Bulk Buying at Farmers' Markets

A mix of apples and pears
25% off because we bought in bulk!

We love our Farmers' Markets; as consumers, we find the price and quality generally excellent, and as citizens we like they way they improve our community and environment.
We found another way to save even more money: offer to do a bulk buy of produce. For example, this Sunday we got 25% off by buying a whole box. They let us pick from a selection of fruit so it's not like we'd be stuck chewing the same thing all month!
This is a great deal for us; with 3 adults in the house, we go through fruit at a good clip, especially since I am boosting my fruit consumption to try to bring down my weight and therefore blood pressure. And it's probably a good deal for the farmer, who turned over a lot of product in a short time!

Another Farmers' Market buying tip is to look for the "seconds" or "Number 2s". These are fruits and veggies that are perfectly healthy, but ugly. If you're going to be cooking with them anyway, what do you care that they are shaped like a horror movie? Save the money and give perfectly good food a perfectly good home!

We picked up the box of organic lovelies in the photo this Sunday at the West Seattle Farmer's Market, conveniently located around the block from a pet store, several books stores and even more pubs. Any fruit that survive the week will be made into pies or sauce next Sunday. Then, we'll take the box back to the Farmers' Market for a refill! Saving money can taste great too!

Bottling Wine at Jim and Charlotte's

Wine for immediate consumption
in mason jars

 My friend Charlotte, who taught me everything I know about stocking books at the Mercer Island Thrift Shop, said she needed help bottling wine, so last Saturday Kris and I stopped by to see what we could do.
It seems that Charlotte and her husband Jim used to make wine as part of the Boeing Wine Club decades. They kept this up for a while after Jim retired, but for the past decade had been busy doing other things (Jim was the electronics guy at MITS for years, and put in a huge amount of time tinkering on donated gadgets to get them into sellable condition.) Recently while clearing out a basement room, they came across three carboys that had been put to bed 10 or 15 years ago - surely it was time to bottle them!

Kris, Jim and Charlotte

This was a heck of a lot of fun. We'd bottled wine before at Gallagher's Where-U-Brew, and enjoyed it a lot, but doing it in someone's basement was a whole new experience. The biggest issue is that Gallagher's is heavily optimized for getting it all done quickly; they're all set up with spaces and sinks and gadgetry, whereas this home operation was a lot more casual. Also, at Gallagher's we make the wine from juice and it therefore need not be filtered; at Jim & Charlotte's it had been started from fruit, so we had to run it through a filter (...or else the wine would be chewy. I dunno, that might have been o.k.)
We tinkered with the best arrangement for going from the carboy to the pump to the filter to the bottle and eventually worked out an arrangement involving the counter, a table and a chair. Corking was a challenge; whereas Gallagher's has a neat corking machine and pre-softened corks, we had to soak the corks to make them compressible, carve them to fit, and then hammer into place. It all worked but it was a long series of interesting puzzles to solve. Luckily we all like to have a good time.
There were three carboys: pear, blackberry and plum. The last bits of each we poured into mason jars, on the theory that we were going to drink them right away anyway.
Jim & Charlotte insisted that we take half the bottles. We felt that was a bit much since they'd supplied everything, but on the other hand, we didn't want to argue. We'll make sure it all gets put to good us (already we gave one as a holiday gift as our friend Claudia happened by.)
 They gave us one of the carboys as well - a very generous gift and one we will put to use as soon as the blackberries are in season. The best way to honor the gift of winemaking equipment must surely be to make more wine!
Thanks Jim! Thanks Charlotte!

Rebinding Mom's Bible

Mom's Bible needed rebinding.

It is probably older than I am, and in a lot worse shape.

Mom and her rebound Bible

Although it was not often read, over the course of more than fifty years, both its covers and the spine had come off, although the pieces had been kept together. Around last Christmas, Dave got the great idea of having it rebound, and I agreed to take care of it (...I guess the theory being that once I was in the book business so I must know about this sort of thing.)
Unfortunately I am a bit literal sometimes, and I didn't get the sense that mom was in a hurry to have the binding completed. This was the Christmas when we were moving to a new house, in preparation for buying another house, so what with a couple of moves and everything else, I got nothing done on this project except identify a skilled binder in Pioneer Square who kept very particular hours. I resolved to get this done, but kept putting it off.
Then came the sad time when Uncle Louis passed away. He was a great guy, always full of good humore and fine intelligence, but he frankly got old and the end came. Mom wished to record his death in her family bible, same as she had for other family members, and who was still in possession of it? me.
I had to move fast!

Inside Phil's Custom Bindery

Bookbinding tools

Using the google machine I found Phil's Custom Bindery located, not in Pioneer Square, but just a couple of miles from here in a small industrial park. Phil is a real character; he talked about books and about other stuff for at least half an hour before I finally had to leave to get other work done. His shop was fun to look at, including several old bookbinding gadgets, plus some modern printing machinery in the back, on which he was producing something with the curiously named "Perfect Binding".

Phil Shows His Work

Mom was very pleased with the result, and the price was not bad. I had to talk another half hour with Phil but that was fun too! I'll definitely come back the next time I have another project like this!

Harry Potter and the Elements Song

Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements" sung by Mr. Radcliffe ... true geeky fun:

4freeCLE Techniques

The Sissor and the Dollar:
symbol of 4freeCLE's
characteristic bluntness

My hobbyblog 4freeCLE catalogs free continuing legal education, using a number of shortcuts to simplify the job. Here's my notes on the process to help me to remember and you to copy.

Monitoring

• Gmail Reader - monitors a lot of sites that have RSS feeds
• For the rest, there's a number of change-detection sites. I use http://www.changedetection.com/log/ but have no reason to think that others might not work just as well (subject to the usual caveats of internet hygiene: don't go along with any registration process that wants too much information.)

Publicizing

• In the beginning, there was http://groups.yahoo.com/group/4freeCLE/. This is a stone-simple listserve with nice archiving ability - something very important to people looking to see what has been available, on the theory that it might become available again. Listserves that don't include easy archive access are missing a big chunk of functionality, but I've seen them done by people who should know better.
• When blogs became popular, I added http://4freecle.blogspot.com/. I briefly experimented with automatically updating this blog from the listserve; it was straightforward to parameterize the blog to accept email additions (subject to certain security measures) and then add the blog's email address to the listserve. Unfortunately the posts often didn't look right; typically there was some signature trash or something at the end. Still, this was pretty convenient and perhaps I'll return to it someday. As it is, I simply "BCC" the blog when I email the listserve.
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/4freeCLE was amazingly easy to set up. I never post there directly, but instead use TwitterFeed to automatically post whatever goes up on the blogspot. Every now and then I log into 4freeCLE/twitter so I can "follow" a few more lawyers; this will often get them to "follow" in return and help share the awesomeness that is 4freeCLE on Twitter.

Sharing the Work
With the number of people out there looking for free CLE, you might think there would be more people interested in contributing to a catalog - but there aren't. There are rather few people who actually submit their work to me to add;  I always encourage them to post directly but so far, no-one wants the responsibility. You can see the two or three entrepreneurial types who actually send stuff - that's why Ohio and California and the Washington State ACLU have an exceptional number of entries.

That's about it for now. If I think of something else, I'll add it.

Turning Gold into Gold!

Weighing the gold

With gold prices above a thousand dollars an ounce (and with a very weak idea of how much an ounce weighs) I resolved to sell the ring from my 2nd marriage the next time I went by West Seattle Coins. Why not? I'm very happy with my third (!and final!) marriage and have no need of this relic from my second (!and worst!) one.  It has no artistic value (being a plain gold band, with "ludmila" in cyrillic carved on the inside) and I can think of something better to do with its cash value.

The process was pretty straightforward. There were a couple of people ahead of me, so I looked around at the shiny shiny coins in glass cases. If I were buying instead of selling, I'd have been mightily tempted!

When it got to be my turn, the actual sale itself took about 30 seconds. The guy weighed the ring, made me an offer, and paid in cash. My ring was way under an ounce and of course it wasn't pure gold, but I had a moment of disappointment at the price. Still, upon reflection, it seemed fair and I'm glad I took the money. The gold in the old ring means a lot less to me than the gold in my credit union account!

I would suggest before selling a ring from a past marriage, that you weigh it carefully and then use the google to get some idea of what gold is selling for (...keeping in mind you won't get the "Price Of Gold" since your item isn't pure, plus the shopkeeper has overhead.) If you have some idea of the money you may be getting, then you won't have to make a spot decision whether you're happy with the offer or not.