Tag Archives: homemaking

Should You Stock Up?

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Sick Child is Offered Some Sustenance from a Girl Acting as Nurse
Sick Child is Offered Some Sustenance from a Girl Acting as Nurse

All the furor over the swine flu (which may or not be justified, we’ll have to see how it plays out) is resulting in news reports suggesting that people should stock up on food, water, medicine, etc. in case a pandemic wipes out our already struggling economy.

Of course, if everyone followed this advice, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because most grocery stores keep very little in reserve, instead relying on a steady stream of deliveries to keep their shelves stocked. It only takes a little fear-mongering to quickly clear those shelves.

Nevertheless, it’s always wise to keep a small stash of necessities in your house. (Learn more about stashes here.) I learned this the hard way when my husband and I were struck by a rough flu bug at the same time. Back then we had two toddlers; keeping them fed and their diapers changed was all I could do because I had a fever and was so dizzy. But my poor husband was even sicker than I was. So when we discovered we were completely out of acetaminophen and pop, guess who got to drive to the store to buy more? I was the logical choice, being the less dizzy of the two people in the house with driver’s licenses.

That was over 20 years ago, but I remember well driving down the highway and then trying to aim at the parking lot of the store and thinking, “I have no business driving in this condition.” It was all I could do to stumble into the store, buy what I needed (imagine the clerk’s joy over waiting on someone as sick and probably contagious as I was) and make it back home.

That experience made me decide I would never let my family be caught sick without supplies again. Since then, we always have acetaminophen, ibuprofen and aspirin in the house. I keep spare containers of drink mix just in case. Crackers, applesauce and rice are also good things to keep in the pantry for recovering patients.

So, should you stock up in case the swine flu makes it to your neck of the woods? That’s up to you, but I highly recommend that you make sure you at least have the basics in good supply at your house, because even if the swine flu turns out to be just another bug, you know how families share germs. Sooner or later, you’ll be glad you don’t have to run out for supplies when you’re feeling awful.

It All Started with a Check

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I’m still going through stuff from the storage unit, and am embarrassed to admit that I have boxes and boxes of bank statements with cancelled checks dating from the year we got married. Considering that we’ll be celebrating our 30th anniversary this summer, that’s a lot of checks!

My defense is that I was too busy raising kids to go through all this financial detritus sooner. Whatever. The fact is that I have to go through this stuff and shred the checks because our SSNs and credit cards numbers are all over them.

Yes, it’s time-consuming. But I’m determined to get rid of all this before we move again (which may happen this summer, but that’s another story).

One good thing about doing this is that it’s like a walk down memory lane. I’ll find a check for the ob-gyn from when I was pregnant with one of our children, or the big check we wrote for the down payment when we bought our first house, and it’s like reliving those wonderful times.

Today I found a check that really got me thinking about how we can do something very little or ordinary without knowing that the repercussions of that action will be enormous in our lives. Here are the details from that check:

Date: 3/1/84

Amount: $25.00

Pay to the order of: Moore Seminars

Memo: Homeschool Seminar – Wheaton

Who knew that my curiosity about homeschooling would still be affecting our lives 25 years later?

Grandma’s Cooking

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Isn’t she just the cutest thing? And this is just one of several short films made by her grandson, a filmmaker who wanted to preserve his memories of her.

Grandma is 93-year-old Clara Cannucciari; her 30-year-old grandson Chris is the filmmaker. When Chris posted his films to YouTube, neither of them had any idea that a turbulent economy would make their series on Depression-era cooking a smash hit on the Internet.

Clara has had an interesting life, as this article describes. Watching her in the kitchen brings back my own “grandma memories”….maybe it will do the same for you  🙂

Here’s the link for the entire series of films, so you don’t miss out on any. Enjoy!

When I Don’t Buy Based on Price

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Amish Farms Holmes Co, Ohio by David M. Dennis
Amish Farms Holmes Co, Ohio

I usually try to get the lowest price on everything. This works fine for most things, but it occasionally backfires.

Take chicken, for instance. I always bought large quantities of it and froze it when the price was right. I didn’t care what brand it was, I just went by price.

Then I started to see Amish chickens for sale in the grocery several years back, and I thought, what a rip off! Why should I pay several dollars a pound for chicken when I can get it for 89 cents a pound? Who buys that stuff anyway?

Before long, I started seeing articles about the chicken sold in groceries and how it contains all sorts of antibiotics that are reducing our immunities, and hormones that are making little girls mature too early. And I got to thinking, maybe I should be watching what kind of chicken I buy…. 

One week the local Piggly Wiggly put the Amish chicken on sale and I splurged on some (even the sale price was higher than what I usually paid for chicken). When I baked it, the whole house soon smelled wonderful! And when we ate it, well, all I could think was that this was like I remember chicken tasting when I was a child in the 1960s.

I thought it was all in my head, but the next time we had chicken, it was my usual sale-priced store brand, and it tasted like nothing compared to that darned Amish chicken.

Since then, I’ve gotten hooked. I try to stock up when Amish chicken is on sale. Sometimes I run out before it goes on sale again, so I’m stuck with the regular stuff, which I still buy, but I don’t like nearly as well.

I’ve noticed a few name brands are now offering “all-natural, no hormones, no antibiotic” chicken, and the price is better than the Amish chicken. But you can’t match the taste. There is nothing better than Amish chicken, I’ve decided. So I buy it when it’s on sale, and I pine for it once I’ve used it all up…….

A Simple Solution? Not Exactly

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Most of the time, the concepts of simple living and frugal living are complementary. Simple living usually involves downsizing, decluttering, even working less and living on less money. All of that fits in with a frugal lifestyle.

But some people are a little confused on the concept. Take the editor of the “HomeStyle” section of a local newspaper. She recently wrote a column about simple solutions that save time. One of her solutions:

Pre-sort laundry: Well, I finally did it—I purchased a plethora of laundry hampers that say “lights” and “darks” so everyone in the family can help sort the laundry as we go. So far, it’s the best $80 I’ve spent in a long time.

Whoa, $80? If she had to spend money, couldn’t she just have bought white, beige and black laundry baskets and told everyone to put their whites in the white one, their darks in the black one and their light colors in the beige one?

Better yet, why spend money at all? Can’t you just put signs on the hampers you already have? Write the word on a piece of duct tape if you have to.

I can think of all sorts of uses for $80, and none of them involve labeled laundry hampers. That kind of waste has nothing to do with simple or frugal living.