Lessons for Living

Parents, Save a Buck

Or two. Or more. (Or none?)

Trent over at The Simple Dollar offers up Eight Tips From An Ultra-Frugal Parent

Get old towels at yard sales and cut them up.

Make simple meals with as basic ingredients as you can, then spice from there.

Focus on open-ended, imagination-based toys.

Buy end-rolls of newspaper and be creative.

Cut their hair at home.

Involve the children in every possible activity that you do.

Find activities that free up one parent.

Find another couple with children and swap babysitting.

What would you add to that?


Cheap Talk with the Frugal Friends: Over 600 Tips, Tricks, and Creative Ideas for Saving Money       Educational Travel on a Shoestring: Frugal Family Fun and Learning Away from Home

Measure 49: A Lesson

A few weeks ago I started seeing signs like these:

Yes on 49

The more I saw, the more it seemed the best thing was to approve 49.

Especially since I didn’t see any anti-49 signs.

Finally I noticed one in town.

Then a few started popping up in the country:

No on 49

So despite my early misimpressions, the issue does have two sides. (No real shock there, of course.)

Monday morning, as I drove by some of the aforementioned signs, I suddenly thought of two Bible verses.

I see now they’re both from Proverbs 18:

“He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him” (verse 17).

“He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (verse 13).

So there you are — an important life lesson that far exceeds the importance of Oregon’s Measure 49.

Every story has two sides, so wait to express judgment till you know both sides!

(And even then, be careful.)

Rattler Warning

I’ve never heard of this before:

Turns out, even beheaded rattlesnakes can be dangerous.

That’s what 53-year-old Danny Anderson learned as he was feeding his horses this week when a 5-foot rattler slithered onto his central Washington property, about 50 miles southeast of Yakima.

Anderson and his 27-year-old son, Benjamin, pinned the snake with an irrigation pipe and cut off its head with a shovel. A few more strikes to the head left it sitting under a pickup truck.

“When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger,” Anderson said. “I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose.”

Book Review: Plain Secrets

A unique story of culture crossing in rural America explores the role of religion in modern society by looking closely at the life of the Swartzentruber Amish.

Amish buggy in traffic

From the Boston Globe, The shock of the old:

Joe Mackall’s new book, “Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish,” explores the role of religion in modern society by looking closely at the life of a small devout religious community in Ohio: the Swartzentruber Amish. The struggle of the Amish people to live with “the English” (the non-Amish), and of the English “outsider” (Mackall) to understand the Amish, is a unique story of culture crossing in rural white America.

The complexity of the bridge that Mackall attempts to build between the Amish and English cultures is mirrored in the Latin root of the word “religion” — religare, to bind together again. This is the problem/promise that Mackall confronts: Religion can both liberate and indoctrinate, both create a community through the bonds of tradition and doctrine, and enslave a community through the binding of minds and control of behavior. The book points to a difficult truth: A religious community is bound to be freed.

If you need more than the first two paragraphs of the review, click the link above.

If you want the book, click the book graphic. 😉

link to Plain Secrets

Alito’s Promises

A promise is a promise, right?

So beware of what you promise. Once you have made it, you cannot qualify it. Any qualifiers must be an expressed part of the promise at the time it is made.

In my view, to try to qualify it after the fact shows moral weakness and illuminates poor judgment.

That’s why this AP story leaves me shaking my head:

Alito serves on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and has most of his money in mutual funds. When he joined the court in 1990 he told senators he would avoid cases in which Vanguard Group was a party.

Senators questioned him about the 2002 Vanguard case, which was the subject of a conflict of interest complaint filed by the woman who lost her lawsuit. Alito withdrew after first ruling against her and the decision was reaffirmed without his participation.

Alito and the White House have offered several explanations: that a computer glitch allowed the disqualification issue to slip through undetected, that Alito’s 1990 pledge to stay out of Vanguard appeals only applied to his initial service, and that the promise was “unduly restrictive.”

“Unduly restrictive,” eh?

Amazing!

Ah, the frailties of man. (And nobody has a corner on that market!)

I wonder how soon till children start using “unduly restrictive” to explain away their failures to keep their promises.

Survivors Find Blessings

Out of curiosity, I did a Google search of news stories with this phrase in them: “for which to be thankful.”

I clicked the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) link with this Associated Press story:

They lost homes, neighbors and cherished communities to Hurricane Katrina. Some are uprooted, far from the only place they ever knew. Others have returned to the cities they love, to pick up the pieces and start over.

They will gather this Thanksgiving with family and friends to reflect back and look forward. But when tragedy scars the soul, what is left to be thankful for?

Blessings, it turns out. Big and small ones. A beloved city that is crippled but stands. Strangers who gave of themselves and became heroes, then friends. School, once a drag, now appreciated. A new life whose future had been uncertain.

Many who made it through the storm have a new understanding of what it means to give thanks. Here are some of their words.

What blessings can you find in your life?

What are some of your words of gratefulness?

Above all, love God!