Friday
Saving log - $2 tip box
Spending log - $1.75 coffee
Found money - $0.10 (sidewalk, 1st Ave)

Thursday
Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $1.75 coffee
Found money - $0.01 (sidewalk, Greenwood Ave)

I can't say that I've had a St. Paul on the road to Damascus moment in being frugal. I was always a good saver, and had a reasonable amount of discipline even in college in the early 80's when I held myself to $10/week (this when a Saturday Harold's Chicken white half came to $2.75).

I graduated from college, worked for a year, applied to grad school, got into grad school, got my grad degree, moved and became a journeyman scientist, well for each leap I saved up about $2K for the move. It was always paycheck to paycheck but with 2K savings.

Where I really fell in my youth was in the money management arena. During my bad old days, my money management skill consisted entirely of: Look at ATM balance, I have $x in my checking account, therefore no spending. I hated it when the bank's monthly statement came in - I never looked at it. Too depressing. My spending was hit and miss - paycheck week I could be social, the next I had to be super frugal and was a pain to be around. Even up until my early 40s I felt like my money was managing me. Worse, when money manages you, you feel on edge in your job ... you have to keep that job no matter what because you have to keep the money coming in, no matter what.

My first big break was getting a PDA for Christmas. I found a free checkbook program and began putting in my checks, ATM trips, paycheck. Then I put in my savings. I put in my credit card balances, then I put in my 403B balances. I found, to my surprise, that even though I owed 15K in credit card and student loan debt, my net worth was positive.

My second big break came when I finally paid off my student loan. I was lucky (not skillful, particularly) that I took out loans only during my undergrad years; I grit my teeth and lived on the meager stipend during my grad years. Still, I realized that in 1984 I had $15K in student loan debt, 0K in credit card debt. In 2002, the tables were reversed. I had $0K in student loan debt, $15K credit card debt. I used the satisfaction that I got out of paying the student loans to inspire me to pay off the credit card debt, which I did in May 2005, a few months before I started this blog.

My third big break came a bit before the other two, strangely enough. DH gave me a share of Coke (KO) and started my first Dividend Reinvestment Program (Drp). My granddad used to invest in penny stocks in the 70s and had a lot of fun ... this before index funds, 401Ks, IRAs, or even Drps. All there seemed to be after passbook savings accounts were stocks, bought in 100-share round lots. Anyway, as I got a grip on the credit cards, I began to put in $50 every month or so into KO stock. I treated it a bit like a letter to a long distance friend. You get the mail, open it, and respond. I used to mail the check back within a week of getting the receipt of the last payment.

So really I had a lot of little money management revelations. For the longest time, it was paying off credit card $300-400/ month, putting in some $266 in the 403B every month, putting in $50 into KO, adding savings at the top of the month, tip box in the middle of the month, living within my means the rest of the month, and noting the transactions into the PDA. I didn't care about being splashy - I went for relentless. I decided to learn by doing with investing, never paying more than $100/ pop, but doing it over and over again.

Working small, gradual, and relentless meant I learned enough to handle two inheritances - as I describe in my blog. I really shudder to think about how I would have handled the inheritances when the money was managing me.

I've said it several times, and will probably say it several more - don't wait for the "big money" to learn how to handle money, the "small money" has a lot to teach you.

Saving log - $0 tip box
Spending log - $3.88 coffee, bagel + $.69 apple + $11.50 conveyor belt sushi

Today I found .12 on the ground. I generally find a coin here and there (pennies mostly) every couple of days. Often, like Disneysteve, if I find one, I find another - so that is a good little rule.

As a public service, and to the determent of my own coin hunting, I thought of coming up with a checklist of reasonable places where I find stray coins. I've been hard at work thinking about it, but the places that I've found coins are so varied - sidewalks, parking lots, bus stops, on the floor of the bus, in front of my driveway, on the road along the curb, pedestrian intersections, behind the paper honesty boxes, in front of ATMs ... in other words I can give you an inelegant, exhaustive list that isn't very easy to remember.

Later, it hit me the thread that most of these places share: they are high foot traffic places where people wait for a few minutes, stick their hands in and out of their pockets and then leave. Fine, but as you are walking along a sidewalk, hard to tell those high traffic hotspots from ordinary sidewalk.

Or is it? I suspect not. One of the things that some people do as they wait and jam their collective hands in their collective pockets is smoke. And when the bus comes, friend comes, cigarette is finished, what happens? Some of the butts go into the can (thank you), some land on the sidewalk or whereever.

I submit to you a very simple rule: the more cigarette butts on the ground, the more likely you will find change on the ground.

Let's be clear here. I'm not saying smokers are more likely to drop change. I'm saying that cigarette butts are a reasonable marker to identify those good coin hunting places where a lot of people wait with hands in pockets, yet have to leave in a hurry.

I'm probably also saying that street sweepers and those business folk who keep their front sidewalks clean are my competitors - if you sweep a butt, you probably are sweeping coins too.

The rule isn't perfect - I've found coins in our front driveway (neither of us smoke), close to gas station pumps (not supposed to smoke there), on bare sidewalks. Still, today, there were a lot of butts (even a joint where I found that dime) where I found my change today.

If you are a coin hunter, let me know if this rule helps you find more change!

Last night was the night of ghost hunting at the workplace. In a nutshell, nothing dramatic happened (jokingly, DH asked me to rinse off outside if I got slimed and I stayed dry), but it was fascinating nonetheless. Right off the bat, no pictures just words.

A little background - a month after and ever since we moved into our new digs in November 2003 (our last day in the old office fell on Halloween - no joke), we've had reports of odd sightings of people and emanations. The two incidents that I knew about before last night were - 1.) a month after the move, a self-described psychic who was a fundraising temp staffer in 2003 described that she saw shadows of people counting money. Not unhappy, they were just counting money. 2.) Another fundraising temp staffer a couple of years ago said she saw a thin man in an overcoat walking quickly then turning left into a wall.

Last night I heard about several more stories through the years: a cleaning staffer saw a man in hip boots, dark coat, and scars sitting in a cubicle in the 1st and 3rd floors; the daughter of the facilities manager said to her dad that she was trying to talk to a man in a tall hat on the 1st floor; as the events manager came up the back stairs ran into a gate that opened and slammed shut; the same fundraising temp staffer who saw the overcoat man heard bag rustling and stomping coming from the 1st floor and she was the only person in the building; and a couple movement-from-the-corner-of-the-eye sightings in the old bank vault on the lower level.

So I come to work at 7:30 pm to a dark building, with one of the ghost hunting team on point to greet us and meet his team. The completely dark building was part of the setup. The facilities manager cut the lights and ran down the backup lights. Everything we did was either in the dark or by flashlight.

On our team of co workers were: the facilities manager (dad of the daughter), director of IT, me, the fundraising temp staffer who saw the overcoat man and heard the stomping on the 1st floor, 3 co workers who were very, very interested (all women, interestingly enough). On the ghost hunting team: 9 members, including a woman who attracts ghosts, and later on, a 10th person, the president of the ghost hunting club back from giving a ghost underground tour of Seattle. (Wow, there is one.)

The ghost hunters all setup behind the reception area. They came with a lot of equipment, IR cameras, EMF detectors, MP3 recorders, digital cameras, and headlights. They and by extension, we, looked like spelunkers. We were split into 4 teams: generally 2 ghost hunters teamed with two of us. I was with the temp staffer who saw the overcoat man (she was a good friend of mine). We were to go to each floor - LL, 1, 2, 3 - and stay for 1 hour in rotation. (It was to keep everybody from hitting the LL and the vault all at once!)

Another of guy ghost hunters set up stationary IR cameras on the straight ways on each floor.

Most of the night, we would walk around the dark corridors of each floor in turn to keep them from getting lost. The IR guy would continuously videotape, every so often the woman ghost hunter would photograph the corridors or cubicles. As they asked questions about the building, we would answer them, and they'd tell us a bit about what they were doing - the IR camera was to identify hot spots, the digital camera with the flash was to identify shadows. Apparently our computers would give spurious readings on EMF detectors so we didn't really use them...but other teams did. We learned that many of the sightings are 'residuals', where an entity doing something re-appears over and over again, like a repeating tape. 'Hauntings' are when you communicate with the entity.

We did a complete walk around of the floor, then we would sit down in a common area and tape. We would ask questions, let them hang in the air. Most of them were open ended - please talk to us, we want to talk to you, why do you stay? I'd ask a couple of questions: sometimes ghosts react to voices that they are familiar with or that are different, so we were encouraged to speak up and ask questions. Then after a bit of taping, we'd play it back. So out of politeness, we mentioned our stomach growlings, or in my case, a rumble a bit further down.

Oddly enough, we heard things on the 2nd floor (where there were no sightings) that sounded like clicking heels. We (meaning our team) didn't really see or hear anything on the LL, nor on the 1st floor. The ghost hunters said for some of these places 4 teams would confuse the ghosts - that they wouldn't know who to communicate with. The 3rd floor we got a little bit in the main conference room. The woman ghost hunter asked me if I had shifted my seat and when I told her no, she told me that she thought she saw movement or a shadow behind me.

On the 1st floor we caught up with another team and the president. It was fascinating hearing the different styles, especially with the questioning. One was a bit more provocative, he would ask questions designed for a response, such as:

Do you know you are dead?

That team sat in the conference room near where we heard the clicking on the second floor. They ran their tape and apparently got a mysterious knock in response to the questioners knock.

After the 4 hour tour, the teams all gathered together. Here's where it got interesting. The women who attracted ghosts could not stay in the vault on the lower level - she sensed a heavy, unfriendly presence, and when she sat in the 3rd floor main conference room her chair vibrated the entire time. Another team, trying to get at the man-with-scars angle, asked about being a fisherman and heard a cat meow. Another smelled a perfume smell in the lower level, in the cubicle next to mine. The hunters noted the 2nd floor issues. The man in the overcoat was hypothesized to be part of the bank. It was noted that the vault was probably at ground level in 1870's Seattle. Fascinating that several entities might be involved, coming from different times and places.

What the ghost hunters wanted was a history of the site, floor plans of the buildings that came before, go through tapes that they got, give us a report. They also want to set up and run an IR camera in the vault and the 2nd floor conference room over a weekend.

I can't say I believe any of this, but I have to respect the equipment, the lore (I hesitate calling it a science) and the know-how. Good people, too...with a very interesting hobby.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $0

You have to wonder whether astrology actually worked on Feb 12, 1809 - both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born today 200 years ago within a couple of hours of each other. Most of us in the United States think that Lincoln's birthday was the bigger deal, Darwin's less so. Not me - as a former scientist, Darwin is definitely the bigger deal.

Not to mention that I could celebrate Darwin's birthday in a unique Seattle way: The Discovery Institute (creationist think tank) is across the street from our offices.

Figure 1. Matter of fact it shares a wall with the back of my gym at left. So to the left, inside people pursue fitness to prevent natural selection, enhance female choice, perhaps allow for a little forced DNA repair in the tanning bed; to the right, none of that.


Figure 2. The prank itself. Not terribly elaborate or destructive, and perfectly legal. It felt very good, despite being part of their video surveillence tape. Happy 200th, Chuck!


A special citation to the fellow conspirator, eg the picture taker (clearly not me). We've gotta keep an eye on these guys.

Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $13 lunch

I looked at the totals of all of my accounts and compared them to the numbers that I ran on my net worth on 6/30/2008.

I've lost $25.7K since late June.

Today, my dividend stock portfolio, about 4% of my total net worth, is down about 16%. KO is still showing a profit - my average share cost of KO is $42, so it has to drop a bit more before I lose money. WEC is also showing the barest of profit (8$). In other words, both have "the margin of safety".

If KO gets down to $42, I think that's when I will buy more. The rest of the DRPs I will maintain the discipline and dollar cost average. Dip implies a drop and then a rise. Well, while I believe in the rise, it looks far, far away.

In May last year, I re-allocated my 403B holdings to (for me) a very conservative mix - 30% bond, 20% cash, 10% gov bonds, 40% stock. (I was 90% stock, 10% bond). I blogged about it quickly, but didn't discuss it much in real life. I figured I would get teased for trying to "time the market". I'm glad I did, and would do it again - I'm down about 10% on the 403B holdings.

The rest is cash and cash equivalents (T-bills, I-bonds). Most of grandma's inheritance is still in a cash money market in Vanguard. Vanguard is participating in the Treasury Guarantee program, so if it "breaks the buck", we'll all be standing around burn barrels to keep warm.

So far I've kept my nose above water and have done much, much better than many. I do want to explore getting out of the very conservative mix of my 403B (stocks are about to get cheap enough for buying on that margin of safety), but I want to do so in a thoughtful, calculated way. I plan on blogging my thoughts, calculations, and analysis. I've been giving advice to others about looking into what they have in mutual funds and making reasonable decisions based on that. Time to practice what I preach.

Saving log - $2 tip box
Spending log - $12 lunch

SWOTs are a kind of old school brainstorming technique. I'm going to brainstorm here a bit and apply the answers to my investing and financial plan.

S - Strengths - strong cash position; patience; somewhat diversified (403B, IRA, Roth, taxable, cash equivalents, individual stock); no outstanding credit; still have a job w/benefits including health insurance and a bus pass; ability to save; can live cheap; good health; stable relationships; optimism & gratitude; ability to think and learn; a taste for being contrarian.

W - Weaknesses - emotion (unless you're Vulcan, you have that problem); my investments already have a lot of moving parts; need to experience things to learn them; a taste for risk; tendency to cheerlead and weigh positive info more strongly than negative info; incomplete analysis; too much/incoherent data; being contrary by itself is not a good enough reason to do things.

O - Opportunities - stocks are dropping to levels that I can afford; real estate is beginning to drop to levels that I can afford.

T - Threats - macro economic uncertainty (deflation, inflation, stagflation, hyper-inflation - do I have all the -flations?); political uncertainty; will I have a job?; mis-timing how low asset prices can go (they can keep dropping); as I buy, I tie up money that I'll need for other things.

Saturday
Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $13 brunch + $5 grocery (produce) + $5 night trip

On Saturday night, DH and I took the night Seattle Trolley Tour. Its run by MEHVA - cost was $5 for a 3 hour tour. It was very fun and historic ... however, you will be sitting on a historic bus/trolley for 3 hrs, so a word to the wise: there is a certain amount of stamina required. Again, MEHVA - a non-profit - collects buses and trolleys, but to keep them in good condition, they must be driven around. They would be driven around anyway, so MEHVA charges the rest of us to ride along.

Our chariot for the evening - a circa 1940 trolley. This trolley runs completely on electricity: two poles attached to the roof of the trolley run along a double electric track about 25 ft above the ground.


Since we could only go where the double electric track still exists, and the 68 yr old trolley doesn't have enough of a counterbalance to handle the top of Queen Anne Hill, our itinerary was: from 2nd & Main, Beacon Hill, International District, Pioneer Square, Pike Market, Belltown, lower Queen Anne Hill, then back downtown, Eastlake, over to the University District, Montlake, Capitol Hill, then 2nd & Main again.

It was the perfect time to try out the night landscape setting on my new camera ... so let me re-phrase that: its the perfect time for me to inflict night camera pictures onto my blog readers.

Inside the trolley - they went all out and maintained the old placards, too. Hmmm, I should look into that.


King Street Station - where the Amtrak goes. I seem to remember that this station is also being renovated.


Hey, who let the Alaskans in? (N.B: Washington state is the closest in the lower 48 to Alaska).


Close up of some neon on Stewart St.


I apologize right now - no tripod, no sharp night pictures of the Seattle skyline. Maybe next year. You'll have to settle with the artistically blurry ones.

One of the layovers - this one in Queen Anne. At our layover in the University District, we were swarmed by college students who were fascinated because the trolley looks so different. It warms my heart that they were interested. DH and I suspect that we had a couple of college stowaways riding from the U-District back to downtown. Touching that we were cool enough that they would do it.


The Saturday night action on the street. We were stared at and waved to numerous times. Funny story - as the trolley was navigating through Queen Anne, a young couple got to the driver's side of their car. I suspect that they were hitting two social events last night because when the young man got to the car, he took off his shirt to change presumably for the second event. The middle-aged woman watching him in the trolley began to shriek with laughter. I still think she owes the bus driver a big tip.


In short, cheap, fun, historic, green. What's not to like?

Friday
Saving log - $3 tip box
Spending log - $15 lunch + $102 dinner & drinks

Saturday
Saving log - $0 tip box
Spending log - $12 brunch + $10 produce

My surprise guest is kashi!

DH and I met with Kashi and her SO Friday night. Most of you old-timers remember her; for those who forgot, or are new enough that you've never run across her blog, let me be helpful:

http://kashi.savingadvice.com/

I hope that I'm not stealing too much of her thunder, but she looks fantastic, her SO is very sweet, she's working part time in a photography portrait studio (my big, big question - keep pursuing photography, Kashi, your pics are fantastic!), and she's on a vacation between jobs (she was also escaping the effects of the convention). Hopefully she will catch us up a bit after she gets back to Minnesota.

The four of us ate and drank a couple of cocktails alfresco along Pike - a wonderful 2 hour wide ranging catchup. The funny thing was that DH and Kashi's SO seemed to click even more strongly. If an objective observer looked at our table, it would have appeared those two had the reunion rather than the two of us! Could that be an effect of blogging - Kashi and I could quickly catch up through our blogs, while DH and SO did it the old fashioned way?

Kashi mentioned that she just ran out of things that she wanted to blog about - I can readily relate. Its hard to write if things are going well, and if you feel like you are bumping up against the same issues, well, posting those over and over gets problematic.

Kashi and SO put up a bit of a fight when I nabbed the check. It's the end of your vacation, you two, allow me. Besides, it was the very best money I've spent this year.

I promised that when DH and I visit the farmette in Wisconsin, we will look them up in Minnesota. And if they are more serious about moving to the PNW - please visit for a week in February. Late summer is Bali-Hai season in Seattle ... it leads tourists to their doom.

Now what you've all been waiting for - pictures!

An action shot of Kashi doing what she does best ... and using the PricePlus gambit.


Baselle (in black) and Kashi (in blue) walking away...


And after all that...

"Good night, Kashi," I said.
"Good night, baselle," Kashi said.

Savings log - $2 tip box
Spending log - $1.50 coffee + $11 lunch + $4 dinner for two.

Not much is happening at work in these past two days. But this morning I walked to my stop and found this:


Which means only one thing - the Greenwood Seafair Parade. DH joined for a bit this year - I sprung for Greenwood Market $2 brat special for each of us: brat, potato chips, bottled water. The parade suffered a bit from timing issues, as in "when the (*&)(*& is this starting?". I told DH the only way to make it go faster was to walk backwards along the route. Most of my pictures are blurry, of which I will now bore you forthwith.

The motorcycle drill team:


The QFC shopping cart drill team:


The Seafair Pirates are now equal opportunity. A little something for the three guys who are reading - besides, we are a family blog.


And finally, keepin' it fiscal:


Bonus points that adults would dress up as checks and tax forms.

This is not an anthem for my life, a la Merch; its more like a soundtrack every time I cross this street ...and I cross it often - I work three blocks away. From the musical Little Shop of Horrors.

[WOMAN]
Alarm goes off at seven
And you start uptown.
You put in your eight hours
For the powers that have always been.
Till it's five P.M.

[BUM 1]
Then You go

[COMPANY]
Downtown
Where the folks are broke.
Downtown
Where your life's a joke.
Downtown
When you buy your token,
you go
Home to skid row.

[BUM 2]
Yes, you go

[COMPANY]
Downtown
Where the cabs don't stop
Downtown
Where the food is slop
Downtown
Where the hop-heads flop
in the snow
Down on Skid Row

Uptown you cater to a million jerks.
Uptown you're messengers and
mailroom clerks
eating all your lunches at the
hot dog carts.
The bosses take your money
And they break your hearts.

Uptown you cater to a million whores.
You disinfect terrazzo on their
bathroom floors.
Your morning's tribulation,
afternoon's a curse
And five o'clock is even worse

[BUM 3]
That's when you go

[COMPANY]
Downtown
Downtown
Downtown
Down on skid row
Down on skid row
Down on skid row
Down on skid row!

[AUDREY]
Where the guys are drips.
Where they rip your slips.
Where relationships are no go.
Down on skid row
Down on skid row
Down on skid row
Down on skid row!

[SEYMOUR]
Poor! All my life I've always been poor.
I keep asking God what I'm for,
and he tells me "Gee, I'm not sure
sweep that floor, kid."
Oh, I started life as an orphan,
a child of the street
Here on skid row.
He took me in, gave me shelter, a bed,
Crust of bread and a job
Treats me like dirt, calls me a slob,
Which I am.
So I live
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR]
That's your home address.
Ya live
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR]
When your life's a mess.
Ya live
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR]
Where depressions' jes'
Status Quo.
[COMPANY]
Down on skid row

Someone show me a way to get
outta here,
'cause I constantly pray I'll get
outta here
Please, won't somebody say I'll get
outta here
Someone gimme my shot or I'll
rot here.

[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
There's no rules for us.
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
'Cause it's dangerous.
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
Where the rainbow's jus a no-show
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
Where the sun don't
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
Past the bottom line
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
Go ask any wino, he'll know
I'll do I dunno what to get outta skid
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
But a hell of a lot to get outta skid
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
People tell me there's not a way outta skid
[COMPANY]
Downtown
[SEYMOUR & AUDREY]
But believe me I gotta get outta skid

[ALL]
Row!

Yesler Street, Seattle, the original Skid Row. A hundred and twenty years and thirty feet lower the traffic was logs. Today the traffic is equally mindless.

Saving log - $0 tip box
Spending log - $3.60 coffee, doughnut + $6 garage sale + $14 brunch + $15 grocery

Well, we had it all weather-wise at the Greenwood Garage Sale. No takers on my invite from this blog, however in the spirit of karmic whatever my housemate from my grad school days walked by, training for the Susan G Komen walk. Hadn't seen her in 15 years! We caught up a bit, at least as much as one could in 5 minutes.

Apologies if I missed you if you showed late. I came about 15 minutes early, then waited the academic wait of about 10 minutes after 9 ... but deals await and there is no rest for the wicked!

Across the street from the pick up point, they were setting up for my first stop of the day.


A little flea market/plant sale/bake sale in the lower parking lot of the Phinney Neighborhood Center.


We had snow, we had rain, we had cold. Mad props to any life form having sex outside in this weather. Not even drunk University of Alaska college students would think of it!


Since hunting for cheap deals in bad weather seemed so very Scottish, the bagpiper at the church rummage sale at 70th and Greenwood fit right in. Slim pickings at the rummage sale.


For 6$ I bought: 1 small hammered metal dish, 1 bundt pan, 1 scent diffuser, 1 barbeque fork with a thermometer attached for DH, 1 deck of "Wall Street's Most Wanted" playing cards (Broken Arrow, I'm thinking of you here). DH wanted to try bundt pan meatloaf, I don't bake, hence no bundt pan until now. I bought some aromatherapy scents in Paris. At the time, I thought, "why buy the scent diffuser and waste the space in my luggage when I can get one in Seattle?" I priced simple ones in the $15-$20 range. This one's battery powered with a little pump. $2.

Not bad for a couple hours work. I met one of my coworkers shopping. We both agreed that we were hard core, but it was too cold to keep at for more than a couple of hours.

Every so often the question comes up. Do you pick up change from the street?

And the pros and cons come up which boil down to this. Pro: the money's risk free; con: my time is precious, and by G*d, I'm not the type of person who picks up pennies from the street. In case you couldn't tell by the subject line, I'm a pro change picker upper. I know I won't convert a con change picker upper people but I do want to provide a little food for thought.

First of all, you have to be in the right position to even pick up change from the street. If you are already in the right position, you're already un-American. You can't be in a car. You have to be on a sidewalk or in a lobby, walking. You can't be on a cellphone. You shouldn't be pacing and staring off into middle distance, listening. You have to be on a sidewalk, & basically unproductive - not doing deals, not selling something, not ordering someone around. If you're just walking, so much for your time being precious; might just as well train your eye searching for little metal circles.

Second of all, do you pick up change in other aspects of your life? Change that collects in the bottom of the washer/dryer when it fell out of your pants? You pick that up. Change on the carpet of your car that you tossed in your hurry pulling out of the drive thru? You'll pick that up, sure, especially if there's a toll involved. Change that you sucked up in the vacuum bag? Nasty, but you'd rescue it. Change between the couch cushions? You'd pick that up. Matter of fact, isn't that the first place you look for pizza and laundry money?

Here's a news flash. Picking up change from any of those sources, some even nastier than the sidewalk, doesn't change your net worth one iota. Its money you already have that you've moved into your pants pocket from an alternate pocket. Sidewalk change is new money.

Lastly, there's the I-make x-dollars-per-second-its-not-worth-it argument. That only works if your pay is docked when you pick up change. Otherwise, if you find change at night or on the weekend, your pay that hour is $0. Picking up the coin means your pay is $0 plus coin. If you find the coin during lunch and you are making a salary, you pay that hour is $salary plus coin. Think of it as a tip for being alert.

I don't have any reason to convert a non-change picker upper into a change picker upper. Why make competition? Change that you pick up means change I won't. All I ask of you is this: if you see sidewalk money, point it out to me. I'll pick it up.

Saving log - $0 tip box + $35 Drp 1 + $40 Drp 2
Spending log - $1.55 coffee (16 oz size), $6 lunch

Put money into two of my Drp stocks. They aren't going gangbusters, but its nice to be able to put a little something in when stocks are cheaper.

I finished figuring out what I want to now put into my 403B. 2007 I had to pay tax with a penalty, and I want to avoid that. I figure the most strategic way to avoid it is to increase my 403B to the max.

The maximum that we can put in is $15K; from my latest paycheck (end of February) I've already put in $1170, I can change quarterly so I will have put in $1755 by the end of March (quarter 1), so I have $13,245 to put in for 9 months. That works out to be around $1470/month, or $735/pay period. I used the paycheck calculator, first putting in what I was doing already to see if the numbers were about right. They were within $5, so I increased the percentages by 5%, then 2.5% until I got a 403B withholding close to but under $735. 37.5%. I drop my paycheck by 300$ and that's per paycheck - $600/month. I can do it, but it will take some getting used to.

The other commitment was to the trainer. I've had a heart to heart. I've basically been 185 (sometimes as high as 190, or as low as 183) for over a year. Is the plateau an issue? What kind of new goals should we go after?

I thought about this over the weekend, and I came to some conclusions:

1. The weight plateau doesn't bother me - unless I stepped on a scale, you wouldn't guess that I'm 185, and these days, maintaining and not increasing weight even during the holidays is an achievement.

2. What does bother me is my waist. Legs, arms, chest, back, butt, even upper waist have become more defined and I'm happy with their progress. My lower and mid waist are stubbornly resistant. Don't get me wrong - the ab muscles underneath have gotten a lot stronger - they just are still cloaked by the fat on top.

3. Weight training is great and I enjoy it - but right now its the same moves with increasing weights. Not too much to learn after you get the form down and you figured out what muscles get targeted. I suggested that I'd like to learn some pilates and yoga moves and with that my trainer brightened up. We did a couple of them today - the v sit keeping the chest up and moving the arms up and down. Pumping arms up and down gives you something to do while you are holding that darn v sit...my mid back is very stiff.

Conclusion is that we are going to work on an inches goal, specifically for the waist. Not that you can spot lose, but something's bound to happen.

Tuesday
Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $3 coffee

Wednesday
Saving log - $0 tip box
Spending log - $0

Attended a workplace all staff retreat with breakfast coffee and lunch provided, so I managed to have a no spend day today. Yesterday I brought a lunch and I knew that I would have a no spend day the next day so I splurged and had the delicious $3 drip coffee. Averaged out over two days, its just a bit more than my usual.

The retreat was interesting as these things went. I had a minor epiphany during the retreat with the concept that relationships usually succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly. It came from a Hemmingway character, when asked how he became bankrupt, said, "gradually, then suddenly."

The speaker at the retreat generalized it to all relationships, but since this is a financial blog, I much prefer to keep it in its original setting. How many of us got into serious debt gradually (through denial), then suddenly?

For the bloggers here wrestling with their debts, please remember that denial is a powerful, long lasting emotion. It makes the gradualness of your financial situation so easy to take ... much easier to take than facing the sharp shock of reality. And who among us remembers exactly all of the items we got into debt over? Wonderful or necessary, it doesn't matter - only the denial remains.

All of us savers, though, saved our money gradually, then suddenly. Compound interest is the classic gradually, then suddenly situation. Our 401Ks didn't just magically get big, it took time for most of us to start our 401Ks, decide on the amounts, increase the amounts over time.

Several of the new bloggers here talked about the courage it took us more established bloggers to blog about the mundane. Money management itself is all about the gradual, then the sudden, all about all the little mundane choices to save small amounts consistently over long periods of time, the fact that putting $44 into savings while taking out $40 from the ATM is somehow different, and better than just saving $4.

Right now its all about you all out there discovering the same thing. Try it. Saving will be gradual for a long while, but when it turns sudden, it becomes amazing.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $3.36 coffee & bagel, $60 clothes

Didn't feel like working out at the gym. It was a nice day so instead I did a little shopping - bought several more long sleeved solid colored tops that I use year round - and did the mega 50 block walk.

I did a little detour. DH sometimes cuts down streets I never travel along, let alone walk down. On the corner of one street he drove, we saw an asian temple, so during my walk I walked past it.


I've lived in Greenwood for 8 years. Darned if the neighborhood still surprises me. This is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery founded in 1973. Its stupa (the white shape) is on the right, with prayer wheels circling it.


The red sign in the left corner invited you to walk around the stupa clockwise, turning each prayer wheel clockwise as you do so. Didn't have to ask me twice. It was very relaxing to hear the wheels turning as I walked. And I forgot to get ATM money afterward.

N.B.:According to Images of America: Seattle's Greenwood-Phinney Neighborhood, this is Sakya Monastery, the only Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside of Tibet. The head lama is 3rd in rank below the Dali Lama.

Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $1.19 coffee + $8 lunch + $25 poker game

Crazy, crazy day today. I work for a large non-profit in Seattle, who shall remain nameless (initials are UW). Today we organized and readied pledges for processing from a large company. From my perspective it was fun, putting pledges in piles, adding things together, taking a box of unruly and making it "ruly". Just a few observations on the process.

1. Fascinating looking at personalized/ artistic checks. It makes you wonder what kind of adult writes a Kenny Chesney or a Scooby Doo check. Since artistic checks come in a series you have to wonder ... for every Kenny Chesney-guitar pose check, do you get the Rene Zellweger handing-you-divorce-papers check?

2. Checks are a magnet for another kind of transaction - badly filled out checks. A fundraising staffer showed one check which had the money amount written on the to:line, where our name of our non-profit is supposed to go. Nothing else. We can't cash it. I was pretty sanguine about it. "Fake pledging at its finest," I said.

Fake pledging happens every so often. Its a badly filled out check or a pledge form. Sometimes the check bounces, sometimes the "donor" wants his gift to go to a place that we can't send it (a place that's not a non-profit). If you are new to the non-profit biz, you think, "how can the person be so careless?" The old hands to this biz just smile. Fake pledging. After all, if the person is paying a mortgage or rent ... they know damn well how to write a check.

Fake pledging is perfect to the passive aggressive employee. They appear to follow the herd and pledge, and if they do it in the sight of others they aren't bothered for the rest of the fundraiser. They don't have to go through the discomfort of saying no. Best of all, they spend no money - when the fake pledge gets to us, we can't cash the check so we don't book it.

Too bad the employee who didn't want to participate couldn't say no... they could save themselves a check, we could save some time, and we would have no one to laugh at.

I know you are curious, so as threatened, pictures of the farmette. These are shots of the house and barn. Warning - long, long, long, with lots o' pictures.

House - facing west. This is the side facing the barn, which we will see later. The foundation got recently fixed.


House - facing east. This is the side facing the garden and the property now owned by the Wisconsin Dept of Natural Resources. We'll see that later, too. We never ever used that porch.


This is the north side of the barn and the now fixed up milkhouse. The red barn door is now new, and there aren't many diamond windows around on barns these days. The house would be behind you and to your left.


Inside of the old shed on the east side of the barn - all you would do is take a few steps to the left of the previous picture. This old, 20 ft shed contained the old, copper-bottomed still my grandfather (father's side) used to make whiskey during Prohibition.


This is the south side of the barn. The barn is actually in the shape of an upside down U - The milk cows were generally led in the central courtyard before milking and went there during rainstorms. Nowadays, the solar panel stands proud on the left. Its generating power - kind of fun watching the inverter go in reverse, sending power back to the utility.


Close up of the three poles. We installed three poles in case sister and I wanted to install two more solar panels. Under the three poles lay a trenched copper cable which delivers the power to the farmette. In the background, the southwest corner of the house is peaking through the trees.


Close up shot of the back end of the solar panel.


Close up of the courtyard where the cows lay. The flooring - ahem, compost - is like scotch: very well aged.


This is the south west corner of the barn. That little blue-green thingee sticking out is the automatic manure spreader - how cow manure got out of the barn.


Grounds and fields next.

It was a bizarre day at work yesterday. We interviewed for my temporary helper. The first interview went with only a minor, non-bizarre hitch, but the second one... well, you hear about it maybe as a joke or urban legend. What happened was this:

The HR person on our panel confided in us that she wondered if she would make it - interviewee wanted to come in at 11 am, rather than 10:45. One of our panel had to leave at 11:30, so to get at least the 45 minutes, HR was insistent - 10:45.

At 10:45, the person was waiting for us. We ushered her into the room, and while we were all standing, introduced ourselves. Interviewee, a woman, introduced herself - and solved the mystery about how we were to pronounce her first name - then said that she had to use the restroom. Fine, the HR person (a woman) escorted her to the restroom, maybe 30 ft from the interview room.

Back in the interview, while we were waiting for the interviewee, we chatted a bit about this and that, listening. DJ friend, who was on the panel, told us about the little whooshing sound people make as they walk on the carpet between the cubicles.

Minutes pass. I make a joke that the interviewee will be interviewing at 11:00 am. But we thought - well, zippers, snaps, putting yourself together, the fact that women have number 3 to deal with, etc. A few minutes after that, the other woman on the panel and I went to the bathroom to check.

Bathroom empty; interviewee gone.

Other woman and I make a cursory pass along the cubicles in case she got lost. I went and chatted with the front door receptionist. She described the interviewee, saw her go in, didn't see her go out.

Oh boy. The four of us on the panel each took a floor to make sure she wasn't hurt, hiding, lost, committing a crime, etc. I took the second floor and chatted with a coworker little about our "runner". Other than the fun fact learning that visitors to Bill Gates' mansion are given a name tag with a GPS unit in it... well, we saw or heard nothing odd or amiss in a bathroom, stairwell, cubicle, office, store room.

Interviewee went poof. The HR person scratched her head. No shows, yes; but she never had anyone bail out at the interview stage before. Someone thought that maybe she thought that she could count us as one of the three contacts/week needed to collect unemployment, but that would mean the definition of contact really stiffened up in the past 15 years.

One thing's for certain - she had a transporter and we didn't.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $.10 coffee

Well, had my dime spending day today. I feel almost as virtuous as I would if it was a no spend day. Made $180 in interest last month.

Voted this morning in a special primary. Normally its in September; this year's several weeks early. I voted an electronic ballot - its very rare that electronic gadgets fail for me, but not for many other people. It won't matter soon because King County is heading toward an all mail-in ballot.

I prepare for voting the night before by looking at the voters guide and writing down how I'm going to vote. It was nice to have a friend running for school board because I usually decide eeny-meeny-miny on those. But despite the planning, there's always one item on the ballot that I didn't decide on. When I pick blind it never fails that I pick the nutball. Too bad; nutballs are easy to spot in the voter's guide. Here are my EZ rules:

1. No more than two fonts in the candidate's statement. Regular and italic or regular and bold. As soon as you start with the regular, bold, italic, ALL CAPS all on a 1/2 page, well...do you really think that way?

2. No underlining passages whole passages and paragraphs. C'mon, it looks kind of stupid when you underline whole chapters in a textbook. If you think all of this is that important than none of it is.

3. Not keeping the use of capital letters to the first word of a sentence and proper nouns. Just because You have a Word you like doesn't mean You can Capitalize It.

4. No third person POV. The main reason baselle didn't vote for Bob Dole ... well, okay other than the fact that baselle normally votes Democratic.

5. A first name that's not obviously made up. This year it was Goodspaceguy Nelson. (actually his entry was pretty funny - "to glorify King County, ask that governments make it easier to make movies here.")

So Duvall friends told me they had no ripe blueberries...


And they swore they had no ripe huckleberries...Cripes, this is the most huckleberries ever I've seen on a bush. I must not get out all that often, I guess.


The Duvall friends were interested in doing pickles and marmalade. Are you crazy! I told them that berry jam is easy with no botulism potential. And the quick pickle steps usually had the "put in salted ice water for hours" step, which means canning the next day. The only problem with the jam is what couple can really go through a quart of jam in a reasonable time and without an insulin shot?

So we picked up some pint jars in addition to the quarts we got from the other friend. They'll use the quarts in the next few weeks. I showed them what you look for when you go through jars. We got one bad cracked one, one with a rough spot on the rim (I use those, but that one gets opened and put in the refrigerator after canning), and one mayo jar. No mayo jars as a canning jar for me.

We picked berries for a couple of hours, doing grizzly bear style picking - stripping the berries, rather than picking each one. For the huckleberries it still meant a lot of stripping for a small volume and it meant a lot of cleaning of leaves, berry stems, bugs, overdone fruit. My advice: use a fair amount of water. Leaves float, and the overripe stuff tends to sink and dissolve. Still it took about an hour to clean and pick.

The first step is to measure, which is a bit of a craft, because if you pack them down, you change the volume. This is 4 cups of blackberries, 7 cups of blueberries, 2 cups of huckleberries.


We made two batches of jam - 6 pints of a blueberry huckleberry lemon combo with added pectin, and 6 pints of a straight cooked-down blackberry blueberry number with sugar. The Duvall friends took lots of notes, but they did fade in and out, something you can't do during canning. Something about hot boiling water and hot boiling sugar that keeps you on task.

Here's the waterbath canner in action, steam surrounding it.


The batches of jam. Blackberry on the left, huckleberry/blueberry on the right.


Turns out that the added pectin number did something strange. It passed my fork test for jam, which means that it would jam up, but it seems jammy at the top and syrupy at the bottom. Tastes fantastic though. The cooked jam number took forever and ever to cook - it never really fully passed the fork test - but it jammed up nicely in the jar. Tastes great, but blackberry is always stronger than blueberry in my book.

Spent Friday night and Saturday in Duvall Washington, at the north edge of the county. The Duvall friends invited us to the tractor fair Saturday morning and early afternoon. Not only did it harken back to a more frugal time, it was a blast!

This is an International Harvestor (IH) tractor M - a tractor that my dad had and "Nut" borrowed as a ransom. This one is in far, far better condition.


These weren't just for show - they had to run enough to participate in a parade and some, for a tractor pull. This is one of the oldest tractors restored and running - a 1919 Allis Chalmers.


The 1919 tractor with one of the newest tractors - from 1981.


It wasn't just tractors - any old engine or gas fired appliance that could be restored seemed to appear. This is a gas powered washer. You primed the beast using the pedals at the bottom.


And a more detailed shot of the gas iron. Inside the base of the iron was a pilot light! To a farm wife, the question "did I leave the iron on?" had a whole new dimension.

Saving log - $5 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $5.45 lunch

Nothing, nothing, nothing happened today. I mean I always think of something to write about, but today absolutely nothing financial happened to me. (Okay, when I got back from an hour of gym, I got 22 messages, all from a fax machine.) So little has happened today that all I'm going to do is post the image, tell a story, and get outta here.

Its summer, and the poppies are out...


Which reminds me of a story.

Back in the 80s, I went to a housewarming party in West Seattle. It was a charming little place, tiny front yard with a little deck, and a high fence. I went into the backyard and came chest to face with a clump of 4 foot high red poppies, the flower and ovary capsule swelled up the size of a baseball. The real (ahem, illegal to grow in the US) thing, if you know what I mean. I remarked on it to the new owner ... how could I not? He smiled and told me that when he moved in the entire garden was comprised of two plants - these huge poppies, and dill (!) While he enjoyed opium poppies as well as the next knowledgable non-DEA agent, he wanted a little more variety. So he dug all of the dill and most of the poppies out and composted them.

A couple of days later, some of the older neighbors came to visit, and were very, very disappointed to find that the new owner had dug most everything out. It turns out that the old owner was the daughter of a Chinese missionary and used to make a "medicinal tea" with the poppy leaves. The neighbors remembered with a certain amount of fondness that they would all sit around, sipping tea and dreaming about how they would renovate the kitchen.

So I say to you ... if you want to get away with something, have a good story. Don't want your opium den busted? Invite your neighbors over for tea and dreams.

A quick itinerary:
18th - L'Opera & the neighborhood around the 1st arrondisement
19th - Madeleine Church, Rue Royale, Invalides, Napoleon's Tomb, Champs Elysses, Arc de Triomphe
20th - French lunch with the Parisian side of DHs family
21st - Notre Dame, Ile de Cite, a little bit of walking around the Rive Gauche
22nd - Montmartre; Dali Museum
23rd - Louvre, Place de Bastille
24th - 2nd french lunch with MIL friends, a nap, then an evening at the laverie automatique.
25th - Le Defense, Effiel Tower
26th - Marche aux Puces (Flea Market); walking tour of the Pallisades
27th - Versailles
28th - Picasso Museum, Pompidou Center
29th - Rodin Museum, Musee d'Orsay
30th - Pere Lachaisse Cimitaire

Thank you, Paris Metro and the Paris Museum Pass (PMP)! We managed to get to museums before the crowd did early on, but we got the 2-day PMP for the 28th and 29th. The PMP doesn't pay if you calculate it against admissions, but boy it does in terms of time and aggravation. The cheap person waits an hour in the rain, the frugal person gets the PMP and walks right in.

These pics aren't exhaustive - they're just some of the fun ones.

From the hotel room balcony


The cafe scene along the Champs Elysses is not as intimate as one would like


A nice atmospheric from the top of Notre Dame. Sepia setting, not sunset.


I have a ton of great Louvre snaps, but I just love this one. What you would really get if you tried to wrestle a big cat to the ground.


The laundromat next to the boulangerie...


Damn, its big...


Well you get the idea. Might just as well stop before y'all fall asleep.

Saving - 0$
Spending - $20 chiropractor + $3.50 coffee, cookie + 5$ lunch

Today DH and I were off, but since the chiropractor was next door to work, it didn't really feel like it. Got my neck and back popped; another set of errands got us to the Pike Market and then it was back to the car.

On the way back, we made a little pit stop at the Cadillac Hotel where the revamped Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park has their new digs. Fabulous place to visit, and for the frugal, the price is right: free. Course we made a suggested donation and took a look around.

The Klondike Gold Rush occurred 1896 - 1899, but there is so much similarity between Americans of a 100 yrs ago and us today. There was an economic panic in the early 1890's. News of gold sparked gold fever in hundreds of thousands of desperate people. Crazy decision 1 - to go. Seattle made almost $1B (today's money) provisioning prospectors - everybody had to have a year's worth of food and gear for the Yukon, which happened to be in Canada. In other words, 1 ton of gear. Crazy decision 2 - to buy.

Most of the trip was by boat, but there was a mountain pass that a prospector had to cross...with 1 ton of gear. Most had to hoof it, going up and down that pass over 30 times, taking a pack of gear up the hill, then sliding down, then up the hill, then sliding down. I'll bet it got old after the first trip. I felt for those prospectors, doing something insane just because they made those first two crazy decisions.

Lesson 1: How much had I bought in my early 20s on a credit card that I was metaphorically lugging up that pass over and over again?

And when the prospector got there... the good claims had been taken already. Some worked other claims or bought them. The guys who really cleaned up were ones selling donuts and coffee or fresh vegetables. One guy took one look at his claim, then looked at all the scurvy going around, and farmed it. 20 hrs of daylight, giant vegetables, big bucks.

Lesson 2: The entrepreneur sees the situation as it is. Its rarely the original situation that provides the opportunity.

Final amazing stat:
For every 100,000 people who started out
40,000 made it to the Klondike
20,000 prospected for gold
60 people found more than $15,000 worth of gold
30 people kept at least half of their gold after 5 years.

Lesson 3: A lottery's a lottery, no matter how its dressed up.

Saving log - $4 tip box
Spending log - $1.50 coffee (didn't drink my milk yesterday) + 7$ lunch

Walked to my bus stop on a near solid surface of black ice. Thanks, Yaktrax. You still have to be cautious, but those rubber springy things really work! Crossed my usual black ice intersection with a lot more confidence.

Succumbed to the holidays: I gained 1.5 pounds for Christmas. I can lie to myself and I can lie to the trainer, but it appears that my body has the last laugh during the holidays. At least I enjoyed that little bit of chocolate.

Still was a crazy work day today but the work piles are backing down, so I'm catching up. The highlight of weirdness came this afternoon when one of our campaign managers told us that one of his companies had a penny drive.

Fine, we said.
Oh no, you don't understand, he said. You will be processing 5000$ ... in pennies!

They were rolled (pwhew, I guess) and were put in boxes and boxes, filling a dolly cart to a height of about two feet. About a third came in cardboard boxes the size and heaviness of a large brick - 25$. The other two thirds were loose rolls thrown in boxes, and even a large money bag. Yikes! I never thought I would see a half a million pennies in one place. Actually, the claimed count was 5003$, so 500,300 pennies. Maybe.

The campaign manager managed to get them all in his car trunk, but he could have sworn that his front wheels never touched the pavement.

The COO came down to our safe just to see what a half a million pennies looked like. The manager who brought it asked how we were going to process a half a million pennies and I joked that we were going to dump them in a pile and roll around naked in them. And why bother with the safe, anyway? If the pennies disappeared, all we would have to do is check the hospitals for thieves with hernias.

Seriously, if it wasn't for the massive amount of energy it would take, since it takes 1.4 cents worth of metal to make a penny, the scientist in me would have much preferred to extract the $7000 worth of zinc and copper from the $5000 pennies.

Sigh. Fun's fun. I'm sure that the bank that we normally use would basically wipe their collective eyes from laughing, then charge twenty percent for the privilege. Its either a run to a friendly credit union and a coin counter, or to the nearest US Treasury office, where they would weigh them. Hard to imagine a coin counter that would handle a half a million pennies.

N.B. we didn't get those pennies out of the safe and in the bank until June of 2007. You want a penny drive? Write us a check!

Now I'm not talking about the big horrendous lies that break the law or really, really hurt people. I'm talking about the little white lies, the ones that provide social grease. Often, white lying is a skill that can help you become frugal. Let me explain...

My DJ friend is also a co worker at the non-profit, just a couple of office doors down. Because it is a non-profit, its just like a family - money is short and arm-twisting is long, especially with fund raising staff, who have heard soft "nos" before and will press you until you give them a hard "no", and then you get the lecture on teamwork. Substitute "what kind of team are we that we can't get X?" with "what kind of family are we that we can't get X?" and you can see where I'm going with this.

Anyway, DJ friend got tapped to run his two turntables for a task at work. Bad in some sense because now everyone knows he has equipment. A day or two later, another co worker (also a DJ, kinda) wanted to borrow DJ friend's stuff to use for his DJing at another work event.

DJ friend, of course, knows that all electronic equipment is touchy. He doesn't trust the other guy but he knows that a straightforward "no" will get the lecture about not being a team player. (Of course getting your stuff back busted or tweaked so that it takes a month to get it to what it was isn't team playing either, but somehow that gets ignored. ) So DJ friend came to me for help.

I laughed. "You gotta learn to tell a brilliant white lie."
"Teach me," he said.

So what are the principles of a good white lie?
0. (to get you in the mood) Remember that the original situation might well be a white lie.
1. Know what your final result is.
2. Your white lie has to start with the truth.
3. It has to be plausible & the implications understandable.
4. It has to told simply enough so that no one wants details, or even thinks to check on the few details you do provide.
5. It has to be complete. No one should be able to come back and say, "maybe we can do/wait for Y instead?" This is the principle that most people fail at - its the difference between white lie and glorious white lie.

So let's begin.

Borrower claimed that he didn't have the funds to rent or buy another turntable - he bought records for the event (principle 0). Could I borrow one or your turntables?

Here's the white lie we came up with for DJ friend.

First of all, the final result is that no, you cannot borrow either turntable (principle 1).

During the event that DJ friend used his turntables, one balked on a song. Nothing horrible, one performer had to take the place of another until the snafu was resolved ten minutes later. So the truth was that DJ friend's turntables were balky, and we had hundreds of folks who witnessed it. That formed the nucleus of the white lie (principle 2).

DJ friend embellished the problem a bit, claiming skipping, which is a brilliant twist - DJ friend could claim that both he and the borrower's reputation are at stake (principle 3).

Now we get to the meat of the white lie. Both turntables are in the shop. No one wants to know which shop (principle 4). Both turntables are in it (principle 5.) This part was where DJ friend questioned the lie. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"You have to do both," I said. "Your turntables are a team so both could be causing the skipping (principle 3), and besides you don't want him to borrow either of your tables. Right? If you say one, you give him the opening to ask for the other. Then you have to give him a second lie about the other turntable."

(And the second lie is where the white liar usually gets into trouble. Remembering one lie is doable, remembering two is often not.)

The closer is that the problem is so intermittent that its going to take a while (principle 4) for the repair shop to figure it out. (principle 5)

So sorry, came the reply. Then nothing. No reply is the symptom of the brilliant white lie.

I throw the principles of great white lying out as a public service to the frugal community. After all, how much money do we have to shell out to fix whatever a borrower did?

Use the skills only for good!

That's why it took sooooooo long! (and that's why it is so long)

1. I follow only two professional sports – baseball and football. I do not wish to follow any more because I think you need a vacation from following stuff. I look forward to tossing out the sports pages in February, March, April. DH follows no sports. We once had a fight about what we were going to watch on Monday night. I wanted Monday Night Football, he wanted Ally McBeal.

2. In grad school, I managed to live on $550/month. I never bothered to take out supplemental loans. How stupid! I thought at the time. Now I say, “Whew!”

3. I owned a car for only 3 years of my life. During a very bad 6 week period, I wrecked and bought 3 used cars. I have not owned a car in 7 years.

4. I am the navigator on car trips. DH and I have a system that keeps us from going crazy. Default is straight, give at least ½ block warning, tell him the exit number, up to me to find and pick out landmarks and correlate to the map. We are actually quite good, even during advanced navigating jobs – Washington D.C. for instance.

5. Sometimes I have problems asking for directions.

6. I sleep like a rock. I have slept through: DH’s snoring, a category 3 hurricane, a typewriter blowing up (college roommate’s), a neighbor’s house on fire – okay my BF at the time woke me up and got me out of the house, but I would have slept through it. And I talk in my sleep.

7. That poem about driving in a blizzard through Reliance, South Dakota? All true. I believe that I was the closest to death at the time.

8. I cook, but do not bake.

9. I am the designated gravy maker during every Thanksgiving feast. Flour, not cornstarch.

10. I collect fortune cookie fortunes.

11. I have a very distinctive laugh.

12. At one point in the 80s, I lived in a shared household with my BF at the time and another housemate who later became my DH. Lawyer friend once asked me, “what do you look for in a man?” “Proximity,” I said with a sly smile.

13. I was a party girl in college.

14. My now nearly 20 year old cat knows his name. When DH and I lived in Arizona, we heard our neighbor call his dog. We came up and remarked that our cat had the same name. He told us that our cat always came before his dog did.

15. I did not talk to any family relation for 7 years.

16. I have learned to eat and enjoy asparagus.

17. To the best of my knowledge, I am not allergic to anything.

18. I am addicted to Sudoku.

19. I also do not, nor have any desire to own a mobile phone.

20. The worst grade I ever got in high school was in typing: a D. I hate to type on a typewriter – my fingers get performance anxiety. I learned computer skills starting in my sophomore year in college (1981) because I had the backspace key and you could send a print job to a laser printer and get a perfectly clean copy. My grades on papers suddenly went up at least one grade.

21. I have a PhD in botany. (Plant physiology/plant biochemistry)

22. One of my summer jobs during college was at Green Giant. I tested the sodium content of corn, and once in a while filled in for the canned corn taster.

23. Just like some people have a seasonal wardrobe, I have a seasonal mixed drink. My summer drink is campari and soda, my winter drink is an extra-dry dirty martini. Gin of course. What kind of lame-a$s drinks a vodka martini?

24. The house of my childhood – which we are trying to sell off as part of the farmette – is haunted by a ghost dressed in a fedora hat and 20’s garb that would go up the stairs. Anybody want to buy that house? It will be sold separately from the second property. Are you sure? One time only… Going, going, gone!

25. I take baths, very rarely showers. Not frugal, you say? Try taking a bubble shower! And if you are stressed and angry, a hot bath and a glass of wine is far, far cheaper than psychiatry (or bullets). I only take showers away from home – hotel rooms and in the gym.

26. I set my mp3 player to shuffle (aka random). A Julie Andrews song came up then one by Old Dirty Bastard. And no, it was not a mashup.

27. I taught DH one of my favorite car games: figure out the crop or the orchard. We farm families play practical games, none of this license plate nonsense. Sometimes it was easy – in North Carolina you could smell tobacco. Other times it would take us months to figure it out. When we were in Tucson, it took us until October to figure out what we had been driving through when we went to Phoenix: cotton.

28. I hate being photographed.

29. I once attended a botany class in college where I was the only registered student. The prof sighed at first but then brightened up and said, “if I’m teaching only one student at least its you. I can go as fast as I want because I know you’ll keep up.”

30. I am a night owl. My favorite hours to work are 12 noon to 8 pm. My best time to work is 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm.

31. I’m usually the cut-up during meetings at work.

32. The first time I ever had to use a key for a door was when I was 18 and in college in Chicago. The locks on the farm never worked. The first thing sister had to do when dad died was have the sheriff put padlocks on the doors of the house.

33. I can taste the difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk.

34. For the midwesterners out there: I find the smell of FleetFarm evocative. I walked into a FleetFarm in Montana, where most of DH’s family lives. One sniff and it all came back.

35. I like to find “found” food. Not dumpster diving, but blackberry brambles, plum, apple, pear, cherry trees, that sort of thing. When I find one in the neighborhood on someone’s property, I knock, introduce myself, and often will ask for a cut of their bounty. I used to pick and cure the olives along Olive Way on the University of Arizona campus.

36. Stores that have a lot of fiddley-stuff in them are catnip to me. Office supply stores, CD/DVD stores, kitchen equipment stores, five and dime stores, the dollar store, bead store…you get the idea.

37. I have more male friends than female friends. I have more gay friends than straight friends.

38. I have no wisdom teeth.

39. My hands are steady and I am good with them, which helped when I did experiments. I like to do crafts and work scissors quite well. However I cannot for the life of me cut a right angle.

40. Most dogs make me nervous.

41. My sister and I sound alike. I used to play a trick on my boyfriends in college. When they said something “good” (use your imagination), I would pause and say, “hold that thought, let me go get my sister!”

42. I worry that I will develop some of the same mental illnesses my mother had – depression, alcoholism, hoarding.

43. For you real old timers on the Internet: I created a newsgroup on Usenet (rec.food.preserving), then developed its first FAQ file. One year after I created the FAQ, I received a note that that FAQ file was one of 7 files left and lovingly saved on the last working computer at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia during the Bosnian civil war.

44. I can usually make any piece of electronics work.

45. I find window shopping boring and stupid.

46. My first scientific love was astronomy. I used to amaze my college friends by telling them what star that was in the sky. (It was Chicago – only 12 stars are bright enough to be seen with the light pollution. Not rocket science.) Even now I can identify all of the constellations. The JPL and NASA websites are amazing to me.

47. DH keeps two rifles and a pistol in the bedroom. All unloaded. I have no desire to handle or fire a gun.

48. For 14 years, through 5 bosses, the name of my boss alternated between David or Bob.

49. I have never been outside of North America, yet if someone tells me they are from a foreign country, I know what countries that country is next to and its capital.

50. I totaled a 1975 Datsun with my face when my bike brakes failed on a hill. (Very cheap car – replacing a busted window cost more than the car was worth.) I have a noticeable scar on my upper lip from that accident.

Every so often, I read the Millionaires in the Making column on CNN, and I've glanced at the pfblog to see how he's doing.

At first glance, they both depress the hell out of me. Nothing against them, but saving a ton of money when you make a ton of money ain't that hard. I mean the worst problem is the I-make-a-ton-therefore-I'm-brilliant and-I-deserve-it spending that you would have to quell. But really now, saving 25% on a combined salary of 145K still leaves a combined salary of 108K.

Yeah, I think I can live and save on that.

I'd be more impressed if they lived and saved on a combined salary of 60K, which is what DH and I make. And I have saved about 30% of my take home salary. (Not this last year - gym ate that, its about 12%.)

Every so often The Motley Fool trots out an update on their Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth column, which usually cheers me up. It just means that I'm going to have to live for a long time. I throw the link out to cheer whomever needs the cheer.

This morning the bus passed by a dark, closed up node of Scottrade, downtown on 3rd & Union. Wonder what happened there?

The gym has come through. The Halloween costume will be spectacularly good.

Counted a lot of money and pledges today at a company. Tomorrow our department has work!

Its weird how people will bust their butts and get all excited about a 4% raise. It is exciting, but if you save 4 pennies off of each dollar, its like giving yourself that raise.

I was talking to a mid-aged friend of mine who remembered $60/month rents, and how he joked that he was bugged when it when up to $70...all for only $10, he said. What do you mean? I said. You should have been bugged - that's a 16% increase. Man, that's an accountant's answer, he said.

And why save a dime per pound on 99 cent potatoes. Yeah, sure that's a dime, but that's also 11% savings.

Well, it's a lot easier to get into the frugal mindset and easier to rationalize your purchases if you calculate your savings in percents.

As far as gym is concerned - 0%. I lost a pound, gained .5% of bodyfat, lost an inch on the waist and chest, gained an inch on my arms and legs. Considering I punked out on eating and exercise for 2 weeks, I dodged a bullet.

Actually it's a pretty good story.

I was eating lunch alone at the sushi bar in the place that I generally get chirashi sushi. I didn't this time - it was cool and rainy, so I sprung for hot fat - tempura!

An Asian woman tried to get up onto the high chair next to mine. The chair was light, so I grabbed on the back to help steady it. We both laughed.

I went back to eating and watching CNN. I noticed the classic pull out the downtown map and stare it. I asked her if she was looking for something. Turned out she thought she was on the opposite end of downtown from where she thought she was and that she was looking for a specific shop, to show some of her wares - she made ceramic dolls. Then she asked me something that I didn't expect, somehow.

"So how do you tip?"

It turns out that she was from Japan, that she was an english teacher (her english was excellent and she appreciated the compliment), it was her second trip to the United States, but her first real trip by herself. No tipping in Japan.

"Well," I said, "its pretty easy. Its usually 15%. My fast way is two times the tax." (On further calculation, that was closer to 18%-20%)

"Yes, but how do you do it?" she asked.

I told her that if I pay by a card, I'll just add it to the bill and they'll charge me. She had cash..what then? Well, I put the money close to the plate so that the waiter would see, but someone walking past wouldn't really.

"Do you calculate it each time?"

I told her - not really. I guess at it, and I usually tip high, because the waiter's pay depends on it. Two times the tax (I showed her my check, which came) is a quick way to do it. And I taught her that a polite "check please" is perfectly fine.

She was so relieved. She confided to me that this was her first restaurant meal, and she was very nervous. She picked a Japanese place because she thought she would find someone understanding. (Me!) I told that it wouldn't do to eat McDonalds for your whole trip because anywhere else you'd have to tip. She laughed, and at that, I went back to work.

I have to say that she was doing a lot better here than I would in Japan... I'd be tipping!