Today I am . . .
- Wishing my husband a Happy Father’s Day. Or I will after he wakes up.
- Thinking about calling my father, who is certain to be completely unaware that today is Father’s Day.
- Watching my cat play with a used Q-tip, and thinking about how my once-a-month-garbage pickup means a full bathroom wastebasket.
- Contemplating the gamble of pegging up the laundry on a grey Oregon day.
- Hanging onto the memory of my son’s martial arts testing yesterday. He did an incredible job and earned his “gold sash.”
- Wondering when plastic grocery bags become the norm. I watched an episode of “My So Called Life” on Netflix last night and noticed that the groceries being unloaded were all in paper bags.
- Wearing pajamas at 11:00 A.M.
- Receiving an e-mail about how the Kill-A-Watt that I checked out from the library is overdue, and feeling guilty about how I never even took it out of its box.
- Feeling good about how I am already on disc 14 of the 28 disc audio book of “Outlander.” I’m pretty sure I can finish it before it’s due back at the library.
- Feeling proud of my older son who jumped through many hoops to get hired as a lifeguard with the city Parks and Recreation department.
- Feeling a little melancholy, but know that activity will help me not dwell on this emotion. Pretty sure that is a residual feeling from finishing The Knitting Circle yesterday which was a huge tear jerker.
- Not going to place leftovers into a Jello mold.
- Feeling guilty yet clever that I sent my husband home to make tea and coffee in the middle of our son’s four hour martial arts test instead of buying from the coffee shop next door.
- Continuing to read Julia Park Tracey’s Plastics Purge month over at Modern Muse and thinking about what a good writer she is.
Asking you the same. What are you doing today?
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
I am thrilled to hear you are reading or listening to Outlander. It is by far the best series I have ever read. In fact I have read the full series three times and listened to the full series three times. I am sure when the next book (anxiously waiting) comes out I will do the whole routine AGAIN! Enjoy every minute – then do it again. I love my husband but I love fictitious Jamie Fraser too!
I didn’t realize the “Uplander” was part of a series. Yummy!
Katy
Sometimes I wish blogs had a like button. I don’t really have anything to say but I read your piece & I liked it. I think there should just be a little Facebook type like button at the bottom!
There is a way to add a “like” button to the posts, but I am the least computer savvy person ever and can’t figure out how to do it!
Anyone want to help?
Katy
Today I am “puttering” around a quiet house. I have been scanning documents that I want to keep but not in paper form (just learned to do this today!) and working just a bit in the garden. Hung laundry on the line. Went for a nice long dog walk. Planning to visit a friend in the neighborhood (and take along a bottle of wine that I’d forgotten in the fridge). Oh, and I started reading Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project”–it was the first chapter that inspired me to take on the scanning project. A slow, gentle Sunday–very nice!
Hey – you are just as accomplished a writer as Modern Muse. I went over there on your recommendation . As a science major and health care professional I am really against carcinogens, styrofoam, excess anything. That person seems unrationally focused on plastic, when it sounds like her husband smokes and eats fast food. Doesn’t make sense to me. I like you Katy. You are crazy about making the best choices but really want to veg out and watch junk tv and probably drink Starbuck’s coffee drinks. I have to admit you are making me change – a little. I am thinking about the Safeways $10/$50 thing when I get near a Safeways and I question spending money period. I like how you are raising your kids. You know what the important things are. Get that Kill 0 Watt thing working and return it. Only in Portland could you borrow those things from the library. I saw JD’s post at GRS on it and was intrigued. I still think using a microwave for two minutes is more efficient than heating up a stove. Keep up the good work. Ann
Modern Muse is doing a one month try-and-live-without-plastics experiment. She is usually much more wide with her focus.
Katy
Most grocery stores in my area mainly use paper bags still, Walmarts the worst store for plastic bag usage. I am happily remembering my reusabe bags “most” of the time!! I do bring all the paper and plastic bags I do get to our local Goodwill. Still wasteful , but at least they’re getting another use out of them.
I love the novels of Ann Hood: The Knitting Circle is nearly unbearable in its sadness.
We (my 2 toddlers and I) were extra nice to my hubby and called both his dad near us and my dad who is in Japan – he was already in bed, oh no, but I will skype him tomorrow again.
I made a Katakana (Japanese alphabet) chart for my son,
did gardening/turned compost together,
played soccer with my dog in the backyard,
couldn’t finish 6th Harry Potter book on time, so wrote down on a piece of paper I’m on p.275 and returned the book at the library and felt like a failure :/,
sold 3 books online,
shopped for this week’s grocery and spent $53, hoping I have enough meat to last another week (am doing $10/day for 4 people),
did stop by at Starbucks with my son and just enjoyed talking & looking at him – he is 5 and just adorable – persuading myself $3 coffee is worth it.
Thanks for the yesterday’s post.
We are signed up for Kids Bowl Free.
And because of you I finally started hanging clothes!
You are so inspirational.
Let’s see – I woke up to pack so I could visit my parents for a couple of days, cleaned out the fridge, packed the new CSA food into it, made up two half-pints (and why do we call a jar that measures a cup a half-pint rather than a cup?) of blackberry jam so the blackberries wouldn’t go bad while I was gone, packed up other leftovers for lunch, took it to the theater to run lights for a matinee, then headed up to my parents’ house after, had dinner with them, and just checked your blog during a lull in conversation. Looking forward to a more relaxing tomorrow!
Okay, I clicked through on the jello mold thing. Now I feel queasy.
Leftover fruit in jello as a cheap dessert? Sure. And I’ve had stuff like raw celery and raw, shredded carrots in jello (usually one of the citrus flavors, like lemmon or lime) that was at least edible in a retro, okay-this-is-interesting, kind of way. (The latter was fed to me my old ladies, of course.)
But….peas?! broccoli?! whatever that white stuff is (I do NOT want to know!)? what looks like some kind of raw meat? (I assume it CAN’T be raw meat but what IS it?) WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
Do you live walking distance from the martial arts center? If not, how do you figure that sending him home would be less of a waste than buying coffee there? I’m trying to be conscious of my gas usage and tend to have these dilemmas when I am out.
We are around three blocks from the martial arts center. 🙂
Katy
I am reading this book again:
In 1988 Forbes Magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the twenty-third richest American alive. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Depression, a veteran of the Korean War, he had made a fortune as co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world’s largest duty-free retail chain. But secretly, Feeney had already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Only in 1997, when he sold his duty free interests, was he “outed” as one of the greatest and most mysterious American philanthropists in modern times. A frugal man who travels economy class and does not own a house or a car, Feeney then went “underground” again, until he decided in 2005 to cooperate in a biography to promote giving-while-living. Now in his mid-seventies, he is determined his foundation should spend the remaining $4 billion in his lifetime. The Billionaire Who Wasn’t is a tale of one of the greatest untold retail triumphs of the twentieth century, and of what happens to a unique man and his family when confronted with wealth beyond imagining.
The author writes: pg. 169, Capter 19 – Stepping Down– “Feeney had been spending less and less time at the family houses, and he never set foot in the once run-down family home at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Rivera after Danielle finally transformed it into an elegant mansion.â€
Pg. 323 the author writes: “Feeney’s life is full of paradoxes. He bought some of the finest mansions for his family but would not live in them. He lives modestly but occasionally stays at one of InterPacific’s five star resorts. He made a fortune pushing high-end consumer goods yet dislikes Christmas because ot its consumerism.â€
The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing [Hardcover]
Conor O’Clery
I re-read from time to time for continued inspiration this news article: Oregon man leads life without frills, leaves $9M to charities, children — “He talked cars with salesmen at various auto lots but rarely drove his old, beige Mercedes-Benz.. He was better known as cycling across town with a cat trained to ride in a baseket. Gordon Elwood, a lifelong native of the Rogue Valley, lived a remarkably Spartan existence. Beginning as a paper delivery boy at the age of twelve, Gordon scrimped and saved and invested the bulk of his earnings through years of labor as a fruit picker in the Valley and forty years as a television technician. After retiring, he continued his frugal lifestyle by collecting recyclable cans and bottles for their deposit value.
When he died at age seventy-nine in 1999, Gordon left a surprisingly large financial estate of $9 million to benefit his beloved southern Oregon community.
That is so cool to hear you are listening to Outlander—and got it from the library too. I started reading Outlander the summer before last and couldn’t put it down. Have read the rest of the series and like the other person who posted above, am waiting PATIENTLY for the next book. (I took out the last book on audio from the library because after reading all those books, I really wanted to hear the Scottish accents, ha ha).
This summer I am reading the 4 books that make up the HBO series Game of Thrones and am already 1/2 way thru the 807 pages of book 1…I love epics!
The jello was….odd.
Walmart does use too many plastic bags. Today I forgot my reusable (or I should say I went in for one thing that I didn’t get and ended up with a bottle of windex, a 1.00 plastic bouncing ball, and 2 loaves of bread and I kid you not, this was all bagged into 3 bags. She did it before I had a chance to stop her—-told myself to let it go and will use the bags for cat litter.
I once came home from WalMart with 15 items in 12 bags. I refuse to get on the line where that cashier works. Our Lowe’s Food Store asks paper or plastic, so I opt for paper when shopping there. I do recycle the plastic bags as each grocery store has a bin for them, but they accumulate much too quickly! I remember as a kid in the City, we reused the paper shopping bags as our garbage bags.