Today's cheapness accomplishments

-A lovely neighbor (with a charming Bichon!) giving away her sofabed ended up leading to a new piece of furniture in my apartment. The bureaucratic procedure involved in moving a couch from one apartment to another in a non-shack-like apartment building such as this one made me almost lose hope, but the $60 (including a tip) moving fee meant a $60 couch that, like, unfolds and everything. If we had cable, Jo and I could, in theory, each spread out on our own couch to watch it. Whee!

-Lunch at home (because of couch-related confusion) involved a too-long-frozen bagel, testing the limits of the toaster's 'bagel' and 'defrost' capacities, but keeping the total meal in the $1-ish range.

-A stamp-card meant we'd 'earned' a free half-pound of Oren's Viennese Roast. Huzzah!

-After learning that the stylist who gave me the infamous $85 haircut switched salons, losing me one free bang trim (I think? does this carry over from salon to salon? would it be worth going to Williamsburg to find out?), I took matters into my own scissors and, while technically it's not even or anything, I much prefer the style of the self-inflicted cut to the ones I've had done professionally.

-I walked right by the coffee place with the iced coffee I like so much that used to cost $2.25 but is now $2.49 (?) and resisted temptation. The freezing weather may have helped in this regard.

And now for today's cheapness failures.

-Sure, the couch was only $60 in moving fees. But we already had a couch. This was kind of gratuitous, in that it's a studio apartment. A studio apartment we may never leave, now that we each have a couch.

-Breakfast out at a certain Tribeca bakery-market thing, which I've finally come around to having croissants and coffee at (but no more!) despite the startlingly severe and repeated Health Dept. warnings against said establishment, cost more than oatmeal at home would have.

-This evening, tempted by a $22/lb cheese, I asked for a quarter pound of it, only to find myself with more like 0.38, and post-couch-situation, not up for making a fuss. So, I spent too much on cheese.

-Did I mention the dangers of dining in Chelsea Market? The Thai food itself is a bargain, but the place happens to be surrounded by ever more delicious and pricey options. The $2 piece of Sarabeth's lemon pound cake that will be breakfast was among the cheaper baked goods in the whole of Chelsea Market, but was nevertheless an impulse buy.

Halloween costumes cost money... UPDATED

...but they don't have to cost much! After much soul-searching, I've decided to go as a can of San Marzano tomatoes. These have been on sale for forever now at Whole Foods such that we now have a lifetime supply, so in terms of costume-making materials, their easily-removable labels came to mind. Three of them are to be a belt around a silver dress, worn over silver leggings - together these will form 'the can'. Red keds and red nails will, if I'm feeling energetic, complete the look.

Photos forthcoming, assuming this does not look too ridiculous.

UPDATE



Photo credit: the party hostess, via Facebook

When cheapness goes too far: or, tales of my weekend

Like my co-blogger, I'm in the process of moving apartments. Technically this means putting stuff into storage, running off to lower-rent lands, and returning come the fall, in the hopes of finding a recession-priced townhouse in the West Village, by which I mean studio apartment within walking distance of NYU. While we have hired (Brooklyn's least expensive!) movers for the furniture, the storage space happens to be on the same bus route as our apartment, and it was cheaper to 'claim' the storage space early, so we figured we might as well start the move ourselves. For whatever reason, the fact that a street fair blocked the entirety of that bus route did not stop us from thinking this course of action made sense. My arms are now in fine shape indeed. Jo suggested I try weight training, but to go to the campus gym in the summer now costs $50, so boxes it is.

Speaking of carrying things, here's another area where frugality adversely impacted my quality of life. After carrying around a backpack with every-expanding holes at the bottom and an ever-thickening layer of filth (as happens to things you put regularly on the floor of the subway) for some time, it occurred to me that perhaps the bag had had it's day. Which it had, so I threw it out. What I didn't do was buy a replacement. Because that would require the exchange of money for stuff, stuff that isn't fun in any way, and I figured that through some combination of tote bags and reused plastic shopping bags, I could get through the great Library Book Shift of 2009. I figured wrong. Thank you, Brooklyn Industries, for having one of your periodic bag sales just in time.

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In news of thrift on a larger scale, colleges are now cutting back on 'extras'. Predictably, in that the linked-to story is a lifestyle piece in the New York Times, and one that allows comments, after reading about some rather extreme college perks (how many schools ever had HBO in student rooms?) you get to hear from the ranks of those convinced that bratty Kids These Days demand luxuries beyond what they, when young, would have dared ask for.

But is it really the kids who demand these perks? I agree that there's been a trend in abandoning austerity-for-character-building's-sake, and that we no longer as a society believe one must be in a permanent state of physical discomfort, ala British boarding school of yore, in order to get an education. But I simply don't believe the undergrads care about the landscaping, the 'free' laundry, the fancy gyms, and so forth. These are things colleges do to one-up one another. Sure, there's some sense, if a student looks at nine schools with Perk A, that if the tenth lacks that perk, it's perhaps a worse-funded or less-brand-name institution. But it would have never occurred to individual undergrads to ask for most of what's now offered, to set the spartan-to-lavish scale where it's currently at.