Karma Crash

The content you’re looking for is no longer here. We’re finally beginning to shut this blog down, to remove old content.

We’ve chosen to start with essays that are available elsewhere. Specifically, this article has been edited into our eBook, More Calories Than Cash: Frugality the Zeiger Homestead Way. It contains edited, improved, and expanded versions of essays that used to be available for free on this blog, and new material as well. You can learn more about it, and order it here.

 

 

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4 Responses to Karma Crash

  1. angie says:

    “I benefited too much to claim any sacrifice on my part!”

    I think the point here is, it wasn’t a “sacrifice” for you, at least not in the same sense as it would’ve been for most other families; time and flexibility are something you have to a degree most of the other parents don’t. For them, chaperoning a long-distance trip would be a “sacrifice” in a tangible, quantifiable sense: the sacrifice of actual income or earned vacation days, as in “this trip cost me a week’s pay/vacation.”

    For some families, contributing a chunk of cash to a student event would be no sacrifice at all: They’ve got the money, it’s going to something their own kid is doing, and hell, they needed one more deduction on that 1040 anyway. For you, the donation of cold hard cash would be more of an actual sacrifice.

    Why, no, I haven’t had too much coffee. Why do you ask?

  2. Mark Zeiger says:

    I guess what I’m saying here is that by devoting a week to the trip, I left home at a time when I should have been cutting and hauling firewood, preparing the garden for the upcoming growing season, minding my own business as it were, as well as sleeping in my own bed. I can easily quantify what I gave up, postponed, and, in some ways spent that I wouldn’t have if I’d just stayed home and not volunteered for the trip.

    On the other hand, I’d justified all of that in the first place, before going to the school and volunteering to serve as a chaperone for school trips. And, I ended up having a great time, and getting some important things done in addition to keeping the kids safe and the coach relatively sane.

    So…what does this phrase “too much coffee” mean? I’m unfamiliar with it.

  3. angie says:

    Sorry, Mark. That didn’t come out quite like I planned. I had started that post with some point to make, shifted gears, deleted a few lines, and ended up with my original point forgotten. And me dissing you. I never meant you weren’t sacrificing, or that sacrificing time versus cash is a lesser thing. I think I’d started with some point about how much in this town is run on volunteer labor, (which started from an earlier, unfinished, never-posted comment fragment of mine about “self-sufficiency” and “community”) and the words that would’ve connected the dots fell by the wayside.
    Apparently the Stupid Check on my computer isn’t working.

  4. Mark Zeiger says:

    No worries, Angie! Even if it didn’t come out as you intended, you call things as you see them. If I can’t defend my assertions, I shouldn’t be blogging! Amazingly, through all the convolutions you described, it still came out as a coherent reality check for me.

    I paid big money for the Stupid Check software, downloaded it, but can’t figure out how to turn it on….

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