Bill Busting 106: Cheap Laundry

"Laundry costs money," some people say. "If you're not in a position to buy washing and drying machines, you'll be spending a lot of money in laundromats. Mostly in coins. Paying more than double what people who own washing and drying machines pay for soap and bleach, too."

What's wrong with this picture? 

A hundred years ago, nobody had electric washing and drying machines. Nobody thought they needed them. Getting clothes clean took more time and energy without the machines. It was even a specialized profession, in cities where enough people who could afford to pay someone to do it lived close enough together. But no machines that plugged into the wall were necessary.

What do washing machines do? They slosh clothes around in soapy water, then in fresh water, and finally spin them around fast to use centrifugal force to extract some of that water. The sloshing part can also be done with a sturdy piece of wood in a large container of water. The spinning part used to be done by squeezing the wet cloth between a pair of rollers. Finding the rollers will be the hard part, but there are other ways to squeeze water out of cloth once it's been cleaned.

What do drying machines do? They blow dry air through wet fabric until the water evaporates out. This, too, can be done without a machine that plugs into the wall.

I'm not saying that machines don't make laundry much easier. I am saying that, if you want or need to save money, clothes can still be cleaned in the way they were before the machines were invented. Cooperative weather and muscle strength are the absolute requirements.

There are alternative ways to get the benefit of modern laundry technology, too. The only one to rule completely off the list is that lame old "just keep buying more clothes, with the pocket money the'rents send me at college, until a long weekend rolls around, then cram six weeks' worth of dirty laundry into the back of the car and wash it at the'rents' house." That's not frugal, it's infantile.

You can, of course, work out barter arrangements with people who own washing and drying machines and agree that something you do is worth the use of those machines. Cooking, driving, baby-sitting, yard work, painting, and so on are good laundry barters. Parents have been known to participate in laundry barters, but this will still look as if you needed their help to do your laundry.

As a student, you might be able to get into a dormitory or boardinghouse where use of the house laundry machines is free of charge, In an au pair or international home stay arrangement, use of the house laundry machines may be part of the deal.

There are neighborhoods where neighbors agree to share laundry machines. You might still have to pay per use, but the neighbor will probably accept currency instead of all those coins. 

Or you can get a nice big waterproof tub. A washtub must be big enough for whatever you want to wash in it to slosh freely about. If you have a five-gallon bucket, you can wash a few shirts at a time. If you have a ten-gallon tub, you can wash about enough clothes to fill a pillowcase. You could use the bathtub and wash your bed linens, blankets and all. If you use the bathtub, put a strainer over the drain to avoid clogging the drain. 

"In olden days, my ancestors used to wash their clothes in the river." Don't. Modern laundry detergents are much more effective, and also more toxic to aquatic animals, than lye soap used to be. Pour soapy water out on the ground to let it filter through the soil before it flows into the river. 

Whatever you use for a washtub, it should be about twice as deep as the amount of soapy water you put in. You want to be able to stir the clothes about vigorously without splashing water outside the tub. Work outdoors if possible. Plan on ten or fifteen minutes of brisk sloshing to remove ordinary dirt, plus extra time for scrubbing marks like ink that won't just float away when clothes are swished through water. Slosh and scrub until everything looks, feels, and smells completely clean. As with machine washing, some things may need more than one fifteen-minute washing to come clean..

Now slosh the washed laundry in two changes of fresh water. Run fresh water over it until no more soap bubbles form in the water that's run through it. Residues of detergent in fabric can cause skin rashes.

Now press the water out of the well rinsed fabric. If you have a roller wringer, you can use it. If not, gather up the wet fabric in your hands and squeeze it against something to press out the water. 

You can still buy hand-powered washing machines with roller wringers, which make this job much easier. I've mentioned my legacy washing machine, Sweet Baby James. People still find a James Wringer Washer in an antique store or on a shopping site now and then; they were built to last, but they no longer cost one or two hundred dollars. Lehmann makes something similar that sells for about $1300 online. 

https://www.lehmans.com/product/lehmans-own-laundry-hand-washer-with-wringer

That can now be considered the deluxe model for families--it washes about a pillowcase full at a time. For students there are smaller, cheaper, probably more labor-intensive models, many sold without the roller wringers, that are basically buckets with lids that fit tightly around the paddle. This is a great improvement over a plain uncovered bucket when you want to wash the mud and dust out of things you wear on a construction site. Not that all of these gadgets are big enough to wash a Carhartt, or even a pair of jeans. Many are designed for instant cleaning of underwear or cloth diapers, only, on the theory that work clothes only smell like dust and paint (yeah right, and then there's the septic-smelling rich black muck you dug into, and the blood from the paper cut on your thumb...) so people wait to take them to the laundromat. And, to wring the water out of the fabric? Just drain off what runs out, then crank faster. It's the same principle as the spin cycle in an electric washing machine, but it's a lot easier for a motor than it is for the person who's been cranking the soapy water into and out of the clothes.

Here's a typical model that will wash 4 to 8 pieces of summer clothes or 1 to 5 pieces of winter clothes per load.

https://www.amazon.com/AGULIUM-Portable-Washing-Machine-Apartments/dp/B0D2RJGGNY/ref=asc_df_B0D2RJGGNY/

If your legs are stronger than your arms, or you want them to be, you could buy a foot-powered machine instead. Again, to get the water out of the washed and rinsed clothes, you pedal faster, and you can wash up to one pair of jeans or four or five shirts in one load.

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/yirego-drumi-washer-review.html

There seems to be an assumption in the industry that everyone will be willing (and can afford) to take linens to the laundromat. Sweet Baby James will wash sheets, but not quilts. With the hand- or foot-powered machines in the under-$200 ranae or even in the under-$500 range, you're going to be washing quilts and blankets in the bathtub.

The Internet's marketing these devices as "off-grid" rather than "frugal" is probably the key to the vast room for improvement in the field. The ultility companies really don't want people "going off the grid." They want it not to be possible for someone who's been left alone with three school-aged children and a huge medical debt to keep those children's school clothes clean without plugging something into the wall. It's possible, but currently nobody seems interested in making it any easier.

Hand-powered or foot-powered washing machines will probably always be small, because big loads are heavy and hard to slosh efficiently. And there's a time-saving tip for really badly soiled things: before body secretions have had time to dry into fabrics, shove the soiled part down into a water-flush toilet bowl and flush; repeat as necessary, then spritz with enzyme-based "Pet Odor Remover," and then, when all visible contamination is gone, hand-wash. How much work the enzymes will do for you will amaze you. Still, there ought to be an easier way to clean a two-person coverlet,

If you live in a dry climate and get hours of bright sunshine, and if your fabrics are all pale sunbleached colors or you would prefer that they be, you can pin things out to dry on a rope stretched across the yard in the sun. Sunshine kills some pathogenic microorganisms. It also breaks down dyes in fabric, so avoid sun-drying things you wear to funerals. 

If sun-drying is not feasible where you are, your motivation to pursue a good laundry barter deal will be intense. You may have to dry things indoors by hanging them up close to an electric fan, which can easily take long enough to waste as much energy as you saved by not using a drying machine. In the olden days people used to speed up the process a bit by drying things with a hot iron, cuasing the water in the fabric to steam up in a little cloud, continuing to press until the fabric was bone-dry. Soot and scorch marks often caused the whole process to have to be repeated and sometimes spoiled the look of a white collar forever. Victorians loved to pile on layers of fabrics in weights ranging from gauze to poplin, because at least a shirt whose collar had been scorched could still be worn as a collarless undershirt.

The secret to successful cash-free laundry is to resist the temptation to cut yourself slack on the sloshing and scrubbing part of things. Every particle of dirt must be removed. A little speck that nobody would see can easily attract a fungus infestation. Moldy clothes and linens look nasty, smell nasty, and may raise a rash on your skin. Everything must be thoroughly cleaned.

(If you are hand-washing your clothes and you start to find your friends keeping a healthier distance, the car pool that advertised empty seats five minutes ago filling up when you call to reserve a seat, etc., a relatively cheap way to identify the problem is to take all your clothes to the laundromat and wash them with strongly scented detergent. It can be easy to build up enough tolerance to the bacteria in your own laundry hamper that you think things smell cleaner than they do.)

If you live near a store that resells clothes in aid of a charity for which you have any respect at all, there will be tremendous temptation to buy more clothes and wait for a good laundry barter deal instead of laundering your clothes the oldfashioned way. Still, it's good to know that the oldfashioned way is an option you can fall back on.

Bill Busting 105: Cheap Baking

If you have a non-electronic meter with dials to indicate electricity or gas consumption, you may have noticed how turning on the oven makes the dials spin madly around. Creative Tightwads have not invented a secret way to change this.

We have. however, found some ways to reduce the damage the oven does to your frugal budget. Not all of these tips will work for everyone. Use the ones that work for you. 

1. Know your alternatives.

Is microwaving a good alternative to baking? Does radiating your food cause diseases? Microwaving things wrapped in plastic or in plastic-coated cardboard or paper will, unfortunately, add plastic residues to your food. Microwaving things in glass or china containers seems to be much safer. 

Microwave popcorn comes in bags coated with toxic chemicals. Popcorn is a nice natural snack or breakfast cereal when it's not smothered in carcinogenic compounds. An air popper may be a better investment than a microwave if you and your household use a lot of popcorn.

Several other small alternative appliances may or may not serve your purposes better than a full-sized oven. Check and compare the ones you use for the things you bake at home:

* A pressure cooker concentrates energy from one burner on the stove, using steam, to heat foods fast. It's possible to steam breads in a pressure cooker, sealing the dough inside a metal container with plenty of room for expansion. Steamed breads have a heavier texture than conventional sandwich bread. For multi-grain or vegetable breads, this effect can be regarded as a feature. 

* A toaster oven works just like a traditional oven, only in miniature. If you bake only small batches, a toaster oven might be a good investment.

* A slow cooker uses a small steady amount of electricity to keep things warm or barely simmering for a long time. This is not usually recommended as a good way to bake breads, but it's an excellent way to cook beans or stew cheap, tough chunks of red meat.

Other unconventional alternative methods like cooking on laboratory or repair shop equipment work better as jokes than as frugal alternatives. When Mrs. Murry (in A Wrinkle in Time) cooked stew on a Bunsen burner in her home laboratory, readers were meant to recognize her as a lovable mad scientist, not ask for recipes. And nothing cooks very well on pavement, even if the pavement is hot enough, and nobody would want to eat it if it did. 

2. Bake off the grid if you can.

Wood stoves, camp stoves, bottled gas or kerosene heaters, charcoal grills, hibachis, etc., are not feasible alternatives for everyone. They work, but you must follow all the special safety rules for whichever you are using. Depending on where you live, they may or may not actually be cheaper than using your gas or electric oven in a frugal way. 

You can, however, bake things in a tightly covered Dutch Oven (heavy lidded pot) between layers of coals in a grill or even in the fireplace. This will require attention and practice, and will help you understand why, in cultures where traditional food was so plain, people sang the praises of "good" cooks and bakers. 

3. Cook more, bake less.

Cooking on the stove top tends to take less time and electricity than baking. So, cook oatmeal instead of baking biscuits. Cook pudding instead of baking cookies. 

4. Plan ahead to consolidate cooking times. Use the whole oven if using the oven at all.

Traditionally "Baking Day" meant Saturday.  For the rest of the week the frugal housewife did not  heat the oven or soil the baking pans. 

5. Use the free heat.

You have to preheat the oven in order for things to bake properly. You can, however, turn off the gas or electricity (or stop feeding the fire) for the last ten minutes of baking time. The oven will stay fairly hot, and the baked goods will finish baking on that free heat. 

6,  Count the costs. 

When it's most frugal to buy and when it's most frugal to bake, will vary depending on your specific situation. Grain loses nutritional value in the process of being dried out, ground, stored as flour or meal, and eventually baked into bread. Supermarket sandwich bead is pretty much empty calories, its main value being as a handle for the meat, vegetables, or peanut butter in a sandwich. (Try "sandwiching" those things between leaves of dark green lettuce.) If you can buy freshly harvested whole grains and grind them as needed, you can make better bread, because almost any other kind of bread is more nutritious than supermarket sandwich bread. Do you and your family really need to eat that much bread? If the grains available to you have had poisons sprayed right on the grain, to harden the grain faster or keep out weevils when the grain is stored, their nutrient value will be negative in any case. 

In theory, if you had access to unsprayed, mold-free, insect-free, whole grains, you could rely on grains for most of your protein, vitamins, and minerals. The expense of time spent baking your own bread (or cooking your own cereal grains) would be offset by reducing your family's need for meat. You could meet any remaining needs for protein and B-vitamins by using milk and eggs, and not need to kill any animals, a diet plan that always appeals to animal lovers. You could bake big batches of bread in winter, when the oven would heat the house. Depending on the local climate, it might be feasible to freeze some of this bread for use in summer. This plan works for some people. It's a good bargain: the home-baked bread may cost less than supermarket bread, certainly is fresher and contains more nutrients, and also is fun for the whole family to make. Children enjoy being part of a self-sufficient frugal family farm. In fact the main drawback to that lifestyle is that the children may want to stay on the family farm more than they want to go to college.

Then again, you might perfect your bread-making skills and then find out that most or all of your family do not actually digest wheat and rye, or corn, or rice, anyway. Diet for a Small Planet was a well written book by a lovable person who didn't realize that a minority of humankind are not built to digest grain very well. Celiac genes are uncommon among people of Irish descent and nonexistent in the rest of the world. (People all over the world are now reporting celiac-type reactions to wheat. A few of those people really have inherited celiac genes from an Irish ancestor. Most of them are sensitive to glyphosate and/or other chemicals sprayed on wheat.) Other types of grain intolerance are less dramatic than celiac disease, but there are people who are or will be healthier when they avoid eating wheat, corn, or rice. Not everyone on the planet can eat a grain-based, mostly vegetarian diet.

For many people it is a good frugal bargain to raise their own grain and bake their own bread. The time involved in making five acres of land into a self-sustaining micro-farm may become a full-time job for one family member, who "sacrifices" a nine-to-five commuter job. (Oh, the sacrifice. Freedom, you see, has got our hearts singing so joyfully...) I grew up that way, so I am not impartial. What I feel a need to say here is that there's no need to judge people who find that it's more frugal for them to keep their nine-to-five jobs and eat less bread.

7. Stay flexible.

Good food is one of the things that are worth spending money on. Especially for young working parents who need to economize, it's hard to overstate the important of good nutrition for mothers and babies. A well nourished fetus is a healthy fetus, likely to pop out easily at the right time and become a healthy infant. A well nourished, preferably breast-fed, infant is a healthy infant who doesn't need dozens of vaccinations, is not much of a distraction from home-based work, absorbs language from listening to adults, becomes a fast learner, and doesn't have "the usual number of colds." 

Exactly what good food is, for you, depends on who you are. And who your family are. And what's available to you. 

Many books have been written on the subject of nutrition and dietetics. What a study of this subject should give you is a sense of the vast complexity of the subject and the amount that remains to be learned. We know that there are optimal levels of various nutrients in healthy bodies; we know that simply ingesting food that contains those levels of those nutrients does not guarantee that the optimal levels of those nutrients will be maintained in the body; we're only beginning to find out some of the reasons why. 

Of course, one big reason why what we think we know about nutrition is still far from being a settled science is that the effect of pesticides and other pollutants on crops has been categorically excluded from most of the studies. People who say "wheat is good" or "wheat is bad" are not comparing sprayed and unsprayed wheat in a scientific way. Corporate sponsors of these studies want to assume that sprayed and unsprayed wheat are equally nutritious (or harmful). They are not.

Experiment. Read the books. Crunch the numbers. But realize that what actually nourishes you or your children is unlikely to be a plan worked out on a computer. If you try a plan that seems to offer frugal nutrition, on paper, and it doesn't seem to be working for you, it's better to try a different plan than to stick to the one that wasn't working.

Children tend to be wary of new foods--which is a good survival trait--even without being exposed to unhelpful messages from school, television, and neighborhood busybodies. Try to avoid being too dogmatic in encouraging children to try modifying their diets for optimal frugal nutriton and health. In the long run it will be better to have said "Let's see whether you have fewer colds this winter than last winter," rather than "Eating something you liked CAUSED you to have so many colds last winter." For one thing, primary schools tend to be boring places, so children are apt to agree that "Staying in bed and being sick is better, as a rule, than grammar and arithmetic and all such things at school," and may feel that more colds = more time at home = a net gain. There are children who might be motivated to eat more vegetables by the idea that, if they build up more resistance to colds, Mommy or Daddy will try homeschooling next year. Then again there are children who, given a free choice, prefer primary school to homeschooling. 

Baking at home may be part of your family's system for maintaining frugal good health, or it may not. Eating fewer baked foods may be part of your family's system for maintaining frugal good health, or it may not. Find out what works for you. Understand that what works for you may be different from what works for someone else. It's possible to talk about how your plan seems to be working for you without being judgmental about other people's plans.

Book Review: The Circle of Simplicity

Title: The Circle of Simplicity 

Author: Cecile Andrews

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 1997

Length: 256 pages plus bibliography and acknowledgments

Other books by the same author: Slow Is Beautiful 

Quote: "People in simplicity circles discover that everyonecan simplif their lives in some way... Simplicity circles lead to both personal fulfilment and social change."

In 1989, Cecile Andrews offered a "voluntary simplicity workshop" at a community college.Four people came. In 1992 she offered the same workshop.A hundred and seventy-five people came. In 1997, this book didn't quite make the bestseller list, but it became popular with Green, frugality, and liberal readers.

In 1997, though people who shared Andrews' views about thrift, not being sucked into compulsive purchasing, and engaging with the real world, would hardly admit knowing what the Internet was. Page 82: "Some people have started Simplicity Study Circles on-line. To me, this cannot be. It's not a study circle if you can't laugh together, if you can't reahc over and touch someone's arm." 

Today, of course, there are online simplicity circles. In fact, there was even, for a while, a web site called cecileandrews.com. Cecile Andrews still doesn't have a Wikipedia page, as nearly all writers, living or dead, now have; she does have a handful of articles at resilience.org. But plenty of people who have read this book do prefer to connect online, so do you still need this book?

You do, if you enjoy reading. It's a good read, and a good referencewith lots of citations of other good books. 

What else do you get by buying the book? After a nine-page overview, 33 pages of the book review reasons why people are opting to simplify their habits rather than dress, buy, and spend to impress others. (How it worked for my generation, in practice, was later described in detail in a book called Bobos in Paradise.)

Pages 34-123 discuss some things people cut back or cut out of their lives when practicing simplicity, and things they do with their time and money, instead.

Pages 124-210 discuss ways to "build community." This part of the book is quite controversial, in a gentle goodhearted way. Andrews applies the concept of simplification to philosophical quesitons about ecology, health, spirituality, and politics, and airs some opinions with which some practitioners of simplicity don't agree. She endorses homeopathic approaches to personal health. Even in 1997 she had not reconsidered socialism, though most of my generation were shaken out of whatever faith we'd had in it in 1987.

You can practice simplicity, and bond with others in a simplicity circle, without agreeing with any of Andrews' opinions. Not only Republicans and fundamentalist Protestants, but also collectors of specific kinds of "stuff," people who depend on allopathic medicine, people who enjoy computers, people who want to celebrate our introversion as the gift it is, and so on, can simplify their lives as profitably as "limousine liberals" can. 

Pages 210-247 providke specific instructions for organizing your own simplicity circle. They're not restrictive; it's not a franchise. These are just tips on methods that have worked for existing groups, and how, and why.

Finally, pages 249-254 provide suggestions for further reading for simplicity circles. It's not exhaustive,. New books have come out; some old ones have become hard to find. Groups that want to stick together, reading and discussing books at weekly or monthly meetings, should love this part of the book too.

There are books and writers in the simplicity/frugality/Green category that are closer to my heart, and my practice, than this one. Richard J. Foster's Freedom of Simplicity, Wendell Berry's What Are People For, Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad Gazette, leap to mind. Walden, for pity's sake. Still, I've kept a copy of this book for more than twenty years. If this description interests you, you'll probably like the book too.

Makers and Takers: How Welfare Hurts Entrepreneurs

(Status update: this whole post is another big fat status update. Bottom line, I just earned $18, to add to $5, for the week's living expenses. If your income for the past year was US$12,000 or higher, go here first, and follow instructions:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4923804 )

I am sooo tired this afternoon, Gentle Readers. It's a Friday afternoon and I've spent the morning in the open-air market in Gate City, Virginia.

Technically, the day started at 5:45 a.m., which was when I woke up. I left home at 7:15. Car-pooling with a fellow vendor, I was in the market at 7:34. The market technically opens at 8:30. Vendors and a few sharpwitted tightwads check out displays before that, if they can. Of the $18 I collected from sales, I'd taken in $13 before 8:30.

I had a few books that have been reviewed at this web site, a few that had not; I try to avoid taking the same ones in twice in a row. Fear it not, with my furniture-smart-but-book-clueless friend's collection on top of mine, I  have enough books for sale to deliver a new collection every week for a year or more, if I make the time to rotate stock.

Mostly I had soda pop.

Earlier in the spring, I happened to be looking for something to buy, "for Miss Manners," in a convenience store where I'd used the facilities. I found some small bottles of soda pop on sale at a price that allowed me to take them into the market that Friday and offer them, not on ice, at a price Wal-Mart couldn't beat. They sold fast. I used the profit, and the frugal supermarket shopping habits I learned in Mrs. Ramey's Home Economics class before Gate City even had a supermarket, to locate more bottles of soda pop at a price Wal-Mart couldn't beat next week, and the next week, and the next week.

Anybody can do this; Sam Walton would have approved. It's merely a matter of taking the time to shop for the lowest prices for an amount of any kind of merchandise that you can handle, on which you can then make a modest, ethical profit by reselling single units of merchandise as impulse purchases. It's how Wal-Mart actually began.




To offer single bottles of soda pop at a price substantially nicer than Wal-Mart's only involved walking seven miles to the supermarket where they were on sale in six-packs, carrying those six-packs to the warehouse on my shoulders. Well, fifty-year-old women do not maintain my kind of body shape by sitting in that ugly slouched-back-then-hunched-forward position car seats force a woman into. The usual sarcastic observations on people who drive past me in half-empty cars, not offering a lift, and then call themselves Christians, naturally apply...

Well...last week people didn't come to the market at all. For the first time I had a lot of bottles to lug back from the market.

This week, however, a well-known welfare cheat was cluttering the path through the market. (In an open-air market it's not an aisle; it's a traffic lane, along which people drive trucks.)

If I'd imagined anybody was going to listen to this character, I would have snapped a picture of him and posted it here (and a cheap cell phone camera can compete with Busted magazine for unflattering snapshots). "The Blighter" used to work in a local supermarket, from which he wasn't fired immediately after I caught him trying to rip me off, and was able to alienate me as a customer. He officially left the supermarket claiming some sort of work-related injury. If he has any such injury, it's not noticeable. He has rented space in the Friday Market. He has usually sold work tools for which he obviously has no use, and sometimes sold iced bottled drinks--smaller bottles, for a higher price. His father, whose disability pension is based on alleged mental illness, is one of my Insane Admirers. (Because he didn't want to admit how accurate his father's claim of mental illness probably was, at one time this poor man was worried that he'd have a stepmother who's a few years younger than he is. He had no need to worry.)

He had not set up a booth. He was just wandering around, telling everyone how terrible it was that "some idiot comes in, offers a lower price, and spoils things for everybody."

In selling bottled drinks at low prices I am not, of course, spoiling anything for anybody--not even the blighter who could, if he were intelligent, buy my drinks early in the day, at my price, and resell them at his price. My best steady customer has been doing that. Steady customer, who was intelligent enough to get a post-"retirement" job, buys bottled drinks at a modest profit to me, puts them in the cooler at his workplace, and resells them at a modest profit to himself.

I don't try to sell things at a price much higher than I'd be willing to pay for my own personal use, because I don't have the best lying skills. I can give people really ridiculous disinformation, in such a way that any competent adult knows it's a joke, but I wouldn't be able to ask the kind of prices The Blighter asks with a straight face. Local lurkers can expect to get dealers' rates on everything...unless they tick me off. When I offer any of the books in a box for $1, it does not bother me at all to see a literate fellow vendor buy a dictionary, Bible, or instruction book, transfer it to her or his own booth, and sell it for $2 or even $5.

As a Christian, I don't presume to forgive people before they repent, but I do release my emotional energy from people who, let's just say, could best serve humankind by dying right now before they waste another breath of oxygen. I've not followed The Blighter around trying to ruin everything he does, although I would technically be in the right if I did that. I would have been delighted to sell him all my bottles and let him spend the rest of the day reselling them at his prices, if he could, while I spent the day online.

The Blighter is not, however, intelligent enough to think of that. It's the sort of thing his pathetic father would have been able to think of, all by himself, if goaded to use what he has in the way of brains. If he needed the money to pay bills and buy groceries, The Blighter would probably have realized that his nasty behavior did him no good at all.

Let's walk through the steps, making this simple enough for a brain like The Blighter's.

A. Intelligent Choice: You, the person who wants to be able to get a higher price for something, buy as much as you can from anyone who's offering a lower price.

Result #1: The person(s) offering the lower price have accomplished what they set out to accomplish. They are pleased. They can go home.

Result #2: Although your purchase doesn't guarantee that they want to buy something from you, their feeling of being pleased in the Friday Market does improve the chance that they'll buy something in the Friday Market. The money may trickle back to you on the very same day.

Result #3: People like good customers, so someone who may have had good reasons to dislike you based on your past behavior (assuming the person spends enough mental energy remembering your past behavior to notice that it's you) may start to form a better opinion of you because you're a good customer...even if you turn around and resell the person's merchandise at a higher price.

B. Stupid Choice: You, the person who wants to be able to get a higher price for something, are able to exploit people's loyalty, ignorance, or fear of your reputation as a middle school bully, enough that they don't buy it at a price Wal-Mart can't match.

Result #1: The person(s) offering the lower price will still be able to sell some merchandise to some people, so you're not making them go away. To whatever extent you do reduce their profits, you merely make them less happy--and less likely to circulate more money around the Friday Market.

Result #2: Inevitably, the person(s) identify who's been sabotaging their business. Then they're motivated to discredit that person. You set up a backlash of dislike and disloyalty against you.

Result #3: A more hostile market is a less lucrative market. In a small town whose economy fluctuates noticeably depending on the Friday Market, your "negativity" may well make a small but noticeable dent in everybody's profits.

Result #4: More people buy food products than sell them, so you're not going to win a war with the person who's willing to sell them cheaper. You can hurt everybody's profits and everybody's feelings, maybe all over the whole town...but you, yourself, aren't going to come out ahead.

Now obviously The Blighter never was Berea material...I'd be surprised if he'd been able to finish a two-year course at one of those public colleges that are required by law to accept anybody who can sign a tuition payment check. Still, he did qualify for a cashier's job and even work his way up to a middle management position in a supermarket, before his "injury" (not that he walks with a noticeable limp). So he probably can count, as well as read at least a little. If all he had to live on were what he earned, he would have figured this out for himself.

How is it possible that he's not figured it out? How is it possible that a man who's old enough to be a grandfather, and can probably even read on at least a third or fourth grade level, is still acting like a fourth grade bully?

Welfare is what makes it possible. As long as this able-bodied semi-skilled worker is able to live as a parasite on working people, as long as he doesn't actually need to make a profit, he can afford to go into the Friday Market for the sole purpose of, well, blighting the market for everyone else. He doesn't have to make a positive contribution to the community. From his drug-warped point of view, it may even seem profitable to him to do only harm to everyone around him.

Frankly, Gentle Readers, I was surprised that this sort of thing could happen. Yes, we all carry around our "wounded inner children of the past," and mine is a sickly middle school student who just couldn't be as big or as strong or as energetic as my alleged peer group, no matter what I did (until I grew up and stopped eating wheat products). My "inner child" is always willing to believe that anyone I don't know well who looks in my direction is going to hit me if I don't knock him down first, because, for no logical reason--after all I was a child prodigy, and "everybody always" hates child prodigies--everyone else is hostile to me. For all my "inner child" knows, if my parents aren't around I probably am the last nice, quiet, peaceable person left on Earth.

(And yes, it's true that all I have to live on is what I earn...so if people pass by me in the Friday Market and don't buy something, they are in fact doing me harm. Don't think you "need" anything you see? Well, maybe not; from a broader perspective, there are a lot more humans on Earth than the planet really needs, and maybe what you need is to try to push up some daisies that will undoubtedly be more pleasant to look at than you ever were. Try telling yourself the truth, that you're shopping because you enjoy shopping, and all you need to do is encourage people who are not welfare cheats to stay honest and healthy so that you can grow older in a community of decent human beings. Which means, if there's something else you want more than you want what I currently have--which is likely, given that what I have is what I carried in on my shoulders!--you need to put up the money to order it from me. That's what Amazon is for.)

But no one else seemed surprised. Apparently there are several welfare cheats who have nothing to do but hang around trying to sabotage honest enterprises, even in a town as small as this one. Apparently some lazy, greedy, ignorant son-of-a-pup pulls some sort of stunt like this every time somebody tries to offer prices good enough to attract intelligent customers. Apparently they succeed in discouraging a lot of people into either joining the welfare-cheat demographic, or leaving our little town, moving to cities where they are the ones who tell the rest of the world how worthless towns like Gate City are.

There are things you can do about this, local readers. You can start by showing respect for whatever your neighbors do instead of welfare-cheating. Should you stumble across someone offering dealers' prices to any and all customers in a flea market, make sure the whole market hears you proclaiming how WONDERFUL it is to find anyone PUBLIC-SPIRITED enough to offer this kind of SERVICE TO THE WHOLE COMMUNITY--while you peel off not the one-dollar bills, but the twenty-dollar bills, from that wad I see you pull out and count as you approach. Make sure people see that you're taking from that site a little more than you can comfortably carry.

There's probably no real need to identify The Blighter, although it'd be no less than he deserved if I posted his picture, real name, and home address here--which I could do, and might still do. Just make sure he sees and hears a good strong backlash against his little hate campaign. He knows who he is. Encourage me, encourage any other vendors who you may know are working for their living rather than cultivating old injuries as bogus disabilities, and with any luck The Blighter will go home and commit suicide. Maybe he'll even report his emotional distress to some sort of counsellor who might (with God all things are possible) help him develop into a decent human being.

But this is not only a conflict between two individual vendors who've chosen different pricing strategies for their own reasons. That would not be a story worth publishing. This is also a conflict between honest business and welfare-cheating. It involves many other people as well as The Blighter and me, and there are things you can do to help all of those other people, too...to build a healthier community.

One of those things is to demand a pitiless reexamination of the whole monthly pension plan: In order to draw one penny beyond the amount they have personally paid into their own retirement, disability, or unemployment accounts, people need to be genuinely disabled, which means they're not walking around town making nuisances of themselves. Anyone who is able to walk, or steer a wheelchair, and who receives any tax-funded benefits needs to spend the "business hours," 9-5 Monday-Friday, on a designated day labor site holding up a list of the unskilled labor jobs s/he is able to do. Any absence from that "job," except when and as they've been led away from the site by an employer, should mean no benefits for at least one month. There's a reason why the Bible tells us that even widows should not be able to depend on handouts before age 70--which in Bible days meant "before they were totally bedridden": lest

"
 they learn to be idle, cwandering about from house to house; and not only idle, butdtattlers also and ebusybodies, speaking things which they ought not. 
"

The Bible tells us that able-bodied people should be paid for what they do, not according to what they supposedly "need," but because they and their work are worthy:

"
the labourer is worthy of his hire.
"

We all need to stop deluding ourselves that anybody "needs" anything. At best people "need" things in order to stay alive. Well, if all they're doing is sitting around (or sauntering around) going "needy-needy-needy," maybe they really need not to stay alive. Let'em starve, see how they like it! Let's admit that adults in these United States buy things because we want and choose and enjoy them, and public-spirited people enjoy supporting honest, public-spirited people rather than lazy, greedy parasites. Let's start rewarding honest efforts that are worthy of compensation, rather than listening to any blather about "needs."

The Glamorous Life of a Writer

Once again I overheard someone venting envy of me and the allegedly luxurious life of a writer. Hah. That I do enjoy my life, most of the time, is powerful evidence for the benefits of Christian discipline. Many, some say most, professional writers are alcoholics; some commit suicide. Being chronically cheated and underpaid, and despised by people who show no evidence of being as intelligent as any dog you’d be willing to feed, are not exactly sources of pleasure. Maybe some people would like to know how that day actually went. Here's what I wrote, the morning after:

6:15 a.m.: You wake up. The weather couldn’t be more perfect, the prospect of lunch with your Significant Other is delightful, and you never know when somebody out there is actually trying to buy something from your web site. Your business is once again under attack, only the attack is coming from someone who is hated by at least as many people as you are, for reasons far beyond just making people uncomfortable by having less money than they; this person should be even easier to submarine than the rip-off “massage therapists” who unknowingly gave you so many profitable years in the massage business. Light a candle (in the absence of electricity) for morning reading before daylight. Sip a cheap nutrient-free drink (in the absence of solid food). Dry-clean body with alcohol solutions (in the absence of supplies you would need to restore running water). Wear the nicest clean outfit left in the closet in case Significant Other feels fit, after his appointment with a doctor, to meet at the café in town for lunch. Do not, however, invite regrets by breaking out a new pair of shoes, as certain people have started to hint about; in order to avoid wearing out shoes by cleaning them too often, you wear one pair until they wear out from use, and although the current pair has holes in both toes and one heel, it has only one small hole in one sole. You need to walk only six or seven miles. You are happy. You can do without the things you can’t afford until you’re able to afford them again. 

10 a.m.: Give the cats the last bits of kibble in the bag. Leave the bag on the porch for any cats who feel hungry enough to lick out the crumbs. Walk into town.

11 a.m.: Get café’s WiFi password and dig into e-mail while waiting for Significant Other, who’s never been a café person but is enough of a businessman that you know he’ll treat you to as much coffee and snack food as you can be persuaded to carry out, if he feels fit to drive. Nobody is trying to buy anything—from you, or from the café. Someone you would have credited with more intelligence than that is asking you for money. Do not blame Congressman Brat; he was probably out of the office when some half-grown intern saw your e-mail address somewhere and added it to a fundraising list. Give him a snarky but not hostile blog post.

12 a.m.: Call Significant Other. Leave voice mail message. Watch people come in—ten people altogether: one group of two, one group of three, five other singles. None of them is he. Café could seat thirty people; during peak use it seats six. Smell their coffee. It is delicious. Do not buy coffee, because (a) their cheapest, smallest cup costs about three times the amount of money you have, and (b) if you drink coffee 48 hours after your last solid meal, it’s unlikely to stay down. Café does meals, too, if anybody can afford those. Recollect having heard that their meals are excellent. Tell stomach to stop growling.

3:30 p.m.: Overhear café employees muttering about people who “just play on the Internet all day” and don’t even buy coffee. Continue sorting through the petitions you do and don’t sign, the heavy legislative and political content your blog audience expect (none of which is exactly delightful), and the news of a mass murder that at least targeted a place where your relatives in that city wouldn’t have been likely to go. You do not personally know any Cuban homosexuals. On the other hand, after spending a day thinking about murders, rapes, bankrupt U.S. territories and potentially bankrupt U.S. states, by way of relief from the thought that your favorite living person is dying, you have never heard a Cuban homosexual express envy of personas que no tienen más que hacer que divertirse. You are…bemused.

4:10 p.m.: Internet service suddenly fails. You promised your readers the Link Log your e-mail and Twitter streams normally generate. Well, if they miss it perhaps they’ll buy something to fund it, so you can put your own WiFi into your own store.

4:30 p.m.: The other thing you had planned to do in town was to consult your attorney...having no prepaid phone minutes to spare for luxuries like scheduling appointments, go to his office to schedule appointment with his secretary.

5 p.m.: Go to real home of Internet Portal. Call Significant Other again. When phone goes into voice mail mode, decide against adding to his misery with another message, although you’ve wasted a prepaid phone minute anyway. Do not cry. Write a book review.

5:15 p.m.: Bricklayer referred by family construction experts calls to schedule appointment to assess your home’s masonry needs. The time he has available this week happens to be the time scheduled for the attorney. This is just as well, since nobody in your home can afford to pay him to do anything about your masonry needs, anyway, beyond telling you how much money you have to raise. (Do all readers know that my immediate family consists of a sister who can barely afford to feed her children, a sister who’s given up trying to feed her children and sent them to live with their father, and a mother who can’t deal with the fact that she can’t pay for that big house in town that she refuses to give up?) Five phone minutes gone for nothing.

7 p.m.: Cousin Tracy Doe, who does usually pay you for odd jobs even if it’s 60% barters you don’t need right now, has not called you or answered the phone for several weeks. TD is a bit of a “black sheep” in the family due to being divorced. You are a bit of a “black sheep” in the family due to being penniless. This has brought you closer to TD in recent years than you are to hundreds of people who are more closely related, even more congenial. TD works at a place that is only about a mile out of your way, if you take the long way home. Pack up a couple of small, light things to sell in case anyone you meet on the way wants to talk with you. (Never talk about your personal affairs; most people want to talk about their affairs, and what those who want to know about yours most need to know is what you have for sale.) Decide to walk past TD’s workplace.

7:30 p.m.: TD’s car isn’t there. While observing this fact, notice a very young man you don’t recognize who seems to be shouting across the street to you. He is in the passenger seat of a truck. The driver is the one whose services you needed, but could not afford, to inherit from a departed relative. He now works for a young go-getter who is trying to start a cleaning service, and sure enough, go-getter and some other young people dressed like laborers are in the back of the truck. If you were advertising a cleaning service these people would be your enemies. As long as what you advertise is merchandise and a newspaper, it’s probably safe to let them take you home. You would rather do a job, even if there’s not much actual work time and all you’d actually get out of it is a bag of kibble. Decide to walk two more miles and see whether TD is at home.

8 p.m.: See TD’s car parked behind the company’s main office. Send a quick phone message. Decide to walk one more mile, to the nearest supermarket, and see whether they have any usable produce on sale for what you have, which is 98 cents. They don’t, but they do have a sale on Skittles. Buy one small packet of Skittles for quick energy while walking back past the main office. This is the closest you’ve come to a meal this week. Of course, Skittles are basically a mix of corn starch and corn syrup, with artificial fruity flavoring; you’ve avoided corn products for the last two years and don’t know for sure, but there’s still a high probability that these Skittles will make you sick. (They did.)

8:30 p.m.: Main office is closed and dark. TD’s car is still parked there. On closer observation, it looks as if it’s been parked for several days. Of course TD wouldn’t waste phone minutes to notify everybody about a business or vacation trip in a co-worker’s vehicle. Wouldn’t have cell phone service if in hospital, either. Wonder how many of your other relatives would have visited TD, or notified you, if TD were in hospital. Wonder whether you would take the trouble to visit TD, or whether TD would want you to, if TD were in hospital.

9 p.m.: Bloated SUV with Tennessee tags pulls over, narrowing your way. Whip out phone in case driver needs to call for help—or you do; in all my fifty-whatever years it’s been the driver every time, but You Never Know. Driver scuttles around back of SUV to open both doors on right side of vehicle, almost completely blocking your way. Driver is smaller and moves as if “older” than you are, though, so the worst thing likely to happen is that she will waste a lot of phone minutes. As you move into speaking range, driver speaks first, offering you a lift. You have walked about nine miles and have a little over three miles to go. If you accept this lift, the worst thing likely to happen is an unpleasant conversation. It happens. 

9:05 p.m.: Driver might actually be an old school friend, but you prefer not to find out, because driver is determined to talk to you in “Me Human, You Stray Dog” Mode. After ignoring the first vap and using Verbal Self-Defense to evade the second, return driver’s clumsy, obvious vaps with sneakier, guilt-trippier vaps. Know that, although exchanging vaps is not a good way to spend time, it’s a less harmful way than participating in conversation based on the presupposition that you are a stray dog—as Jesus specifically recognized. Remember how, once, long ago, when you had a reasonable income, there used to be people with whom you enjoyed conversation: people who liked and respected you, whom you liked and respected, who talked about events and plans and ideas rather than illness and old age. Remember how many of those people are now dead. Wonder if any of them are still living and, if so, whether they still talk about events, plans, or ideas. Wish driver the kind of night you are about to have.

9:15 p.m.: The way to your home directly approaches a hill where the road forks in four directions: right, left, up, or down. Tell Tennessee driver, twice, that you go down. Watch her try to go up. “Oh, I didn’t even see that road.” Decide to walk the rest of the way, as Tennessee driver obviously suffers from blindness of more than one kind. The cats are outdoors and can hunt, so they won’t actually starve because you don’t have any food to offer them. They will, however, cry at you all night. Somehow, at the end of this long day, the sound of their crying attracts your attention to Significant Other and Cousin Tracy Doe. Cry. Even though tomorrow will be another day, and you will sell something and be able to buy both cat and human food, cry.

Some time between 9:30 and midnight: Who keeps track of time when they’re crying? Do not waste phone battery by checking the time. Blow out candle. Go to sleep. In the morning it’ll be interesting to see just how much damage a good cry has done to your fast-aging eyes.

 “Play” on the Internet, they think? Play? I’d like to see them try it. See how much fun they have. Within a week the people who think that what I’ve been doing, these ten years, has been “playing” would commit suicide, and the world would be a much better place.

I do enjoy my life…most of the time. I’ve chosen to earn a living by doing only things that I believe are morally and ethically good. Doing things you believe to be good is a source of pleasure. I’ve had more than my share of hard times, and I have a few regrets, but I’m not one of the writers who become addicted to various substances that seem to help them suppress feelings of guilt about the things they’ve done for money; in that way I’m better off than many of my colleagues. Do not be deceived. Professional writers are a different breed from the people who sit around envying other people. 

And I'll bet you thought I couldn't think of an Amazon book link to add to this me-me-me post. If so, you were wrong.

HB 1768: Striking (Out) Environmental Courts by Popular Demand

The people for whom this story will be most "educational," in the words of the Tea Partier who sent it in, probably don't read printouts any better than they read web pages. They need help from Creative Tightwads. If anybody out there knows who they are, this web site offers two suggestions from which to choose:

(1) Tell the illegal dumpers that they can get actual money out of old tires, cars, refrigerators, etc., if they haul this junk to the right places and dispose of it legally. If they don't have a way to haul off their junk, help them connect with someone who does.

(2) If you know for sure that they're total jerks, not only illiterate but malicious, like the unspeakable something-or-other of a poacher who has been killing does out of season and killing my possums, wrapping the carcasses in plastic garbage bags, and pitching them into one of those scenic mountain streams from which Gate City and Kingsport get their drinking water, and if you can control your feelings about these alleged people enough not to do anything to them that our contract forbids me to describe here, which I can tell you is not easy...anyway, if they're that kind of neighbors, why help them make a dime? Raid their dumps and keep all the money. Even money probably prefers to be in your pockets rather than theirs.


Anyway, Virginia House Bill 1768 would, if enacted, have set up "environmental courts," an old Agenda 21 phrase, repugnant to many people in Delegate O'Quinn's district:
http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+HB1768

The bill was written to set up a procedure for addressing some specific illegal dumping issues. However, in Washington County, county supervisor Bill Gibson smelled a rat. His e-mail to Delegates O'Quinn and Kilgore is now circulating around Tea Party mailing lists. In Bill Gibson's words, "I know you both must be against Agenda 21 as the national and state party have in their platforms and this bill only helps it get a foothold in local govt. "How do you eat a elephant? one bite at a time"....this is how Agenda 21 is being implemented in swva."

Delegate O'Quinn's response is worth sharing:

"I can assure you that we did not receive the bill from any elitist environmentalists. It came from the Wise County Sheriff's office to address several illegal dump sites across their county which contain items such as tires, couches, cars, refrigerators, etcetera and those who continue to add to the ever present problem...That being said, we certainly are not trying to create some completely new courts system and we don't want to overburden the court system or cause them undue financial burden. Thus, we are going to strike the bill.

www.israeloquinn.com

www.facebook.com/israeloquinn "

Would any Facebook users care to "like" this Delegate?

Book Announcement: Poorcraft

At Making Light, Avram Grumer discusses good recent cartoon books..."graphic books," not reprints of newspaper comic strips. The one I want to read is Poorcraft.

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0979408059

If you click on the Kyle Baker links, you can watch animated versions of this author/cartoonist's books...on the weekend?

http://www.qualityjollity.com/Why_I_Hate_Saturn.html

How to Shop at Thrift Stores

Far back in my e-mail archives, there are copies of paid articles I wrote, years ago, about the pleasures and rewards of shopping at thrift stores. Do you have to wait until I find the online time to dig back through them, check all the facts, and update those articles? Of course not! Mmarquit shares ten (generic, not neighborhood- or charity-specific) tips:

http://couponshoebox.com/tips/10-tips-for-shopping-at-a-thrift-store/

I'd underline and highlight item #4: "Return until you find what you want." Thrift stores don't buy what you ask for; they sell what's donated to them. If you saw something in the latest L.L. Bean catalogue that made you think "I wish I could buy that for $1.98 off a shelf in a store near home," and you frequent the thrift stores in an upscale urban neighborhood, you very likely can try it on, buy it for $1.98, and take it home on the bus. When L.L. Bean used to offer one dress as a sort of token recognition that women shoppers might want something to wear in town, I'd be walking around Washington in that dress...for $1.98 plus a bus trip to Bethesda or Hyattsville. But you won't usually find the item the first time you walk into a thrift store. You may find all kinds of other wonderful bargains in the same category during the weeks, months, or years before you find the dress, or the hand-powered lawn mower, or the coffee table you originally had in mind. You have to decide whether you'll settle for anything in the right category, for $1.98, until you find the item, or whether you'll hold out for the item.

If the store gives its profits to a cause you respect, I recommend buying anything for which you can find a use, to support the cause. If they give 3% of the profits, or don't have a particular cause--it's just Dumpster Diver Dan's Discount Den--I'd hold out. Then again, if it keeps Dumpster Diver Dan off welfare, that is a respectable cause.