Money and Eating Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Reading my blog, people might get the impression that I’ve never had to worry much about paying my bills. With the exception of a few months in my early thirties when I was on crutches and couldn’t work and a few months after my husband's stroke when we had major cash flow issues, that’s essentially true. But both my husband and I worked a lot---had two or three jobs/careers/businesses each most of our adult lives. He was raised on a farm with parents who went though hard times and learned early on never to turn down work if you knew how to do it and he could do a lot of things. He was a tool and die maker by trade, but in the Army Reserves he learned how to drive and maintain heavy equipment which he loved doing, thus he came to own a parking lot maintenance company on the side, making more money with that than he did with his GM job of 35 years. And while I never made much money by comparison I never had expensive tastes or spent above what was coming in.

Following Don’s street sweeper, frontend loaders and snowplows around town with my yellow flasher going was part of my life for decades, and so was helping to fill pot holes and lay down yellow lines and---the biggie---I plowed snow for 17 years. Thankfully, after three years of asphalt patching he dropped that aspect of the business. That’s an awful job, so when you see a crew out working in the streets have pity on them. The heat coming off that asphalt makes you punchy, not to mention it sticks like snot on everything you’re wearing and you have to throw out clothes faster than you can buy them at Goodwill. 

Don tried to get me to learn how to run a frontend loader but I put my foot down and refused to do it, but another woman on our crew was more than willing to learn. It was a match made in bragging rights heaven. She was the first woman in town to do that kind of work and she needed the self-confidence it gave her. He loved shocking all the guys he came in contact with the fact that half his snowplow crew were women. Back in the ‘80s that was a big deal in a male dominated field. Don claimed women were better because we followed instructions and the guys he hired wanted to do things their own way. And, Ohmygod, it was true! The stories I could tell about pissing contests....

Anyway, because I’ve never really had to worry about paying my bills and still having money left over to eat and play, I’ve become obsessed with making as much as I can during my downsizing because I’m worried once I move and my expenses increase---that continuum care place I’m moving to is not cheap---I’ll end up eating peanut butter sandwiches the last week in every month. I’ll need to be on a budget for the first time ever. I take solace in the fact that many of my frugal living blogger friends seem to find budgets and bargain shopping to be a fun challenge rather than a blood sport. And I'm wrapping my head around the fact that there's a difference between being fugal and being cheap. I don’t want to become a person who steals sugar packets from restaurants and toilet paper from gas stations. I dated a guy who did those things before Don came along and I couldn’t stand his cheapness. He was living frugal but on other people’s money. Waitresses for example never got tipped no matter how good the service. Most of us work hard to get ahead and it isn’t right to justify stealing goods or services like he did. That’s not to say I’ve never stolen anything; when I was 12-13 years old I stole a small, ten cents cross from a dime store and I still have it. It’s made out of a clam shell and it stares up at me from my jewelry box, reminding me that a little humility is not a bad thing. We are all imperfect human beings. 

Back to making money as I downsize. Sometimes time is more valuable than money. I had a lot of stock left over from when we had booths in antique malls and were vendors at gas & oil memorabilia collector’s swap meets and shows. Gas stations, during their heydays of trying to market their way to the top of the heap put out a lot of freebies like mirrors, combs, match books, note pads, car window hooks, coin and toothpick holders, poker chips, charms, key chains, ink pens, tokens, games, calendars, thermometers, sewing and first aid kits, maps, etc. etc. We’re talking the ‘30s through the ‘50s, before the drinking glasses most of us remember from our childhoods came along. That’s the kinds of things I’m currently e-Baying. If I had all the time in the world, I could e-Bay my heart out but I can actually see the end of my old gas & old stock and the end is looking good to me. So I’ve started selling stuff in groups of 20 to 50 and I'm giving the swap meet vendors some fun bidding wars. I picked out the stuff that goes for over $50 a whack to sell individually, but stuff under that are going in what is known as junk drawer lots. The most I’ve gotten for a junk drawer lot is $148 but that translates into eating less peanut butter sandwiches at the end of the month. Hey, wait a minute! Sometimes I actually like having peanut butter for dinner, especially when I fry the sandwich and it includes banana slices and bacon. ©

Recyling and Junk Yards Now and Then

What do you do on an afternoon in September when the clouds in the sky are whiny and can’t make up their minds if they want to move on by to dump their sorrow elsewhere? You hop on a bus down at the senior hall and head to a recycling center that covers 65 acres where we got to watch a machine shred cars. This place isn’t your standard recycling center where the neighborhood moms and dads conjugate on Saturdays to drop off their newspapers, tin cans, glass bottles and plastic trash. This place is like a modernized junk yard of olden days that, when you think about it, have been recycling long before it became cool. 

I’ve got a long history of going to junk yards. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was to go with my dad when he’d take a load of stuff to the junk yard. Back in those days they let you pick through what other people left behind until they got smart and had one of their workers set aside any useable goods and they started selling them out of a building they put up on the property. That place is still there. In its current form it’s a popular place for people restoring old homes to find architectural savage.

Then along came my husband and his three front-end loaders and street sweeper and I was introduced to specialized heavy equipment recycling centers---bone yards. If a part broke on one of those secondhand ‘beasts’ off we went to spend an afternoon out of town at one of the three bone yards in the state where similar equipment could be found. The rule, back in those days, was customers had to disassemble whatever needed to come apart to get at the part they wanted to buy. Unless an extra set of hands was needed, I’d usually be in our pickup truck near-by with the dog, reading a book. People who own places like that were always down to earth and pretty interesting when you got to know them. One guy in particular stands out in my memory. He once charged my husband $60 for a part, then handed one of the twenties to me and said, “Have this guy take you out to dinner tonight. No reason why you should have to cook after keeping him company all afternoon.” You should have seen the look on Don’s face. “Hey, that’s my twenty!” he said. “Not anymore,” the bone yard owner said. “It’s hers now.” He was a sweet guy with a beach front “cottage” in Hawaii. When he died he had a large, marble bulldozer on his grave and, of course, Don and I had to go see it. 

And then there was the junk yard for cars out by Lake Michigan that we always had to stop at on our way to the Big Lake. Not that we needed to buy anything there, but my husband had met the owner at a gas & oil memorabilia swap meet and he had a private museum that you couldn’t get into without an invitation. Don, being a likeable storyteller, finally got the invitation. Come to find out the guy had a one piece glass gas globe that was highly sought after and that knowledge started “the dance.” It took two years but eventually Don talked the guy into to selling him the globe for $6,500. Let me tell, I about had a cow at that price and for something so fragile, having been responsible already for breaking a lesser quality globe. But that hand-painted gas globe was his pride and joy for several decades and when I sold it after he died, I got three times what Don paid for it. The man who bought it, just died and his gas globe collection is up in the air because the out-of-state daughter in charge of the estate is an idiot. I passed along the contact information for the leading appraiser in the field but she'll probably have a junk dealer haul it all away---all 300 globes.

Back on topic: The recycling place we toured today has a set of scales that all the trucks coming into the place have to drive over and it can weigh up to 200,000 pounds per vehicle and trucks never stopped coming and going the whole 2 ½ hours we were there. The place employs over 650 people and 75% of their business is shredding cars. They had mountains of mixed metal including vehicles and every conceivable thing you can name waiting to go through their giant shredder. All that stuff comes out the other side sorted and melted and ready to be sold to industries that use the aluminum, copper, brass, bronze and steel to build new stuff. We got to walk up the 75 steps to the glass tower where a person controlling the shredder works. He monitors 5-6 screens and a computer keyboard making sure everything is working as it should be. While we watched the machine in action we got to see a couple air bags go off as cars got crushed, sending up a cloud white gas. Once in a rare while, he said, if they haven’t gotten all the liquids drained out of a car properly, a fire will start but the machine puts it out quickly. “It’s pretty cool to watch,” he said. “I’m surrounded by flames.” The tour cost a whole six bucks for our transportation. Quite a bargain, don’t you think and the tour also brought back some priceless junk yard memories. ©

NOTE: The photo at the top is what the junk looks like before going through the shredder and next two photos is what the sorted and smelted metal looks like when it comes out the other side of the shredder. And the third photo shows a pile of wiring that somehow in the process of shredding mixed junk gets separated out from rest. Oh, and this place has other areas where they process paper, plastic and electronic equipment into a form that can be used in manufacturing more stuff. This place is where all the community recycling centers and pickup services bring their stuff after they've sorted and bundled it on their sites.

photos off their website

Downsizing in Widowhood City

Since I started my downsizing project a few of weeks ago I’ve cleaned seven drawers, filled a large trash bag full of shredded papers and listed ten things on e-Bay. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it feels like it was. The sentimental things I brought out to my nieces last week came from three of those drawers and two of the drawers was full of records of e-Bay and antique mall sales---representing so much more than just sales. I couldn’t help getting lost in reading those records here and there and remembering where Don and I was when we found a certain ‘treasure’ we couldn’t pass up. It was Don’s passion. And mine before we met. He got a thrill out of the hunt and every chance we got we were combing estate sales, flea markets, garage sales and antique malls. 

I was the person in charge of cleaning and pricing the collectibles we bought, entering them into our inventory software, keeping our antique booths stocked and tracking sales. Don was the ‘purchasing agent’ and research guy…I’m talking in the days before his stroke. He especially loved traveling across the country to go to 3-4 summer conventions and swap meets each year. And why not. I did all the packing and unpacking for those shows and he was the sales guy who stood in our vendor space swapping stories and selling gas station collectibles---our market niche--to other hardcore gas and oil guys. If you’re wondering if there’s a little resentment in that last sentence, don’t. There’s just no other way to describe the division of labor. Don was a workaholic most of the time and he deserved these unwind and have-fun weekends. He loved it all---the auctions, dinners and show-and-tell events that took place in the evenings after the swap meets closed down for the day. They were high energy where millionaires, museum curators and flea-marketers alike gathered to share a love for the early days when gas stations first spread across America. 

My current e-Bay strategy is simple: list the hardest to pack and ship things first in case I run out of steam before I’m finished. After Don died I spent two years in e-Bay Hell selling off Don’s private collection to the tune of forty thousand dollars, enough to pay off the mortgage. The 3^rdyear I opened another antique booth and hauled lesser stuff to a local auction house. I don’t have much left but I don’t have much energy left either. I literally spent a full morning constructing a box and packing something that is one of only twenty ever made. A royal pain in the butt, but I did it. You can’t donate something like that to Goodwill. Well, you could but how dumb would that be? (I knew a widow who threw out her husband’s entire collection---junk to her---while complaining about not having enough money to live on.) I have, however decided to donate Don’s language disorders machine. I should have done it soon after he died. It was a pricey piece of equipment and it was worth selling back then when the technology was brand new. Now, not so much. Now it represents a problem because I need to take Don’s personal information off the software and so much time has passed since he died that I’ll have to relearn the program to do it. I’m saving that project until winter. Downsizing in Widowhood City is like living your life is in reverse. It’s depressing at times and at other times it’s fun to walk down Memory Lane. 

All of us want to believe we are or was a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s too late for my husband to be Teddy Roosevelt but Don would have loved to be an outdoor adventurer like Teddy was in his ‘spare time’ and he studied the man’s life like it was a map to the Holy Grail. We had that in common…the love of learning. Don’s passion for gas and oil collecting, for example, led us to learning about the era of wildcat drilling for crude in Texas and Pennsylvania, the lives of the big oil tycoons, the era when gas pumps first populated in front of hardware stores across the nation and the heydays of Route 66. By studying the industry’s history he was able to find a few items that ended up in museums and that’s about as close to being part of something bigger than himself as he ever got. But his love for what he loved was palatable to all who knew him and hopefully that’s the big take-away he passed on to family and friends---that to fully appreciate the present we pay homage to the history makers of bygone eras, and by telling their stories we become the flame tenders on the continuum of time. ©

NOTE: The photo above is a colorized photo of a black and white image taken by Dorothea Lang, a woman who photo-documented the Dust Bowl during the Depression. It was taken in Gordonton, North Carolina in 1939. When we went down to Texas in 1990 we experienced a couple of places like that…where several black men came off a porch to pump gas, check our oil and clean our windows and when it was time to pay, the white guy came down to take our money. We came back from that trip believing that affirmative action laws were still needed in this country.