Archive for the ‘Dollar S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-R-S’ Category

Hold fast to these commandments should you find yourself perpetually broke, suddenly unemployed or OWING THE IRS SOME CRAZY AMOUNT DUE TO A STUPID ERROR.  Here you go, YOU STUPID.  (By you, I mean me.)

• Thou shalt never enter a Starbucks or Peet’s coffee.  Gourmet, whole bean coffee shalt be purchased at extreme discount from Costco and ground and brewed at home for 1/36 of the cost.

• Thou shalt never accept an invitation to a social event through which thou wilt incur a large bill.  The French dinner out with 70,000 friends splitting the tab shall be politely declined.

• Thou shalt not eat the flesh of an animal more than twice a week.  Those suckers art expensive and chock full of hormones.

• Thou shalt never buy an expensive, pesticide-free or sustainably farmed fruit, vegetable or potato chip.  Scoff at friends who suggest “you really should buy organic.”  Then state, “It must be fun being a billionaire.”  When they tell you that they are broke, too, scoff harder and louder.  Enjoy this.

• Thou shalt never freaking EVER unnecessarily free-load from friends or colleagues, lest you feel indebted or, worse, you be disrespected or condescended to.

• Thou shalt never enter a Nordstrom shoe department.  Ever.  Thou shalt not kill, either.

• Thou MUST covet thy neighbor’s home, bank account and trip to Club Med.  Then curse the rich heavily.  And repent with even greater ferocity.  But enjoy it before that.

• Thou shalt keep thy home spotless.  This is the quickest path to self-respect, and ordered humbleness trumps messy opulence any day of the week.

• DO NOT EVER attend a school auction or purchase a ticket from a turkey for a turkey raffle or let your child pressure you to purchase eight Self-esteem Bracelets at school.  Self-esteem is for the rich.  Don’t attempt to purchase it with your money for the water bill.  If thou art desiring to donate thine last cent to charity, choose someone less fortunate than thou art.  Someone always is.

• Thou shalt not ever do lunch.  Do coffee.  Then repent of the first commandment.  Or invite a guest to thine home.  Thou shalt be a gracious host and offer a tasty, affordable meal.  True generosity of spirit cannot be outdone or outspent.

Hey, Channa Masala and Naan Bread. Thank you.

I am not really sure what America has done to deserve Trader Joe’s Channa Masala and Naan bread, but I would beam, not run, to the nearest TJ’s to get some.  I am not a connoisseur of Indian cuisine, but after this dish I can’t see why I don’t always set fire to my tongue every night via the food of the biggest democracy in the world.  Outsource me now!

As if taste good enough to impress even your friends from Berkeley weren’t enough, the meal is VEGETARIAN.  Even your heart loves this!  How often do the tongue and the heart battle over possession of your mind?  Oooooooo.

But here’s the grand finale of good fortune.  THIS IS AVAILABLE IN THE FROZEN SECTION.  So for less effort than walking to the car that will float your healthy rump through the drive-thru, dinner can happen.  To people like you and me.  What a country!

So my recipe for a great dinner is to direct you to the icy boxes of that lovable little grocery store (I swear, not an ad).  Get some Channa Masala and Naan Bread, before you start doubting yourself and decide that you’re just not worth it, because I believe you really are.  Unless you are my brainless and hairless former boss.  In that case, I wish you an eighteen-course meal of all your clothing, accessories included.  That you must cook and eat by yourself.  Naked.

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"Are you close, God? It's me, Greta."

What do you do when you want to save money on a child’s birthday?  You take her on vacation instead and spend three times what you would have on a party.  But then, in THEORY, you are off the hook for a summer vacation when rates are up.  Anybody buying this?  If so, I recommend you become a regular reader of the Alice In Wonderland-ish world that is this blog, where inverse reason reigns, and overdressed moms, who stomp their feet and talk about ‘pulling [THEIR] money out the public schools’ (OUT with my cash!), get likened to worms who poo out their mouths.  Which, by the way, is MUCH more plausible than the floating head of a Cheshire Cat.

Well, I sold this logic to myself and to my husband who is kind enough or tired enough to trust me since he doesn’t understand how lanterns from the dollar bins and some cake and market lemonade add up to a couple hundred dollars for a birthday party. So off we went (much to the birthday girl’s delight), and on half-a-tank of gas, we transported the five of us to Cannery Row of Monterey Bay.

Monterey includes an incredible intersection of some really great things:  dramatic shorelines (can you say:  blast, splash, foam?); a rich, albeit brief, history spectacularly told by John Steinbeck; a hub of oceanic research and activism at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; and a strong commitment to American tourism via numerous candy shops and a wax museum.  In the end, you can’t attract the masses without a wax museum.  But not me.  I come for the fudge.

More details on the trip as they unfold.  I invite you to check back tomorrow.

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"Gee, Rickie, it's funny to think that one day you'll grow up to believe that this kind of celebration is inadequate, unacceptable, and abusive. You'll even despise cake mixes."

This is a continuation of the previous post where I present  The Crisis that is planning the child’s birthday party.  If you are obsessed with spending, adorning and overdoing, read no further.  Read The Crisis and laugh heartily.  I would.  Unfortunately, I am the crisis, but like an organizational paramedic, I have devised some strategies, after several crashes and burns, to increase your chances of surviving the dangers of being alive in a society that really doesn’t have enough to do, yet is ALWAYS BUSY.

Unlike most life-saving techniques, I will not tell you what to do, but what not to do.  Instead of teaching you how to wrap a tourniquet, I’m teaching you not to get in a knife-fight at the mall.  It’s much easier to keep your arteries intact if you do not impale them with switchblades and broken bottles.  Gosh, I love a violent metaphor.

Below is a list of Do Nots.  In fact, it’s a list of Don’t Even Think Abouts.  Trust me.  I thought about it before, and don’t care to anymore.  Now I know why my mom is so obsessed with microwaved hors d’oeuvres.

• DON’T MAKE THE CAKE. Take it.  From a store.  Even a low-end high-profile one that will throw Elmo or Sponge Bob on it.  Most kids take one bite and then run down the hallway to spill their lemonade.  If you like to bake, send cupcakes to school for the Halloween Party or the Cake Walk.  Don’t take on baking masterpieces unless it’s the only duty you have.

• Don’t Prepare The Food Yourself. Order Food.  You think it’s expensive, but doing it yourself adds up too.  Don’t have the entire thing catered.  Have the central item prepared for you:  3 pizzas, one thousand potstickers, a three-foot long sandwich,one million chicken nuggets.  You can fill in the extras on your own:  chips and dips; crackers and veggies with hummus; fruit; chocolates.  Don’t feel you have to offer ten-thousand varieties of food either.  Caterers usual offer less than most of the do-it-yourselfers.  They’re being paid.  They don’t have TIME to represent all 194 nations at the buffet table.

• Don’t YOU DARE chop fruit and vegetables. You can order a platter from a store, though they tend to be pricey for inexpensive ingredients.  Make your own, but don’t include every vegetable that Chile ever harvested.  Pick the ones you don’t have to chop:  baby carrots, broccoli florets.  And okay, I will let you chop TWO or THREE red peppers for color, that’s it.  If it must be cut, it must be cut (from your list).   As far as fruit goes, embrace strawberries.  Just rinse and call it decor.  Walk right past the melon like you would an abusive ex-boyfriend.  You don’t have the energy for all that drama.  Of course, children will eat none of this.  This food is for the parents who stay to supervise their children because they think you just might allow them to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in traffic.

• Don’t trip out on entertainment. Kids like to yell and scream.  And they actually like opening presents.  They like to play with them and grab them from the birthday kid.  And if you try to avoid that, there will just be another crisis, like, the birthday kid hitting someone in the face with her sparkly shoes over the toys that she got last year.  If your kids are older, consider some old school games:  hot potato, musical chairs, pin the tail on the whatever you want (you can tie it in with the theme, if you’re crazy:  pin the tail on the princess, Sponge Bob, Eric, Lightening McQueen or pizza).  If you have boys, find something for them to run on or into:  a park, a basketball hoop, a backyard, a trampoline, a ball.  There is ALWAYS WIFFLE BALL.  Never forget this.  Give older girls some glitter and nail polish and kiss your carpet good-bye, or throw some decorative oil cloth on the designated primping area.  Or let them run around a park.  Or a beach.  They like to hang out.  Just give the kids space to run and be loud.  An ordinary art project works wells, too.  Drawing, cutting, pasting, molding.  Oh, and don’t forget the simple joys of a treasure hunt (for craft store jewels or trinkets or things or gum).  You can even make a map for them.  If all else fails, have Wii wars.  Or beat a pinata, or go to a pizza place with video games.  Are there any of those left?  Above all, RELAX.  As long as kids have larynxes, they will have joy.

• Don’t not give wine to the adults. You can buy some good, inexpensive bottles, and no one will ever hold anything against you since you gave them wine.

If the theme of your party doesn’t match your outfit, you will survive.  And your kid will not necessary lose the fourth grade election, though I can’t PROMISE this won’t be part of the fallout of not hiring a clown.  So I beg you to relax a bit and let it happen.  And if we as parents all unite in celebratory mediocrity, our children will not beg us to bring Cirque de Soleil to our living rooms.  Let them eat cake, and rejoice in it even if they don’t get to pet llamas and reptiles.

Birthday photo is courtesy of http://www.webweaver.nu/clipart/.

Greta requests your vote for her blog on Babble.com.  She thanks you, too, as she wonders why she always asks for your vote in the third person.

So You Think You Can Bake

Every child has a birthday.  And for parents it’s a wonderful celebration of the most important beings in our world.  Who doesn’t love their babies even once they’ve learned to talk back and they need rides to softball practice?  They are our pride and joy.

Unfortunately, beyond the second birthday of the first child, the romance of throwing parties that cost $400, that have color-coordinated themes followed through to every Dollar Store trinket that will soon have its own eternal celebration in one of the landfills of our world, wears off.  The planning is exhausting.  Why do you think the gymnastics parties and the jumpy Hell parties are so popular?

I am a firm believer in the at-home, old-school party.  The kind where the kids actually open the presents, a practice which has become basically unacceptable in the mommy circuit via a trend started by one very loud person with a nice handbag, I’m sure.  That is the key to being heard in the mother community.  No one will listen to what you have to say if you don’t sport the proper attire:  “How could she really know, anyway?  (pause)  Did you see her shoes?”  No.  I am not kidding.

The old-school parties, however, in the wrong hands can be overdone and exhausting.  For the doer.  The guests enjoy themselves at the expense of the doer.  Oh, the poor doer who gets stressed and broke and funny looks from her husband, the doee, who just might also say, “What have you been doing all week?”

It is at this moment that the doer curses the day they met and considers applying for every job known to man so that she can bring in a paycheck and not have to have an answer for her husband that sounds like one or more of the following:

• I swept the same pile of dirt seventeen times this morning.  It kept coming back.

• I went through the pile of eight days of bills and junk mail that you gifted the entry way table.  At one point, I almost fell in and died.  I might have been happier there, in the stranglehold of Costco coupons, than having to hire a snowplow to have them removed from our home.

• I told the kids to get dressed.  Eight-thousand times, just before 8 AM.

• I fought exhaustion from boredom all day long.

• I drove the car to every crevice of town.  It sucked.  I did it.  And I will do it over and over again until the three-year-old is twenty-two.

• I thought about folding the laundry.  To even contemplate folding the laundry takes a full day.  To actually do it ALL and put it away, would take an estimated eighty-one years.  Which, frankly, I just don’t have this week.

• I did have seven outstanding cups of coffee, though.  And got hugged by the kids.

So, now that the doer has spoken and the doee stares off into space, the party still has to be planned.  There is a child to celebrated.  And you do feel like celebrating.  Just not the kind of celebration that involves too much chopping, money, and staying up past 3 AM.  Yet, PEOPLE WILL COME and they must be fed.  It’s time to GO THE DISTANCE.  It’s time for Mom to start cutting back.  The little voice in your Kevin Costner head should say, EASE HER PAIN.

If the voice says Martha Stewart.com, call your therapist and ask for a medical referral.  DO NOT LISTEN TO MARTHA.  NOT IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN UNDER FORTY.  DON’T LET HER DO IT.  PERUSE HER MAGAZINE IN THE OFF-SEASON, FOR ONE OR TWO IDEAS, BUT DO NOT GET ANY IDEAS DURING YOUR CHILDREN’S BIRTHDAY SEASON.  YOU ARE IDEALISTIC AND, THUS, VULNERABLE AT THIS TIME.  LOOK TOWARD THE LIGHT AND LISTEN FOR THE VOICE OF TRUE PROPHETS.

Please check back tomorrow, for some Party Planning CPR.  You still need time to digest the crisis.  At least I do.  All in good time, most wonderfullest readers.  All in good time.

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