At The Movies

There is something about recessions/depressions that makes people go to the movies even more often. Escapism for the price of a movie ticket, I guess. I know I’ve been to a ton of movies this holiday season, way more than usual. Also, we are a little more comfortable these days because we have paid off our moving expenses (utility deposits, security deposits, etc.) and are now paying our true rent.

So this weekend I took my 16 year old granddaughter Rachel to the Palm Springs Film Festival. You can get a “six pack” of tickets for $50 and that got us into 3 films. Luckily all 3 films turned out to be really good. Saturday morning we went to see “The Witch Of The West Is Dead.” Shirley Maclaine’s daughter Sashi Parker played the elderly grandmother in a Japanese film and it was fun seeing her speak most of her dialogue in Japanese. It was also fun to see her in the audience looking very young and glamorous and ungrandmotherly. Aren’t actors amazing people?

Saturday afternoon we saw “The Black Balloon”, an Australian film about a family with the oldest boy being autistic. It was a wonderful story about how the younger brother both loved and hated his brother and dealt with how his life was turned upside down on a daily basis because of his brother’s condition. Rachel really identified with this film as she has two little autistic girls who frequently come to visit and was able to spot their different kinds of behaviors in the austistic onscreen performance of actor Luke Ford.

The third that we saw at noon on Sunday was “Tales from the Script” about screenwriters experiences having their scripts made into movies. I was worried that she might find this one too boring but she’s a prolific writer (just like her grandma!) and was really in to it.

All in all it was a great weekend visit, one of our best ever! Usually we have to go buy special Rachel food but now her palate has matured and she’s also into eating healthy, so no special food was needed.

Reality TV

We spend a lot on our cable bill. I just can't bring myself to go back to basic cable, plus we don't go out much so ... what to do but pay up and enjoy ourselves? Over the last couple of years, daughter J & I have become addicted to Reality TV. One of our favorite shows is Jon and Kate Plus 8. Like the rest of America, we just love those kids.

Monday night we stayed up late to watch the start of the new season. At least it appeared to be the first show of the new season, but it looked old because of Kate’s hair which was short and red. She’s been growing it out lately, based on recent booksigning photos and those photos sure didn't match how she looked on this show. The network must have a ton of old footage that can be made into episodes but are limited by having to keep the kids around the same age and trying to match the parents evolving looks.

This episode was about making soup at home. I watched it carefully and don’t believe I heard Kate use her favorite word “organic” even once. She & Jon described some of the ingredients in her soups – broccoli & cheese in one and beef with an assortment of veggies in another. Once again I was amazed me at what sophisticated and adventurous palates her 8 kids have. When my 3 were growing up, they never cared for cheese-based soups or the squash or root vegetables that she named. She had two huge lobster-style pots on her stove and were cooking both soups at once which had to have taken forever! I also wondered at how many meals she’d be able to get out of that batch, since there are 10 in the family – she claimed that she’d be able to get 5 or 6 lunches out of it if she included grilled cheese sandwiches. This definitely made it worth all that effort!

Kudos to Kate in this episode for keeping her cool when her stovetop exploded and she had to get a entirely new stove. Trust me, non-working appliances are a biggie in the Mom stress-o-meter level counter. It was always the one thing that threw me as a single parent - the one hassle I couldn’t just shrug off even back when money wasn't so hard to come by.

The kids were jumping on a Little Tyke inflatable bouncy toy. I saw something like that at Sam’s Club recently and thought it would be a great thing for the Gosselins to have since they have so many kids of the same age. Lunch time brought about the oddest part of the episode - watching six 4 year old children sitting in high chairs and wearing bibs ... all righty then!

During lunch they announced that they would be moving soon. Kudos to little Alexis, the oldest of the septuplets, for figuring out how to get her own bedroom. Evidentally she’s “disruptive” and so sleeps on her own and was informed that this arrangement would continue in the new house. Yup, she scored a major coup in that family!

the 99 Cent Store

Cool things I’ve found at the 99 cent store:

Kitchen sponges with the scrubber on one side

Fat Free Half and Half (for my coffee)

Super fresh produce

The best Italian meatballs ever

Plastic food storage containers

Holiday decorations

Office supplies

Eggs

Coffee

Vanilla frosting

A full color coffee table book about celebrity marriages (half of which were already kaput…)

Pizzas & Pizza rolls

Cute socks

Revlon Makeup

Tooth whitening kit

Sugar free candy

Sparkling water

Dog treats

Hair ties and clips

Self-tanning lotion

Pregnancy Testing Kit (!)

Joke gifts

The 99 Cent Store Rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Advantages of the Current Economic Crisis

After my last post, I started thinking about the plus side of the current economy. For one thing, it's kind of fun to have everyone in the same boat.

I can only imagine that this is how it must have felt during World War II when everyone made sacrifices for the war effort. My friend even has her own 'victory garden' ... her personal victory over inflated grocery store produce prices.

Here are some other good things that have come out of the current crisis:

#1) Free Groceries - I have 3 great coupons in my purse right now. The first one was mailed directly to me from Ralphs grocery store. I earned $14 in free groceries by using my Ralphs Reward Card when I shopped. They also included valuable coupons for items I buy from there on a regular basis. The other two coupons came in the mail with the Wednesday circulars ... one is for a free $10 gift card if I buy $50 worth of groceries from Stater Bros. The other is for $5 of free groceries if I buy $30 worth at Fresh & Easy. These incentives are really appreciated. Also some groceries have gone up in price but I've noticed that others have dropped.

2) We have been forced to explore alternative forms of transportation. This is possibly the greatest thing that has come out of this crisis, more and more people sharing cars, using buses, buying scooters, etc. And believe me, I am someone who never would have considered using a bus to go somewhere, now everyone I know seems to be carrying around bus route pamphlets!

3) Recycling is something we do religiously now. Good for the environment plus we usually make enough to go out for lunch after turning in our cans and bottles.

4) As people are unable to sell their homes, more and more properties are coming up for rent and thus rent prices are dropping. We ended up with a two bedroom/one bath unit that rivals what I used to pay for rent $10 years ago!

5) I'm enjoying watching the governments efforts to get people back into all these houses that are sitting around empty. It will be interesting to see what incentives they come up with. I don't know if it will ever be worth my while to own a house again some day though. With house prices falling, all the old reasons for buying one have flown out the window! The only way it would make sense now is if it was an income producing investment, not for personal use.

6) How can I put this delicately, hmmmm ... the people who wait on me now at McDonalds actually speak English! Also, we live in a town that relies heavily on tourism and we appreciate our visiting snowbirds more than ever. This makes us more tolerant of their eccentricities.

7) Besides saving on housing and groceries, a lot of companies are trying to figure out ways to make things more affordable for people. We will all benefit from this, no matter what our economic status is.

8) There are more and more enjoyable reality TV shows about how people with large families manage to make ends meet. Besides being entertaining, a lot of the shows have helpful suggestions for trimming costs.

9) Better health - people are gardening, walking places, trying to make better choices when eating so that the food they have truly counts.

10) Camaraderie - I'm not the Big Loser trying to get by during a time of prosperity, everyone is feeling the pinch and trying to save money. Learning to get by on less is also good for everyone. My daughter and I are in a much smaller place than we've ever lived before and it's suiting us just fine. We enjoy being resourceful in creating storage space ... for example, using my 2 drawer file cabinet as a side table in our living room, using a hope chest as our coffee table, etc.

The Current Economy

Oh no! Our economy is in crisis! Wall Street crashed! The president got involved, making a big speech informing us about this sorry state of affairs. Even the candidates acknowledged it! Well, welcome to the party guys, what took you so long to notice?

This is some small ways of how the current economy has affected one person (me!):

1) My sewing basket was reinstated, the sewing machine brought out, dusted off and given a permanent place of honor in our house. No more new clothes … our clothing is patched, repaired and altered instead. If we need something new, it comes from WalMart or a thrift shop.

2) Food – no more experimental recipes using a wide range of ingredients. No more looking at the sides of packages trying to figure out calories, carb counts or fat grams. The only numbers I pay attention to now is price!

3) Pets – no new pets and we cover their little ears whenever we discuss whether we can afford to keep the ones we’ve got. Bob has needed a rabies booster for over a year, as well as eye treatments. Lady is a candidate for new knees, which will probably never happen. Their food is expensive but, since they are Chihuahuas, we keep buying it.

4) We move around to be closer to work to reduce our gas prices. This has to be done cleverly so that the amount spent on the move doesn't add up to more than the gas would have cost but we've pulled it off on more than one occasion.

Am I in favor of the government bailing out those big businesses that are about to go under? No. Am I prepared to deal with the consequences of those businesses going under? Not even. I can’t imagine the trickle down effect of that.

Inexpensive Gift Giving

It's about this time of year that I start thinking about Christmas gift giving. I spent my summer of unemployment going through The Family Photos. If I couldn't be out earning money, at least I could be accomplishing something. I came to the conclusion that it has gotten far too cheap and easy to take and develop photographs. I have maybe a handful of photos of my parents and grandparents when they were young but at least a thousand of each of my kids, grandchild, nieces and nephews. My nephew Chris and his wife have a son named Michael that I call The Most Photographed Child in the World (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of Prince William of England .)

When my mother died, I inherited all of her photo albums. In addition to the 32 I had ... groan ... I now had 28 more! My lifestyle does not lend itself to hauling around tons of photo albums SO right before a big cross country move I took a deep breath and plunged in … I tore all the pics out of all the albums and put them in one big box that I schlepped to Boston with me.

Late one night I got an idea of what to do with them. It was precipitated by a drunken phone call from my brother imploring me to send him any pictures I might have of him with our deceased father and grandfather. I warily eyed the giant box of photos, not knowing where to start. I reached in and grabbed a random photo which turned out to be of my niece with my grandfather who had passed away 30+ years ago. Why did I have this photo? Shouldn't my niece have it? Does she even know it exists?

Right then and there it became my goal in life to rid myself of most all of these photos and get them back out to the younger family members they should be with. So during the summer of 2006, I started sorting. Everyone in the family had their own pile and the treasured group photos went to either the youngest person in the picture or the “star” of the photo – the one person front and center smiling into the camera. For Christmas that year, I put together photo albums for everyone. They weren’t even fancy or scrapbooked, just colored paper hole punched, bound with ribbon with a sheet of plastic on the cover. Christmas Eve everyone started tearing into their gifts and suddenly the room became silent. People had found their photo albums! There was tears and laughter (and we’re NOT an emotional family.) The photo albums, which cost me practically nothing, were the hit of the holidays!

This summer I started going through the photos that were left. I still have tons of them – what to do, what to do, what to do. I realized as I looked through them that most of these would have been duplicates. Most were photos of my mother’s kids and grand kids, which had been sent to her for every occasion. I needed a way to return LOTS of pictures back to the original givers without insulting them. I decided to make Photo Collage Place mats for the Christmas of 2008, one for each family member.

I had a great time dividing the photos into sets or themes and learned that it takes approximately 35-50 photos to make a place mat-sized collage. I cut and stuck the photos by glue stick onto cheap plastic place mats that I found at a street fair. Once finished, I covered my creation front & back with clear plastic contact paper. Still with me? It was fast and easy and could be done while watching TV. The photos I had of my ex-husband and his family were given to my daughter so that she can make photo place mats for them.

Guess what, even after all of this, I STILL have plenty of photos left for my private collection! A lot of the photos are of our ancestors and parents, all of who are deceased. My parents were big party animals and I have a photos of them and their friends taken at random parties over the years. How do I evenly divide those among family members? I’m thinking about making scrapbook pages of our ancestors, or of Christmases past and then copying them on a colored copier and making sure that everyone gets a set.

Another puzzlement is what to do with pics of my exes? Not just my ex husband, but do I really need a million pictures from another relationship that lasted for 4 years and ended badly? The problem was how to let go and what to do with these pics. I decided to keep any photos of my ex(s) in which I or my family, friends or pets also appear, the rest got tossed. It was extremely cathartic. I highly recommend it!

Food Cost and Quality

The harder times get, the more fun it seems to be. Don't get me wrong, poverty is always a grind but when everyone else is feeling the pinch people start getting creative and enjoy wallowing in it together. I'm still spending a lot of time shopping for food deals and thinking about cooking.

A couple of years ago my friend Diane & I were hooked on the Food Network Channel. We co hosted a food blog and started experimenting with various recipes from Food Network shows and cookbooks, much to our families dismay. No matter what we made, nothing tasted very good! Our families started to revolt and we went back to the basics – meat and potatoes. But as I was eating my old meatloaf standby, I wrote to Diane and complained that food just doesn’t taste the same anymore. Was it me and my aging tastebuds or is this true?

Don’t even get me started on restaurants! A couple of years ago I went with a group of people to a restaurant for their $45 New Years Eve dinner special. My lamb chops were gross – too fatty to be eaten. I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to spoil every one else’s expensive meal. It made me wonder how many substandard meals they got away with serving that night, due to thinking like mine. I never went back to that restaurant of course, and the list of local restaurants I no longer patronize (for the same reason) has grown rapidly over the years.

Surprisingly I tend to get the most consistently good meals at chain restaurants – Applebees, Cocos, etc. Perhaps it’s their quality control. It’s just so disappointing to try to make an event out of going out to eat and end up paying for a meal that is substandard to what you could make at home more cheaply.

Another disappointing phenomenon is the price staying the same for items that are shrinking in size. You no longer get 64 ounces of ice cream, you get 48. You can tell easily by looking at candy bars. I remember the size of the bars I used to get as a child for a nickel. Not even close to what you pay a dollar for these days. Cadbury even has a disclaimer on their site that the eggs aren’t getting smaller, we just got bigger … so, not true. Then I read that candy companies are also using cheaper ingredients to make up the price difference, like the oil Hersheys is using in the chocolate. No wonder things don’t taste the same!

Then there’s the problem of meat at the grocery store. If I see the words “Aged Beef” I drop the package and run for the hills! There is nothing grosser tasting than aged beef but grocery stores and restaurants are only too happy to charge you big bucks to come to the same conclusion. Recently I made filet mignons that had been marked down as a “Manager Special” at my local Ralphs. It was completely disgusting. I’m so glad I didn’t pay full price. I had bought several packages (at $1.29 each) and my daughter implored me to just throw them away. I told her that I plan to use the meat in a crockpot stew dish but was there enough gravy and spices to disguise the taste? Finally I made chili out of them and was it good! It gave the chili a really rich, earthy taste.

The one good thing about items shrinking in size is that we Americans can use some portion control. I heard that the size of the burger that kids get in Kids Meals are the size that adults used to receive when fast food places first opened. My daughter and I have decided to order kids meals whenever we eat fast food. We have also learned to share entrees – one person orders a dinner salad, the other gets the entrée. I don’t mind ordering my own entrée occasionally through because I can take the leftovers home and make another meal out of it (and sometimes a third meal!) I don’t want to turn into one of those old ladies who hoard little bits of leftover food, but I think I am well on my way to joining their ranks.