Errand day and other things I blow out of proportion

The thing I dread more than anything is running errands. I'm not sure why exactly. It's some combination of the driving, the waiting, the being away from home. It fills me with an overwhelming sense of anxiety. Since I hate it so much, I tend to procrastinate my errands until I have a big old pile of them which fills me with even more anxiety.

The worst thing about the whole scenario is that I have ABSOLUTELY no sense of how long anything will have to take. A simple trip to the post office or the bank, and I feel like I need to block out half a day. The grocery store, I have convinced myself, cannot be navigated in less than an hour. I map out complex routes to increase my efficiency, I wait until I have a long, uninterrupted block of time, and then I dive in.

And it's never as bad as I expected it to be.

Don't get me wrong: I still can't stand waiting in line at the post office. I have yet to find a time to go to the bank which is not incredibly unpleasant. But when I finish my errands, I always have - along with a sense of relief and accomplishment - a little voice in my head that says "Oh. That was it?"

I dont' know why I build these things up in my head to be so overwhelming and all-encompassing. I know that I am making myself crazy. And yet, I continue to do it.


So, what's the solution? Do you have any tasks in your life that you blow out of proportion and avoid?

Festival of Frugality recap

This week's Festival of Frugality is up at Personal Finance Analyst, and it's a great one.

Some of my favorite posts:

Frugal Tips from America's Cheapest Family is a great book review that takes apart a book I've been meaning to read.
55 best ways to Save Money is a huge list of great frugal tips from readers. Most of them are things we already know, but it's always good to hear them again.
Ten Ways to Save Money when you fly on your family vacation is a great rundown on ways to save on trips. I do most of these, but there are a few new takes on things that I wouldn't have thought of.

Lazy summer

Usually I start the summer with vast and far reaching goals: make money, write more, spend less, organize/declutter, finish projects, write more, lose weight, exercise more. Then about halfway through the summer I realize I've accomplished almost none of it, and I get extremely disheartened. So this summer I'm setting only one goal for myself.

Be lazier.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, not for me. Somehow I'm no better at being idle than I am at being productive. I'm not working, I'm not in school, my house isn't especially clean and yet I will go through entire days without being outside, and end the day anxious about all the things on my list that I haven't done. What am I spending my time on? I can never remember or tell. Whatever it is, it doesn't bring me joy.

So this summer, I want to do less. I want to forcibly make myself sit and do nothing, or read a book (with permission to stop whenever I want). To eat slowly and taste my food. To sit outside and watch people go by. I'm just going to rest for a while and get off the treadmill, and once I learn how to do that maybe I'll know what it is that I want to do with my time.

Because I wanted to live deliberately

I turned my ketchup bottles upside down because I wanted to live deliberately. Hmm, somehow it doesn't have the same ring to it as what Thoreau said.

There are two kinds of frugality and finance blogs out there that I know of. One of them goes into details about things like how to make your own laundry detergent, substitute cheaper ingredients into recipes, and hang your laundry. The other type likes to insult writers of the first type. Lives for it in fact. Gets most of its juice from saying just how wrong those frugal writers are.

"Why are you spending time counting the number of grinds on the pepper shaker? Tearing paper towels in half? It's a waste of your time and brainpower! Do you know how much more money you could make/save by [insert topic of blog here]?? How can you guys be so stupid as to think it matters whether you get the last ketchup out of the bottle???????"

The thing is, they don't get it. They're totally missing the point.

People don't cut their toothpaste tubes open to save the 5 cents on toothpaste. We don't spin our laundry an extra time before putting it into the dryer because we think this will make us millionaires. Frugal folks are, for the most part, just trying to see what we can get away with, how to get by with the least possible stuff. For some of us, it's simply an exercise in austerity, for some it's an issue of stewardship and ecology, for some it's part of a larger budget plan.

But the point of frugal blogs is to remind us that the individual frugal choices matter. Doing more with less makes us aware of what we have, makes us focus on all of our decisions more. It's about being connected to the food we eat and the products we buy. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

Thoreau would be so proud.

CSA and vegetable wisdom

I've written before about how much I love my CSA. Last summer, one of my husband's friends was visiting when I picked up my basket and he got to see me process and cook my vegetables - and he even got to eat some. Apparently it made an impression on him because he went home and got himself a half share in a CSA near him. A few weeks ago, he had a picture of it on his facebook with a caption that read "Now I just need to figure out what to do with all this." I glanced over my husband's shoulder and said "Tell him to steam the asparagus, sautee the swiss chard with garlic and onions, and use the green onions in everything."

I was kind of amazed to hear the words coming out of my mouth. A year ago, I wouldn't have known half that. Some other things I've learned from my CSA:

• I love chard. Collard greens not so much.
  
  
• When it's squash season, you eat squash. And you eat it all because next week there will definitely be more.
  
  
• Most greens don't need to be boiled for a million hours and I like them better when they're not.
  
  
• The fresher the vegetables, the less you need to do to make them taste great. Except for collards which still usually need bacon.
  
  
• When you eat fresh raw vegetables for lunch and dinner, it's hard not to lose weight.
  
  
• In hot climates like mine, by the time the tomatoes come in, most of the lettuce is done, so the salads my mother made in my childhood are hard to make locally.
  
  
• Husbands must be accounted for when planning vegetable sides. Even if they do like their green beans mushy.