Pecuniarities

An easy, time- and money-saving way to prepare personal-sized cakes as a snack for yourself, with a friend or everyone at your dinner table.

Having a whole house to ourselves, Penelope and I often feel like a couple of kids when the parents are absent. We play fetch with the dogs in the hallways and let slobbery tennis balls bounce off the walls. We push furniture around and rearrange the rooms on impulse. We call every meal or break [...]

I know this seems strange considering that I am currently holding a 2009 Financial Resolutions Blog Contest, but I don’t do new year’s resolutions anymore. Sure I still make general decisions/goals/plans/etc. for my life, but I no longer pin them down to specific years.
In years past I have set new years resolutions only to forget [...]

Playing the Piano is a Privilege (Not a Chore)

An interesting experiment would be to forbid a young child to ever touch the piano, after all it is a very expensive instrument. One can easily imagine how much higher the piano instantly rises in that child’s estimation. One then promises the child that he or she will be “allowed” to begin learning the piano at a certain age. Even better then, if someone in the family—a parent, older sibling or cousin—were to frequently play very charming pieces of the kind accessible to children. Pieces from the Romantic era are very suitable for this purpose (e.g. Fϋr Elise & Doll’s Dream), should be repeated often and might even have stories invented about them. It is very natural that the child will aspire to play these pieces someday, and a united goal has been formed without duress.

For the lucky few who have extra leisure time this summer, I thought I’d put together some suggestions for productive and fun activities that will help enhance your personal, academic and/or professional life. Some of these suggestions are addressed as if to young people (students, adolescents, etc.) but can also apply to grown-ups.
My suggestions are [...]

I received the following comment today from a reader about my earlier post Simple Solutions to Staying Out of Debt:
“All good advice – sadly, it is harder than it sounds. But then again, the more you make the more you can spend, so figuring out how to live within your means is a lesson we [...]

Fabric scraps are the natural by-product of a sewing project. Bags and Bags of fabric scraps are the natural result of many sewing projects and the frugal impulse to keep every potential resource. While these collections of small and irregular pieces tend to be a nuisance, they are usually of beautiful or expensive materials that [...]