WIse Bread (Margaret Garcia-Couoh)

Ode to the Ecofan

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:00:02 +0000

Judging by the the thermostat this morning, I’d say it’s time to turn on the heat (37 degrees this morning). As we settle in for another fall/winter season that’s sure to see high prices in oil to heat our houses, or take time most of us don’t have to stack firewood and build fires, I present to you my favorite cost cutting item that I was initially super skeptical about: the eco fan. I usually have an issue with buying anything if it’s $100.

The ecofans run about $79-$159 depending on size. Ours was $100 from Gaiam. That model is now $109. But there are a ton of places online you can get one these days. You can use them on either oil burning or wood burning stoves. They work best in houses that are ‘cabin-style,’ split levels — anything that’s really open. Our bottom floorplan is really one giant room of the kitchen, dining and living room with no doors that would block air flow. With an ecofan on the top of our stove we can keep our oil stove turned to 1/2 — not even one — on its dial. Without the ecofan to get the same amount of heat from where the stove is in the kitchen to the living room, I’d have to turn it to 4-6 (floorplan is 1000 sq. ft.). The guy who comes and fills the kerosene tank often has commented that we go through less than most of his customers in our area. We also have dual paned windows which helps keep all that heat inside.

The ecofan works by you placing it on top of the stove while the stove is on. The heat turns the fan. There’s nothing to plug in and no hassle. I dust it a couple of times a year. That’s it. What seemed like an extra added expense a few years ago, now feels like a godsend as we’ve been able to last through our tank of kerosene for a full month longer than we did before. If you tend to like a really hot house, be careful. If you have a bigger space than what I listed below, you’ll probably want one of the bigger sized fans. Either way, you’ll save money on oil and labor on wood.

Oh Ecofan, I love you!

Disclosure: I was not given anything for this review.

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Dreaming of a Frugal Christmas: 6 Things You Can Make That People on Your List Will Use and Want

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:00:22 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

The problem with many great Xmas ideas is we wait until November to start them and then can’t finish in time. Just devote a little Sunday afternoon time to all or one of these ideas and you’ll have an arsenal of cool cheap Xmas gifts to play Santa with. I present to you a few of the ideas and projects I’m working on and have done in the past.

Baby Food Jar Votives

Back in the day when my kids were eating baby food from a jar I must have saved up a hundred of those cool tiny little jars. Get a double boiler from the local thriftstore, some wax and wick from a craft store and you can have some fun. I’m a candle person anyways so I always save my old candle bits and keep them in a color coated ziploc bags. Come candle making time I mix some of the old wax with new wax and some dye if you wish and you’ve got some groovy little votive candles. I add a ribbon around the top of the jar so it looks less baby food and more clever disguise.

Bath Tea Bags

I order empty tea bag containers meant for the bathtub that can run as cheap as 20 cents a piece. If you’ve got roses and lavender growing in your yard the way I do, you just found a great aromatic "tea bath" recipe! Most tea bags simply have you iron the sides together when you are done. It might take the better part of an afternoon but then you have what’s often a $4 to $6 dollar item in a bath boutique made! Try this idea from You Grow Girl.

Bath Bombs!

This is a hit with my family and friends. With a little baking soda, witch hazel, natural herbs and fragrances, you can come up with great bath fizziness that everyone will like! There are molds you can buy. Some are a bit pricey to set them in--but I found that empty apple sauce containers make great molds! Here’s a recipe from Teach Soap that works well.

Infused Olive Oil

Hey, people spend good money on plain old olive oil infused with rosemary or garlic or both for example--why not make it at home? World Market usually has some great bottles for just a few dollars that can make a really stunning gift. Here’s an easy to follow recipe.

Amigurumi

Let’s face it. Everyone has more than enough scarves. You don’t need to knit any more. You can’t knit everyone a sweater--you’d have to have some serious downtime for that sort of project and yarn can be expensive. Enter the tiny knit project--make the kids and cool adult kids in your life some rockin’ amigurumi! What's amigurumi? Inexplicably cute crocheted and knitted animals and whatnot with excessively cheery expressions. No one can be depressed with these around AND if you buy them in a store you'll probably spend $20-$50 on them. Each one shouldn’t take too long to make and you can use scrap yarn to do so. There are a bunch of cool patterns for knit and crochet online but I went ahead and invested the book, Amigurmi World, that’s been a lot of fun.

Fingerless Gloves

You know why gloves take so long to make? Too many fingers! Enter the fingerless gloves. All of your friends sitting at computers in cold cubicles and apartments will think you are the most amazing friend ever. Each glove takes about an hour + a little wiggle time for the thumb. One skein of yarn can get you through a pair and many yarn stores will have great sales of one skein left in a dye lot. I’ve made these for awhile so I actually don’t look at a pattern anymore, but Knitty has a good basic one. I confess though, my kids were with me while I was looking at patterns and now I’m stuck making a complicated Transformers hat and sweater. Kids, don’t you want gloves?

Bottletop Checkers

Make a homemade checkerboard. I’ve made some from cloth with a checker pattern; I’ve painted old found wood as well to make a checkerboard. The fun comes in with the bottletop caps. We’ve done a big board with peanut butter caps (red and blue) and milk caps (pink for the 2% milk; blue for the fat free) to make two sets. The kids can glitter glue up the tops to match as well.

These are things I’ve been making but my big sources of inspiration, patterns and ideas often come from checking out these places:

The weather is starting to cool off. Time to head indoors, sit down and literally make the holidays happen.

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Disneyland on the (Sort of) Cheap

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:00:02 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

Disneyland is like a drug. Once your kids have had a taste of it, they remember it. They ask for it. When they hear you say the word "vacation" they remind you of it. We went a solid three years of their lives keeping them from all things Disney -- from the Disney channel to the diapers, but one trip there when a cousin was getting married about a mile away from the park, and that was it. They were hooked. Now, anytime we find ourselves in southern California we find ourselves considering the big trip to Disneyland -- the happiest place on earth. But return trips have made us much wiser Disney guests. If you are contemplating a trip with the kids these tips just might help you out.

In the old days my family collected tickets for our favorite rides in a shoebox in the cupboard above my grandmother's microwave. These days there are no tickets or passports but just passes instead.

Admissions

Think this article is out of season? Think again. There's no better time to go to Disneyland than -- for lack of a better phrase -- anytime that's not summer. We used to joke about it and say the best day to go to Disneyland was a Tuesday afternoon when it's raining in February. You don't have to wait for bad weather but here's what not going in summer might do for you:

Lower admission. Keep a look out on their website for deals. Sometimes you can get a 2 or 3 day pass at a big discount if you go off season.

Friends go with you. Tons of southern Californians have year round passes. They ususally have some blackout days in summer and around holidays but most of the time your southern California family and friends with passes can get in any time. And have them buy the tickets for you. Often there are discounts if you have a southern California zip code.

You can also make friends with people who work for Disneyland. They get a limited number of free passes for family and friends. If you hear your cousin's daughter is working there, hit 'em up.

Kids under 3 years of age are free. That can get a bit subjective. I had a big three year old son that they questioned was really three, but you aren't required to carry a birth certificate, so I just told them his birthday and got slightly indignant.

Free Admission on your birthday! You better bring proof!

Deals for multiple days and multiple parks. You can get a ticket for a day, two days, or three days. You can get a ticket for just Disneyland or Disneyland and California Adventure park or just California Adventure. California Adventure has a couple of great Pixar kiddie attractions that might lull you into the big ticket price. We were on a budget this time around and told the kids that those rides were closed today. They forgot about them soon enough.

Parking

There is almost no way to get out of the $12 parking fee except if you bus in or hitch a ride in a shuttle from one of the nearby hotels. One cool thing though is that you can park in the Downtown Disney parking section for free for the first three hours. You'll just need to send someone out of the park by monorail to repark and come back. Or if you plan a really brief trip.

Food

The most money you'll shell out after gaining entrance to the park will be food. They know you will be there for hours; you'll be walking a lot; you'll want food and drink. Here are a few tips Disney afficianados, Briana Sanford and Kathryn Couch shared with me:

Start the day with your own stuff. Every member in your party can walk into the park with a beverage in hand from somewhere else and they can't make you throw it away. We stopped at Tully's for a cheap round of coffee for us and juice for the kids before entering the park. Careful though! If one person carries all the drinks in a take away box or tray they'll make you dump it out. They can each be carrying something to eat in hand but again, one person cannot be carrying all the food. It must be for immediate consumption. But hey! You just got away with breakfast!

Your backpack full of snacks. My cousin's husband filled his backpack with any number of snacks, fruit and water bottles. Technically if you bring a "picnic" lunch you are supposed to eat at picnic tables provided outside the park, but no one uses these that I've ever seen. So long as the snacks are something you can eat standing up, you are okay. They'll look through your backpack but you are allowed to bring it all in.

Resist the urge and share germs. There will be $4 drinks everywhere. You'll see the number 4 so much you'll think sure, it's normal to spend that much. Don't do it. Buy one $4 drink per 4 people. They are big and if everyone gets their own drink then you just bought yourself an extra line for the bathroom. Keep it to the water bottles you brought with you. I ask for extra straws or bring them so my kids don't complain.

Find deals for food. At some point you'll break down and eat there. Some places are better than others and some are better deals. Our frequent guests Briana and Kathryn shared these cheaper favorites:

California Adventure's Pacific Wharf Cafe has a large shrimp louie salad served in fresh baked Boudin sourdough bread bowl for only $10. A bunch of people seem to swear that this is the best food in either park.
Pizza Port in Tomorrowland is a family crowd pleaser with pasta dishes big enough to share and affordable.
Plaza Inn has large portions that can be shared amongst a family of four for under $20.
Main street bakery has some sweet yummy treats under $5.
Take the monorail to Downtown Disney and hang out and eat down there instead. It has upscale mall food for the most part.
Stay away from impulse buys of cart food and retreat to your backpack full of snacks instead.

Souvenirs

It goes without saying: if you have kids with you, you ain't getting out of Disneyland without a souvenir. But you can make more bang for your buck choices around it. Number one from the moms I know? The official Disney autograph book. For $6.95 you can get an autograph book so your kids can chase down their favorite characters and ask for their autographs. If you are crafty you can remember the book for repeat visits and fill up the pages. A little interactive activity. We usually tell our kids that they can look in the stores -- and to let us know what they liked and maybe we'll share the info with Santa Claus. Almost anything you can find in the park you can find online. And some of the very best Disney deals are at their outlet store. We got these great Alice and Wonderland pillows we saw for $45 bucks for under $5 at the outlet.

Buttons

Are you celebrating something? If you are there for the first time, having a birthday, anniversary, etc. go to Ciity Hall on Main Street at Disneyland or guest services at the California Adventure entrance and tell the cast members what you're celebrating. They'll give you a big dorky button to wear on your chest all day that exclaims whatever that is. Wear the button for potential freebies. Cast members are required to smile at button wearers, shout out Happy Birthday, and I hear rumors that various places will give you a slight advantage of one thing or another. A free bag of tortillas awaits you in California Adventure for example, or an extra cherry in your mint julep. You never know. Pays to wear the dorky button and find out.

Leaving the Magic Kingdom

We lasted nine hours at Disneyland. The tickets were $268 for the four of us. I brought an additional $100 cash and some change for a family of four. I also fed 2 cousins at lunch for coming with us. I entered the parking lot at the end of the night with $29 left and change. Not bad for two meals, drinks, two souvenirs. Anyone else have any cheap Disneyland tips?

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Little Road Trips Here and There: Little Savings Everywhere

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:00:14 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

We’ve gone on two road trips this summer, with two more to go. Trips with a family of four can get expensive, but they don’t have to be. Here’s my advice on where to cut corners and where to splurge, and have fun doing so.

Rental car versus your car

Most rental cars aren’t maintained for a lengthy trip. I reserved a car from Avis, but when I went to pick it up the tires were bald and they refused to put new tires on it. I refused the rental. They offered to upgrade but their upgrade was a gas guzzler. Be careful with accepting upgrades on rental cars. Keep your destination in mind. An explosive fight between a husband and wife unfolded in front of us as the husband accepted an upgrade to a bigger, better, longer vehicle. The wife called him any number of choice names. “We are going to San Francisco!” She screamed, “just where do you expect us to park that boat?”

Unless your own car is on its last legs or you are concerned about adding miles to it, my mechanic says to take your own car. If you do regular maintenance on your car (tune-ups, oil changes, recommendations from the manufacturer) then your car should be up for the challenge. In my case, the road trips are what got me to give my car the tune-up it was asking for. So I now have a well maintained car with new tires, because the road trips made me anxious to make sure the car was in good shape. Without the threat of travel, I’d still be behind in my maintenance. Apparently many people tune up their cars before road trips, so going on a road trip might actually help your car’s maintenance.

If you have kids with you---it’s less stressful to be in your own vehicle. You never know when junior is going to get artistic with the back passenger side window. If it’s yours, you panic less.

Food

My family likes to fill up a cooler and picnic basket full of food and drinks, along with a cutting board and knife. We don't forage exclusively from this, but it allows us some control of the food availability this way. There could be long stretches of the road where you'd be hard pressed to find a piece of fruit. That’s when it’s great to have carrot and celery sticks at the ready. An empty calorie fast food stop can run you up to $20 for a family of four.

Having said that, we DO stop at fast food for the bathroom and maybe a shared order of fries. That saves $18 bucks each stop. We eat out of the picnic basket until we can’t handle seeing anything in it or we finish it.

We keep a look out for Asian restaurants that serve food family style. Family style means we can order for two people and have extra plates for the kiddies, instead of having to order a full separate meal they won’t eat. That saves us money on the kids. On our last trip we dropped $60 bucks on a great Indian food dinner, but we took the leftovers and ate them for breakfast the next day! Nothing was wasted, everything was good.

If you are going to some place known for its food, of course you don’t want to skimp on the food. Instead, skimp on breakfast and dinner, and make the big meal lunch since lunch is often cheaper than dinner. Eat with your region. One of the most expensive things to do food wise is to try and eat the same as you do at home. Eat what the locals eat--it’s going to be cheaper.

Accommodations

We do a mix of things. Obviously crashing on your best friend from college’s couch ain’t going to work with two kids and a husband (unless they are really mellow with a really big house). Our rule of thumb is that if we are invited to stay with friends, we stay one day less than they anticipated, and we only stay with people that are messier than we are.

More often than not we wind up at motels. After much trial and error we’ve decided that Comfort Inns and Best Westerns are the best way to go. They have more options on the continental breakfast (cutting out a meal on the road), have bath tubs (important with kids), have working pools (another important thing with kids) and are usually really clean. They take AAA discounts (which really just knocks off the tax).

What works best though is going to the town next door to the town you really want to go to. For example Ashland, Oregon is the big theatre destination with rooms running up to $300 a night. So if we go to Ashland, we drive 10 minutes and stay in Medford, which doesn’t carry the same high rate ( we stayed for 1/3 of what the price in Ashland was).

If you’ve got long term plans, think of housing swaps. In the 10 years that friends of mine and I have done this, I’ve only heard one story from one couple where this didn’t work out.

Souvenirs

When you travel with kids, this is the big one outside of food that can really set you back. Create family traditions that don't revolve around buying high priced and useless souvenirs. We put together a road trip scrapbook where we collect everything from leaves, matchbooks, postcards, menus, business cards--any piece of something that can be glued into a scrapbook. Time permitting, we like to stop at used bookstores or thriftstores where we might find the typical souvenir t-shirt from the area. Our souvenir becomes a few pages in the scrapbook rather than a shot glass that we might not use again. We know going into the trip that we are working on a scrapbook so everyone in the car is on the look out for symbolic things to put in the book.

Car toys

A couple of weeks before the trip, I glean the rooms and toyboxes for things the kids haven’t seen in awhile that would be good to occupy the kids in the car. I add a homemade journal for each kid of plain white paper with construction paper covers. When they are strapped in the car seats I present them with the new old backpack of forgotten toys and journal. It works like a charm and keeps them from fighting for at least a half hour while they look at all their forgotten treasures.

Lastely, don't forget that AAA allows you to get free maps and discounted rooms, as well as roadside assistance which provides a sense of security while you're on the open road.

The most successful road trip vacations incorporate a balance of two important elements: spontaneity and planning. While these might seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum and enemies of each other, they really aren’t. When applied successfully, spontaneity and planning go hand in hand. Keep this in the back of your head while driving.

What are some of your road trip suggestions for making better, cheaper road trips happen?

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Who Cares if there's a Recession? I just started a business

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Sat, 23 May 2009 03:51:21 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

About four months ago my best friend thought she’d run a crazy idea by me. Want to open a shop together?

No.

It’ll be fun....

No.

Come on we can do it together.

No. Okay. Let me think about it.

The only person I know busier than I am is my friend Kristy. A year ago a woman with a salon and boutique who did nails asked if Kristy would come back and do hair at her salon. Kristy had a good reputation in town and had made a little home salon and was getting by that way. She’d put herself through college doing hair and a few years back had decided that doing hair fit better with the mom schedule than anything else.The original salon owner was leaving and offered Kristy the business. She was buying but there was a whole second room in the shop that didn’t have much in it. The rent for that room would be about $100.00 a month. Was I interested?

I did what any friend does. I went home and ran it by the family.

Here are some factors we considered:

Cheap overhead?
Concept of the store?
Location of the shop?
Time to devote to it?

The more I thought about it, the more the idea sounded intriguing.

The overhead is $100 a month plus $60 in Internet expenses. I’d been wanting to have an office in town so that I could stop working from home all the time. The salon is located caddy corner to my kids’ school. One was getting out at noon and the other at two so I was frantically driving back and forth or having to hang around to go home. With the Internet, I could still grade papers and work in a new place. Kristy is busy and so am I. She cuts hair in the morning; I’m online in the afternoon. We could have a shop open all day and just overlap by about thirty minutes each day.

Then it dawned on me. A couple of years ago I’d started up a site on etsy.com for a bunch of women around here that made things but weren’t very Internet savvy so that they could promote their wares online. I called a few of the ones that were around. If I open an artisan consignment shop , are you up for it?

We’ve been up and running for two months. I’ve got 15 local venders that make t-shirts, soap, lotions, bbq sauce, hot sauce, jewelry, bread mixes, rocking chairs, spin and dye their own yarn plus a few artists in the area that hang their photographs and paintings. In the corner of the shop I’ve set up my desk with my wireless to grade papers and write. We put the waiting room for the salon in the room so that customers get an eye full of stuff to look at and browse through while they are waiting for hair cuts. We’re the only place for Wi-fi on the way to three campgrounds. We have a huge porch out front for the kids to play on. We aren’t making the big bucks but we don’t owe anyone a dime either. We put together a small book exchange too.

In a town with only 150 residents in a region with only 2000, having a place to hang out and to showcase local stuff for the tourists, having a little shop like this one can play a big role in the community. Once a month we have an ‘event’ that helps us make rent---thus far we’ve always cleared rent that one day for the whole month. Somedays we only make about $10 bucks. But I look at it this way---had I not moved my office into the shop , I’d have been sitting there grading papers anyhow---now I’ve got $10 extra.

Local response has been great! Vendors are willing to ‘babysit’ the store when I can’t be there. There’s nothing around here in the way of competition and people are happy to be supporting the local artisans before they go to other sources like the Internet or big box stores two hours away.

The husbands helped us with building fixtures and set up. Kristy's given some free hair cuts in trade for banners for the store and advertising. Low and behold! Last week a restaurant opened across the street from us. What was a tiny deserted ghost of a town now has a full two blocks of commerce.

So if you are sitting around working from home and you don’t mind someone walking through every now and then walking through and buying a little one of a kind treasure, consider opening a little shop---you might just make yourself and your community smile.

Long Live SierraMaid!

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The Disaster Known as the California State Budget

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:43:10 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

On May 19th, Californians pretty much rejected all the budget ideas coming from our governor and the capital city of Sacramento. I'm sure he's exasperated as we all are. The only proposition that passed was one to make sure no bonuses were distributed to lawmakers during budget crisises. Go figure. Arnold has indicated he's open to ideas. As a teacher and parent in a rural community I've taken the opportunity to look around my county in the last few days since the election. Here's some ideas for Arnold from me. What are your ideas to help solve California's crisis?

I live in that beautiful golden state and three hours from the capital of Sacramento---otherwise known as the place where nothing can quite get done. Here in California we get an onslaught of mail and TV ads telling us how detrimental any cut would be to our state budget and how the state government and Schwartzenegger are out to get us. You know what? Baloney. So Arnold, if you read Wisebread here are some of my suggestions for budget trimming in California based on my own experiences with some of these programs and institutions.

1) Don’t feel guilty about cutting First Five. Don’t get me wrong it’s a lovely idea to employ various people around the state to ‘work with’ parents to teach them to read to their kids and send them to preschool. But in my county? First Five had a better office than I have in a brand new building with two staffers! They’d come around to our tiny programs that served a couple to five kids tops at a time. Most of the kids that wind up using these programs have parents that care in the first place. The objective should be to help kids whose parents are not giving them opportunities. But it’s impossible to reach those kids because the parents impede the process. So essentially First Five, while well meaning preaches to the choir. Cut it. Go ahead.

2) After school programs. In urban areas it makes sense to have these. But our tiny counties pretty much waste this money. Students sign in that they were there and then leave. My business partners two kids are in the local program in our town. That’s what they do. I checked it out across the county and that’s pretty much what happens. Students sign in, get a snack, leave. Divert the money to large urban areas that need it. Forget about us rural areas. Our kids are outside playing anyway.

3) Take away the tax credit for having kids if you have more than two kids (zero population growth).

4) I live in a county that has 20% unemployment and multigenerational welfare recipients. I know most of this is federal , but do what you can.

5) Student loans and grants. Come down hard on community college students. Each semester I have about 1/3 of my students in any given class disappear after the second disbursement of federal and state aid. Pay instead directly for their books and do it the first week of school. Don’t let them take out $10,000 for community college for a year. You don’t have power over the federal grants too but you do have control over the Cal Grants.

6) Release all prisoners convicted of marijuana related crimes as long as they aren’t violent crimes and let those people go back to their wheeling and dealing which stimulates the northern California economy.

7) Start working on a Proposition to abolish the Proposition process that takes up countless tax dollars and empower those elected to office in California to actually do their jobs. I’ll be the first to sign this to get it on the ballot.

8) Repeal Prop 8 since it’s not lawful to vote to take away people’s rights. And enjoy the stimulated economy that arises from all the weddings!

9) Take state employees to a voluntary 32 hour work week. Then moms and dads might have time to spend with their kids instead of sending them off to the after school programs where they are signing in and leaving anyway. Parents having that built in time off will be less likely to feign sickness to get errands done.

10) California public schools: look at the models of Japanese and Catholic schools. In Japan students clean their own schools and don’t tend to be as slovenly chiefly because they are the ones on cleaning detail. In many bare bones parochial schools the administrative duties are a shared task among faculty. This could make a lot of sense. And I know, you have to deal with the teachers union but common sense is on your side.

11) Forest management. Let's get back to traditional ecology and traditional ways to manage the forest. If we had some selective burning and cutting we might just avoid those crazy summer wildfires that take an enormous amount of resources we just don't have anymore.

Okay California and national readers...what can we do to save California from itself? If you were in a room with Arnold where would you tell him to cut? Where would you tell him to raise revenues from?

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Are you a telecommuter paying commuter rates for auto insurance?

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 22:51:29 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

I was reading through the http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/13/lower-car-insur...
That was posted as part of Will’s great list of articles on April 9, 2009 and thought I’d share a couple of tidbits I didn’t see mentioned in this article on car insurance.

I just added my husband as a driver on my car so I’ve been in a good deal of contact with my AAA guy. We’ve already followed many of these tips including bundling our home and auto insurance, maintaining a good driving record, and trying to keep a good credit rating.

A couple of other things to consider that are working in our favor is the car being completely paid off---which seems to be lowering it quite a bit as does paying it up front for the whole year (no finance charge or interest).

But the thing that saves me the most is being listed as primarily a telecommuter. Apparently many auto insurance companies now offer a telecommuter rate if you can prove most of your work is done from home. My car takes my kids to school every day but pretty much sits in the garage unless I’m running errands or out of the area. I qualified! Makes me land in the same category as a Sunday driver. For all of you beginning to work at home or anyone who is unemployed, this might make for considerable savings. Worth asking your insurance agent about anyway.

Of course, living in the mountains means we’ll always keep the deer collision insurance. Deer are notoriously bad about carrying their own insurance and great about playing 'dodge car' down the mountain highways.

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DIY Entertainment--A Recipe for the Recession

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:57:10 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

Last Friday night something nearly impossible happened in our tiny hamlet down the road of Taylorsville, CA (boasts a population of 175?)---nightlife. Nightlife in a recession no less. How did we get 40 + people to show up at an evening event in a town that opens at 8 am and closes at noon? In a time when many people in our town have less than no money? I’ll tell ya....

This is my recipe to cure small town boredom on the cheap. You need a few items:

One Facebook account
One aging dive bar in the middle of nowhere whose manager won’t say no to you because they haven’t seen a steady flow of customers in years.
A few serious musicians and writers that are good enough to be entertaining and willing to pitch in for free beer, but obscure enough not to demand big money or billing.
One PA system
A point of contact/go to person/emcee

Last May a former student and I had an idea after attending some Words + Music shows in neighboring towns. We’d attended a few of these shows and noticed the majority of the musicians and some of the writers were actually from our area but since our area did not sport any venue to play in, those seeking the stage were going elsewhere. It was rare for us to go anywhere, especially in winter due to icy roads. The last thing one wants to do after partying all night is to have a nice white knuckle drive through icy canyons on the way home. So we thought. How could we bring this kind of thing to our town?

We looked around at different restaurants and cafes but most had bad accoustics. Then we discovered the Taylorsville, Tavern. Born in the late 1800s, it sported an almost forgotten backroom that already had the hints of a stage. Hmm...would they go for it? We talked to the manager and asked if we could ‘try’ something one Friday night a month. We’ll clean up and set up, and you provide us the free room and hopefully whomever comes to see the show will buy beer. Worked like a charm.

Next we did what every rural person does around here. We got on Facebook , added friends by the dozens that lived around here and created an event. We also hit the town with flyers the old fashioned way and the local paper as well. Now we had an event and people were RSVPing and asking questions. How much were we charging and why were we doing it?

Free. No charge. We billed it as Entertainment on the Cheap. That was 2008. Now in 2009 we call it Entertainment for the new Economy.

Once we had the show hooked up at the bar and people RSVPing 21st century style we began working on potential players. We made friends with the guy who had the PA and encouraged him to play a few songs. We heard the librarian sing and told her she should polish a few songs and come sing for us. We told two musicians who we’d heard play that these other musicians were playing and did they want to play too? We found writers who were funny and asked them to read a funny story to us in between music sets. Unlike a regular talent show where those without talent eagerly take the stage like American Idol wannabes , we actively solicity talent that we hear about and wear them down until they agree to play us a few tunes.

Our first show we had about seven people show up to perform and about seven people show up to watch. Our last show we had 40 non-performers show up and nine performers. That’s hella huge for a town of 175. We buy the first drink for each person taking the stage. Audience members usually follow suit. The bar is seeing totals on those nights that it hasn’t seen in decades.

It’s taken 10 months of these once a month shows to really get it off the ground. Now people are stopping us on the street telling us what a good time they had. Maybe they are thinking of performing next time. Are we going to do a theme again? Someone told me that she doesn’t go out anymore because of the cost of everything. But with our night she can have one beer at home and one at our ‘niteclub’ and sit and listen to some music and words and feel like she used to when she did have money to go out.

Just because the financial world and our financial world is tanking doesn’t mean the fun has to stop too. If anything , this is when we need it the most.

I sincerely hope our NiteClubs at the Tavern have a long life ahead of them. This combination economic downturn + community involvement has really come to = a real good time. We are doing it ourselves: singing , dancing, laughing for four hours a month all for the cost of a couple of beers. And when you live in a snowy mountain range, that winter interaction can mean everything.

I give you this recipe free. Take it to your nearest dive bar manager. Find your musicians. Find your comedians wanting their training wheels to finally be off and a way you go. Find your community. Show them a good time.

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Book Review: Tyranny of Dead Ideas

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:49:51 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

Trying to start off the new year in a forwardly thinking direction (isn’t that what we are supposed to do as citizens of ObamaLand?), I picked up a copy of Fortune columnist Matt Miller’s The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity and began fulfilling my new year’s resolution of reading things that are ‘good for me.’

I love Matt Miller’s radio program Left , Right, and Center which I listen to faithfully on Santa Monica College’s KCRW (more accurately, on my iTunes). He holds up the center of discussions on economics, politics and culture at large. Yesterday as is usually what happens when I begin to read a book that came out recently, I heard Matt Miller interviewed on KCRW for the new book. He’s also the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems In Ways Liberals And Conservatives Can Love.

The radio interview focused on six dead ideas that Americans need to give up in order to move forward (and these were all in the book as well as additional dead ideas). Chief among the ones discussed were uniquely American ways of doing things that don’t quite work anymore: healthcare tied to employment, local control over education getting in the way of unified standards, wanting tax cuts as baby boomers retire, the idea that a child will prosper more than the parent, that education, knowledge and skills will automatically produce a certain level of income, and many others. Miller argues eloquently both in print and in radio interview about all these dead ideas and more.

I've sat with some of these ideas a good deal--especially over localized control of education and realizing that at age 40, I do make less than my parents with a much higher mortgage. And perhaps I should be telling my kids hey, don't become a doctor you'll be sued for malpractice--become a banker who gets slapped on the wrist with a big fat severance check instead. The book is a great snack food for thought.

What makes the book a good read is his ability to put each of these ideas in their historical context of how we arrived at them and why we’ve steadfast held on to them. He seems uniquely rational and doesn’t come across as being in love with his own voice or discoveries in the way say Thomas L. Friedman seems to in The World is Flat (never listen to the audio of that book unless you really like the Disney approach to the adult world--his voice literally hurt my ears).

A few online reviews of the book have bashed the book as socialism but it didn’t come across that way to me at all (full disclosure: I have more than enough left wing subscriptions for decades to know the difference). I am finding his chapters and discussions of these dead ideas to be a bit of what the doctor ordered---giving voice to things I’ve already thought about but hadn’t researched myself. As the new Administration of “Change” gets underway, it might make informative reading.

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The Gen X Last-Minute-Get-Creative Xmas Present Alternative

Margaret Garcia-Couoh — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:54:47 +0000

By Margaret Garcia...

I’m not quite sure how this all started, but for most of my teens, twenties and thirties those I exchange xmas gifts with and I have given each other things in threes: music, book, and random. By music, book, random, I mean that each person on my list gets a book to read on winter nights, along with some music, and then something that can only be found in my neighborhood. Back in college this meant a used book, a tape I made myself, and some random item found in a .99 cent store: perhaps a candle or an ice scraper for the car windshield.

Perhaps not everyone over the years has appreciated my gift giving tactics, but I’ve heard few complaints. The magic of Christmas of course is in the giving and perhaps someone out there was waiting for just that book, song, or that bar of goat’s milk soap. Who knows?

And so I offer these suggestions for those of you , like me, who are long on intentions but short on cash. You might even explain your little bag of gifts as you give them. Knowing that thought went into everything really does overwhelm the receiver at times--in a good way. Generation X-ers seem to be particularly susceptible to this kind of giving and receiving. It some how goes with our ethos to have something to read and listen to and something completely inexplicable and rare. We like that. We respond well to anything that sounds not quite in the mainstream of things. We are our own cliche. So, following that logic, here is my last minute get creative Christmas gifts for the gen-Xer in your life:

The book. Go to your nearest library and find the Friends of the Library sale. If you pay more than $1.00 for a book you paid too much. Go to libraries in nice areas or areas where you know there are book clubs. My advice is someplace with lots of old people. They religiously join book clubs, buy best sellers, and then turn them back in within a few weeks because they get up at 4 am to read and do so too quickly. If the almost new bestseller isn’t to the taste of the recipient go for the kitsch value. I found my brother in law the sheet music booklet to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album for a dime. A dime! Priceless indeed. Other finds of the season are a set of those damned Ladies Detective series for my mother and the new David Sedaris. The last two for a buck. Major score was a Mother’s Encyclopedia from the 1950s with great color photos with collage potential for the craftster chicks on my list.

The music. Now over the years this has definitely been one of those things that has evolved. I no longer make tape compilations with handmade labels. I no longer make CDs with embossed seal makers either. I let iTunes gift cards do the work of it instead. But giving a $10 or $15 gift card is so impersonal and doesn’t say anything to the recipient about music that you think they’d like. Remember too that odds are your friend or relative's musical experiments stopped with either high school, college, or graduate school graduation depending on how far they got in life educationally speaking. Their tastes have fossilized. When they buy new music if at all, they buy the new record by their favorite balding, now corpulent rocker of old. So now you have the chance to save them from themselves and give them back some dignity in the process. If you don’t give them suggestions they’ll just go and download an old Joe Jackson record (with new bonus tracks!). Help guide their purchases for some contemporary street cred. I wrap up the gift card in a nifty list of my top ten suggestions for them to purchase with the gift card based on their past musical taste and where I think they should be headed.

So, my recipients this year who liked twangy and ethereal chick singers of the 80s and 90s are getting suggestions of the new Jenny Lewis or She & Him for example. It makes aging Gen-Xers feel good about their aging irrelevance to say they own something that came out in 2008. Help them help themselves. And if they are gay, Mexican, your grandfather or all three? You can’t go wrong with suggesting Eydie Gorme’s Personalidad. That gives them retro street cred. Timeless.

There’s not an alternative, hipster, gen-Xer worth his or her salt that doesn’t buy into the mantra of think globally, act locally. This is as engrained in our heads as Schoolhouse Rock songs about grammar and government or the Indian Chief crying at all the litter by the river bank in those seventies commercials. So buy your recipient something that is only made in your town. For my family that means goat milk soap and beef jerky (jalapeno flavored). We give the soap to the vegetarians and the jerky to the beef eaters. End of story. These two companies don’t even have a website. You can only find their products where we live. Giving those relatives one of a kind gifts like that mean that they have bragging rights at work. (“See this jerky? It comes from these special cows found only in Plumas County...”). Our generation always wants to feel unique. And voila. For 5 bucks, you just helped them feel different from the rest.

So these three items go in a used gift bag or a lunch bag painted Christmas-y. And there you have it. If done correctly, you shouldn’t have spent more than $16-20 tops. Depending on your sense of propriety (music downloads) this might even be cheaper. And of course you could just do one of the three. If done really well, you may not have even had to leave the house for more than 30 minutes. Happy Holidays.

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