Filed under: Uncategorized
Lasse and I have d one a pretty good job paring down our food budget. When I look at how much we used to spend to feed the two of us when I was working, I’m amazed: it’s nearly twice what we spend now. Clearly, we ate out at a lot more and I bought a lot more crap at work.
But we’re still looking for ways to trim it further and stock up on the staple items we buy frequently. We decided it was time to join a Warehouse Club.
In New Hampshire, there are three Clubs to choose from: Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s. We being as we are, we went to each one to see what products they had, how far they were from the house, how much membership was and that sort of thing. We also made a list of the products we use most frequently and wrote down their price per lb or quart and then compared it to where we usually do our grocery shopping, Stop and Shop. Lasse then typed the list up in excel and analyzed it. See, there are some benefits to being married to someone who loves statistics.
The end result?
BJ’s was clearly the best wholesale club for us. Not only is it right down the street, it also has a wide selection of HFCS-free items. We won’t buy things that have HFCS in it, so places like Sam’s Club who would have otherwise been very competitive got booted entirely off the list. Costco also would have done quite well, if it hadn’t been located within spitting distance of the Massachussetts boarder. It’s so close to MA and so filled with Massholes that you can tell when Costco executives were looking at sites they found this one and thought, “Aha! Perfect! It’s so close to Massachussetts, our customers won’t have any problem driving up here, especially since they can do their shopping tax free! And should any Granite Staters want to shop here, they can too!” I swear, 9/10 cars in the parking lot were from MA. It took me forever to get out of there because they kept cutting me off.
It was also quite surprising to see what exactly we were paying out the ass for at Stop and Shop. Things like onions, potatos, and butter are just slightly cheaper at BJs while pure vanilla extract, King Arthur’s Flour, and cheeses are ridiculously chceaper. I can’t believe we’ve been paying $17.99/lb for parmesean reggiano at Shop and stop while it’s $12.99/lb at BJs. I really wish we’d joined sooner! Some items, however, are cheapest at Stop and Shop. Lemons, for example, I will only buy at one Stop and Shop due to a wonderful quirk in their self-check out system. Beans are also cheapest there: $1.00/lb for most types, while lentils and split green peas are $0.79. You can’t find them anywhere cheaper.
We are thoroughly enjoying our ability to buy large quantities of things all at once. This is especially true since we’ve decided to up our paranoia level and start stockpiling some food items we use regularly. Yes, there was quite a bit of discussion involved here. On the one hand, we don’t want to look like we had a great time at a tin foil hat making party. On the other hand, with the amount of money the government is pumping into the economy, there are only two things that could happen:
The beginnings of our stockpile
1) Our government will borrow the money from abroad, thus increasing the number of dollars in circulation, thus causing massive inflation and food prices to increase, thus causing the government to institute price controls thus causing food shortages and rationing.
and/or
2) Our government will print all the money, thus increasing the number of dollars in circulation, which will cause massive inflation, which will cause food costs to go up, which will cause the government to institute price controls thus causing food shortages and rationing. Ta-Da!
Don’t believe me? Think back to the 1970s energy crisis when they imposed price controls and we had gas rationing.
Since it looks pretty likely that the dollar is going to lose value and food prices are going to go up, I think it would be very handy for us to at least have a month or two of food supplies hanging around. If hyperinflation does occur, we’ll be prepared. If it doesn’t, we won’t have to do much shopping for a few months. It’s really a win-win situation.
Filed under: baby
So, I kind of figured out what the problem with the pictures was. They were saved as .JPG files instead of .jpg. Apparently, capitalization makes a difference. Don’t ask me why the archive program decided that the best way to unpack and save my zipped files would be as .JPG instead of .jpg because I couldn’t tell you.
So, here’s a picture of Haakon and Big Foot playing together.
Haakon and Big Foot
And here’s a pic of all the boys (yes, Big Foot is male so it works):
My sister actually got a better picture of this than me, but whatever, it works.
Lasse and I trooped up to Concord yesterday in order to sign against two house bills that would regulate homeschooling.
For those of you not in New Hampshire, a brief back story is necessary. About 3 years ago, homeschooling laws in New Hampshire were a bit stricter and free stater Dawn Lincoln went about changing them. She worked super hard and managed to change the laws to make it a lot easier. Now all you need to do to homeschool is notify the local school board, agree to be supervised by superintendent, private school principal or the State Department of Education, and either collect a portfolio of your child’s work or have them take a standardized test each year.
Well, enter Representative Day, who is the worst sort of politician: the One Who is Just Trying to Help (link goes to another blog post with a video of the hearing). Apparently, there might be some homeschoolers out there who aren’t actually aware of the RSAs relating to homeschoolers and they just might not be instructing their kids in all the subjects required under New Hampshire law. So, in order to help this dreadful situation, she introduced two bills. One would require parents to acknowledge that they understand the homeschooling laws andd the other would require a portfolio review and standardized assessment every year. The portfolio would have to be reviewed by either a superintendent or “certified educator,” and said educator must also administer the test. I guess homeschooling parents have been slipping their kids the answers to the standardized tests or something. And we all know that never happens in government schools. If the child doesn’t do well enough on the tests and porfolio, they have to meet with the superintendent and come up with a remedial plan and if they don’t do better after that, they can’t homeschool anymore.
Got it? Let me just note for one second that if the government had put in these policies in regards to the schools it runs, public schooling would have ended years ago because the majority of kids would have been pulled out for failing to meet standards.
Well, I guess Rep. Day learned a very important lesson yesterday, namely that it’s bad idea to mess with people who can just drive to Concord whenever they like because they have a very flexible education schedule.
We arrived at 1:30, found the hearing had been moved to the Representative’s Hall, ran over to the State House and found it was PACKED. Now, mind you, Rep’s Hall seats over 400 people. Then they have the visitor’s gallery. All packed. Apparently people were standing in the aisles, in the hall, on the stairs, and there was a long line on the first floor of the state house as well.
Never in my life have I seen so many people in the State house for a single bill, not even when gun bills are involved. Newspaper estimates reckon there were 1,000 people there, most of whom were against the bill and I’m willing to bet that the chances of it passing are nearly zero.
It really makes me love New Hampshire to see how many people turn out to defend their liberties, especially since Wednesday was our first day of warm weather in months. How many other states have such dedicated residents?
On an unrelated note, this is not the only bill this session that was intended to help. Some other hapless rep introduced a bill to require licensing and mandatory vaccination of horses. Horse owners around the state got up in arms over the bill and the rep backed down and asked for the bill to be killed. Apparently she didn’t expect horse owners would object to having to pay $50 per horse as well as pay a vet to administer shots most did on their own. She thought that paying $50 a horse was a way the horse-owning community could “band together” and help the state out, since it has run quite the budget deficit. Seriously, if she wants donations to decrease the state budget, why doesn’t she just ask for them instead of trying to pass asinine laws?
Ob in guten
oder schlechten Zeiten,
ich werde Dir stets
viel Glück bereiten!
My host family sent me a package for Christmas filled with baby stuff and other goodies, one of which was this little man, a Wolmirstedter Glückswichtel. He promises “If in good times or bad, I will always prepare a lot of luck for you!” It’s a heavy promise in times like these.
It’s amazing to realize that I’m living in the first real recession to hit the US in about 30 years and I couldn’t be less thrilled about it. Since the recession started in December 2007, it means we’ve been in a recession the entire time Lasse has been in the country. Consequently, his job search has been long and difficult and certainly not helped by the fact that he would really love to have a job as an analyst in the finacial field. You know, the exact same field that got clobbered already in the recession. Then Lasse stumbled on translation work and we found an undiscovered wealth of work, so I quit my job to have Haakon….and then the translation project that we thought would give us enough income for a year in just a few months got cancelled.
Can you say, “oh shit?” We most certainly did. That began 4 months of no income, from September to January we lived off savings while waiting for Lasse’s security clearance to go through so he could start this other translation job. It sucked ass and there were times when we seriously considered just packing up, moving to Finland and making good on his parents’ promise to find him a “good job in the government” there. But Finland isn’t home…and home is New Hampshire.
Now things are getting worse with the economy and it seems like every day you hear about more companies laying people off, or going bankrupt and people who are about to do the same. Friends we thought were well off are turning out not to be as well off as we thought.
And you know what? It makes me feel pretty damn lucky. If Lasse had gotten a job in finance field like he wanted, odds are he would have lost it by now. Most companies seem to fillow a “Last In, First Out” policy on their human inventory. We would have been stuck without an income and no backup. Currently, Lasse has 4 jobs. They’re all contractor positions, which means that some months are very good income wise (like January, for example) while other months are slim pickin’s (March). But, it also means that he’s home all the time and has a lot of spare time to do things with me and the baby when work is slow. If Haakon has a bad night and I didn’t get much sleep, Lasse takes the baby and I get to sleep in. He does laundry and has time to work on side projects, such as his blog (which you can find conveniently located in my blogroll. It’s the one that’s not in English. You should go there and coughclickonadscough.), going to the state house for bill hearings (which we’ve only done twice, but we’re doing it again tomorrow), and that sort of thing.
It helps, of course, that our expenditures are very low. If we needed to, we could live on $2000 a month (and $950 of that is rent). We have no debt and used to have savings (we’re working on rebuilding those…). We’re very lucky that we didn’t give into temptation and buy a couch and recliner or a new car or anything that we wanted since we got our apartment. We still use the futon I bought off of craigslist when I moved to New Hampshire and my car is 14 years old, but still going strong. Everytime I think something’s wrong with it, it turns out to be something very minor, such as the battery being dead, or the cap for the clutch fluid not replaced properly. We’re hoping our patience will have paid off and we might be able to get a couch at least this month, from January’s income. We’ll see, though.
We’re also very lucky that both of us are healthy and that Haakon had a normal, uncomplicated birth. Apparently, it costs $16,000 to have a baby in a hospital in New Hampshire. My boss was complaining about it to me because our insurance at work only covered 80% after the deductible. “So I still have to pay over $3,000! Kids are expensive!” He stared at me when I mentioned that I only had to pay $1,000 because the midwife only cost $5,000. If there had been complications, it would have been a lot worse, not just financially. One of my co-workers had an emergency C-section at 32 weeks due to pre-eclampsia and her son was transferred to Boston’s Children’s Hospital. They had to continuously travel down there until he was well enough to be released and it was quite some time. I couldn’t imagine not being able to spend time with baby and having him an hour’s drive away.
We’ve also been very lucky in that we have hardly had to buy Haakon any clothes at all. Most of them have been given to us, some at our baby shower an others from friends who didn’t need them any more. My host family sent me two large packages of clothes from a friend who had had a son earlier. A former neighbor of mine has been generous enough to give me all the clothes her grandson grows out of, though the story behind this is rather sad. Her son knocked some girl up who was on crack and the baby was born addicted, so they took him away as well as her daughter and gave my former neighbor custody of them both. He’s grown up well though and is now fat, happy and well bonded to his grandmother. The amazing thing is that I pretty much have clothes for Haakon until he’s two, depending on how fast he grows.
The funny thing is that I have so many clothes for Haakon, I have really too many. So, I’m looking to give some away. A friend in Germany is pregnant with her first baby and it turned out to be a boy, so I’ve packed up a box of baby clothes for her so she should have a good selection of clothes at least for the first 6 months. The good thing is that her baby is being born in the spring, so a lot of the newborn clothes Haakon didn’t get to wear in the fall should be perfect for her baby. I figure it’s one of the ways I can spread the luck around, so to speak. It’s nice to be able to give occasionally, instead of just receive.
I don’t know how bad this recession is going to be (though I’m hoping for the best, I also like to expect the worst), but I do hope that no matter how bad it does get, I can at least look at the bright side of things. Or that the Glückswichtel will work his magic. I put it on Lasse’s desk, just in case.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My computer is on its last legs, which is partially my fault and partially the fact that it’s a Dell. First off, I knocked it off my desk on the morning of the Tea Party Money Bomb in my eagerness to see how much money Ron Paul had raised, thus causing the Great Harddrive Crash of 2007.
The casing of my laptop is cracked in various places due to that and other times I’ve dropped it. It falls quite frequently, mainly because I use it while I breastfeed and it perches on the edge of the futon. When I get up, it looses its balance and falls on the ground.
Which brings us to the next problem. One of my USB drives has never quite worked, even when the laptop was brand new because Dell forgot to install a grey thingy in it that would make it transfer data as well as electricity. Now, neither of my USB drives work because I keep knocking my laptop over while the external fan is plugged in and have bent both USB drives. I can still transfer electricity in the top one (which used to be the good one), which is good because…
My laptop overheats. This is apparently a common problem with this model of laptop and it requires an external fan, which needs to be plugged into the USB drive. Even with the external fan, if I do anything that makes my laptop do too much for too long (like watch DVDs), it starts to run reeeaaaaallly reeeeaaaallly slooooooooowly and I have to boot. Plus, now that both USB drives are bent out of shape, I have to make sure it’s plugged in in a very specific manner or it won’t run and then the insides of my laptop will melt, congeal, and die.
And since my USB drives are broken, I can’t download pictures onto my laptop anymore. I have to do it on Lasse’s computer and then he sends them to me in a zip file. But you know what? After I unpacked them and saved them to the file I wanted, none of my photo uploading programs could find them. It was like they didn’t exist. I could find the pictures, they were there, but the programs could not. It was extremely frustrating, so I kicked my husband off his computer so I could upload some pictures.
The files are there on my computer, but the internet refuses to acknowledge their existence.
I need a new computer.
