Ideas for Saving Money

When I was a child, we didn’t have much money. Invention being the daughter of necessity, we learned early that one must “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” as the old folk saying goes. Although my finances got easier, many of my thrifty habits remained (though my natural generosity tends to take a bite out of my finances when I am doing well).

In these times, every little bit helps, and so I am going to share some of my tips on how to cut back your costs. I have a lot of them—65 on my list, and I’m not done listing everything. I’m not simply going to give you a list, however, but am instead going to have a separate  post for each item on the list so I can discuss it a little bit, say why it works or how it works, perhaps give instructions if it is something along the lines of reusing something for a new purpose (“repurposing,” as it is known in the corporate world), and even, if you don’t mind, sharing a bit of the philosophy behind the item.

Some of the ideas I will be sharing with you will simply involve changing habits—doing something differently than you have before. Some will involve buying things in different ways. Others will involve not buying something entirely. It is of course entirely up to you whether you choose to take one, some, or all of these ideas and make them your own. All I ask is that you read through them with a neutral eye. If you find one you like, consider making it a goal to incorporate that idea into your life.

Idea #1: Cancel Your Television Service

Television does not exist to entertain us; it exists to sell to us. (Commercialism by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen)

In some ways, there isn’t a priority to these ideas, but idea number one is so important in so many other ways than saving money that I am sharing it first. It is also going to be an idea that many people will resist, so I am throwing it out there first so that you have a chance to mull it over, maybe do a little research yourself, perhaps give it a try for a month and see how you do with it.

Style Guides

For writers, a style guide is an essential tool for ensuring consistency and clarity. When a company I am working for does not have an in-house style guide, I recommend the following style guides:

• The Chicago Manual of Style, 15^th Edition. The CMS, which is the standard of the publishing industry and has a long and venerable history, is a well-loved manual that I’ve used through several editions. The CMS is available in hardcover, on CD, and as an online, subscription-based version. When a new edition comes out, I geek out and read through it to see what might have changed.  If you have no other guide, this is the one to have.
• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Third Edition. (Currently out of print.) As a supplement to the CMS, because of its emphasis on computer-related terminology, I’ve followed the Microsoft Manual of Style since its inception back in the early Windows days. Some of the approved terms have changed (even flip-flopped) since those early days, and I only recently switched to the third edition, so you may note older style choices in my writing samples. However, I am always consistent, whichever style I follow.
• As an alternative to the Microsoft Manual of Style, some people prefer to use Sun’s Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry (there’s a new edition coming out in November 2009).
• For Apple-based software, there’s the Apple Publications Style, which is free to view on the Web. Note that Apple has it wrong when it comes to the correct capitalization of Web and the separation of the words Web and site (as in, “this is my Web site”), though some day it may become the lowercase web by sheer weight of usage. (Microsoft has it right on both counts in their style guide.)

“It used to be home to old cars and one angry dog”

I read today about how San Francisco’s mayor wants an audit of all unused land in the city in order to grow food there. It’s a good article and I encourage you to read it. One phrase in particular caught my eye, and that was discussing a former junkyard-turned-farm in Oakland:

“…it used to be home to old cars and one angry dog, but now is run by the nonprofit City Slicker Farms.
With a handful of staff members and scores of volunteers from the neighborhood, the nonprofit operates six small farms in West Oakland and sells the produce, along with honey and eggs, on a sliding scale to local residents at a Saturday farm stand. The 2,000-square-foot former junkyard now produces 2,000 pounds of food every year, including lettuce, squash, tomatoes, parsley, sage, collard greens, grapes, cherries and plums.”

If every town and city used empty land to grow food, we’d all be better off, and so would Mother Nature.

Only Infinite Justice and Mercy

As a psychic, channeler, and medium, I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with the other side, including with the loved ones of those who remain on earth.

In all my communications with the dearly departed, I have never once encountered any reference to hell. Instead,  I have only ever seen infinite justice and mercy.  This has held true no matter what a person had done or how badly they treated others while in a body.

I recently came across an article about the topic of hell that provides the results of a lot of research, with the conclusion being that Jesus (Yeshua) never taught that there was a hell.

While you’re at it, take a look at this article on mediums and the Bible.

Sanitation and Safety

A few years back, I took a sanitation and safety course at my local JC. I took it because it was required to take any of the more interesting culinary classes, and I do like to cook. I passed the course with flying colors, a new respect for germs, and greater wariness for restaurants., where I see sanitation violations everywhere. And I am completely not OCD. I am the mom who picked up her daughter’s fallen binky, rinsed it off–maybe–then gave it back to my daughter. Bur what restaurants do? shudder

One of the things I was convinced to get back then was a fingernail brush–a professional quality type–one for every sink in the house. And yes, I use them. While clearing up a stack of papers, I found the instructions for them, along with the Web site where you can get more, and since they are very cheap, and because I am recycling that piece of paper. I wanted to (A) share the information with you and (B) post the information here in case I ever want to find them again.

The brush is an FB001 Fingernail Brush, and it can be gotten at http://www.retailfoodalliance.com.

Opinions

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and in fact, I am not sure it would be possible to stop some people from having them. Lots of them. But there’s a difference between having an opinion and expressing it, and also a difference between having an opinion and believing that somehow your opinion is the only right one to have. Or, worse yet, believing that your opinion entitles you to trying to coerce others into agreeing with you.

For example, let’s say your friend has set her sights on a particular career and is working hard to achieve that goal. If you have concerns about that career (safety, legality, suitability), then you are entitled to express your concerns once or perhaps twice. But only as concerns, and only as your opinion. Beyond that, as long as the career is not self-destructive, it is none of your business what your friend is planning to be, and in fact friendship demands that you be supportive of her choices.

But what if you think it is self-destructive of your friend to pursue her chosen career?  First, ask yourself if you are truly seeing things from her perspective, or whether you are instead judging her choices by your own preferences. What you may think is self-destructive may not have any reflection in reality if you aren’t separating your own preferences from your friend’s.

For example, perhaps you have a friend who is really well suited for the corporate lifestyle, but you personally would find that lifestyle stultifying. Don’t tell your friend to abandon her plans if that is your only concern.

FrameMaker Single Master Template Procedure

If you use FrameMaker, you are probably aware of how much trouble you can get into when you have a set of separate templates for a book. But most people struggle with it anyway, not knowing how to get around it. I hope you will enjoy learning about a procedure I came up with many years ago for creating a single master template for all your different templates for a given project; say, the title page, table of contents, chapters, appendices, and index templates for a book. Using this procedure, you will take a set of separate template files for a book and create a single master template out of them. I am providing the instructions as a high-level list of steps; I assume you know FrameMaker well enough to know how to access the various commands.

The benefit of this procedure is that when you are done, you will have a single master template for your book. When you make a change to this master template, you can freely import that master template into all files in your entire book, so that each file in your book will be up-to-date with the latest version of your template, without worrying about messing up anything.

MS DOS DEL versus ERASE

Long ago in the MS DOS days. I recall being told that there was a difference between the DEL and ERASE commands. One just deleted the directory entry for the file (and therefore the file could in theory be restored), the other actually erased all the data from all the sectors that file was stored on (better for security).  However, although it would seem that intuitively DEL would do the former and ERASE  the latter, I also recall being told that the commands were not intuitively named, though that source wasn’t reliable.

Doing a Google search has turned up a plethora of sites on these commands, but all the ones I checked claim that both commands do exactly the same thing. Can anyone help me out here with the correct information on these two commands? Thanks!

Nutella

I’ve loved Nutella for as far back as I can remember. However, for a very long time, I have avoided it because it was made with partially hydrogenated fats (now more commonly referred to as trans fats), which I’ve known since the 1970s were Bad For You. (More.) I do not know why it has taken the rest of the world to catch up on that one—that information was freely available to any nerd anyone who read Science News.

Anyway. I have recently discovered that Nutella has been reformulated to that it no longer uses partially hydrogenated fats. I think I heard choirs of angels singing when I discovered that fact. They use modified palm oil now, which is perhaps only mariginally better, but I’ll take that margin. (My cholesterol levels have always been quite healthy, thankyouverymuch.) So, lately, I’ve been having Nutella as a dessert almost every day—Nutella on brownie bites, Nutella and crepes, or just Nutella on a spoon. I’m not picky.

My beloved has expressed a concern (tongue firmly in cheek, of course) that, with my new enthusiasm for Nutella, perhaps there is some kind of addictive chemical or other in it, and that it is all probably part of a plot for Alien Domination.

To which I say, if this is part of some alien plot, then beam me up.

Burnt Cookies

This is just a quick question/rant, and I sincerely would like to have someone answer it. Why do people donate burnt cookies (or burned other baked goods) to bake sales? I am talking about cookies that are completely black on the bottom, not just a little darker than they should be. (And even those should be kept at home for the family, not donated to a bake sale.)

I mean, seriously. They have to know those cookies are burned beyond edibility, and they also have to know that people won’t eat burnt cookies. People especially don’t like paying for burnt cookies in all innocence and trust that they were paying for a good product. It is so disappointing to purchase a tasty-looking cookie or brownie or whatever, and then when you unwrap it and bit into it, you find that it has that chalky, charcoaly burnt taste and texture. So you just throw it away, which the original baker should have done in the first place. (Well, in our household, it would be composted, so at least it wouldn’t be a complete waste.)

Anyone have the answer? Yes, I know that they usually have committed to supplying five dozen cookies or whatever. But for heaven’s sake, if these people burn some of the cookies, why don’t they just bake some more? What makes them think it is okay to donate inedible food? Don’t they realize they did not, in fact, meet their obligation after all, even if it looks like they did?

And then I have to ask myself, why didn’t I ever just take the cookies back and ask for good ones? Because I was being polite, I guess. But it is so totally not polite to foist burned food off on someone, and it doesn’t serve anyone to let them get away with selling inedible food. They might as well have had lumps of charcoal out—that would have been more honest. The next time I get burned cookies at a bake sale, I am going to take it back to them and ask them nicely to give me unburned ones. There is no possible other right response to that but to apologize and make good on the error.