About cars

Crunchy Chicken posted today about whether higher gas prices are a good or bad thing.

This is a tough one for us. Our "family car" is a 94 Chevy Astro van that we bought used 10 years ago. It gets about 20 mpg in the summer. At that time we planned on having a big family and would be needing the room. That indeed happened. We have 5 kids, so the 8 seats in the van definitely get utilized. At one point, we had 3 kids in car seats, though we are down to 2 now. We also have a 180-mile round trip every other week for visitations with my oldest daughter who lives with her father. This was murder on the pocketbook.

Last year we used our tax refund to pay cash for a used 99 Mazda Protegé. The gas mileage (when it is only being used for the trip to get my daughter) is around 35 mpg in the summer. Winter is harder on the gas mileage since we have to leave vehicles to warm up (especially the van) before we go anywhere or else the cars complain.

The Mazda only has 5 seats. It won't fit our whole family, so if we go anywhere as a family, we have to take the van. The van is going through some trials right now (over 200k miles on it), and we are trying to decide if we should keep putting money into it and hope it lasts as long as we can afford gas, or if we should replace it. But with what shall we replace it? Financing a $20k hybrid car is completely out of the realm of the most remote possibility. I suggested an old station wagon, the kind that has the extra back seat that flips up and faces backwards, but I haven't seen one of those in, well, probably decades. My husband suggested a small pickup truck. Yes, it would mean we have to take both vehicles to go somewhere as a family, but really, we don't make long distance trips as a family very often. He also said that when gasoline is prohibitively high, we can pull the engine out and convert it into a horse- or ox-drawn cart. I don't know how plausible that is, but it is intriguing. We shall await the prognosis on the van right now.

Christmas at our house

We had a lovely Christmas this year. Our apartment is so small that we don't have room for a Christmas tree this year, so we got some poster board and I outlined a tree, then the kids colored it in. We hung it on the wall and taped some ornaments to it and it is lovely. It comes down today and will be put away in case we need it another year. We hung ornaments from the ceiling and strung lights around the walls at the ceiling, so our living room looked quite festive. Cait is spending Christmas vacation with us this year, part of a new agreement that now eliminates our being on the road on Christmas Day every year for the 4-hour round trip between houses. This is the first time since Terry started working this job that I have had both my husband and my daughter home on Christmas morning. He works on Christmas on odd-numbered years and doesn't get home until after 2, and on those years Cait would spend Christmas morning with us, but go back to her dad's at noon. So this was an exciting year for me.

We even invited my mother over to spend the night Christmas Eve so she could be there first thing in the morning when the kids wanted to open their presents. By the time dinner at 2 rolled around, though, I think we all had had enough of each other. She left shortly after dinner to go visit my brother in Concord, and Terry and I heaved a sigh of relief. But the kids enjoyed her being there the whole time.

We tried to keep Christmas simpler this year. I hand knit something for everyone, and we got them socks and underwear (which they desperately needed), Terry got them each a DVD, and in their stockings were a couple of candy canes, a new cocoa mug with some cocoa mix and a few hair ties. We also got each child one specific present: Cait got needle nose pliers for making jewelry, Moira got a sketchbook that she has been asking for for weeks, Lauren got a stuffed animal since we accidentally culled too many of their dolls, Rowan got a Magna-Doodle since she is always drawing and uses far more paper than I am comfortable with, and Eirik got a rocking horse. My mom gave them each an article of clothing and a book or two. Cait also made presents for everyone, too. Overall, they got what they needed and something they wanted. Next year, though, I want to spread the purchase of such items out over a longer period of time. Did you know that socks and underwear for 5 kids costs $72! One package of each for each one. Egads!

We didn't overdo on confections, primarily due to our new diet, but I am making some decadent chocolate and coconut bars for tonight as New Year's Eve. We also get to get some of our baking fix by hosting our church's coffee hour this Sunday. Overall, it was a good holiday.

Toilet Paper on the Clothesline

This past winter, we decided to finally get rid of the toilet paper. My husband has, over time, brought home over 100 washcloths from work where he uses them to mop his brow. At one point I counted nearly 200, some of which I promptly gave away. So now I put a small stack of washcloths on the toilet tank behind the seat and we use those as our TP. I keep a bucket in the downstairs bathroom, and the washing machine is immediately outside the door to the upstairs bathroom. I can't put more than a few in each bathroom at a time or else the boy will take the whole stack and dip it in the toilet, which gets flushed every two or three uses.

So the other day I was hanging the laundry out to dry and realized that up to 1/4 of my clothesline space was used for drying toilet paper. How many other folks hang up their toilet paper to dry? Not many. I did notice that more of my neighbors are starting to use their clotheslines, though. Every apartment here has three lines run from the house across the patio, to the fence on the far side. They weren't ideally placed however, and the lines for my building are on the south side of the patio, right up against the fence. This means very little sun. On dry days at this time of year, though, I can still hang two sets of clothes, sometimes even three. I can fit anywhere from half a washerload to a full washerload at a time if I push things close together. If it is just adult clothes and/or towels, I can fit the whole load. If it is mostly kids clothes and/or washcloths, I can only fit half the load.

It is nice to know that we use almost no paper products now except paper to write on. We have an abundance of towels and washcloths that get used for everything that most people use paper for. I made up some nice muslin napkins for the table, and I haven't had a roll of paper towels in the house for over a year. Now to get rid of the last of the plastic. I still use ziplock bags for dividing up larger purchases into more manageable sizes, and gladware for leftovers.

Buy Nothing Month sins

I thought that the Buy Nothing Month Challenge from Crunchy Chicken would be a breeze. I don't usually feel a "need" to have something. It's funny how much you suddenly "need" as soon as you swear it all off. I have gone to Sunday confessional twice at Crunchy's blog. I thought I would update you as to how I am doing on here as well.

Two days into the challenge, I got a call form the local kitchen store that the pot I have been waiting forever for finally came in. It was a 2-qt stainless steel saucepan. I had a 1-qt and a 3-qt cast iron saucepans, and an 8-qt stainless steel stockpot, but I needed something I could heat tomato sauce in without wasting the energy needed to do it in such a huge pot.

It is also very hard to do this challenge in a month when I have two children's birthdays. When we got them each their own bed, we discovered we owned 3 sets of twin size sheets and had 4 beds. So I took Rowan out for her birthday and got her a set of sheets so each bed could be used. The rest of the sheets are about 10 years old and getting pretty threadbare and elastic-worn. I promised the other kids they could each pick out new sheets for their birthdays, too. We go out today to get Lauren's.

All the rest of my sinful indulgences have been edibles. Ice cream, chocolate, etc. I think I have bought junk food 5 or 6 times this month.

Buy Nothing Month

I have entered Crunchy Chicken's Buy Nothing Challenge for this month. You can read the rules at the link above this post. I confess that I bought a WoW game card yesterday since I was planning on buying one in a week or two. Don't grief me about WoW. It helps me keep my sanity. As the world goes to hell in a handbasket around me, I can pretend to some sort of normalcy when I play. It is my drug of choice right now. When the grid crashes I will have to find a new drug, I know. And I know that the environmental impact of playing WoW is not small, but that and driving 90 miles each direction for my daughter on the weekends are my hugest impacts by far. So check out the challenge and join us.