Mysteries of Frugality

Living frugally sometimes means fixing things you've found. Often it means you just keep plugging along, eating up pantry or freezer food, wearing what you've scrounged or altered or been given, driving the car you locked into several years ago. Sometimes it means you reach into the stash of pinecones and fake acorns you bought at the dollar store eight years ago, and add them to the fake leaves someone gave you a long time before that, to make a fall arrangement in a thrifted basket. (Why don't we just go out and find free, real pinecones, acorns, and leaves? Because of allergies and teeny little bugs. Besides, I already have these, so they don't cost me anything. If you love picking up real maple leaves, go for it.)

Today I have a shoe story with a mystery attached to it. Recently I found a nice pair of  leather pumps at a thrift store.

What I didn't notice until I got them home was that the soles were separating from the uppers. See the space by my thumb? So, the first mystery to me is why a pair of shoes, from a good brand, that didn't appear to be otherwise heavily worn, would have that problem. And not just one shoe, but both of them.

But the other mystery, to my frugal mind, was why the original owner didn't either take them to a shoe repair shop (if they were in the habit of buying better-brand leather shoes anyway), or buy a tube of Shoe Goo (if they were tightwads). Which is what we did, when we happened to be in a store today that sold shoe sprays and polishes and things like that. And...they were having a new-location opening sale on just about everything, so we got a discount on the Goo.

Sometimes you have to change your frugal habits because the price of something goes up, or your family size changes, or you move to an area where the expensive thing costs less, or vice versa. When we had more people eating dinner at our house, I almost always had fresh onions, garlic cloves, and a bunch of celery in the fridge, and we used them before they had a chance to go bad. As empty nesters with (often) less ambition to chop things, we've switched over to a frozen vegetable combination that, until recently, was called Spaghetti Mix, but has now been relabelled as Frozen Diced Vegetables. I guess somebody figured out that you can use diced onion-celery-peppers-and-sometimes-carrots for a lot of other things besides spaghetti sauce, though it is good for that too. A package lasts us quite awhile, and we don't have to worry about fresh onions sprouting or celery going limp. As for garlic, we've been using the jarred minced stuff for quite awhile now, for the same reasons. And garlic powder for homemade seasoning mixes.

Sometimes, even if you're frugal, you have to know when it's the right time to spend money (though hopefully not too much).Fixing broken things in your house or on your car falls into this category, and so does medical care. But there are less vital things that come up too. Recently I did a whole blog post about fitting travel gear into a well-used freebie shoulder bag. Although I am not actually a rabbit going to a conference, the packing plan is a real one. After I posted the story, my husband wanted to use the bag himself, and when he was packing it, the zipper pull came right off. Knowing that I planned to use it for that one final trip (because it fits the extremely small size limits of our own Bunny Airways), he offered to try to replace the zipper pull with one scavenged from something else. Being Mr. Fixit, I was pretty sure that if anybody could manage to get one last hoo-rah out of that bag, it would be him.

But no, it was not to be, and we said our final goodbyes to the shoulder bag. I searched around online, but couldn't find anything that wasn't too big or too small. My husband's search was more successful--he found a reasonably-priced messenger bag that fit the size requirements, and that he actually likes as well (it's labelled as a men's item, which to me is like calling diced vegetables spaghetti mix, a bit limiting). The bag arrived very quickly (the wonders of this time we're living in), and I did a trial pack-it-up with about the same amount of stuff I used in the blog story. The doll will not be travelling, she's just demonstrating the size of things.

So, we fix things, or sometimes we don't. We keep and re-use things, or sometimes we don't. We buy fresh things, or sometimes we don't. Call it a mystery, but it works.