Monthly Archives: March 2010

Don’t pay a fortune for moving boxes

Of all the hassles that come with moving — packing, unpacking, loading, unloading, and the chaos in between — one of my least favorite parts is finding boxes. In fact, when we moved here, I so dreaded the search for boxes for our next move that I crammed all of our cardboard boxes into a closet in the guest bedroom where I’ve kept them for three years.

Finding the perfect moving box is an art. It needs to be sturdy, big enough to hold a decent number of items, but not so big that it will be too heavy to carry. Handles on the sides are a plus, and a blank side for labeling helps, too.

If you’re planning a move and you find yourself with no moving boxes, it can be tempting to pay a fortune to a moving company or retail store for an assortment of boxes. Don’t do it! It’s possible to find moving boxes for free, and reusing them is much more environmentally friendly than buying new. Here’s where to start:

Ask friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors.

Some work places have a greater volume of boxes than others (I used to work at a publishing company that had a surplus of excellent moving boxes shipped in every week). Even if you don’t work at a retail store or publishing company, send out an email requesting that your co-workers hang on to good moving boxes for you. Also notify friends, family, and neighbors that you’re moving soon. They may have boxes they’re willing to give up or loan to you.

Ask your local recycling center.

Many recycling centers have a special area for cardboard boxes that can be used for moving. Show up early Sunday morning (or first thing Monday if the recycling center is closed on Sundays). If your recycling center has them, they’re likely free to a good home.

Check Craigslist.

It’s become pretty common for people to list stockpiles of moving boxes on Craigslist for free or cheap once they’ve moved in. Just be cautious when completing Craigslist transactions. If you can’t meet in a public place, bring some friends along to help you load the boxes.

Don’t dumpster dive.

Many retail stores and businesses have special cardboard dumpsters for recycling purposes, but digging through dumpsters without permission is actually considered trespassing. Not only can you get hurt, but you can be fined. Instead of jumping into a dumpster, ask businesses if they’re willing to let you take boxes before they end up in the dumpster. You might have to show up on a certain day and time, but many business owners don’t mind giving away used boxes on a first come, first serve basis.

Photo by ahhyeah

Turn off the lights to conserve energy & save money

This past Saturday, cities and households throughout the world observed Earth Hour. Once a year, families, businesses, and cities shut off the lights for one hour to raise awareness about energy conservation.

Tony and I observed the tradition with candles, an game of Battleship, and Jones Soda root beer, and it was actually a lot of fun. It reminded me of summer power outages when I was a kid when we suddenly had to find creative ways to entertain ourselves.

Shutting off the lights doesn’t just conserve energy, though. It also reduces energy costs and promotes quality time with family. Shutting off computers, televisions, and video games — even for an hour — is a great way to reconnect. All of the benefits made me wonder — why don’t we observe Earth hours more frequently?

Every year, my older sister and her family shut off the lights, eat canned foods, and enjoy an entire weekend with limited energy use. For them, the tradition is a chance to embrace simplicity. It’s also a reminder of how life would be without electricity.

If you’re trying to conserve energy and lower your electricity costs, consider a weekly or monthly “earth hour.” Stock up on candles and flashlight batteries, and plan a fun night with these power-free activities.

Play board games or cards.
Tell stories.
Read or write by candlelight.
Prepare a meal that doesn’t require electricity.

How did you observe Earth Hour?

I wasn’t even being chased

This morning I finally ran a 5K after four months of training.

My first accomplishment was actually getting to the race and starting. I was convinced that it was too soon, and that I wasn’t ready. I almost backed out at the last minute.

But I made it there, and I ran the race. I’m not going to lie to you — it was hard. Today wasn’t just my first race — it’s the longest I’ve ever run in my life. I’d never run longer than a mile and a half in one stretch.

When I came to mile 1, it felt like I’d already been running for an hour. I made the mistake of training indoors on a treadmill, and running outside was a whole different experience. My lungs were burning with the chilly morning air. My legs ached as they hit the hard concrete. Several times during the race, I wondered if I could actually finish. I considered stopped, cutting through, and walking back to the car without finishing. But I kept going.

I was hoping I’d get a second wind as I hit mile 3. Instead, I just felt exhausted. I wondered how I’d actually get over the finish line.

At that moment, you’ll never believe what song randomly started playing on my iPod shuffle: “Eye of the Tiger.” I almost couldn’t believe it myself. I was going to finish my first 5K to “Eye of the Tiger”? It was too perfect. So I picked up the pace, pushed myself a little further, and I crossed the finish line.

My goal was to finish the race in under 40 minutes. I came in at 41:35. That’s roughly a 13:45 minute mile. My fastest speed is about 12:30 minutes per mile, but considering the fact that I’ve never run a full three miles, I’m cutting myself some slack for endurance.

I may have been slow by a seasoned runner’s standards, but I still crossed the finish line feeling like Rocky.

Photo by Tony, who was so proud when I crossed the finish line that he actually got misty eyed. :)

Bad dog

Yesterday I had a very. important. phone call. An organization that I’ve wanted to work with for years is hiring for a position in Indianapolis that would be absolutely perfect for me, and they wanted to interview me.

I was on my way out of the office last night when the phone rang at 5:30 on the dot. On my drive home, I talked to the interviewer about the position and my qualifications. It seemed to be going great.

When I pulled into my parking lot, I stayed in the car to finish up the call. Things were wrapping up, and I was asking questions, when I looked up and saw my dog standing in the middle of the lawn by himself.

Howie. Wandering around off leash with Tony nowhere in sight.

I’ve always been overly paranoid about allowing dogs off leash. When I was a kid, my family had a dog named Bruno, a German shepherd mix, who we could not keep inside. The dog was constantly running away, and he was fast. My sister chased him down once in her car and clocked him at 40 miles per hour.

He would disappear for days at a time. I was a sensitive kid and a dog lover, so while my parents muttered under their breath about the damn dog and waited for the dog catcher to call — he knew Bruno by name — I tossed and turned for a lot of sleepless nights.

Because of Bruno, Howie has lived almost three years without ever wandering the world off leash. We take him to the dog park and let him run around in fenced areas, but that’s the extent of Howie’s experience with independence.

So there I am, on arguably one of the most important phone calls of my life, and my dog is wandering around the parking lot. Now I’ll admit, the sight of my dog off leash led to a slight overreaction. After years of experience with a dog who ran, I expected Howie to turn and run, too. Running from us after escape was Bruno’s absolute favorite pastime. But Howie is about half Bruno’s size with absolutely no experience dodging cars, and our apartment is on a very busy road.

The last thing I wanted to do was interrupt my interview to start shouting at my dog like a crazy person. I fought the urge to chase him, afraid that he might decide it was a game and run from me.

When I got out of the car, Howie looked surprised to see me. He also looked like he had no idea what he’d gotten himself into. The hair on his back was standing up straight, and I assumed that as soon as he wandered outside he looked around, realized Tony and I were nowhere to be found, and didn’t really know what to do with himself.

I started snapping my fingers and pointing at the backseat like a maniac. Howie regarded me much like he does at the dog park. He sort of looked at me like, “Oh. Hey. Fancy meeting you here.” Then he took his time smelling the grass as he wandered over to me.

Typically when he does this I’m able to call him in a tone that he recognizes as very. serious. In this case, I was trying to have a very. important. conversation. So I continued to snap and attempted to communicate telepathically with my dog.

The whole time I’m thinking Tony has probably been murdered. Either that or he’s not home, and we’ve been robbed. I imagined myself walking back upstairs to find the door hanging open, everything we own scattered around our living room. How else could the dog have escaped a 900 square foot apartment on the third floor without anyone realizing it?

Howie finally wanders over to me, tail wagging, happy to see me. I reach out, grab his collar, and shove him into the backseat.

Throughout all of this, I tried to stay engaged with my interviewer. I was absolutely interested in every word of the conversation. Unfortunately, though, I’m sure I seemed distracted. How could I not? I was wrangling my dog, considering the possible murder of my husband, and picturing my apartment in shambles from a break-in.

We still have no idea how the dog escaped. Tony’s theory is that he left the door slightly ajar when he came home just minutes before I found Howie in the parking lot. He was opening windows in the apartment, and the door must have cracked open enough for Howie to wander out. What confuses me is that the door was closed when I came back upstairs. The only other explanation is that Howie has been studying magic.

The interview is over. I did my absolute best to stay engaged in the conversation despite the circumstances. All that I can do now is wait to hear back from them and hope the interviewer didn’t notice my distraction.

What a savings account can buy

When I tell people we’re moving in 6 weeks, it always leads to the same conversation:

“Oh, so you found a job?”

“Nope. Not yet. But I’m looking.”

“So your husband found a job?”

“Not yet.”

That’s when they look at my like I’m nuts.

I don’t blame them. Back when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, the idea of quitting my job without another one lined up would have seemed pretty nuts to me, too.

It’s not polite to ask specific questions about our financial situation, so most people leave it at that. They sort of raise their eyebrows like we’re nuts and assume we’ll be mooching off our parents for months while we job search. I don’t ever bother to correct them, even though their assumption isn’t really true.

Yes, we’ll be staying with Tony’s family temporarily, and it’s extremely kind of them to give us the chance to get settled in Indiana before we find an apartment. And yes, the absence of a rent payment from our budget for the few months that we stay there will help keep our savings account healthy. We won’t be mooching, though. We’ll be paying all of our own bills, chipping in for groceries, and helping out in any way we can to repay their kindness. But the truth is, we’re staying with them more out of convenience than financial necessity.

My husband is hoping to find a teaching job. Because the availability of teaching jobs depends so much on geography, we don’t want to lock ourselves into a certain area with a lease. We want to be open to move where ever the jobs are. Staying with family while we look makes the most sense.

Financially, though? We’re in a better place than we’ve ever been. Because we’ve been saving for the past three years, we have enough cash savings to carry us through a full year without any income. We won’t be living without income, though. We plan to earn money through part-time jobs or substitute teaching while my husband searches for a full-time teaching job. I also make a little bit of money from freelance writing and advertising on this site. That income will stretch our savings even further.

Obviously, the sooner we start earning income again, the better. I don’t want to completely wipe out our savings accounts while we search for jobs. I’m just not too stressed about the fact that neither of us has anything lined up yet. The sooner we find jobs, the more money we’ll be able to keep in our emergency fund and move to our house fund. For now, though, our savings has bought us peace of mind and the freedom to move closer to family despite the fact that the job market is sluggish, because we’re not dependent on our paychecks every week to live.

I doubt I’ll ever view our savings the same way again. Sometimes when I looked at that balance, I saw all of the things it could buy: a new car, a new computer, a million other things I wanted but didn’t need. It was tempting to spend at least some of it.

Now I see that the best thing a savings account can buy is freedom and peace of mind. We’re free to move closer to our families, free to be a little picky as we job search, and free to enjoy our vacation to Europe right before we settle into our new home. All of that is worth so much more to me than any material thing our savings account could buy.

Photo by alancleaver

Losing the battle, winning the war

I write about this topic a. lot. It’s because after years of working on it, I still spend way too much time beating myself up when I have to let things go.

This week I announced that I’ll be updating this blog a little less frequently for the next few weeks as we head into the final weeks before our move. I put a lot of thought into the decision, and I know it’s the right thing to do if I want to maintain my to-do list and my sanity. But knowing it’s the right decision wasn’t enough to keep me from feeling defeated when Tuesday passed with Monday’s post on the homepage.

I’m running my first 5K this Saturday after months of training. The last week in February, my training was going really well. My times were up, my endurance was strong, and I felt like I would surely be ready by the end of March. Then I came down with a brutal cold in the second week of the month that kept me out of the gym for over a week. The endurance and speed that I worked so hard to build flew right out the window. My lungs are still recovering, and my body is still weak from what was a pretty nasty virus. This week I can barely make it a mile before I have to slow down and walk.

My difficult runs aren’t a product of laziness, and I can’t control it. Still I can’t help but my kick myself as I consider the strong possibility that I won’t reach my goal on Saturday. I may not be able to run all 3 miles without walking, and my time will likely be much slower than I hoped.

I know I’m not alone in this endless struggle to convince myself that obstacles are not necessarily failures. I know that you can lose the battle without losing the war, but I still have trouble getting over even the smallest of defeats.

I think a lot of women (and men for that matter) waste too much energy beating themselves up instead of building themselves up. Unfortunately, I’m proof that recognizing the problem isn’t enough to solve it. I can tell myself over and over that it’s okay to take a step back, the important thing is to keep going. Yet I still end up here — beating myself up for obstacles that I can’t control and feeling defeated prematurely. Of course, that attitude isn’t very motivating, and I end up sabotaging myself with negativity in the end.

It’s a vicious cycle that I hope to someday overcome. In the meantime, I just have to keep reminding myself that each setback makes me stronger, brings me one step closer to my goals, and teaches me a valuable lesson in how not to get there.

Photo by kaneda99

Boxed in

The image you’re about to see may disturb you. Viewing this image is not recommended for people sensitive to clutter, disorganization, and mess. Potential side effects include headache, shortness or breath, difficulty concentrating, and severe writer’s block. View at your own risk.

This is the current state of my guest room and, consequently, the current state of my brain:

Somewhere under this pile of boxes and junk there is a bed and a desk and even a floor. Sadly, you can’t see any of that.

This mess has been accumulating for the past six months. At Christmas, new things left a lot of our old stuff homeless. Of course, I should have been getting rid of things then. But a funny thing happens when I know a move is coming. I start putting things off.

“I’ll be going through everything in a few months when we’re packing. I’ll deal with this then.”

Clutter began to accumulate a little at a time. A few boxes here; a pile of books there. We couldn’t decide whether we should sell our old TV, give it to Goodwill, or bring it with us — into the guest room it went. We bought a used TV, and it was shipped to us in its original packaging. We thought it would be nice to keep the box so we could pack the TV in it when we move — into the guest room that went. A co-worker kindly gave us a trunk load of good moving boxes. I’m sure you see where this is going.

Now this room haunts my nightmares. I just keep closing the door tight, trying to pretend that mess isn’t there. Unfortunately, it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem, though. The guest room is ground zero, but there are tiny little catastrophe zones throughout our apartment. Closets, drawers, cupboards, shelves — all piled with junk I’ll have to sort and pack.

We’re moving in about 6 weeks. During my least anxious times, I tell myself that’s plenty of time. But then I open that guest room door, and I’m reminded of just how much I have to do.

What I mean to say is I have a lot on my mind right now, and a to-do list that’s a mile long. I do most of my writing on the weekends, and unfortunately that’s also the only time I can focus on decluttering, packing, and planning. My brain looks a lot like that room right now, and sorting out the mess to find inspiration is becoming harder and harder. Something has to give.

Since I started this blog almost two years ago, I’ve updated most weekdays. For the next 6 weeks, I will likely be posting every other day. I don’t plan to disappear for days or weeks at a time, but cutting down a little will help my sanity immensely.

I can’t guarantee that this will be the last time I whine. Please be patient with me as I attempt to navigate a lot of stress.

How are you doing? I’m happy to join your pity party if you’d like to whine a little. :)

Instant comfort

Whether I’m feeling sick or I’ve just come home after a particularly tough day at work, the first thing I do is kick off my shoes and slip into a pair of cozy fleece socks and slippers. They have the power to instantly comfort me.

Every year at Christmas, Tony gets me a new pair of cozy socks or two, so I’ve built up quite a collection. They’re particularly comforting in the winter. But even in the summer time, my feet always seem to be cold in the evenings, so I wear them year round.

There’s nothing special about the slippers. You can get similar pairs at Target or Wal-Mart for under $10. This is probably the fifth or sixth pair of similar, plain old fuzzy slippers I’ve had since college. I’ve had these for over a year now, so it’s time to replace them.

On road trips I always leave them out of my luggage so I can put them on during the drive. They’re the most comfortable thing I own, and sometimes I wish it was socially acceptable to wear them in public.

This is one of four favorite things I’ll be posting about this week. If you’d like to share your favorite things, leave a comment or send me a link to your blog post.

Shelved

I love everything about books. I love the way they look, the way they feel in my hands, the way they smell. When we were less frugal, my husband and I spent more money buying books that we should have.

These days, we get most of our reading materials from the library, or we borrow books from friends. But books remain our favorite frugal gift for each other. We each have a wish list a mile long for books that we’d like to own, and every birthday and Christmas most of our gifts have that familiar rectangular shape. Only now we prefer to buy used books instead of new ones to save a little money.

Most of our furniture is second hand. I’ve been sleeping on the same double bed since college, we bought our couch for $30 from a college student, and our TV was purchased second hand from a friend. These bookshelves are one of the only pieces of really nice furniture that we own.

We found the big one at Target right before we moved to North Carolina, and we decided to splurge on it. (It’s no longer available.) We’d been using cheap bookshelves made of particle board and held together with glue and small screws, but anyone who’s ever tried to move one of those knows how difficult it can be. They’re impossible to move up and down stairs, and they’re so cheaply made that they rarely survive the move.

We loved this bookshelf not only because it’s beautiful, but because it easily comes apart into two separate pieces and six shelves. We’ll be able to carry it and move it unassembled, so it will survive many moves to come.

Despite the fact that we’ve slowed down our book purchases since we started living frugally, we’ve slowly but surely outgrowing the big bookshelf. So when I found a smaller matching bookshelf at Target, we invested in it.

I love everything about these shelves from the way they look to the books they hold, and because they’re so sturdy, they’ll be in our home for years to come.