Adventures in Frugality, Part 1

Recently I learned that I will soon be losing my job. It wasn’t a good job. I won’t miss the work much. I will miss the people I’ve been working with, some of them for more than nine years. I’ll miss the money too. Even though I haven’t been well paid, selling books has contributed to our household needs.
I’m confident that in time the money issues will work themselves out. I’ll sell some of my work or I’ll find another job. In the meantime my goal is to spend as little money as possible, to stretch what we have as far as possible. I intend to have a good time while I’m doing it. It’s time for adventures in frugality.

For a start, I plan on driving the car less. Gas is expensive these days and likely to get more expensive. I can’t afford to burn any if I can avoid it. I’ve started walking Maura to school again now that the snow has melted off of the sidewalks. The mornings are brisk but if the weather is clear the walks are still enjoyable. The birds are singing in the trees and the first flowers of spring are blooming. I also walk to the library often. I can use the exercise; the library is often a good place to work and its services are still free.

The dinner table is another place we’ll be enjoying frugality. I’m trying to find ways to make inexpensive meals that please my family. No one in our house is a vegetarian but no one is a determined carnivore either. Meatless meals have always been among our favorites and I plan on making more of them. Made from scratch, they should be healthy and cheap. The challenge is to be creative enough that no one gets bored. I have plenty of time for cooking most days and I enjoy being creative in the kitchen.

I also don’t want to waste anything I can use. We already make homemade stock out of our vegetable scraps and bones. In the past leftovers often went to waste but I’m going to try harder to make sure edible leftovers get eaten and scrap paper gets used again before it gets recycled.

Our need to be thrifty will probably keep us close to home this year but Maura and I are still planning some adventures that will start as soon as the weather allows. For a school project on animals Maura researched lemmings this year. One of the things she learned was that the Southern Bog Lemming lives right here in Massachusetts. We’re planning on being amateur naturalists and searching them out in their natural habitat. While we’re at it we’ll get to know some of the other animals and plants that inhabit our local bogs and fens. I’ll write more about hunting for lemmings when we’ve made our first expedition. With luck we’ll find them close to home but I expect it may be a project that takes a good part of the summer.

The Harry Potter Exhibition

This Sunday Jennifer, Maura and I went to see the Harry Potter Exhibition at the Museum of Science. Our good friend Joe McGlone joined us for the trip. The exhibition was a collection of props and costumes from the Harry Potter movies. They were extremely detailed and well crafted and many of them were quite beautiful. Most of them, however, were props from movies neither I nor Maura had seen. Despite that, both Maura and I enjoyed the exhibition, though I might have been slightly disappointed if we had paid full price for our tickets rather than getting them at the substantial discount available to Museum of Science members. I’m sure the real fans of the movies were completely enthralled and felt they got their money’s worth.

Since we arrived early and had timed tickets we had some took in some of the museum exhibits before viewing the exhibition. The Museum of Science has become one of our favorite spots to visit in Boston and we’ll be there several more times over the course of the year since we are members and our visits to the museum's galleries are paid for. We didn’t have a lot of time on this visit so we concentrated on some of our favorite spots, the mathematics gallery and the Discovery Center which features hands-on exhibits for children.

For me the most interesting thing I saw on our trip wasn’t something in the Harry Potter exhibition or even a museum exhibit. While we were in the Discovery Center we got to watch a fascinating, if gory, display of nature in action. A red-tailed hawk had taken down a squirrel in the back garden of the museum and we got to watch from the large picture windows as she ate her lunch. Though she knew she was being watched the hawk was not at all disturbed by our presence since we were safely on the other side of the windows and therefore no threat. We got a superb view as the magnificent bird devoured her unlucky victim. She took her time and I could have watched for much longer but we had to go.