The Cheapskate Intellectual

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

A cheapskate update: Considering, reorienting, refocusing.

What you see here is the result of my past couple blogging-less weeks of garden work: several big and long-planned projects including the construction, priming, and painting of a new fence (to the far right, now completely enclosing the yard – other people built it and primed it, I painted it); weeding everything and trucking […]

Read more

A tale of two lawnmowers; or, gardening against the Singularity.

Or, two ways of looking at a lawn.  (With another glass of wine I might be able to manage the standard thirteen….) Mower A: Mower B: Mower A: used, gas-powered Craftsman gifted to me by my brother-in-law, then traveled by circuitous routes involving broken promises of mower transit in an SUV by male family members […]

Read more

Preserving.

In the words of the great Candi Staton, self-preservation is what’s really going on today. Or what went on yesterday, for the first time ever in the Cheapskate Intellectual kitchen. But it won’t be the last. Following the directions in the super-easy and super-fun book CANNING FOR A NEW GENERATION, I rendered a colander full […]

Read more

Hair with body — literally.

This is me this past weekend, celebrating my summer self.  Gloriously, the season is shifting inside my head — the loosening and breathing and unconscious release of the anxious, trouble-borrowing, multitasking clench which I realize only in retrospect is my school-year norm.  And the shift is outside my head too.  Literally, right on top. Because […]

Read more

Being a tough gal.

“Be like Flannery,” the late, great Barry Hannah said to our creative writing class at the University of Mississippi, looking at me.  It was the fall of 1995.  I was twenty-one, there as a visiting student to write with him, drink and smoke at City Grocery, moon around the aisles of Square Books, and hang […]

Read more