My thrifty ways

Now that you're all aware of my thrifty background, I can share a recent shopping experience. As you may, or may not know, I work in a bakery. My first job of the day is to fry donuts. (insert the groggy sounding "time to make the donuts") If you haven't guessed this is a bit messy. No matter how careful I am, I always get grease spots on my pants. For that reason alone I hate spending a lot of money on something I'm going to ruin. When I need new clothes for work I don't buy "NEW" clothes. I go to my favorite second hand store.

I walked out with four, count them four, new to me pairs of pants.

 

 Now how much do you think you would spend on four pairs of pants, in excellent, like brand new condition?

 

You probably can't make out all the price tags but they total $21.60. BUT, one of the pairs was on sale so my bill was $20.15. Now is that a bargain or what?

Man I love that place.

A little of my history

Today I have a story to tell you about my father. He was a very thrifty man. He wasted nothing. Back then I wasn't impressed by it, and I even dared to call him cheap on one, and only one, occasion. His reaction? He pulled out his checkbook and proceeded to give me a lesson in economics. I was fully aware from that day on of the cost to run a household.

 

(left to right Dad, my brother Mike, Fernando a foreign exchange student and me) 

He had some of the most amazing talents. The man could scrape a peanut butter jar so clean it looked like there had never been anything in it. This is a skill that I've been working on perfecting for years. It makes me grin every time I get to the bottom of the jar and start to scrape the sides.

Bread bags were never thrown away when the loaf was finished. And yes, he always ate the crusts. He saved each bag and reused them. Most of them transported fresh vegetables from his garden to friends, family and neighbors. When he became a grandfather those bags were used to bring "grandpa cookies" to the kids.

 

(Dad proudly wearing his boy scout leader uniform)

Dads casual and work attire was grey work pants and shirts. When the collars on his shirts started to fray you would think he would have replaced the shirt. No, he would carefully remove the collar, turn it over and sew it back on. He said that the other side was perfectly good and had a lot of wear left in it.

Once when he was attempting to instill the "waste not, want not" theory in me, he told me a story about one of his cousins. He said that the cousins family had been wealthy but very wasteful and eventually lost their fortune. On the other hand, his family was very careful about not wasting anything and that God always provided them with what they needed. To this day I don't know if that was fact or fiction, but I'll take his word for it. He never steered me wrong.

 

He had a heart of gold, a faith that could not be shaken, a love for his children and a passion for flying. Flight may just be a post for another day.

 

(one of the last pictures ever taken of my dad)

The reason I'm telling you all this is to impressively lead up to my silly little post for tomorrow.

See you all then.

Friday night fumble

I know that football season is over but I have to say that mom really dropped the ball when it came to tonight's post.

 

She got home from work and started reading all your blogs and completely forgot about posting on her own. 

 

I had all day to read your blogs and I could have caught her up but no, she said she wanted to read for herself and leave comments.

 

I handled things here though. I think I made an excellent recovery. What do you think?

Blame it on the dog

It's all Duke's fault and now I'm starting from square one.
Along with my new plan for following my favorite blogs, I started a new plan for doing my posts. I've sort of been working ahead. I'll write my posts a day or two ahead and then schedule them. This way I'm not scrambling to get a post together after I finish reading all your wonderful posts. Well, last night Duke was so excited about doing a post that he just went ahead and published it without scheduling it for today. That meant 2 posts for yesterday and nothing for today.
Since I'm starting from scratch again and working on putting together a few posts, today I'm going to bring you a design I put together and named "Starting from square one"
It got it's name because this is what I started with

 

One black square is where this all began.

From there it led to this

 

Next came this

 

and the final product

 

It's a good thing tomorrow is Friday and my weekend starts. It will give me some extra time to catch up on things.