Single Ma Wants Me to Write About Booze.

It's actually not a bad topic for a post this week...

The other night, I went to see a play at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn (The New Electric Ballroom, well worth seeing. You can get discounted tickets using a code from Broadway Box). Before the show, we went to the nearby Water Street Restaurant. It's a convenient place for a pre-show meal, and they have really good burgers, but we were incredibly disgruntled by the wine!

First of all, the wine list is very limited, especially if you just want a glass-- they have a much better selection of beers. But I knew if I drank beer, I'd be wanting to go to the bathroom during the no-intermission play! So I had one glass of wine-- $8 for a fairly mediocre glass of Argentine Chardonnay. There was no Pinot Grigio or New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc by the glass, which would have been safer. And the $8 Coppola Chardonnay was terrible, and the $7 American Sauvignon Blanc was almost undrinkable.

Even worse, these glasses of wine were small! Some restaurants at least give you a generous glass of perhaps 8 or 10 ounces, but these were probably 6 ounce glasses, and not especially full.
We got into a discussion of what the going rate is for glasses of wine-- $6 is probably a standard amount in New York, for something cheap but acceptable. Sometimes you'll see a $5 house wine, maybe even $4, but it's usually pretty bad. And of course if you go to a place that fancies itself more of a wine bar, you can often choose from a selection of glasses from $7 -10, and even higher. This may seem pricey, but sometimes I think it's nice to be able to sample interesting wines-- I'd rather pay a little more occasionally just to taste something a little unusual.

In many cases, it's better just to opt for a bottle of wine. The price of a bottle will tend to be about four times the price of a glass, though the volume of wine is usually closer to 5 glasses, unless you're in one of these places that pours very big glasses. If you don't want to consume an entire bottle, don't forget that at least in some states, most restaurants are now happy to let you take a partial bottle home with you-- they are required to re-cork it and seal it in a plastic bag along with the receipt, usually-- I think the law varies by state. But boy, were we glad we hadn't bought a whole bottle the other night! (For what it's worth, the Water Street waitress told us they just hired a new manager who was planning to vastly improve their wine list in the near future.)

And if you do happen to go to St. Ann's Warehouse, don't feel you have to get all your drinking done in the nearby restaurants-- they actually have quite a nice little bar area right in the lobby by the box office. And we were quite chagrined to see that they serve Root 1 wine there, which happens to be one of our favorites. And they only charge $6 a glass.

Now Single Ma, you just let me know if you have any other requests! xoxo

Free Water, Expensive Notebook

I got a kick out of this article from the NY Times yesterday: Commuters Overlooking Free Treasure:

I might not have appreciated the marvel of the Grand Central Terminal water fountain if it hadn’t been for the notebook.

I had run into Posman Books after getting off my train and finding myself without a notebook, and grabbed what Moleskine, the high-end paper packager, calls a reporter’s notebook. I’m a reporter; it spoke to me. Until I got to the counter and learned it cost a cool $17.95 plus tax, a sum no reporter I know would shell out for a notebook, even if it came with the story already written in perfect Pulitzer-worthy prose.

I put the notebook back, and felt a flash of frustration. Now I needed a notebook and a drink of water. For most of my adult life, I’ve either commuted through Grand Central or lived within five blocks of it, but I didn’t know of a water fountain in the place.

I was on the brink of buying a bottle of water along with my not-quite-as-overpriced notebook at Rite-Aid, but balked. It’s not just that bottled water is a waste of money and plastic; I also never need as much as a bottle carries, so it would either go to waste or I’d lug it around all day, with a lot of overpriced liquid weighing down my bag.

Maybe the saleswoman knew where a water fountain might be. She didn’t, but asked someone. There was one right by the Chase A.T.M.’s.

There, just a 30-second walk from the saleswoman, who surely must occasionally feel thirst, was the perfect water fountain. The spout juts out from the cool, beige Botticino marble wall of Grand Central, a handsome basin below it, a marble relief of some natural harvest above. Water was arcing above the spout, so high that I felt reassured no thirsty germy toddler had mouthed the metal at the base. A fluid piece of accessible history, that fountain, I later learned, has conveniently been spouting water almost continually since the terminal opened in 1913.

The reporter ends up observing the fountain for a while, and it turns out that hardly anyone ever uses it, which probably won't surprise you. Americans have become so conditioned to drinking bottled water, and to thinking public things are germy (not to mention socialist).

I remember that at one of my previous jobs there was an old-fashioned water fountain-- I went to drink from it one day, not long after I'd started working there, and someone cried out "eww, don't use that!" I never saw anyone else use the fountain, since bottled water was provided by the company. They later switched to using water coolers to save money.

I've also filled a water bottle from fountains while traveling in Europe. I probably wouldn't do it in other countries but it somehow seemed safe there-- every town square seemed to have a fountain. And once, on a mountain hike, I was running out of water when we came to a pipe just sticking out of the side of the mountain, pouring water into a small basin-- I had my doubts about that, but my friend drank it and said for all we knew it was probably from the best, cleanest mountain spring in France!

Anyway, one of the first posts I wrote on this site was about saving money by skipping bottled water, and it's still a rule I try to follow. But unlike that Times reporter, I'm still a sucker for nice notebooks, and I've also written about buying Moleskines! However, I've never paid $17.95 for one, and I recently discovered a much cheaper and almost equivalent brand called Piccadilly, sold at Borders for about 1/3 the price of a Moleskine. So whether it's water or high-end notebooks, never think there aren't ways to shave a few dollars off your budget!

October 2009 Monthly Recap

It's a bit late to be getting to this but here's a look at October's results!
My net worth at the end of October was $383,344, a decline of 1.5% from last month. The decline was entirely due to the stock market being down a bit. Also, my credit card balance was a bit high due to business expenses of over $1,000 that I haven't been reimbursed for yet. But I did okay in terms of saving some cash.

Expenses were as follows:

Condo	$ 1,835	maintenance charge just went up
Bank Charge	$ 71	stupidity: ATM fee and late charges
Business expense	$ 1,060
Charity	$ 100
Clothing	$ 301
Dining/Groceries	$ 828	a very social month, eating out a lot!
Education	$ 26
Entertainment	$ 5	Just Netflix
Gifts Given	$ 55
Household	$ 72
Property Insurance	$ 335	once a year charge
Medical	$ 127
Misc	$ 147
Taxes	$ 2,073
Subscriptions	$ 149	renewed the New Yorker
Travel	$ 76
Utilities	$ 167

If you back out the business expenses, my total outflow was $6,366, so I saved $1,651, or about 20% of my gross salary. We're heading into the home stretch for the year, and I have a holiday vacation planned, plus Christmas shopping, so I may not be saving a whole lot more... but hopefully I can still manage to end the year at or close to my all-time net worth high... we'll see! Onward and upward!

My Great-Aunt Minnie

I've been thinking a lot about my Great-Aunt. I've been meaning to write about her ever since starting this blog, as I mentioned in this post (I gave my great-aunt a water buffalo.), but for some reason I never have. She's now 95 years old and sadly, her health is finally fading and she won't be around much longer. Maybe this is a good thing, in a way-- it must be hard to live so long and feel the pain of losing so many people before your own time comes. My Dad was her nephew and I'm sure she never thought she'd outlive him. But she's never lost her strong spirit, and she's actually been a great financial role model in many ways.

Minnie has always been a great aunt, and a great great-aunt, probably because she never had kids of her own and never married. (Perhaps she was discouraged from doing so by seeing her sister pop out six babies in ten years!)

Minnie would have been referred to as a "career girl" in her youth. After graduating from high school, she started working. I don't know the full details of her early jobs, but I assume they must have been more or less secretarial, as that would have been the norm for that era. At some point she must have shown that she was very capable and not on the marriage track, so she started to be given more responsibility. I remember her telling me she'd worked for a large corporation in the 1940s and was sent to live in New York for several months to set up a new office there. She spent the last 25 or so years of her career working her way up to the position she held until she retired, a very prestigious job that she was the first woman to hold.
I remember visiting her in that office when I was about 8 years old. Minnie always dressed very casually when I'd see her on the weekends, so it was funny to see her wearing a formal skirt suit, with reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck, and I was very impressed to see her doing these important, business-y looking things. Everyone in the office called her "Miss B." rather than using her full last name. This was back in the days when people tended not to call the boss by his or her first name, so this was actually quite informal, but I think Minnie was the type who could allow that kind of cheekiness while still seeming very authoritative! She is a very warm person, always cheerful and easy-going, but she has a certain sporty toughness about her too-- she always used to like to pretend we were boxing right before she'd grab me into a big hug.

I didn't think much about it at the time, but in retrospect, I think it was quite important to me to see a woman running things as someone's boss. She wasn't anyone's mother, she wasn't a teacher or a nurse or a doctor or a store cashier-- I came of age at a time when women already had a lot more options for careers, but other than Minnie, I wasn't close to anyone who went beyond those roles.

Though Minnie worked hard, she never let the job become her life. She had a group of friends she would take vacations with, spending a week each summer at the beach and traveling all over the world, always bringing back little souvenirs, some of which I still have. She always loved sports, and used to swim and play tennis and golf, and I remember her being really good at bowling too! She also went to Red Sox games and got tickets to the Olympics a few times. Every other weekend, she'd be at my grandmother's house when my family visited, and every Christmas, she'd be have to be dragged out of the kitchen and forced to eat instead of serving everyone else. She moved back in with her elderly parents to take care of them at the end of their lives, and ended up staying in that apartment, which was rented, until a few years ago. I sometimes wonder why she never bought a house or a condo, but I suspect there was so much history there that she never wanted to move, and the rent was quite low. The apartment was full of things that my great-grandparents had owned, including a few items I now have in my own home, like a little handmade stool, and an old Saltine cracker tin.

Minnie, of course, grew up during the Depression and like so many others, never lost that frugal mentality. I have no idea what her salary ever was or how she might have invested, but she retired with a pension and I know she must have saved quite a bit of money. Every birthday and Christmas, I'd get $20 or $25 from her, as my many cousins must also have, and I know she gave my father and his sisters larger amounts. When I was in college, I remember her taking me aside once just to give me a $10 bill, "for some pizza," she said. And another time, when I'd gotten a $75 speeding ticket on my way to visit her and my grandmother, she again cornered me secretly to give me the money to pay the ticket-- not that she wanted to encourage me speeding, and not that she was ever the type to spoil anyone-- I guess just because it made her happy to do odd little things like that when you wouldn't expect it.

About 10 years ago, Minnie moved in with my grandmother, and one of my aunts moved in with them. After my grandmother died, her house was sold and my aunts helped Minnie find an assisted living facility. At first, she didn't want to do it-- she was still quite spry and she was horrified at how expensive assisted living was. But as she herself admitted, she was "deaf as a haddock," and she didn't want to become a burden to anyone, so she ended up moving to a lovely community where she dove into every activity that was offered: shopping trips, lectures, concerts, fitness classes... Even a few weeks ago she was still going to tai chi regularly because she knew the instructor would be disappointed if she didn't show up. And here's another thing one of my aunts told me: Minnie recently said that maybe this coming year, she'd finally give up doing her own taxes and have her lawyer do them instead!

As I grew older, Minnie was always interested in my progress. She was very proud of me when I started to work, and when I got my first business card, she was thrilled when I gave her one. Every time I've gotten a new card since, I've always given her one. She has always been far more interested in my career than my own parents, and now that I know her time is limited, I find myself wishing I could reach one more big career milestone, just so I could tell her about it. She also has loved hearing about my travels, and whenever I see a sporting event, I tell her about it-- she's even quite tolerant of my having turned into a Yankees fan! In our family, I am pretty much the only female of my generation who followed in her footsteps as the unmarried "career girl" and it's become a bond between us, something I feel very lucky to have had.