New Cook in House

“You are going to learn to cook, Mr. Retired Man!” Coming from my true love’s lips, it sounded more like an ultimatum than a request.

Throughout my working days, my spouse and I had an understanding that one of us would cook and the other would be responsible for the dishes. Since my better-half had a visceral hatred for dishwater, I normally had a hot meal waiting for me when I got home from a hard day. After a post-meal snooze on the couch, I’d pull my KP. My wife recently looked at my dishpan hands and lamented sympathetically on their chapped state. For an instant I thought her pity would translate into her taking over my sink duties. She looked into my eyes, paused meaningfully and said, “Wear some rubber gloves.” And that was that.

But as Dylan and Baez once sang, “The times, they are a changing.” Since she has become the sole bread winner of the family, I honestly think my spouse has begun to suffer from retirement envy. Perhaps it does not help that I greet her with a little jig when she drags herself through the doorway at night…or when she asks, “What did you do today?” I reply “I read a book.” Or perhaps it is that I call her “my little bread winner” (and several much worse terms of endearment which I cannot relate here on pain of losing all computer privileges.) Whatever… I’ve been put on notice that my darlin’ dear expects to smell the aroma of a hot dinner when she opens the house door at night…and, oh yes, I still have dishes afterward.

After years of my feigning ignorance and incompetence, I guess the jig is up. Oh well, it is winter and I really do have time on my hands to learn a new life skill; just last night I learned to brown hamburger. Besides, I need some winter material to write about in my blogs. Still all this role reversal and “I expect my meat and potatoes on the table” attitude bother me a bit.
I’ll keep you posted on my culinary progress… and oh yes, we simply must exchange recipes!

Frugal or Cheap?

There is a thin line between being frugal and being cheap. To help others better understand where that line lies, I will poke some fun at myself with a short list of DON’T DO s that I’ve done.

Do not give your daughter a gift of a diner and theater coupon book and secretly tear out enough of your favorite restaurant coupons and movie passes to pay the cost of the book. (I thought she would never know the difference. Darn, they would have to number the pages.)

Do not take a date to a free Woody Allen movie (Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex, but were Afraid to Ask) when she really wants to attend a Gloria Steinem talk on the feminist movement, which is elsewhere on campus at the same time. (Coeds have memories like elephants.)

Do not buy your favorite record album as a wedding anniversary or birthday gift for your spouse. (How was I supposed to know she did not like Willie Nelson or Arlo Guthrie? For my succeeding birthdays I received Barry Manilow and Joni Mitchell records.)

Do not tell your fiancé that you are going to grow all the flowers for the wedding from Burpee seed packets and inform her at the last minute that you had a crop failure.

Do not take your bride on a fishing trip to a local lake as her honeymoon. (I had the canoe tied to the top of the car when we came out of the church.)

Do not white out names and resend Christmas cards the following year. Just kidding, I haven’t really pulled that one…but I’ve thought about it. Such a waste to toss all those beautiful cards each year!

I must stop now or I will surely lose all credibility as an expert on frugality. Besides, if anymore old memories are dredged up, there may be trouble in paradise.

Presents, Past and Future

If you are going to give your young one that special, must-have toy from China for Christmas, be sure to give him or her a chance to play in the cardboard box it came in. Kids love large containers to hide in. One of my earliest childhood memories was on my grandparents’ farm on a cold, gray day. I was just a toddler who got inside a bushel basket and then pulled another basket upside down on top of me. Encapsulated in my own little space to keep out the wind, I peeked between the basket slats to watch one of the last steam locomotives pull its cars down the track which bisected the farm. As I grew just a bit older, my brother and I made pretend cars and houses from large cardboard boxes.

Our own children interacted well with sock puppets and hand puppets from an early age, even though the puppets tended to be rude and crude and sometimes bit. Cookie Monster taught them alphabet and phonetics when they were quite young. My daughters also loved the marionettes that my wife made to sell at Christmas craft shows. Nasty little devils, those marionettes, they would dance and sing, kick each other, karate fight and sometimes attack small children from behind. Where did those marionettes learn their bad manners!

For me, Christmas presents do not begin with trolling the malls to see what’s out there, and hoping the perfect gift will pop into sight. Instead, I take a hot cup of sweet, lemon tea into a semi- dark room with a comfortable chair to think about people and make a list. What are this person’s wants, needs, interests and hobbies? One person dislikes cold weather; I’ll buy him a good pair of warm work gloves. Another is interested in her Irish genealogy and also thinks I have a good voice; I’ll make her a homemade CD of me singing some old Celtic ballads. Another person has displayed an interest in organic gardening; I’ll buy him a good book on that topic. Books are always a good idea for special interests or hobbies.

Once I emerge from my dark room with a list of appropriate gifts, one per person, (Hey, I know it is Christmas, but let’s not go hog wild!), I proceed to purchase each gift as inexpensively as possible. I can burn the CD of Irish songs for next to nothing and I do know this is what she really wants. I’ll pick up the best pair of gloves I can find at Rural King. I’ll buy all my books at Amazon.com for a third of what they cost in a bookstore. On-line buying is preferable to mall hassle and prices. As for buying for other’s needs, if I see that someone needs clothing or a couple new tires, that is what they are going to get. There…another year’s Christmas shopping complete…finis, the end. Bring on the nog and fruitcake!

Working in a Workout

Before I retired, I was on a tight schedule; at 5 am the clock radio would suddenly start blaring country music. I would make ten or fifteen vain attempts to rise and each time fall back. I had just completed my first set of crunches. About that time a hand would slip out from under the covers and switch on a blinding light to tell me I really did have to get up. Then, in a sitting position on the side of the bed, I rose and sat down 20 times in succession—shallow knee bends to preserve my manly tush.

When I got into the bathroom, I started hot water running into the tub and began brushing my teeth. As I brushed my teeth, I did a hundred toe rises. I could feel the burn in my foot arches and my thighs, but especially in my calves. Once soaking in the tub, I managed to get in my second set of stomach crunches. Getting out and drying off, I held the towel behind my head and pulled strongly to either side, using it as an exercise band.

Next came the part I disliked. When I was half-dressed, I’d close my eyes, take a few deep breaths and channel my Army basic training drill instructor yelling, “Drop and give me twenty!” As I did the push-ups, I listened to my body; if it said “your good”, I’d go for another ten. Otherwise, I’d shut it down and save cardiac arrest for another morning.

After reading the scale (“ Oh, sh.. !”), I’d face the mirror, make two fists behind my neck and isometrically pull them slowly forward half a dozen times until I could really feel my biceps burn. Once I’d finished a quick shave, I looked in the mirror and did my best Charles Atlas pose, rippling my pecs and abs for a few seconds. I had managed to work a fairly strenuous calisthenics into my 15-minute morning routine.

As I gazed in the mirror, I could not help but utter, “Why couldn’t I have been born rich… instead of so darn good looking!”
From the kitchen came a muffled muttering, “Why couldn’t he have been either one?”
A couple coffee slurping sounds and then, “It takes a village to raise a husband.”
Guess it was time to turn the bathroom over to Grumpus and let her transform into the beautiful butterfly I knew she was.

Buying Christmas with Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thank giving Day is my personal favorite holiday. It is the least commercialized and the cuisine is actually very nutritious compared with all the sugars and fats of Christmas. Most importantly, Thanksgiving is all about family. The last thing I would want to do is cause my family and guests to think that while they were enjoying food and camaraderie, I was cynically calculating how much the meal was costing. On my word as a human being, nothing could be farther from the truth. Still, for many people the holidays are budget busters characterized by credit card swiping and loss of financial self-control. Since I have already described our typical Christmas spending at length in other writings, I will now describe our most recent Thanksgiving and attendant spending below.

We decided to celebrate Thanksgiving on Wednesday evening, since my daughter and her beau wanted to celebrate with his parents on Thursday. This was fine with my wife and me, since she had Wednesday off from her school job and could cook and decorate all day (which she loves to do) and since I’m a retiree, half the time I don’t know which day of the week it is anyway. My daughter had gotten a turkey from her employer which we had picked up a few days before and she also donated a gift card (which was about to expire) to a grocery store that we used to buy several bottles of wine. With the two most expensive items of the meal out of the way and with the stores running competing sales, the remainder of our feast was relatively inexpensive. We exceeded our regular weekly grocery budget by a mere $20.

Our guests arrived Wednesday evening, obviously tuckered from their workday and the long drive to our house. We all sat down at the table, gave thanks and let the food, wine and conversation flow freely the rest of the evening. The next morning, our guests surprised us by making us a big breakfast before heading out around noon to attend other Thanksgiving Day meals elsewhere.

My wife and I needed a brief vacation too, so Friday morning we took a scenic three-hour drive through farmland and woodlands to visit my sister who lives in the rustic Brown County area. We spent an afternoon in touristy Nashville, which had just finished its Christmas parade and was packed with people. The town was decked out for the holidays and someone who sounded like Willie Nelson was singing Christmas carols on the main street corner. My wife checked out the little artisan shops while I stood outside and watched hundreds of noisy migrating sand cranes circle overhead for half an hour. That night we went to Bloomington where my sister treated us to a meal at an Irish-style pub and we then got enmeshed in a throng of humanity around the courthouse for an annual winter fest to turn on the lights strung from all the street corners to the top of the courthouse. There was a lot of caroling, a brass band, Saint Nick, a clown and vendor food. The next morning, my sister took us out for breakfast to a backwoodsy little diner she frequents and we then went to the Bloomington farmer’s market where there were again carolers and an unbelievable crowd for this late in the year. As we drove home, my wife and I both felt we had enjoyed a quick, refreshing get- away.

I described our holiday to show that we really did have an enjoyable time, but how does all this relate to having money from Thanksgiving to put back toward Christmas? When the kids left Thursday, the fridge was so stuffed with food that we could barely get the door closed. The following week the microwave became our best friend. We had turkey fried rice; we had open-faced turkey sandwiches with mash potatoes and gravy; we had sweet potato and green bean casserole; we had turkey dressing with gravy and cranberries, and we had turkey vegetable soup. For breakfasts, we had deviled eggs; we had pumpkin pie, and we had hot rolls and jam. While we cleaned out our refrigerator the week after Thanksgiving, our sole grocery purchase was a gallon of milk. Most of that week’s grocery budget got dumped into the cookie jar to go toward Christmas or extra seasonal recreation. Even with our drive to Brown County, we had not exceeded our weekly gasoline budget and my sister fed us and gave us a place to sleep. Gosh, aren’t the holidays great!

Parable of the toast and the Danish

I want to respond to comments made by a friend concerning my blogs: “Meditation on Toast” and “Cocoa Meditation”. Because I respect this person’s privacy, she shall forever remain anonymous. Suffice to say; had I been a celibate, she would not exist.

Let me paraphrase her comment to read: “That’s just like Dad; sitting in the cold, freezing his wazoo off and contemplating a slice of toast while he gloats over saving a few cents.”

First, the “freezing his wazoo off” part implies that I am enduring some hardship and am not comfortable. I believe in comfort; I just believe in achieving it in the least cost, most efficient way. If that means sitting in a 60 degree room with two pairs of sweat pants, two flannel shirts and a sock cap on (I save my ski mask for bank withdrawals)…well, so be it. Why pay for another 10 degrees just to take my clothes off? Of course I’ll back down on this when your mother comes home. I view her “you have to sleep sometime” assertions as veiled threats.

Next, the “gloats over saving a few cents” part implies that saving 50 cents by eating PBJ toast instead of a sweet roll is insignificant. Well, of course it is! It’s not the 50 cents; it’s the dang principle of the thing. The toast is a metaphor for everything that can be substituted for a more expensive, but no better alternative. It’s the lemonade and sweet tea that replace the lemon-lime sodas and colas. It’s the brown-bag lunches that replace the fast food. It’s the home-grown salads that replace lettuce shipped from Napa Valley. It’s the quality used-car that replaces the spanking new car to get from point A to point B. It’s the scholarship that replaces the student loan and the library that replaces the college. It’s the hobbies that make money, like gardening and writing versus the expensive recreations that cost an arm and a leg. It’s the small-mortgage-payment bungalow instead of the I’m-in-foreclosure mansion.

The principle is that if many satisfactory substitutes can be found which replace many expensive alternatives at a fraction of the price, then we can live well on a fraction of our income and labor. There, my daughter…the parable of the toast and the Danish has been revealed to you!

The Cookie Jar and Tiger Kitty

After we had set up our retirement budget and had been living on Social Security for a while, I began to notice a strange phenomenon; my wife never came in under budget on the grocery bill. At times in the summer, there would be considerable home garden produce for the table which I expected would lower our food bill, still she spent every last cent allotted in the budget. I could not complain too vociferously because after all, she was usually staying within the guidelines we had set down, yet I was curious why she never went under. After a “discussion” I discovered we had two different ideas of efficiency. I considered our budget limit to be a sort of bar or benchmark standard. If at times we could come in under the bar and beat the benchmark, then we were being really efficient and thrifty and we should be proud of it. My wife, by contrast, felt that if she ever spent under budget, she would have failed to utilize all the resources at her disposal and therefore be inefficient. In plain English, if she did not spend every cent, then she would never see that money again. In fact, she feared that if she spent less, the budget limit might be lowered to that lower level. (Where did she ever get that crazy idea?)

Thus the cookie jar came into being. Now when we come in below budget, we put the money in the jar and spend it later when needed. If there is a meat sale, we can use the funds to exceed the budget one week and stock our freezer. If we want to eat out or take in a flick or take a road trip, we rob the cookie jar. Dollars, a few fives, and loose change began to flow into the jar. We seem to go under every couple weeks.

After the cookie jar “understanding,” I began to look around the house to see if there were any other money caches which served as “balancers” when we wanted extra cash. There is the penny jar where we throw unwanted change which we roll and spend about once a year. On her washing machine, is a plump tiger kitten bank, which my wife uses to claim any change people leave in clothing that they have thrown into the hamper. Seems every time I lift it, it feels about full of quarters and dimes. I have an old biker billfold where I put my extra change (if I remember to get it out before my jeans go in the wash) and there are a couple coin trays in our vehicles which come in handy when we overfill our tanks by a few cents or need to feed a meter.

Lastly there is the dish of “funny money”. (two dollar bills, Susan B. Anthonys , Sacagaweas, Canadian coins, etc.) Kids seem to really like getting funny money as presents and think every yellow coin is gold. I don’t discourage the notion and let our Susan Bs serve as emergency gifts.

All in all, I was surprised just how many little piggy bank hoards we have around the house and how they help to grease the budget when we unexpectedly need to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Picking Up Sticks, Channeling Mom

Retirees need physical exercise. While they were in the labor force, if they had strenuous jobs, they could ignore the gyms and weight rooms and still stay in shape from work alone. Now if I don’t work out, I will quickly turn into jelly and become an old man. What to do? Should I get on the exercise bike or lift my dumbbell? BORING! How about a 3-mile walk or long bike ride? Still sounds like work to me. What if I did a morning of yard work? My spouse would certainly approve of any improvements, I’d be out in the sunlight and fresh air, and my sour winter mood and self-esteem might rally as I viewed my accomplishments. Yes, yard work seems the way to go.

The leaves are all down and in my compost piles now, clearly showing the structure that needs to be pruned and cleared in the fence rows and woods. What needs to be done reveals itself to me, one step at a time. There is some variety with each new task and I work at a steady but unrushed pace…an entire morning of moderate exercise versus the thirty minutes of more intense stationary bike or weight lifting. The whole time I am outdoors, the house thermostat is cranked back very low and our sun porch is gaining warmth to heat the house this afternoon. As I pick up dead branches and drag limbs to the fire pit where I know there will be a bonfire later, nature works its trick and my winter funk lifts. I don’t use any power tools as the noise would disturb the quietude.

When we were growing up, Mom always wanted a farmhouse on a hill with a woods and a spring and flowers. In her golden years, that is precisely what she got, right on the edge of the suburbs. During the last 20 years of her life, Mom stayed in shape walking up and down that hill past the spring house picking up sticks and carrying them handful by handful to the fire pit where they would remain until the family had our annual soup-making cookout. Dad would get winded if he walked up that hill one time, but not Mom; she had stamina.

I’ve only visited Mom and Dad’s mausoleum one time since they died…I didn’t feel any real connection. There are pictures of them on our living room wall which I stop in front of only maybe once a week…not as much connection as there should be. But when I walk up and down this rise in my woods and pick up twigs… I channel Mom all morning long.

Wrestling With Health Care

As I considered early retirement, health care and health insurance for my wife and I were paramount concerns. Eventually, after wrestling with these issues, I came to a satisfactory conclusion within our limited price range. I want to share with you what I considered some of the major variables and constraints during that period of search and decision making.
There were six considerations that concerned me as I sifted between various health care alternatives.
(1) Affordability: What the premiums cost was important since we would be on a very tight budget.
(2) Length of coverage: Would we be covered until Medicare took effect or could we be dropped early?
(3) Pre-existing conditions: I had fought an earlier bout with lymphoma, which although five years in remission, probably made me uninsurable. I definitely wanted to get my wife on a non-cancelable policy before the same thing happened to her.
(4) High end coverage: A $100,000 upper limit was not going to be any protection in the event of a million dollar illness.
(5) Low end coverage: If you have $10,000 out-of-pocket expenses per person, per year, before 100% insurance coverage takes effect then long term illnesses like cancer or congestive heart disease can wipe you out financially in a few consecutive years, especially if both husband and wife need operations in the same year.
(6) Quality of health care and coverage: What are the limitations and exclusions? I had one company group policy that limited diagnostics to $300. That is barely one set of blood work labs! If you go into a doctor with an illness or complaint the first thing he or she will do is to run tests to get more information. A single CT Scan can be $1,200 plus another $300 to read it. Is preventive care covered or does that come out of the deductible? Are the in-network preferred providers cutting edge or 2nd rate? Cheap coverage may be exactly that.

With these six points in mind, I decided to use the VA health care system where my pre-existing condition was not a factor and my wife purchased a high deductable policy from Anthem. I hope these six points will add some clarity to your search for health care as you begin doing your own homework in this area.

Hauling Compost in my Glove Compartment

My first two vegetable gardens after my retirement were less than stellar successes. I am determined that next season’s garden will be different and that I will be able to significantly reduce my grocery bill by eating home produce. With that aim in mind, I have begun actively planning and working my garden plot this fall and winter. In the past I cleaned out horse stables and hauled pickup loads of horse manure and spoiled alfalfa hay to build compost piles for my garden. That was a lot of work. Reading my organic gardening books, I realized there might be a much simpler solution to building up the soil with organic material, i.e. green manure/cover crops. As a compost pile composts, it becomes much diminished in volume. Green manure/cover crops do the opposite and expand immensely in volume. Armed with this knowledge, I bought a three pound bag of rye grass seed for $3 and threw it in my car’s glove compartment. It has been a couple months since I planted the ryegrass and the garden is now covered with 6 inches of green weed-smothering grass and hidden beneath the soil surface, the ryegrass’s tremendous root system is an ever expanding organic mass, not diminishing like my compost piles. Could this actually be a lazy man’s way to garden?

Cocoa Meditation

I’ve written on various ways to stay warm and reduce home heating bills in cold weather, from moderate physical exertion while wearing layered clothing, to pretending to read a book while basking in free public warmth at the library. In general, the smaller the micro comfort zone heated the better, (better to heat the room you are occupying than the entire house.) It has been about an hour now since my wife left for work and I turned down the thermostat. I’m beginning to feel a bit chilled, so I will warm the smallest micro space possible by warming my body from the inside out with a cup of microwaved cocoa. I often do this as my mid-morning pick-me-up, sometimes hot black tea or sometimes sweet coffee. This keeps me going until I have hot soup for lunch. Today there is a raw wind blowing, but it is sunny, so I take my hot chocolate to the enclosed sun porch and pick up some rays on my hands and face. Cold hands can make you feel miserable, so the first thing I do is wrap fingers around the cup for a couple minutes and warm them thoroughly. Next I do a little sniffing aroma-therapy and then proceed to slow-warm my innards with hot drink while my face basks in the sun. Physically, I’m in the Midwest; mentally, I’m in the Caribbean. “Hey Maaan, you want some more rum?”
What a gift to have the imagination of a child!

Meditation on toast

Here I sit pondering my breakfast toast like Hamlet pondered his human skull. How is this slice of toast different from a Danish sweet roll? The Danish pastry is made mostly of white flour; my toast is made of whole wheat flour. The store-bought pastry is covered with confectionary sugar icing and jellied fruit; my whole wheat toast is topped with peanut butter and jelly. The Danish is tastier but higher in calories which makes it likely that I will overindulge and further add to my beer gut. Two pieces of peanut butter and jelly toast with a banana and coffee make a fast and more nutritious breakfast. I don’t bother with a plate; I just lay it out on an open napkin which I later use to clean my jelly knife and wipe my mouth when I’m finished. All in all, the sweet roll and toast have a lot in common until it comes to cost. Since I pay only four cents a slice (80 cents a loaf) for whole wheat bread when I buy directly from the bakery outlet store, the more nutritious toast costs only a tenth of what the less healthy pastry would. Well, guess I’d better quit meditating on breakfast and start eating or people might call me a... tightwad.