Too Many Projects, update

So, those of you who read my post a week ago may have been wondering whether we ever got around to the two Projects we had on our list—the broken desk fan and the persnickety toilet—or whether we decided to give in and just buy something new. Well, as it turns out, once we actually took a minute to look at these Projects carefully, they weren't quite so imposing after all. In fact, we were able to complete each one with just a few minutes of work, a little ingenuity, and some parts we already had.

Here's Project #1: the toilet chain and flapper. After it got stuck yet again on Monday, I got fed up and did a quick Google search on "toilet keeps running," and I found a Wikihow article with some troubleshooting instructions. It suggested feeding the chain through a plastic soda straw to keep it from snagging. We had plenty of soda straws, so I cut one down to what seemed a reasonable length, unhooked the chain, and fed it through. That worked somewhat, except that the chain was too rigid; its full weight now rested on the flapper, forcing it closed too soon instead of letting it drop slowly into place. So Brian modified my fix by cutting the straw in half at the middle, and then he replaced the hook at the end with a small key ring so that it couldn't slip off. Total time: 10 to 15 minutes. Total cost: $0.

Project #2, the old clip-on desk fan, was even more straightforward, though it did require a couple of tools. Brian simply took a slab of scrap wood (about 6 inches by 9) and screwed it to the bottom of the fan, first drilling out a hole in the middle of the wood to accommodate the head of the screw. He plunked it down on my desk and said, "That should do for now; I can make it look nicer later." But as I was looking at this slightly kludgey construct and wondering what would be the best way to go about making it look nicer, my eye happened to fall on the stack of gift cards I've accumulated over the past few years, hoping to find some way of reusing or recycling them. And just on an impulse, I picked up the stack and fanned it out around the base of the fan, as you see here. Okay, maybe it's not exactly elegant, but then, a cheap plastic fan isn't going to look elegant no matter what you do to it, so you might as well go for whimsical instead. Total time: about 10 minutes. Total cost: $0. Bonus: a way to put something that had been just taking up space on my desk to good use.

So I'm revising my views on the subject of turning things into Projects. I now think that the real problem is not an unwillingness to spend money to fix a problem: it's the assumption that solving a problem without spending money is going to require a major investment of time, and thus should be put off until you have a large block of time free. Sometimes, it turns out, a cheap fix is also a quick fix.

Fruit of the month: champagne mangoes

Okay, this is actually a bit of a cheat, because I first tried champagne mangoes a week or two before May had started. But since I'd already done my fruit of the month for April, and since I didn't have any other good ideas for May, I decided to go ahead and use it.

Here is what champagne mangoes look like. As you may or may not be able to tell from the photo, they're slightly smaller than most mangoes sold in stores, and they have a more uniform light orange color as opposed to mingled red and green. They also have a thinner rind and a smaller pit, which makes them much easier to manipulate. I got some standard mangoes on sale at Aldi last week, and I ended up cutting two of them open before they were really ripe because I couldn't tell by feel or by smell whether they were ready to eat. By contrast, the champagne mangoes, with their thinner rinds, give easily beneath squeezing fingers when they're ripe, and the ripe-mango scent is clearly present to the nose. And when you do cut into them, it's much easier to separate the flesh from the flat pit than from the large round pit of a normal mango. The thin rinds also come away from the flesh much more easily. The only thing you have to be careful about is resisting the temptation to scrape the remaining flesh from the peel with your teeth; I tried it and it left my throat feeling irritated and my mouth sort of cottony, which I guess serves me right for being uncouth.

The champagne mangoes have a very sweet, delicate flavor, less tart than a typical mango (especially one that isn't fully ripe). I'm not sure how they got the name "champagne," since their flavor is nothing at all like the dryness of champagne—but the name did suggest to me that perhaps they would go well with strawberries, which we also happened to have some of in the fridge. So I cut up half a mango and a few strawberries into roughly even-sized chunks and mixed them together in a nice salad. The combination was indeed very tasty, although the strawberries tasted unusually tart when set off by the extra-sweet mango. But the two flavors complimented each other well, especially when I took care to get both mango and strawberry in each spoonful. So far one whole mango has been used up in this way, and another half a mango got eaten plain. That leaves me six and a half mangoes to enjoy. Probably most of them will just be eaten straight, but I might also try some in a salsa or a smoothie, like this mango lassi. The sweetness of the champagne mango will probably be even better than regular mango for setting off the tanginess of the yogurt.

So, will champagne mangoes become a regular part of my diet? Well, they are a bit expensive ($5 for a half dozen), and they are imported from Mexico, so they definitely have a bigger carbon footprint than local produce. I probably won't eat them when there's fresh fruit in season around here, which there is for most of the summer and fall (from the first strawberries in May through the last apples of November). But I think these champagne mangoes will make a very welcome supplement to canned and frozen fruit (and cold-storage apples) throughout the long winter and spring.

Too many Projects

One of the problems with living the ecofrugal life is that small problems, which most people would solve with a quick trip to the store, can easily turn into Projects. Here are a few examples that have popped up for us recently:

The Case of the Running Toilet
Our upstairs toilet has taken to running indefinitely when flushed. It doesn't do it all the time, but often enough to be annoying. It's not always the same problem, either; sometimes the chain has lodged itself under the flapper, preventing it from closing all the way, and sometimes the chain has grabbed onto the  flapper itself, preventing it from falling into place. We've tried shortening the chain, but then it ends up being too short, so that the flapper can't close at all.

Now, a true spendthrift would solve this problem by calling a plumber, without even bothering to glean all this information about the flapper and the chain. A normal person would probably try fixing the chain once or twice and, when the problem kept happening, would go down to Home Depot and get a new flapper and chain for $5. But even that solution would involve spending some money, as well as throwing out the old flapper. And the thing is, we know the flapper we have used to work properly. So in theory, it should be possible to get it to work properly again. But getting it to work again will be a Project. It might involve cutting the chain, or replacing it entirely, or threading it through a soda straw as this Wikihow article suggests, or maybe shaving down the lip of the flapper so it doesn't catch. There will probably be some trial and error involved, and naturally, all of this will take time to do. So, like all Projects, it has to be set aside until we have several free hours to deal with it, most likely on a weekend. And in the meantime, we have to keep reaching in and fiddling with the chain every other time the toilet gets flushed.

The Case of the Broken Desk Fan
For the past several summers, I've kept a little clip-on fan on the edge of my desk. I think we originally picked it up for a dollar at a yard sale, and it's proved to be a worthwhile investment. It produces enough of a breeze to keep me tolerably cool even with the indoor temperature as high as 90 degrees, so I don't need to switch on the air conditioning more than once or twice in a summer. However, when I removed it from the desk last fall, the clip broke. We tried gluing it back together, but no dice; the glue it wasn't strong enough and promptly split. Then we tried splinting it, and the clip just broke in a different place. We concluded that the clip was not salvageable, but the fan still might be, if we could build some sort of stand for it. So now this broken fan is now a Project, tucked on a shelf in our newly-cleaned-out workshop, awaiting repairs that will require, once again, a free weekend. Which I'm hoping we'll have before the weather gets too hot, because obviously I can't just go down to the drugstore and spend $10 on a new fan if we have an old one that could still do the job with just a little bit of work, right?

The Case of the Worn-Out Soles
As I've mentioned before on this blog, Brian has an old pair of shoes that were quite expensive when new, but have worn down to the point that there's little tread left on the soles. When I took them to the shoe shop to see if they could be resoled, I was informed that this type of sole costs $60 to replace (and even after shopping around online, I couldn't find anyplace that would do them for less than $50, which would come to over $60 with shipping). Given that we'd seen a similar pair of new shoes on sale at the Famous Footwear for $70, this didn't seem reasonable.

So, for a normal person, the solution would be obvious: throw out the old shoes and either get a new pair or, since you've managed without them this long, just continue to do without them. But it seemed like a shame to me to throw out a pair of shoes that still had a possible year or two of life in the uppers just because the soles were worn down. So I Googled "resole shoes at home" and decided to try picking up a pair of heels and half-soles for 12 bucks on Amazon.com. However, when they arrived, it became apparent that they were really designed more for a men's dress shoe with a raised heel, and not for a shoe with a one-piece sole like the Rockports we had. So figuring out how to apply these soles to the shoes became a Project. Could I stick them on with Shoe Goo? Would I have to cut out part of the existing sole to create a flat surface to apply the heels? Would I have to clamp the new soles to the shoes while the adhesive dried? For how long? The more I considered it, the less confident I felt about tackling the job on my own...so the shoes sat out on my desk, waiting for—yes, you guessed it—a free weekend when I could enlist Brian's help to fix them.

This story actually does have an ending, because last night I showed Brian the new soles and heels and asked for his advice. He examined them and concluded that they probably weren't suitable for the shoes he had, and also that and it probably wasn't worth putting a lot of time and effort into a pair of shoes that had such an uncertain amount of life left in the uppers. But he did decide that the shoes were still wearable in their present condition—just not in wet weather. So he put the worn-out shoes in the spot next to his dresser where he keeps his everyday shoes, in the hope that he'll remember to wear them in fine weather and get whatever remaining life they have out of them. And the heels and half-soles went into a drawer with his shoe shine supplies, where we'll have them handy should we ever need to repair his 25-year-old dress shoes.

Now if only we could come up with equally satisfactory solutions for the desk fan and the toilet....

The best of all tightwad worlds

Last Earth Day, the "Live Like a Mensch" blog invited readers to "share your favorite low-cost, free, or money-saving tip for reducing waste, energy usage, or unnecessary purchases." I responded with the complaint, "Just one tip? I have a whole blog's worth!" and then compromised by presenting a short list of my favorite ecofrugal tips, including, "use your library," "bike to work," and "join Freecycle." Another regular reader, who goes by the handle "frugal_fun," quibbled with these suggestions, arguing that you have to use a car to get back and forth to the library and to pick up Freecycled items. I explained that I always walk to the library and try whenever possible to pick up Freecycled items on foot as well, or failing that, to pick them up as part of an already scheduled trip. But even as I was writing that response, I realized that the strategies I was suggesting really only work for town dwellers. If you live in a fairly densely populated area, you can probably walk to your local library (or get there by mass transit), and the folks you deal with on Freecycle will probably live within walking distance or, at most, a short drive. You're also more likely to live close enough to your workplace to make biking to work a reasonable option. But if you live way out in the country, it's much harder to get anywhere without a car—which means you can usually be more ecofrugal staying at home.

This discussion reminded me of an article from the third Tightwad Gazette book, called "The City Tightwad and the Country Tightwad." In it, Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) discussed the fact that some of her readers seemed to think it was harder to save money living in the city than in the country, especially since her newsletter seemed to focus so much on "gardening, canning, and squirreling away bulk purchases in a large house and a big barn." In truth, she argued, the city and the country have both have their own particular advantages when it comes to saving money. The advantages of town life include cheap transportation, more inexpensive shopping choices, free entertainment options (such as the library I mentioned in my tip), and more opportunities for "curb shopping" (otherwise known as scavenging). The advantages of country life, by contrast, include gardening, cheaper land, more utility options (like solar panels or wood heat), the ability to stockpile more stuff, and "more lifestyle freedom" (that is, fewer neighbors to expose your family to expensive brands or complain about your laundry hanging on the line). As for the sprawling suburbs, so often attacked as the most wasteful of all  places to live, they actually combine the advantages and disadvantages of city and country life—as well as having perks all their own, such as plenty of yard sales.

I think this analysis is generally spot on, but after reading it over, it occurred to me that for those who aspire to the ecofrugal life, a good-sized town (like the one where I live) is really the best of all possible worlds. Here in Highland Park, we enjoy most of the advantages Dacyczyn cites for city, country, and suburban dwellers. For example:

• Like city tightwads, we have a lot of stuff within walking/biking distance. Brian can easily bike to work in good weather, and I can walk to the grocery store, drugstore, doctor's office, post office, and most other places I'd need to run errands. We could use a few more stores in walking distance (like a bookstore and maybe some reasonably priced clothing stores), but still, we often go for days without getting behind the wheel.
• We also have a pretty good variety of shopping options. While we have just one supermarket in walking distance, there are several others a short drive away, making it easy for us to cycle among them and choose the best-priced items from each one. On the down side, we really don't have any good thrift shops in our immediate area; the local one has a limited selection and even more limited hours, and the next nearest one is a Goodwill store that's about 15 minutes away by car, which I've concluded really isn't worth the trip. 
• We have a good variety of cheap or free entertainment. True, it's not the same same variety you might find in a big city, but between our local library, the nearby museum, town-sponsored events, and all the stuff going on at the university, you can generally find something to do on any given weekend.
• Housing options include the best of city and country. A quick search on Craigslist turned up three rooms for rent, ranging from $465 to $950 a month, which isn't at all bad considering that I paid $400 a month for my first shared apartment back in 1996. Yet those who want a house and land, with plenty of room to stockpile bulk goods and grow a garden, can easily find one. They'll certainly pay more for it than they would in, say, rural Kansas, but with the housing market still in a slump, there are good deals to be had for those who look.
• We also have all the perks of suburban living without the sprawl. The schools are good; there's lots of stuff within a short drive, and a car won't cost an arm and a leg to park; we have yard sales from spring through fall, including a big town-wide sale in September; and carpooling is a viable option for lots of folks, since so many locals work at the university.
• Finally, the "lifestyle freedom" Amy Dacycyn lists as a perk of rural living seems to be just as open to us town dwellers. She finds it easier to avoid "material excess" living in the country, where her kids aren't constantly exposed to temptations from junk food to Nintendo—but our town is so diverse that I think local kids accept a wide range of lifestyles without even blinking. Walking around town, I see Jewish boys with yarmulkes and Muslim girls in headscarves walking home from school, and neither attracts so much as a second glance from passersby, so I kind of doubt that a kid without an Xbox–or even without a TV—is going to be looked on as a freak. 

So while I would agree that both city and country have their own unique advantages for ecofrugality, I would argue that a largish town—and especially a college town—truly offers the best balance of both.

Spring cleaning

Brian and I spent most of yesterday cleaning out our storage room (also known as the shop and the laundry room, but it does those jobs only occasionally and stores stuff 24/7). This time I remembered to take a "before" picture:

As you can see, the most obvious pile of clutter in the room is that mass of stuff on the worktable in the middle, most of which is seed-starting supplies that never got put away after we finished potting up all our seedlings for the year. So we started by going through that lot, emptying soil out of tubes, washing the tubes, discarding the more battered cartons, and neatly stacking the clean cartons in a big box marked "seed starting." The seeds themselves stayed out, since there are still several crops that have to go into the garden, but everything else was neatly contained in that box or thrown out. That made a pretty visible improvement right away.

After that, we moved on to tackling some clutter that was less visible, but just as unnecessary. For instance, I had two big bins full of scrap fabric, mostly old pairs of pants, and I had to go through all of that and admit that, realistically, it was pretty unlikely I'd ever use most of it. I still ended up keeping probably more than we needed (I doubt I'm actually going to need six pairs of old jeans just to make patches for newer jeans, for instance), but I still filled up two garbage bags with stuff to take to the  nearest textile recycling bin. I also made a smaller pile of still-usable clothing that can be donated to our local thrift shop. My scrap bin doesn't actually look all that different without the extra junk piled in and on it, but it's a lot easier to open and close.

Meanwhile, Brian was going through piles of other junk. We puzzled for a while over an assortment of electronic debris, trying to figure out what was e-waste we should recycle and what was just regular trash. We eventually decided we could safely trash all the cables, leaving just one small webcam and one old RF modulator to be taken to down to our local Department of Public Works for e-cycling. 

We also had a large box on one shelf marked "give away," full of random stuff that we can't use but still think might be useful to someone else. However, after my recent Freecycle blast, a lot of the larger items were gone, so we were able to consolidate the remainder into a much smaller box. I also pulled a couple of the items out to list them on Freecycle, as well as a few smaller things that we decided it would be amusing to stuff into Christmas stockings. (This also prompted me to get started on this year's holiday gift list, which we generally work on throughout the year as we pick up yard-sale finds and other bargains that come to hand.)

A lot of the remaining work was just tidying up: putting away tools, grouping items to be repaired on a designated "project" shelf, dumping out the accumulated sawdust and wood shavings from earlier woodworking projects, and vacuuming up all the dirt from our seed-starting ventures. Miscellaneous junk got dumped into trash bins (dried-up paint, packing foam) and bundled up for recycling (lots of corrugated cardboard). And after lots of trips upstairs and downstairs and out to the shed, here's what we had at the end of the day:

Doesn't actually look all that different from the "before" picture, does it? Hard to believe that we filled two big garbage cans with trash, two big trash bags with recyclable textiles, and two smaller bags with other items to be recycled, and yet somehow there seems to be just as much stuff in the room as there was before. But trust me, everything is much neater on the inside. At least, I now think that if I went down there looking for, say, a hammer, I could actually locate it within five minutes, which I didn't feel at all confident about before. 

Gardeners' holidays: The Age of Asparagus

So, here it is, the beginning of May—which, according to this chart from the NJ Department of Agriculture, marks the beginning of the "most active" period for asparagus here in Joysey. I'd hoped that I'd be able to celebrate this event with a meal that actually features asparagus as a starring ingredient. A magazine I picked up at our local supermarket had a couple of interesting-looking recipes in it, and while I didn't expect to have the 2 cups of asparagus needed for "Crustless Asparagus Mini Quiches," I figured I could at least muster the 8 spears needed for a "Crab & Asparagus Omelet."


Unfortunately, though, our asparagus patch doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. So far, it's sent up mostly skinny little shoots that went to fern almost immediately. So all I have at this point is two longish spears sitting on the kitchen table with their cut ends in a jar of water. (They, too, were on the verge of going to fern, but they were the fattest spears we had, so I picked them anyway.) Those will probably make about half a cup once chopped, so we might be able to manage a half recipe of a potato omelet out of my Easy Vegetarian Dinners cookbook, which calls for one cup. Of course, it also calls for new potatoes and a ripe tomato—so in order to enjoy our half cup of seasonal garden produce, we'd have to invest in two other ingredients that won't actually be in season until July.

Of course, I could always cheat and declare this the Festival of Spinach instead. According to the charge, that's the one other vegetable that's technically in season (even if it hasn't reached its "most active" stage yet), and we do have a bunch of it in the fridge. But we didn't grow it ourselves, and it doesn't seem like much of a Gardeners' Holiday celebration to eat something that was bought from a store. I guess the best compromise would be to do both; eat the asparagus, which is actually home-grown, to commemorate the holiday, and then eat the spinach as well to ensure that we actually get a decent portion of veggies with our meal.

Unfortunately, our newly refurbished rhubarb patch definitely isn't up to providing us with dessert. While the three plants that we transplanted all seem to have survived, and one of them is literally blooming, there isn't enough new growth on them for a pie or even a crisp. As for the four new plants, only two have come up at all, and they're only barely visible. Maybe rhubarb can be part of next year's celebration.

Having a Freecycle blast

Lately, Brian and I have been doing a bit of spring cleaning. Our shed, which was nearly impossible to walk around in, is now probably the tidiest it's ever been. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a "before" picture to show you just how chaotic it used to be, but at least you can see from this "after" picture that it's quite neat and well-organized now. Whenever I go in there now, I find myself standing there for a few minutes just savoring all this room we have in there.

Most of the stuff we cleaned out of the shed eventually went back in, just in a more compact and well-organized way. But we did end up with several items to give away, so over the course of the past few weeks, I've been posting them all on Freecycle. I'd list three or four items at a time, and as they were taken, I'd remove the posts and list more items in their place. And since I was making all those posts anyway, I also started working my way through the box of stuff marked "giveaway" that's been sitting on a shelf in the shop for the past year or so, as well as listing a few other superfluous items. I actually belong to two different Freecycle groups, one for the Rutgers University/New Brunswick area and one for all of Middlesex County, so I started out by listing items on the Rutgers group in the hopes of giving them away to someone who lives close by. (I figure it's less wasteful to have the items picked up locally, since it involves less driving, and I also assume—or at least hope—that people who live nearby will be more likely to pick things up promptly.) If an item doesn't go within a few days, I'll post it on the bigger group, and if it still hasn't been taken within a week, I conclude that no one's interested.

Anyway, it occurred to me that this "Freecycle blast" might be a useful way to collect some data about what kind of items generate the most interest on Freecycle, and what kind are hardest to get rid of. As I worked my way through my pile of items, I kept track of what kind of response each item got: how many people responded, how quickly, and how long it took before the item was picked up. We still haven't completely gotten rid of everything, but most items have gone, including all the big ones, so I think I can go ahead and present my findings. So, here they are: Livingston's Laws of Freecycling.

• The items that are most in demand are useful, as opposed to decorative. A set of jumper cables, a beat-up old shovel, a half-full bag of dry cat food, a bottle of hand lotion, and an assortment of curtain rods all got multiple requests within the first 24 hours. By contrast, a glass jar for displaying a floating candle went several days before getting a nibble, and I still haven't found anyone willing to take any of our assorted mugs with cartoons on them (something everyone has too many of already).
• The condition of the item doesn't seem to matter that much. Whenever I post an item on Freecycle, I always disclose any problems with the item up front, because I don't want the person who picks it up to have any reason to feel cheated. Yet we had no trouble giving away rusty old shovel, a digital camera that won't start unless its batteries are charged up to the brim, and a truly antiquated flatbed scanner.
• Bigger items are more likely to be taken on the larger Middlesex County group than on the local group.  Both the scanner and our old recirculating range hood got no offers when I first listed them, but when I posted the same items on the bigger group they were snatched up immediately.
• The more information you can provide about an item, the better. Of the two Freecycle groups I belong to, only the Middlesex County group lets you include a photo with your listing. However, I have discovered that when I post to the Rutgers group, I generally get a better response if I can find a picture of a similar item somewhere online. That helps people get a clearer idea of what's being offered, so that (a) they'll know if they're interested, (b) they'll know if they aren't interested and won't change their minds after seeing the item, and (c) they won't be disappointed with what they get. I also try when listing electronic items to include as much of the original documentation, software, cables, and other paraphernalia as I can scrounge up.
  
• In addition to being specific in describing the item, it's wise to be specific in stating your expectations about the pickup. I made one post offering three vintage glass ceiling light covers (see the photo for an example) with the note "please take all," and I still got two requests from people who wanted to take just one of them. Next time, I'll spell it out: "Please reply only if you are willing to take all three."
• It's best to avoid promising an item to someone unless that person can commit to a specific date and time for picking it up. Sometimes I've been kept dangling, waiting for a reply to my "So when should I expect you?" inquiry, while being forced to put off other people who asked for the same item and offered to come get it that very day. I used to give my address right away to anyone who requested an item, but lately I've taken to saying first, "Let me know when you can come get it, and I'll send you the address." I'm not as strict as some people, whose posts always include instructions to "include a date and time for pickup in your FIRST e-mail," but I might end up adopting that approach.

I'm hoping these rules will stand me in good stead when we finally get around to cleaning up the shop, which will probably be a much bigger job than the shed and yield an even larger volume of stuff to be Freecycled.