Rutabaga Dreams

… over at Building a Home for Our Family!

In between all the usual childcare and household stuff:

Behold, my desk!

I should have taken a before picture just so you could see what I was up against.  Well, no, on second thought I’m glad I didn’t.  It would be too embarrassing.  :-)  It is amazing how stuff piles up when I neglect to do my “Clean my desk” chore every Wednesday for at least six weeks!

P.S.  Isn’t my pen holder cute?  It was Emma’s very first Sculpty craft from about a year and a half ago.  She even painted it herself.

Theoretically, buying used stuff should be a great idea.  You get whatever it is you need for less than it costs new, and you have added side benefit of giving something a home that is no longer wanted by its original owner.  Stuff is potentially deferred from the landfill, money is saved - what’s not to like?

However, I say theoretically - because in my experience it doesn’t seem to work out very well.  For example, I’m trying to buy a small, battery operated lantern to use this summer.  I looked on CraigsList, but so far everything is at least 30 minutes away from where I live.  I would have to spend roughly $5-6 in gas just to get there and back, not to mention the hour plus it would take out of my day.  I could try to combine the trip with a field trip in order to make the time seem more worthwhile, but still…  It hardly seems worth it at that point.  I also tried looking on ebay, but the shipping ends up being so expensive that I could buy the item new from Amazon and get free shipping and either have a cheaper item, or have one that costs roughly the same amount.   I’m also trying to find a certain type of Coleman cooler, and this seems rather difficult to find used as well - and of course being such a large item, shipping is going to be out of the question.

So is buying used really only worthwhile if you are buying something expensive enough (and small, too I guess) or at a great enough of a discount that the shipping or driving & time cost is worthwhile?  And what are those items?

I guess that there’s two other options I haven’t discussed - there’s the garage sale or thrift store route.  Perhaps I don’t know how to work the whole thrift store thing or maybe the ones around here are just lousy, but whenever I go they seem filled with clothing that is way too large and/or is in poor condition and lots of random stuff that hardly seems useful.  And garage sales…  well, I loathe searching through other people’s stuff in order to find a few things I need, and sacrificing my Saturday morning to this past-time sounds horrid beyond belief.

So anyways, I guess I’m posting this because I’m tired of reading article after article on saving money through buying everything used when it just doesn’t seem like a worthwhile endeavor.

OK, so that’s not the real title of the article, but it should be.

This is definitely worth reading, even if it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I particularly like these quotes:

How many people are introverts? … “a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population.”

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts.

So take that, all you extroverts out there!

(Link thanks to Running River Latin School)

I just found out that I was selected to review Away, by Amy Bloom from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.  I’m excited about this, I think it should be a neat thing to do.  I like doing book reviews and I’d like to push myself to do more of them.  I think this should be a nice little shove in that direction.

I first read about the Early Reviewer program on the LibraryThing blog and while I thought it sounded like an interesting idea, I didn’t sign up for it.  I think I was a little embarrassed to do so and I felt a little shy about the idea.  A couple weeks later I got a comment on my LibraryThing profile saying that I am in the top 1000 prospects for the books currently available and that I’m number 703 out of 205,000 members in terms of how my library matches up with their super-secret similiar titles list generated by the publisher.  The direct marketing worked - I looked into it a bit more and decided to sign up for a couple books the next day.

Here’s the blurb about the book I’m getting (from the publisher)

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work—her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart—come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

I’m looking forward to reading it!

I read a great hint in Mother Earth News this morning and I gave it a try to see if it would work.  It works beautifully, so I thought I would share it.

If you have a patio or driveway or anything like that where weeds sometimes grow in the cracks, try pouring boiling water on them once or twice.  It will kill them quite quickly, and once they’re dead they are much easier to pull out.  I also poured the water over a particularly annoying patch of a low spreading sticky weed that grows in a rocky area and that is all dead and dried up as well.  The boiling water is also supposed to inhibit seed germination, so it is probably a good idea to do it periodically to keep new weeds from sprouting.  I did feel a little silly watering my front yard this morning with my tea kettle, but the results have been great!

you try to go to the earlier Mass because your son is sick and you want to try to get back before he’s awake and you walk into the church and you realize that the Priest isn’t doing the Opening Prayer a few minutes early but instead is doing the Eucharistic Prayer and then you remember that the earlier Mass is at 8:00 up at the other church that you attend when you’re up in Nevada County and that this Mass started at 7:30?

Yeah, I feel pretty mortified right about now.  Emma and I quickly escaped from the church and ran back out to the car…  now we’re waiting about another 40 minutes before we’ll head out for the 9:30 Mass that we usually go to.  *sigh*