A Visit from Grandma and Grandpa

My parents came from Indiana last week on their annual spring visit. They make a point of visiting several times a year because we don’t have many chances to visit them. They don’t want to miss their only granddaughter growing up. I doubt we’d see them quite as often if it were only Jennifer and me. As always everyone enjoyed the visit though we didn’t have as many adventures as I had planned.

They arrived last Tuesday. Jennifer took the whole week off and Maura was on her spring break so we were all here to greet them when they arrived. We went out to lunch to Sweet Lemons, our local Thai restaurant, which we go to for lunch almost every time they visit. We all enjoy going out to eat.  The rest of the day we just spent relaxing. My parents had had a long drive and I didn’t want to wear them out.

On Wednesday I’d tentatively planned to take a trip to the Cape Cod National Seashore but the weather was lousy. We stayed closer to home instead. The rink where Maura takes ice skating lessons had a free skate period during the day so we took a drive there so Maura could practice and show off her progress to her grandparents. Damp chilly weather doesn’t matter much in the ice rink. It’s always cold in there. We all enjoyed the time, though, despite the shivering. We went out for a nice dinner in the evening.

On Thursday we made an expedition to Cambridge to visit the Longfellow National Historic Site, which consists of the house where the poet Longfellow lived along with its grounds. In an earlier generation the building had been George Washington’s headquarters. We were disappointed because the house was not open for tours, though we had assumed it would be because Jennifer had found it on a list of National Park properties that would be free that week. The gardens were open, and free, but they are always free. They were quite beautiful with early blooming trees, though they will be even more gorgeous in a month or two. We will have to go back during the summer, when I expect the house will be open for tours. Our trip was not a complete waste. We had a nice lunch and did some shopping. Maura got two gifts, both of them books. She tends to get what she wants when her grandparents are around but I’m proud of what she wants. In the evening I took my parents to church with me for Maundy Thursday services.

On Friday Maura went to the Weymouth Carnival with her mother and grandparents. I stayed home because I’d come down with a nasty cold. Maura had a great time. I know because I’ve seen the pictures. I am not surprised. Maura loves carnival rides. It was back to church in the evening for me and my parents for the Good Friday service. Despite being under the weather, I did not want to miss it.

We took Saturday off. I was still not feeling well and everyone else seemed to want a rest. I did have to work in the evening.

Sunday we celebrated Easter. For my parents and me it is a religious holiday and we started the day with church but the centerpiece of the day for Maura and Jennifer was dinner. We had Easter dinner with our friends the Tittlers. We’ve been friends with them long enough that they’ve gotten to know my parents and everyone enjoyed the visit. Julie Tittler is a good cook and she does her best work on holiday meals. It would be hard not to enjoy a meal that good eaten among friends.

Maura was back to school on Monday. We all went out for pizza in the evening and followed it with ice cream at Nona’s in Hingham. They make their own ice cream there, and it’s a real treat. It was a good end to the visit. In the morning my parents hit the road and headed back home to Indiana.

Adventures in Frugality, Part 3: Surprising Results

Because I haven’t yet managed to find any more sources of income we’re still trying to cut the weekly budget to make up for my still impending loss of a job. What amazes me is how well we’ve managed to do. Six months ago we took out $240 each week to cover food, gas and sundries. We’ve been cutting back for a while but now we’re down $180 a week. Despite the rising costs of food and gas we’re doing quite well. In fact I often find that I have more money in my pocket at the end of the week than I did when we were taking out more cash.


Last week I had enough left over at the end of the week to take Maura out to lunch on Friday, which she had off from school. We went to Windy City Eats, our favorite local hot dog stand. The hot dogs are Chicago style and the best I’ve had for a long time, served with a smile and no ketchup. Lunch there always makes Maura’s day and the prices are very reasonable. [Local readers in search of a good hot dog can find Windy City Eats at 407 Middle Street, Weymouth, MA and on the web at www.windycityeats.com.]

I suspect the reason we’ve been doing so well is that we’ve been paying attention to what we spend our money on. We’ve been saving money on our food bills by buying meat in larger amounts when it’s cheap and eating more vegetarian meals. I’m still driving as little as possible and once my current job ends I’ll be taking even fewer trips.

There is one disclaimer on our weekly spending numbers. They do not include the cost of most of our vegetables. We get those from a CSA and pay for them in advance so they don’t come out of the weekly budget. We paid $130 for eight weeks of fresh, mostly locally grown produce. The quality is better than what we’d buy in the supermarket and we support local farmers. We’re still spending less than $200 a week. We were getting our vegetables from a CSA six months ago, too, so the amount we've cut from our budget is real.

A Walk in the Blue Hills

Our good run of weekend weather continued this weekend. We celebrated with a hike in the Blue Hills. We parked our car near the park headquarters and hiked between there and Great Blue Hill, hiking in a loop that included both branches of the rugged Skyline Trail. The weather was perfect, cool enough to be comfortable but warm enough to hike in a T-shirt once we got going. There were lots of people on the trails, not a surprise in the well-travelled Blue Hills. We were joined on our hike by our friend Andrew Tittler and his children. His youngest rode on her daddy’s back but Maura and his oldest child hike well enough on their own.
Though the weather was perfect it was not the most enjoyable hike I’ve ever been on. Maura can be a great hiking companion but on this occasion she was not on her best behavior. Maura is like any other child. Some days she’s a blessing and a joy to be around. On other days she is selectively deaf and won’t hear a word you say to her over her own whining. Sunday was one of the later days. She asked for a drink of water about every five minutes and had to be told so many times not to climb over rocks that weren’t on the trail that I lost my temper and yelled at her. I don’t like to do that. Needless to say we saw little wildlife, though with many other hikers on the trail we weren't likely to see anything shy.

Perhaps it was just a bad day for Maura or perhaps it was that she was hiking with another child. Maura usually goes out in the woods with just her parents. It must be easier to listen to us when no one is competing for her attention.

Fortunately Maura is usually a pleasure to be around. We’ve enjoyed many hikes together and I expect we’ll enjoy many more. Maura’s spring break starts on Friday so we’ll have plenty of time for adventures together and with her with her grandparents, who will be visiting. I’m looking forward to it.

The First Hike of the Season

Last Sunday afternoon we finally had the set of favorable circumstances I had been hoping for since the beginning of March. The weather was fair, everyone was healthy and we had no plans for our afternoon. We packed the expedition bag with binoculars and guidebook, filled our water bottles, put on our boots and headed for the woods.
Our destination was Wampatuck State Park, in the nearby town of Hingham. Our objective was to scout for likely southern bog lemming habitat that Maura and I might revisit later on the Great Lemming Hunt. We didn’t find any place that seemed very promising, though there were a few spots we might visit again.

Despite not finding lemmings we had a wonderful hike and saw plenty of wildlife considering that Wampatuck is heavily traveled and hardly a pristine wilderness. From World War I until after World War II it was part of an ammunition depot where the Navy stored ammunition for large guns and the park is crisscrossed with roads from that time, some crumbling, some well maintained and popular with bicyclists. Between the roads are footpaths and bridle paths that cross the hummocky terrain. Most of the park land is gently rolling hills with swampy valleys between. In places there are open ponds. Everything is covered with brushy, second growth forest and there are occasional old buildings, stone walls and rusting chainlink fences.

The forest attracts many animals as well as people. Even in the early spring there are animals to be seen and heard. Along one sunny stretch of bridle path we spotted a pair of brown and yellow morning cloak butterflies. Further along on our hike we encountered a vernal pool filled with wood frogs. They could barely be seen in the shallow water through our binoculars but they could be clearly heard. They sounded more like a flock of ducks than a pond full of frogs. As we climbed up a bank to get closer to the pool of frogs we startled a barred owl and spotted it as it flew to a perch in a tree a bit further away from the annoying people. We weren’t sure what we’d seen, only that it was a large reddish-brown bird flying away but when it called “who-cooks-for-you” we knew what it was and we spotted it through our binoculars watching us from its perch.

We walked perhaps two miles on our expedition, hiking at an easy pace with many stops. I could have happily kept going, and I think Jennifer felt the same but Maura wasn't in the mood for a long hike so we headed for home. On another day we'll revisit the most likely spots to look for evidence of lemmings. This may be a year of frequent hikes. Everyone in the family enjoys them and hiking in local woodlands is an inexpensive pastime.

Adventures in Frugality, Part 2: Challenges

There never was an adventure without challenges. Trouble, danger and fear are part of adventure. With nothing to be overcome an adventure becomes merely a journey, and it’s likely to be a tedious one. It is challenges that bring excitement. They stretch us beyond our limits and force us to learn and to grow.


I’m feeling very challenged these days. The prospect of losing my job is frightening. I’ve had it for nine and a half years and, even though I have little love for it, its loss will be wrenching. The rhythms of my life that have been built around my job are comfortable from familiarity even if they are sometimes irksome. It will be hard finding the new patterns that I will need to succeed in my life going forward.

Money is an issue, of course. I’ll have to give up some things I enjoy. So will Jennifer and so will Maura. I hate having to tell her that she can’t have something or do something because we don’t have the money for it, but I know she understands. We’ve never been rich so Maura is used to not getting everything she wants. It is just as well. If she had had all she wanted before she would take it harder now that she certainly can’t.

I’ve come to see the upcoming loss of my job as more of an opportunity than a disaster. My job in retail bookselling has been a side job for years. I hung onto it for the money while I spent more effort on other, more important things. The trouble was that it took too much mental energy and distracted me from what I needed to do, which was to write and to sell my writing. I’m not going to be unemployed. I may, unfortunately, be unpaid. My hope is that my time working without payment will be brief.

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.

Wii, Wii, Wii (and mostly stay home)

Maura and I haven’t been traveling much of late, even over the Christmas holiday. We did a bit of shopping one day and on Christmas Day we visited with friends. We also went to the movies twice. It’s one of our Christmas traditions. We saw Tangled on the day before Christmas and Tron Legacy the Monday after. Both were thoroughly appreciated, but not very far from home. There were no visits to museums or other attractions.

We’d planned some, at least a trip to the Science Museum in Boston, but early in the week after Christmas the weather was lousy (a blizzard hit during the night on Sunday) and then Maura came down with a fever so we wanted her to get plenty of rest and we didn’t want to expose too many other people to something that might be contagious. A call to the pediatrician convinced her mother and I that the fever wasn’t very serious and it was gone by New Year’s Day but it kept us at home for most of Maura’s vacation.

During the days Maura felt fine so we all played together at home. There were new Christmas gifts to play and play with. The gift that kept Maura busiest and given lots of fun to the whole family was the Wii game system that Maura’s grandma and grandpa gave her for Christmas. All three of us in the Ellett home have been spending much of our free time in front of the TV waving around the Wii remote.

I’m a bit worried that the Wii might aggravate Maura’s tendency to spend all of her time in front of the TV but provided we can keep that under control the Wii is a good game system for Maura, and me for that matter, to be playing on. We don’t have Wii Fit, which is designed for exercise, but many of the games we do have are active enough. They’re best played standing up and some of them can get your heart racing. Many of them are fun for the whole family to play together, so unlike the games we play on our computer, and many other video games, they are not isolating. On the whole I think playing on the Wii is healthy in moderation and it’s certainly fun. I’m not planning on making Maura stop (and I’ll play now and again myself). Next time Maura has a break, though, I hope the weather and our health give us a chance to get out and do something outside the house. If we never leave home I might have reason to worry.