In an effort to share more of our day-to-day frugality (like many of you requested in my reader survey), I started on a new Friday series: Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies. You can hop back and read last week’s edition if you missed it.
I would love for this to become an opportunity for you to share your own frugal wins from the week so we can all learn from your mad money-saving skills! You can share your frugal failures and funnies too so we can laugh together.
Frugal Feats of the week
We had a wild week with some fun successes! Here are two that come to mind:
We discovered wild grapes!
Last Saturday we went on a family bike ride on a beautiful trail that goes around a lake. The trail was totally new to us, so we took a couple of wrong turns, but eventually found our way all the way around and back to our car (about 16 miles total). We stopped several times for blackberries along the trail, but around here, there are wild blackberries everywhere, so that’s not especially notable.
As we were heading back to our car, my son found what looked like grapes! Now I’m not someone to go eating random wild plants I don’t know anything about, but my husband, who is much more confident in his botanical knowledge and plant identification skills, is.
He and the kids started eating them and eventually I joined in. They have seeds, and they’re smaller than the grapes you’d buy in the store, but they taste just as good. The kids picked a whole grocery bag full and brought it home with us. Hooray for free grapes!
Freeezer cooking was a wild success!
On our way home from biking on Saturday, we stopped by Winco to pick up the food I was going to need for making our freezer meals. I was so glad to have a shopping list prepared for me so I didn’t have to think. The kids were super helpful in peeling and chopping lots of veggies for me.
I’m glad that I gave freezer cooking a chance because I it’s already a game-changer around here. Simplifying dinner planning and prep is making a huge difference so far. By the time the kids get home from school, there isn’t very much time to get in homework, chores, dinner, and a little bit of playing. It’s so nice to not be stuck in the kitchen for the few hours my kids have free. Less dinnertime stress makes for a less grumpy mommy, for sure!
Frugal Flop of the week
Months ago we got the DMV registration renewal notice for my husband’s car. At the time something was acting up with his car (I know, big surprise when you’ve got a car with 240,000+ miles on it), so we decided to wait a few months (until the renewal was due) to sumbit the payment. It would be pretty frustrating to pay registration early and then have the car not even survive the prior registration period.
You probably see where this is going.
In remembered and made a mental not of the month the registration was due. I figured we had until the end of that month. Well, that wasn’t the case. As we got near the end of last month, I looked at the paper and saw we were already past due! Ahh! We already owed the first tier of late fees, but we still had to get the car smogged before we could register it.
We chalked that one up as a loss and planned on getting the smog check and registration done before the second tier of late fees kicked in. Would you believe we missed that one, too?! We thought we had until the 8th, but it turns out the deadline was August 7th (a Sunday, which is really odd).
The third time’s the charm right? Well, after being stuck in traffic as he was leaving work today, he pulled up to the smog place just as their garage bay doors were rolling closed.
I guess the joke is on us. We could have done all of this months ago, but we didn’t want to risk losing the registration money if his car gave out before it was due. That attempt at frugality ended up costing us an extra fifty dollars in late fees!
Frugal Funny of the week
So this isn’t pee-your-pants funny or anything, but it’ll have to do for this week.
Our friends invited us over for homemade pizza last weekend and said to bring our favorite pizza toppings. Sounds simple, but we are (I am) super boring when it comes to pizza toppings. Knowing that our standard of pineapple tidbits would be a meager offering, I volunteered to make the dough as well (I made a quadruple batch of this recipe).
While I knew pineapple was a lame contribution, I had no idea just how lame until our friends introduced their toppings. They must have had twenty different toppings. I kid you not! There were at least three different kinds of sausage alone, along with several sauces, other meats, veggies, and cheeses.
No one made fun of our pineapple, but our “favorite” (well “default” is more like it) looked kind of funny compared to their smorgasboard of favorites. And, wowee! There toppings were good! I think I gained five pounds from trying all of the delicious new combinations!
It’s your turn!
That’s all I’ve got this week, friends. I would love to hear about your week!
- What were your frugal successes and failures?
- Any funny frugal moments?
- Would you eat wild grapes you found growing on the side of the road?
That’s a bummer about the registration, but I guess on the flip side, it sounds like the car made it through which probably saved you compared to what could have happened otherwise.
I remember the old Tightwad Gazette having an article about her husband finding wild grapes and canning a ton of grape jam from it. Are you going to do anything special with them?
Awesome! So far the kids are just eating them. Because they had lots of seeds, then have to have a bowl for seed spitting when they eat them, so that’s a little annoying (and means I don’t put them in school lunches either). I’m hoping to try juicing some of them this week!
I have to admit, I thought of you this past weekend. We had a store bought frozen pizza that looked sorta bland so I added some fresh pineapple pieces to it. It was delicious and the perfect little sweet extra that the pizza needed so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by your topping because pineapple is awesome. Oh and your crust is awesome too because I made it last year. I don’t make homemade pizza much but when I do, I use your recipe..yum!
Pineapple is great! Adding toppings to store bought pizza is genius! How sweet that you thought of me. 🙂 I’m glad you love the homemade crust Jennifer!
I think any kind of pizza is a great kind of pizza, no matter what the toppings are!
Also, that’s very adventurous eating wild grapes like that.. I am very risk averse when it comes to wild fruits and things that I don’t know too much about but kudos to you for being adventurous and digging in 🙂
If my husband hadn’t given the green light, I defintely would not have eaten (or let me kids eat) them. Even as it was, I asked him half a dozen times, “Are you sure they are really grapes? Are you sure they aren’t poisonous?” 🙂
This is a frugal feat. We’ve been saving aside all of our extra money because my husband just switched over to a new job and his check will be less than usual until the health insurance gets sorted out. That will happen on 9/1. So we saved aside many hundreds of dollars only to realize that this next check on 8/19 is an extra paycheck! Such a good oops to have!!
That’s a great “oops” to have Stacey! Who doesn’t love extra paychecks!? 🙂
I would eat the wild grapes after I got them home and washed them. I worry about animals urinating on food in the wild. This week’s frugal win for me was finding a good price on a monochrome laser printer that does duplex printing. That will come in handy as I’ve discovered our 7 and 5-year-olds really like worksheets. Our oldest boy was not a fan of worksheets when he was little.
I hear you! I made sure to pick bunches of grapes that were high up for that very reason! 🙂
My kids all love worksheets. And I love having a printer that prints both sides. I saves so much paper!
I’ve picked wild grapes and have made grape juice and grape jelly from them.
That would be a great way to deal with the seeds! I think we’ll give juice a try!
I love wild grapes! We have a patch not too far from our farm and will harvest them to make grape juice. It is easy to can the grapes and have grape juice by Thanksgiving.
Ooo! We’ll have to try making grape juice! I’ve never done that before! 🙂
Ok, so this story might qualify as all of the above by being a frugal feat, flop and funny, all at the same time. 🙂 We have wild blackberries growing in our yard as well as all over our road. There are sooooooooooo many places to pick them. Not thinking, I started picking one day in shorts and flip flops. I had a plastic 5-cup measuring cup with me to collect them in. I was just planning to pick a few…but it gets addictive. I was getting scratched up everywhere, but every time I started to head home, I saw more juicy black berries. But what I saw most of all were invisible FREE signs…and I just couldn’t stop until that measuring cup was filled to overflowing. At one point I felt something sharp dig into my foot. I screamed. But that didn’t stop me. I kept picking while standing on one foot and limping between bushes. When my measuring cup was full, I limped home. I was still in excruciating pain. I figured I would find a splinter in my toe that I could just pull right out. But it was a thorn with 3 prongs…and all 3 prongs were UNDER my baby toeNAIL! No wonder it was still hurting so badly! You could see the entire thing under my nail. My husband tried to get it out unsuccessfully. I was crying like a baby the whole time. (He was teasing me that I’m super tough when it comes to things like childbirth yet a wimp when it comes to tiny things.) He finally announced that we would need to go to his office (pediatrician) and he had some tools there that he could definitely dig it out with. I was about to have a panic attack at the thought. But alas, that very second the entire thing came out!!! I was so relieved that I wasn’t about to go through the “digging” process that I started sobbing. And here’s the hilarious part of the story: Through the sobs of relief I cried out, “And I don’t even like blackberries!” –No one in our family of four does, but that frugalness in me just couldn’t leave those free berries sitting there to rot. I ended up bringing them all to a friend who was overjoyed, so at least the story has a somewhat good ending. LOL
That is an awesome story! I’m the same way with things that are free. “BUT BUT BUT they’re FREE!!” Haha. Thanks for sharing. That made me laugh.
Do you live in the Northwest? Here (Idaho) we have something called “goat heads” & I’ve never come across them anywhere else. We just moved to a new place & the yard has had little care in quite awhile. Those little monsters are everywhere & they hurt like the dickens. They puncture bike tires too.
Linda: I live in New Hampshire 🙂
You crack me up Liz! I love your story– definitely fits all three! I’m glad your husband got it before you had to head to his office to break out the “real” tools. Like you, I’m tough when it comes to childbirth, but you might think you need to call 911 if I get a paper cut (my family always teased me growing up about what a wimp I was when it came to paper cuts)!