Day 59

Let’s be hon­est here. I don’t know about you but I can go only so long being fru­gal and keep­ing to bare-bones pur­chases. But even­tu­ally, the dam breaks and I finally break down and make pur­chases that I’ve been pon­der­ing or putting off as non-essential. And when the dam breaks, it’s usu­ally not a sin­gle, sim­ple non-essential pur­chase. No, it’s usu­ally a string of non-essential pur­chases. Well, today was the day my dam broke Let’s hope I got that out of my sys­tem for a while and I can go back to a few weeks of reg­u­larly sched­uled fru­gal living.

Costco — $38.66
The Tank’s tank was again just below the half-way mark but since I was going right by there this morn­ing I thought it would be a good time to fill up. I noticed that the price of gas is creep­ing up; it is going up everywhere?

I pumped 14.270 gal­lons at $2.709/gallon. The odome­ter reads 115,829.

T.J. Maxx — $22.61
Here’s where I went “nuts.” I really need to stay out of T.J. Maxx and Mar­shalls. Any­way, I went in look­ing for pic­ture frames and ended up find­ing an arm­band for my iPod Nano and this really cool pair of Merkury Dock­ing head­phones that you plug your Nano into.

I stood there for­ever try­ing to decide whether or not to get the head­phones. I sim­ply can­not use the Nor­dic­Track with­out music — my ADD-tortured brain goes absolutely nuts about 5 min­utes into exer­cis­ing if I don’t have music to lis­ten to and even then some­times I just can­not do it. I wanted the arm­band because I often don’t have a place to put my Nano when I’m exer­cis­ing so I was thrilled to find one for $5.99.

But then I saw the head­phones and sud­denly life was com­pli­cated. I’d found the arm­band I wanted but the head­phones looked really cool. And poten­tially very prac­ti­cal. See, we only have two pair of ear­buds between The Son, The Daugh­ter, and I and no one likes to share with The Son because, well, ear wax issues. Yuck. Plus a few weeks ago The Daugh­ter shared the fact that ear­buds increase ear bac­te­ria by some phe­nom­e­nal amount and I haven’t felt the same about using my Nano while I exer­cise since then. The ear­phones would avoid the whole ear­buds dilemma.

I finally decided to buy them. They were on sale for $15.00 and I con­firmed with the store man­ager that they could returned within 30 days even if the pack­age were opened. Nor­mally my gear-head self would be thrilled with the pur­chase. But my newly redis­cov­ered finan­cial con­ser­vatism is just not let­ting me feel good about the pur­chase. I’ll prob­a­bly get over it

Oh, and I dis­cov­ered I’d paid a Stu­pid Tax. I’m a reg­u­lar at T.J. Maxx but not in the men’s depart­ment. I dis­cov­ered today that I could have saved myself a lot of money if I’d gone here instead of Sports Author­ity when shop­ping for basketball-related cloth­ing last week. C’est la vie.

REI — $36.73
This was my orig­i­nal errand this morn­ing and was my sec­ond unbri­dled, the-dam-has-broken-and-money’s-spilling-out-everywhere pur­chase of the day. And it wasn’t even noon yet! I bought four 32-oz Nal­gene water bot­tles. Two pink ones for The Daugh­ter and two green ones for The Son. I don’t feel bad about pay­ing $8.50 per bot­tle (I couldn’t find a bet­ter price after fac­tor­ing in ship­ping any­where on-line) for Nal­gene because 1) I have very strong opin­ions about the kids drink­ing enough water when they exer­cise or par­tic­i­pate in sports and 2) the non-leeching qual­i­ties of the nal­gene plastic.

The big issue I faced was hav­ing to buy four bot­tles all at once. We used to have one 32-oz nal­gene but it has dis­ap­peared as things will when you have kids — of course, they’d say that I lose things too but don’t lis­ten to them, they don’t know what they’re talk­ing about. We have smaller nal­gene bot­tles that are great for school because they fit into the lit­tle mesh pock­ets on the sides of the backpacks/messenger bags but the 32-oz size is ideal for sports activ­i­ties. I’m not sure about The Daugh­ter but I know The Son needs two bot­tles for each prac­tice. So I bought two each and made it clear that The Daugh­ter will never, under any cir­cum­stances, even with the per­mis­sion of her brother, use the green bot­tles. And, like­wise, The Son, will not, under penalty of major mommy wrath, use his sister’s pink bottles.

Tar­get — $49.00
Not only was this trip made on a frugal-dam-breakdown day, but it was also taken late in the evening with The Daugh­ter. I was hun­gry, tired, in pain, and just a wee bit grumpy. It could have been a SWI dis­as­ter. It actu­ally wasn’t too bad though.

My one com­pletely un-frugal pur­chase was a pic­ture frame that, as it turns out, will have to be returned. I’ve really been itch­ing to buy some frames so I can hang some of the ter­rific pho­tos from the kids’ recent stu­dio photo shoot and have done some com­par­i­son shop­ping at Costco, T.J. Maxx, Hobby Lobby, and Tar­get. I like Target’s selec­tion best and I’m try­ing to wait for a sale but I don’t know that I can hold off com­pletely until then. I’ve been think­ing maybe I’d frame just one or two pho­tos now and a few more if and when I find some frames on sale. So I found one tonight that will hold two 5x7’s and was excited to get it home and put it to use. But it turns out that I don’t have any two shots that will work together in the same frame. The photo of The Son is against a black back­ground but it’s on a land­scape ori­en­ta­tion whereas The Daughter’s solo shot, also on a black back­ground, is on a por­trait ori­en­ta­tion. Also, some pho­tos are on a white back­ground which wouldn’t look good against the frame’s off-white mat­ting. Oh well, I’ll return the frame and pick up one for a sin­gle 8x10 photo and get the cutest photo up on a wall. Then I’ll patiently wait for a sale — or not.

• pic­ture frame — $19.99
• Tide — $12.89
• Glad wrap — $2.99
• Sun­silk sham­poo (for The Daugh­ter) — $2.99
• box of safety pins (also for the Daugh­ter) — $1.49
• pair of Hallowe’en socks (yes, for The Daugh­ter) — $4.99

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