The Cheapskate Intellectual

A journey through matters of spirit, sustainability, and self-reliance

A vermicular update — and some home composting lessons.

A couple of posts ago, you read about my new experiment in home vermicomposting. But since then I’ve learned there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it.  Basically, I now wish I’d started with one of these pictured here — a Worm Factory 360 — from the beginning rather than […]

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Gettin’ worms.

The kitchen of your mama’s house in Alabama is not the best place to announce to your family – all human and animal doctors whose lives are full of horses, cattle, and dogs — that you are about to embark on home vermiculture. Especially if you phrase it, casually, “Hey, y’all, when I get back […]

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Paula Deen and American appetites.

“Southern or not, we all live somewhere on a continuum between Tofurky and Terducken.” — Bob Rini Today the news broke that Paula Deen has Type 2 diabetes. <Pause for Inner Moral Battle that probably ends with Guilty, Helpless Succumbing to Pithy/Catty Line about Oh, The Irony.> Me, I immediately flashed on the recent MLA […]

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Mary, Martha, and cheapskate intellectualism: the New Year’s organizing dilemma.

Every year, fresh from days away at my family home where there are friendly differences about — shall we say — organizing styles, I return to my own little house and see the place with fresh eyes.  Somehow, as good as I usually am about filing and purging, the place just looks full.  The line […]

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Polar bears on a Coke can.

Today, just before Christmas, finishing up my grading and trying to cut down on the caffeine that’s one of the many things spiking my blood pressure this month, I picked up a can of Coke from the cooler in our student union.  Those who knew me in grad school, when I drank about a case […]

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“The Higgs bison:” beasts, songs, bloops, and the creaturely deep.

The ghostly, homely faces of these beasts floated into my mind earlier last week when I misread a New York Times headline at the top of my webmail page. “Physicists will have to wait a little longer for Higgs Boson,” the tagline read.  Of course, I read it first as “Higgs Bison.” But considering what […]

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The emotional surge of the charity splurge.

Back in September, as I was experiencing my first tentative steps into relative debt-free-ness, I received an email from a friend about a concert her husband was co-producing in Manhattan to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, called “Music After.”   Anything you can send, she said, would help.  I gave a small amount […]

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