If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know that our lifestyle is kind of... odd.
You know those tabloid shows where they showcase "EXTREME TIGHTWADS!!"?
We're not quite that bad. But we're not far off.
Both my husband and I scavenge and re-purpose things almost as a sort of hobby. If we can make, re-purpose, or scavenge something, and it will serve the purpose we need as good as or better than the same thing bought new, than we'll do it. To the point that a healthy percentage of my children's toys and our furniture are stuff we found on the side of the road (don't worry, we cleaned it all thoroughly).
So here are five takes on the weird ways we save an odd penny or two (and you don't have to feel guilty for watching a trashy tabloid show!), and two takes about something else (because, let's be honest, those tightwad episodes get old pretty quickly. I'd much rather hear about the slow and disturbing decline of Michael Jackson's Never Land mansion.
Not that I, you know, watch those shows anyway...
...heh heh...
...
Moving on).
1.) We Willingly Let Spiders Live in Our Home With Us (With Some Exceptions)
Why, you may ask, would we allow these things to take up residence in our home?
Because they hunt down and kill the roaches.
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| Photo courtesy of my husband. This picture was taken in our bedroom. |
We invest in roach poison and try to keep things clean, but we live in a hot, humid climate. The roaches LOVE it here, and they're here to stay. We need all the help we need in order to keep ahead of them (and of the flies that seem to throng inside every spring).
Now, the exceptions to this are wolf spiders, brown recluse spiders, and black widow spiders. All three have a painful venomous bite (the black widow spider's can actually be lethal), and I don't want that around me or my babies.
But hairy jumping spiders? Happy to have them (it helps that they don't weave webs).
2.) Bay Leaves Get the Weevils Out of Rice
I'm not sure if this is a regional thing or if everyone has this problem, but we've found that if we store bags of rice for too long, they get full of weevils.
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| Look at the snout on this thing! |
Now, there are three things you can do when you find a bunch of these little long-nosed freeloaders in your food.
a. You can toss the whole bag out.
c. You can put it in a jar with a few bay leaves and let them leave.
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| Tried to make a weevil trap out of packing tape. Didn't work out too well. |
Now, if you're smart (unlike me), you can store the rice in a closed jar or food-grade plastic bucket (you can get these for free from your grocery store bakery--just ask for their empty icing buckets) with bay leaves from the beginning to keep an infestation from happening. Or you can toss the bags in the freezer to kill any bugs or eggs already in there.
But if you forget, this is how you can salvage the rice without eating bugs (or rinsing the rice half a million times to try and get them all out).
3.) We Re-Use Our Plastic Bags...ALL of Our Plastic Bags.
I think I may have written about this before, but we re-wash and reuse any plastic ziplock type bag that has never held meat. We do this until holes start to develop-- we've found we can get at least three or four uses out of each bag before we have to throw it away.
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| Washed plastic bags drying on our knife block and on stuff in the dry rack |
We don't do this with bags that have held meat because we want to avoid food poisoning, and because bags that have held greasy stuff don't usually come clean again easily.
We also save bread bags and the zip-lock type bags that bulk nuts or raisins come in. After these are washed, we use them to split up the huge packages of meat we buy into meal sized portions for storage in the freezer (it's cheaper to buy the 10 pound log of ground beef rather than 10 one pound logs. Ditto for the 10 pound package of chicken).
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| This bag originally held hot dog buns. |
Once I get the meat out of the bag and cook it up, I throw the bag away.
We buy freezer weight zip-lock bags probably twice a year.
4.) We've Asked Brush Clearing Crews to Empty Their Trucks in Our Yard
We're pretty sure one of the reasons it's not doing very well is that the land where we put the plot is pretty depleted. It's almost all clay, with very little organic material mixed in. It forms a hard crust (which makes it very hard for plants to grow well) very quickly after a rain, and does a very poor job holding water.
Our answer to this has been to dump as much organic material on it as we can get our hands on. Chicken bedding, stuff from our compost pile, bags of leaves we found on people's driveways, you name it.
Our latest venture into this has been to get in touch with a brush cleaning crew and offer our yard as a place to dump the wood chips made with all the stuff they've cleared. As a result, our garden patch currently looks like this.
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| For reference, that metal grate cube to the left comes up to my shoulder height, and I'm 5.6". Those piles are HUGE. |
I've been laying down chicken bedding and compost (that metal grate thing holds our compost pile) and then a 6-inch layer of the wood chips on top of that. The mulch should hold water in place and cut down on the amount we have to water, as well as add nutrients to the soil as it rots and decays.
I have to wear shoes in the garden now (a lot of the brush they've been clearing is mesquite, which has very long, sharp thorns), but that's worth it if it increases our garden yield. I really enjoy growing our own food, and it helps our food budget.
*Bonus Mini Take!*
I've successfully grown squash and melons by saving seeds from store bought produce, drying them for about a week on a paper towel, saving them, and planting them in season (see if your area has a county extension office to find out your seasonal planting dates). If you have an old window screen, this works even better.
5.) We Improve the House with Wood Pallets We Got for Free From the Pool Store
Check out this cool gate my husband made!
He scavenged the wood pallet from a local pool supply store, and we bought the hinges, a lock, and a tension line thing to keep it from sagging at Home Depot. Very nice functional gate for pretty cheap. Keeps the dog away from my porch garden, and gives me a space I can let the kids play by themselves.
I think pretty much every Catholic home (or a lot of them, anyway) has this corner of the house.
A hook (or series of hooks, or woven novelty wicker basket, or bowl, or drawer...) where Rosaries congregate and seem to multiply. It is only with difficulty that their numbers can be kept in check.
Today, I found out that the population of Rosaries had spread. We cleaned out our dresser today, and came across these.
Today, I found out that the population of Rosaries had spread. We cleaned out our dresser today, and came across these.
Where do they all COME from?! It's like they're waging a campaign to take over.
First, they'll fill up the hooks.
Then, they'll come for the junk drawer.
Soon, they'll overflow to the top of the fridge and the bookcase. Storm out from under beds and in between couch cushions. I'll open my jewelry box and find a whole contingent.
Slowly, they'll crowd us out of house and home, until only a house full of Rosaries and a single statue of the Madonna remain. I'll be forced to fill my purse with them and hand them out to random passers-by in a desperate attempt to curb their numbers and regain living space.
Then, my full transformation to odd church lady shall finally become complete.
7.) This...is Actually a Pretty Good Book
Speaking of becoming a church lady... (and switching to a more serious topic)
I heard about this book about a month ago, and went out on a limb and pre-ordered 20 so I could hand some out. They came in yesterday.
The Church's sexual abuse crises, and the corruption it indicates, is something that I struggle with a LOT. I'm sticking with the Church because Jesus is in the Eucharist, so the Sacraments are real. That's the main reason. If it weren't for that, I would have left about a year ago.
I found this book pretty comforting and reassuring. He goes into how God deals with this sort of corruption in Scripture (making it very clear that God hates it and that serious consequences always follow), how the Church has dealt with this sort of corruption before and survived (more reassuring than you'd think that would be), and ending with a call to action. It gave me a fair amount of hope, and reminded me that God is pissed off about what's happened too.
I need reminders of that sometimes.
Now, it wasn't perfect. He focused mainly on the scandals involving homosexuality and pedophilia. To be fair these are the scandals that have taken up the most media attention in the news, so he may have wanted to focus on them because everyone knows about them. But I would have liked to see him address at least one case where priests have targeted women as well. It's NOT just a 'homosexual' problem, there are 'straight' priests, and probably bishops, who are corrupt too (the author does NOT claim that it's solely a 'gay priest' problem, but I've heard others say it).
He also spends a fair amount of time talking about how the procedures put into place in 2002 have made a significant change for the better in the amount of abuse cases. While this might be true, talking about them currently seems a little hollow. I do think that these procedures have helped things improve at least a little (at least in my own diocese, based on my experience as a youth minister), but the corruption makes me question how much we can trust the Church's assurances on this point. Thankfully this comprises only a small part of the whole book.
The good points in this book outweigh the bad, and, in my opinion, the $20 I spent were a good investment. It's a well put together, honest resource on how to respond to the crises written by a member of the clergy, and we don't have very many of those out there, sadly.
If you'd like to order some books to hand out yourself, you can find them here. They're $1 a book, free shipping, minimum order $20. It's a pretty quick read, I finished it in a day.
BONUS TAKE!!
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If you're like me, your social media feeds have been swamped with people talking about the crisis on the border between the United States and Mexico.
In one of the most awesome civilian politically bipartisan things I've ever seen, the pro-life groups And Then There Were None and New Wave Feminists have teamed up with about 50 other pro-life organizations from all over the political spectrum to fund raise and raise supplies for respite centers on the Texas border (respite centers are where immigrants go once they've finally got their asylum paperwork in order and are released from the detainment centers). They've already raised $100,000 in funds and supplies, and are accepting supply donations until July 8th, and monetary donations until July 13th. (If you decide to contribute to the supply donations, the address you select for where you'd like them to be sent should be the one labeled "Nancy").
We may not be able to go into the actual detainment centers (where conditions are really, really bad, especially for young children separated from their parents), but that shouldn't stop us from helping how and where we can.
(For those concerned about enabling illegal immigration, these people aren't illegal aliens. They leave the detainment center with a legal status, and the government knows that they are here).
That's all Folks!
Check out the other Quick Takes for this week.
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