Poverty, drawer pulls and you

I recently ran across this article on living cheap and looking (but more importantly, feeling) rich. It's not an amazing article but I especially liked its point 5: purge the existing poverty from your life. Poverty does sneak in... it's the unrepaired cabinet, the way you don't have the right kind of spatula to flip eggs with and little things like that, things that result from inattention and not taking care of oneself. I find it fascinating that with this definition there can be plenty of poverty even in a high-cost lifestyle. The article points out quite rightly that if the real goal is to "live in comfort, ease and beauty" the monetary cost might not be large at all. Especially if one has mostly been paying attention all along.

Today's frugal living tip from me is to buy new pulls for the drawers/doors of an old piece of furniture to give it a facelift. HLM and I spent a surprising amount of time today looking at drawer/cabinet pulls for our new kitchen stuff, and long after we got home from the hardware store I realized that I could get new knobs for my old stuff too. I went back, got a pair of funky pewter ones for $15, and voila, my unfinished pine wardrobe suddenly has a touch of style. What a fun little splurge.

Kind of a packed weekend

This weekend I saw a lot of my engaged friends B and D. First, on Friday night I went over to their place and watched Saved, which B pretty much knew I would like (she and I were both raised in fundamentalist Christian households). After a long week it was so humanizing just to sit and watch a movie with friends. And yes, I did like the movie quite a lot... If there's one thing I know about it's turning away from the Christian faith in senior year of high school, even if I wasn't so dramatic about it. ( Spoiler and childfree thoughts )

The rest of the weekend was mostly spent working on the kitchen. Our new cabinets arrived on Friday, and the next day B and D came over to help us install them. I didn't help much with the real work because D and HLM are both so good... I mostly spent the time talking with B while cutting up all the boxes and bundling them into little bundles for recycling, and going out on snack-buying duty. HLM and I were going to buy them dinner to thank them but ended up saying we'd help them move at the end of July instead--something I find very satisfying, by the way. Friendships have a good base when they're built on really helping the other person do things, and I like it that B and I have both helped each other move and get through weddings and such. It's easier to feel close to a person like that than a person I've just gone out to dinner with a bunch of times, you know? Even if she and I do sometimes ignore each other for a few months. And there's nothing wrong with dinners :)

Anyway, I love the new cabinetry. It looks great, and having the new wall cabinets enabled us to take down the old ones that were always right in my face when I was at the sink. Suddenly that whole side of the room is so much more open! Both HLM and I are thinking that if we get the same cabinets for the other side and for the pantry, we might never feel compelled to do a full kitchen remodel at all... and that's very good financial news. So we are happy. There's still some work left to do: we need pulls, and one of the older cabinets still needs to be cut down to a smaller size to fit next to the dishwasher, and I'm doing to do some sanding/spackling and paint a deep blue accent wall across from the new countertop. But functionally and spatially, you can really see things coming together now.

I'm continuing to find SuperFoods Rx very interesting. This is definitely the book for people tired of thinking about carbs, protein, fat, and all that yadda yadda... it's aimed much more at eating the foods that will get you to old age without cancer, retinal degeneration, wrinkly skin and heart disease (and bluechromis, you'll be glad to know that all but two are vegetarian, though one of the remaining 12 is soy). I found it so weird when it called out green beans as part of the legume family though! I know, I know, they're green beans, so obviously they're beans, I just don't think of them as beans. A little glitch in my personal ontology.

Permanent account sale

Hmmm... permanent account sale. Expensive, but it'd pay for itself over the next 6 years, it's true.

I don't actually think I'm that tempted.