nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. I wouldn’t even get off the couch to cook. DH asked me if I was hungry, to which I responded, “yes, but I don’t feel like doing anything about it.” My plan was to just be hungry rather than do anything. DH had to cook dinner, which was delicious, because I felt so broken. I have gone up at least two sizes of clothes and added thirty pounds over the course of the last five months because the stress makes me want to eat or punch people in the face. Since, obviously, I can’t accost people, I eat to allevate the stress.
I can’t do this anymore.
This is a fifty five gallon water barrel, nearly covered by the snow!
We have gotten a lot of snow this past week and a half, an unprecedented amount, in fact. It is lovely, considering I haven’t been in school since noon last Friday and won’t return until Tuesday of next week. Wohoo.
I have been taking this time to get my housework in order. Once again, I have let it slide a bit. However, once I am done, I have plenty of posts coming your way. To be fair, I have managed to can some goose meat, as my husband was blessed with nine snow geese the other day. And I baked some bread and made some homemade tortillas. I guess I have been a busy bee! Expect a post on how I’m working on gardening and how I sold some text books online.
This month is the first month where I am carefully recording our harvest, preservation, and budget progress. It is my hope that I will be diligent in continuing to keep accurate records. Record keeping is an important part of pursuing and achieving goals.
For the month of January, we:
Found $90 for a snowflake to the credit card.
Canned 31 quarts and 12 pints of food.
Harvested 15 ducks and 5 geese
Collected 182 eggs.
Corned 8lbs of venison.
Traded six dozen eggs for soap.
All told, I think we have made considerable progress in our goal of being debt-free and self-reliant.
For the month of February, we hope to start spinach and kale in our cold frame, start planning our garden, order seeds, baking snack foods instead of buying them and refinance our mortgage, to save about $100/month in mortgage payments. I’ll keep you posted!
Finished batch of homemade laundry soap. It's part frugality, part science! 
On Frugal Dad, Jason once wrote about balance and frugality, relating to things he will not do for frugality’s sake. He specifically mentioned making laundry soap and questioned whether it was “really worth the few dollars saved.” That protest is one that I hear often, one that irritates me.
People assume that frugal tactics do not save them enough money for the time it takes. Generally, they compare the money they save versus their hourly wage. This method is not accurate, as it does not take into account several factors. First, their hourly wage is before taxes, so subtract 15-20% off of the hourly rate to get a more accurate number. Ten dollars an hour becomes eight dollars an hour, like magic (though not the good kind!). Secondly, there are costs that go with work, such as gas and lunches, which may cost about fifty cents an hour. Our hourly wage is now at $7.50, a far cry from where it was. The money saved is tax free, so its number stays the same in this comparison. It’s important that folks really understand the math, before they say it’s not worth the time.
Furthermore, I doubt that anyone is going to stay home and make laundry soap instead of going to work. The time spent doing frugal things would not have been used to work and make money. Excuse the gross generalization, but the time would have most likely been spent watching television. Television has taught us that we need to avoid work at all costs and buy products that save us time. Time which should be used to watch more television, specifically commercials. At any rate, unless you’re going to stay home and bake bread instead of going to the office, it’s like finding extra money. I have far more opportunities to save money on a small, daily scale than I do on buying refrigerators or negotiating on cars. The times that I wash out a plastic baggie will eventually add up to much larger amount.
I just loath the fact that everyone assumes that frugality is a drudgery and that I must be suffering horribly. As a matter of fact, I happen to enjoy doing things for myself. I get a kick out of making most of my necessities myself. Bearing that in mind though, I have to agree with Jason’s conclusion that frugality is a highly personal concept, varying from person to person. I would never recommend frugal tactics that would save money but cause misery.
As far as the laundry soap goes, I make 64 loads worth in about 14 minutes. It costs me $.71 per batch, while the equivalent in commercial soap, at sale prices, would be $8.95. I save $8.24 in, for simplicity’s sake, 15 minutes which brings our “hourly rate” to a hefty $32.96/hr. Who knew laundry soap could be so lucrative?
Here's a picture of something I've been saving for: a spinning wheel. Though I'd rather have a pretty version. What can I say? I'm shallow.
During the holiday season, we are inundated with cries to spend money. The easier ones to ignore are the advertisements on television and in print. However, the big, waiflike eyes asking you to buy just one thing from their fundraiser are harder to turn aside. Here’s how I manage to escape the pressure:
Only you know your financial goals and status. You need to make decisions that are right for you and your family, not your coworkers or neighbors. Gifts should be given with a free heart, not out of a misplaced sense of obligation.
Sure, it ain't pretty, but it's pretty easy to amuse yourself... especially if you have a digital camera and aren't afraid to use it
In today’s economic climate, people need to find ways to entertain themselves on the cheap. Frugal entertainment largely involves staying at home and being creative. Here are just a few suggestions:
While this is hardly a comprehensive list, I hope that these suggestions will stimulate your creativity. The best advice I can give you is to quit expecting to be entertained. All the entertainment you need can generally be found near or within your own home. Use your time to enjoy your loved ones instead of to distract yourself from them.
Do you have any suggestions for entertainment for cheap?
The friend who borrowed the money brought two thirds of it back. He did not end up needing all of it, so he brought what he hadn’t spent back. Interestingly, the reason he cited for bring it back was that he didn’t want to trust himself to come up with the entire sum. He seems to know himself well enough to figure out how to do damage control. While I desperately want to help them with the budgeting aspect, there is really little I can do, other than recommend books or websites. I will offer them suggestions when they ask, but I will really endeavor NOT to give advice unless asked. It’s terribly hard, though, when there are so many things they could change if they so chose. However, ultimately, it’s none of my business, and I will try not to be a busybody. This resolution applies to other folks as well. Today, I learned that other people may surprise you when you’re thinking the worst.
We noticed earlier this week that one of our ducks had a limp. After orchestrating a grand round up, my husband took her to the vet. My decision would have been to wait and see if it got better after a while. If it didn’t, it would have been a duck destined for the freezer. However, my husband wanted to take her to the vet, so off she went. Turns out she just had a sprained ankle. She will recover, but the vet wanted her to be isolated for about a week. The vet also recommended that she be allowed to swim. Considering that all outside water is frozen, the only logical place seems to be the bathtub. Ah, another entertaining development on the Copperwyre Homestead.
Here’s a video:
I am notorious for procrastinating. It has been a habit since childhood. I had a bit of an epiphany as to why, but I will blog about that later. However, here is what it cost me this time.
To put it mildly, I have not always been diligent with going through my paperwork, such as bills and mail. I would like to be able to say that it was from being displaced due to the fire, but, alas, these snafus are from well before the fire.
During my cleaning blitzkrieg, I went through boxes of paper work from my bedroom. There were bills which needed paying, which was no surprise. However, I found a $50 check from over-paying my mortgage fees. From my last house! It was from May of 2008. The worse one was a $100 check lodged in a wedding card. We were married on June 14, 2008, so, needless to say, that check was well past its due date, as it were.
In order to try and salvage the situation, I did a few things. I called the number on the check from Wells Fargo. They said they would reissue it, and it arrived in the mail today. Unfortunately, the wedding check did not turn out as well. I called the gift giver, to let him know that I had found the check and would be destroying it. He didn’t volunteer to send a new one, so I will be surprised to see a replacement.
Final Score:
Penny-50
Procrastination- 100
Procrastination kicks my butt, yet again. Sigh
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