Month: August 2019

Thrift and Laundry

My family wasn’t a religious one, so my Mother kind of substituted the Girl Scout Laws for the ten commandments. One was “a Girl Scout is thrifty”. When I first ran into this, I didn’t even know what ‘thrifty’ was.” It’s when you don’t waste your money on frivolous things”, said Mom. “What’s ‘frivolous’, I wondered…but I eventually figured out the thrifty thing. It was actually easy to be very thrifty on 10 cents a week allowance! This has carried over into adulthood and a few years ago my daughter introduced me to saving a bundle by making my own laundry detergent for just pennies, which I have done ever since. The site I found the recipe on had actually tested it against major brands and found the homemade version is a winner. See the tests at https://cornerstoneconfessions.com/2013/11/laundry-detergent-comparision.html.  This laundry detergent is not hard to make and I’m happy to include it as the first Third Age Thoughts money-saving tip:

By the way, the old Girl Scout laws that I grew up with seem to be retired. Modern Girl Scouts don’t have to be ‘thrifty’, per se, but they do need to ‘use resources wisely’.

Sunflower Maze

In my quest to get visiting grandkids to do something other than screen time I located a sunflower maze at Goldpetal Farms in St. Mary’s County. “We should do this,” I suggested, and luckily, they seemed willing enough. Later, I was rewarded by GD #1 saying, “Mazes are FUN!” when we were actually there walking the path under the towering flowers. Three was a good number to do the maze thing because every time we got to a branch of the maze, there was someone to break the tie if we couldn’t get consensus on which way to go. Yes, it was fun, but we sure were running into a lot of dead ends! And we drank up all the iced tea I had prepared! And it was HOT! We prided ourselves on not using the map, but it seemed to me we kept stumbling on places that we had been before. I spotted three teenagers clutching a crumpled bit of paper. Could they be using the map? I couldn’t tell, but the next time I had to break the tie about what direction to go I pointed to the way I had seen the teens go. Soon after, we made it out! At the exit they had a painting station so you could do a watercolor after your sunflower immersion experience. Later, back home, I was able to also complete a sunflower oil painting of GD #3.