To be, or not to be... Cheap.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my good friends would probably use the words thrifty, economical or just plain cheap when describing me.  I’m often teased for ordering water to drink at restaurants (2 bucks for a sprite, are you kidding me?!), that's just me looking for a way to save a buck.  I tend to try doing a lot of things myself instead of paying someone to do them, even if I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.  I'll figure it out, or at least I think I will.  This has the added benefit of increasing my knowledge base, even if a lot of the info crammed into my brain probably won’t ever be useful again. 

For example, I’ve disassembled a laptop in order to replace a $15 driver for the display, I’ve torn a floor lamp apart in order to replace a $10 dimmer switch, and the list goes on and on.  I believe that food can only get so good, and my willingness to pay for meals at restaurants tops out at about the $15-17/plate price point at the very high end.  Beyond that, I’m wondering why we didn’t just go to buffalo wild wings instead.  I hate paying a lot for clothes and will baulk as the prices go up… pants or a shirt over 20 bucks?!  No thanks; I’ll wait until they go on end of the season clearance. 

That being said, there are some things that I’m willing to pay full price for.  Art, vacations and “toys” immediately come to mind.  While our art collection is small, we have been willing to pay for things that we like when we stumble upon them.  As you’ve also read here, we also like to take at least one nice trip per year, after that, I go cheap and try to make vacations out of work trips (see, I can’t help myself).  I also like nice toys (my camera, tools, etc. come to mind), however I typically search for a good deal before pulling the trigger.

This all brings me to the birthday gift that the CFO gave me that I have yet to pick out, a new gas powered string trimmer (a.k.a. a weed eater).  My dilemma is this:  There are a lot of inexpensive models available at  the typical big box retailers.  However, if/when they break, the college student behind the customer service counter at Lowe’s isn’t going to be able to help me get it running again.  They just don't service what they sell, as if their products never break.

If you are willing to spend 30-50% more, you can purchase one at specialty outdoor power tool shop that has a repair staff with the ability to service the unit when something happens to it.  They also only sell one of the top brands, so the level of product quality appeals to me. I’ve been shopping for almost two months now and I still can’t decide which way I want to go.  I keep leaning towards the nicer option, but those never go on sale and that keeps bugging me.  The store is less than a mile from work and I have gone in there several times, spending time talking to the sales people and playing with the product, but eventually get un-nerved by the price and I walk out empty handed. 

So, why haven’t I bought a nice one yet?  The price and the Sunday paper are the biggest reasons.  I flip through it every weekend and see multiple major home improvement store ads that lure me back to them with the low prices that appeal to my cheap side.  But then I go to one of those stores and their products look and feel cheap (surprised?).   I then go back to the specialty shop, only to look at the price and instinctively do the math between that price versus the cheap one that was in the Sunday sales flier.  Even though I know that I want the nice one, I can't convince myself to pull the trigger. 

I'm glad the CFO gave me the opportunity to select the trimmer that I want, but part of me wishes that she had just bought one...  The yard is greening up and there are some weeds that need to be whacked… I’ve got to make a decision!  Since I just wrote about this, then obviously, there isn’t much else going on around here… We’ve got a concert coming up this weekend, so hopefully I’ll have more to write about then. 

A quiet week

It has been really quiet around our house over the last week, not that I'm complaining.  We went to a friend's house for dinner on Friday and got our dose of noisy kids while we were there.  Their kids are actually pretty well behaved, but kids are inherently loud.  I always like it when we walk into our house after leaving someone's noisy house...  Ahhh, quiet.  It is so nice.

We did a little exploring on Saturday morning, heading down to Funk's Grove to get some Illinois Maple Sirup.  (Yes, with an 'I' instead of a 'Y') My dad is from Vermont and he passed down his love of maple syrup and maple sugar candy down to me.  We picked up a bottle of Sirup for ourselves and one for dad.  We were all set to have waffles Sunday morning, only to realize that we didn't have any waffle mix.  Cue the game show loss music.  I guess I could have found a recipe to make them from scratch, but that thought didn't really cross my mind until I started typing this.  Oh well, we'll try again this weekend.

We also went to the gym on a Saturday for the first time since I was sick. The CFO had been limiting me to just mon-fri as part of her "ease back into it" orders. Our gym has 2 locations and Saturday is the only day we go to this location, which has a scale outside of the locker rooms. The location we typically go to doesn't have a scale outside of the locker rooms and I'm not a huge fan of gym locker rooms... Being sick didn't seem to hurt me too much, I'm down from last time I weighed in. When I stepped onto the scale, the digital display went up to 168.8 and stopped, which made me feel really good about my progress... and then it decided to add another 1.2 pounds and jumped up to 170.0. The stupid electronic scale is messing with my head! I tried to out smart it by getting on it a second time, but it said 170.0 that time too.

We're still on the, "don't change the diet, just burn more calories" approach and it seems to be working for me... 8 down and another 10 or so pounds to go.

I spent some time on Sunday out in the yard and in the garage.  My parts for the miata's coolant issue were supposed to be delivered on Saturday by USPS, but the didn't arrive until Tuesday.  That just reinforced my opinion that Saturday service isn't necessary.  Heck, other than a few car magazines and letters from the CFO's grandmother, all we get in the mail is junk and bills.  I'd be happy with Mon-Wed-Fri or Tues-Thurs-Sat service.  Unfortunately, my opinion doesn't really matter and they will continue to run the postal service into the ground instead.

I worked on the fountain and it is basically ready to go, once the weather warms up at night.  I dug the hole for the liner and we picked up some stone that the CFO thought would look good with the pot.  Now all I need to do is to run power out to a location near the hole.  The fountain is going next to our patio (currently still just a sunken gravel square that is waiting for either brick or stone) and I am going to run the power to a nearby support pole for the deck.  There is already an electrical outlet  on the side of the house by the deck, so I'm planning on splicing into it.  I've never been a huge fan of doing electrical work, but this should (hopefully) go smoothly.

 

The fountain being tested in the garage using a plastic bin as a test basin

Back in the yard!

The CFO came home on Friday with a stack of student projects to grade, so her nose was buried in those for a majority of the weekend, leaving me with some free time.  I finally passed her arbitrary health assessment and was deemed well enough to do some yard work on Sunday.  I’m not sure what she was basing it on, but I’m not coughing as much and have more energy, so I guess that was enough.  I was dying to get outside on Sunday because it was in the sixties and sunny.  Fan-freakin-tastic.

 I finished moving the pile of mulch that I started working on a month ago before I got sick.  I am sure my neighbors were wondering why I had left a third of the pile in the driveway for the last few weeks.  I was happy to see that we’ve got tulips and daffodils coming up, spring is springing.  Unfortunately, a bunch of dandelions are also popping up in the mulch area, I am going to have to get out the round up and start killing off the bad stuff.

I pulled the cover off the Miata and got the oil changed for the New Year.  I cranked it and let it idle for a while and then I saw coolant pooling on top of the radiator.  After some examination, I saw that I have a small leak where one of the radiator hoses attaches to the radiator.  At least I spotted it while the car was idling in the driveway, but now I need to order a replacement hose.  I also continued my fountain mock up, here is a progress photo of me testing the pump's flow.

 

Since the new couch arrived, I’ve been trying to sell the old one on craigslist.  In case you didn't know, it is a huge pain in the @$$ it is to sell furniture online.  Next time, I will save myself a lot of time and borrow a truck and haul it to a donation site for good will or someplace like that. 

The old one is in good condition, so we decided on a price that we thought was a reasonable and I posted it online.  Evidently our idea of reasonable was not the same as others, as I have turned down several offers for $50.  If I was just going to sell it for $50, I’d be better off donating it (like I said above) and write off a more reasonable value come tax time.  I also received a bunch of spam emails and several emails that resulted in long, back and forth email conversations that ended up going nowhere.  One of which ended when, about 8 emails into the conversation, the potential buyer asked what the dimensions of the sofa were.  The dimensions were a deal killer because it wouldn’t fit through the door of her trailer. Knowing that her door was narrow, you’d think that would be one of her first questions, not 8 emails later.  It’s just a waste of my time.

There was one lady that I had talked to off and on for over a week who wanted the sofa, but then some crisis came up that she had to spend the money on.  Tuesday evening she emailed me saying that she had come into some money and wanted to buy the couch.  She came over the next day, super excited about it.  She plopped down on it for literally two seconds before standing back up to hand me the cash for our asking price.  No haggling.  Done.  It was raining outside so we asked if she really wanted to take it that day.  She had her son and his truck plus a tarp, so she was ready to go.  He and I carried it out into the rain and into his truck, threw the tarp over it and off they went.  I’m sure the CFO was a little sad to see it go, as it was one of her first big furniture purchases.  

Happy Easter

We had a nice Easter weekend, other than both of our NCAA brackets going bust.  Neither one of us managed to pick a single final 4 team, very disappointing.  However, I was a little more relieved when I read that only 9 people out of the 3 million who submitted brackets to the yahoo pick'em picked the final 4 teams correctly.  9 out of 3 million!

We went out on Saturday morning to the “Spring Bloom” art show, but we didn’t buy anything, nothing for us and no gifts for friends/family.  We also ran errands and went out for a nice lunch.  We rented the movie zero dark thirty, the one about the search for Osama Bin Laden.  I thought it was well done, but wonder how accurate it really was.  There were some interrogation scenes which caused her to cover her eyes, but she managed to stay awake through the whole movie.

On Sunday, we went to church and then had some friends over for lunch.  I fired up the grill for the first time this year; I really miss the fact that we could grill year round in Georgia.  Here, the grilling season really only goes from April until October, after that, the gas grill has a hard time fighting the sub-freezing temperatures.

The couch that we ordered a while back was delivered on Thursday; it has definitely brightened up the living room.  Now we are working on trying to agree on fabrics to recover two old chairs that came from my grandmother’s house.  She wants pink, I would prefer anything other than pink.  Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so opinionated, it would be so much easier to just let her do whatever she wants when it comes to this stuff… however, since the furniture came from my grandmother’s house, I want to be involved.  It took us 2 years to find a couch that we both liked, who knows how long decisions on this reupholstering project will take! 

The camera didn't really catch the color well, so here is a photo of the fabric sample that we picked it from.  It definitely shows the color better:

It is definitely bright and has an interesting texture to it.