ten outfits under $30.

A while ago, I showcased my bargain hunting prowess by showing you ten complete outfits that cost $40 or less – for the WHOLE outfit. (Care to revisit? Go here: outfits under $40!) 

Well, nine months have passed, and I’ve found myself with a whole new crop of beautiful bargains (plus some that I didn’t show you before). So I’ve got ten more outfits for you!

The same rules apply as last time: no foundation garments – tank tops, etc – as part of my total, for that gets boring and complicated; prices may not be exact, but are estimated to the best of my memory. I am almost positive that I am within fifty cents of each price, and that’s not too shabby! However, I did make one change: this time around, all of the outfits total $30 or less. Yes, I tightened the belt and did some seriously creative (and intense! I almost died at Savers!) shopping, but I happily present to you my top ten outfits under $30!

(a note about the pictures: James and I took them all in one day in different parts of our house, so you get a little tour of our house at the same time!)

dress – Maurices – $7 (buy one get one free)

sandals – JCPenney – $3 (fall super sale)

belt – Forever 21 – $5.80

blazer – Maurices –$2 (half off clearance and $10 off coupon)

necklace – Michael’s – $3 (employee discount)

TOTAL = $20.80

In my last blog about my cheap outfits, I told you all about how Maurices goes on crazy mark-down sprees, and that’s how I score a great deal of my work clothes. The dress was part of a 50% off the lowest marked price sale, PLUS buy one clearance thing, get another clearance thing free. I was able to find two clearance dresses for about $14, hence the average price of $7. The blazer was also part of the 50% off the lowest marked price sale, but I also had a $10 off coupon from using my Maurices stamp card. The sandals were from a phenomenal end-of-September sale at JCPenney. I had just moved from Minneapolis to almost Sioux Falls: I was working in Sioux Falls but couldn’t move into my apartment until October 7, so I was commuting from Brookings (where I was staying in my grandma’s house – vacant since she had moved to assisted living) or Ellsworth (where James lived/was teaching). Most of my income was spent on gas, so the $3 sandals were about all I could afford. I wear them ALL THE TIME, so it was $3 well spent.

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shirt – Goodwill St Paul – $2.50 (half off day)

necklace – Forever 21 – $4.80

shoes – American Eagle – $6

pants – Forever 21 – $15.80

TOTAL = $29.10

The secret to the totally awesome Goodwill deals that I manage to find lies within three simple words: patience, location, and sales. You have to have the patience to dig through the (oft calamitous) racks to find a good shirt or two, so it’s essential that you go to Goodwill when you’re in the right mindset. The location also makes a huge difference: I’ve been able to find much better stuff at the St Paul Goodwill than I ever have in Sioux Falls. Finally, go on a Goodwill sale day. Yes, their stuff is pretty cheap without the sales, but it never hurts. Maybe one day a week, Goodwill will offer half off on tags of a certain color. I scored this shirt when Goodwill had 50% off EVERYTHING. That was quite the day.

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jeans – Forever21 – $10.80

poncho – Goodwill St Paul – $4.49 (half off all clothes)

shoes – Target – $9.98

pearl bracelets – Helzberg – FREE! 

TOTAL = $25.27

I never thought of myself as a poncho kind of person, but when you find one at Goodwill for less than five dollars, you might as well give it a try. Throw in some super stretchy pants and some Target shoes, and you have the comfiest outfit ever. And the pearl bracelets? James got them from Helzberg for free. Since he bought my engagement ring from them, every now and again, they’ll give him (and by “him”, I mean me) some kind of little freebie: in this case, pearl bracelets. Cool, huh?

trousers – Y’s Buys – $4.79        

shirt – Savers – $3 (half off day)

shoes – Target – $14.98

bracelet – Brookings Summer Arts Festival – $5

TOTAL = $27.77

Savers is a dangerous place. It’s a thrift store in Sioux Falls, and you’ll usually find that it’s quite busy. It has the most obnoxious dressing rooms: there are just a few of them, and they’re located against a wall at the end of a bunch of racks of clothes. Whenever I go there, there’s always a huge line for the dressing rooms, but there’s really nowhere to line up. People line up in between the racks of clothes, so there’s no way to actually look through said clothes. Plus, there’s also no real way to tell who is next in line. You get a dressing room at Savers by being faster than the guy next to you. Anyway, I got this blue shirt at Savers on half-off day. My friends, I almost died. Savers rarely has half-off day, and the store was a complete zoo. I got shoved into racks, run over by shopping carts, and you can just forget about a dressing room. I really like this shirt, so I guess I can tell myself that it was worth it. The pants came from another thrift shop in Sioux Falls called Y’s Buys. The pants were way too long, so – instead of hemming them like a normal person – I used fabric tape to fix the hems. It was pretty messy – especially when I forgot about the tape and put the pants in the dryer. Imagine little balls of melted fabric tape stuck EVERYWHERE. I finally took them to be professionally hemmed, and I warned them about the fabric tape. I said, “If the fabric tape won’t come off, don’t hem the pants.” After all, why would I want hemmed pants with bits of fabric tape stuck to them? Apparently, the alterations lady heard “go right ahead and hem the pants – don’t worry about the hem tape!” When I went to pick up the pants, they were hemmed – but the fabric tape was now on the OUTSIDE of the pants. Thankfully, the dry cleaner was able to save the day, but I know which Sioux Falls alteration shop is never getting my pants again! So even though these pants ended up being way more expensive than I had anticipated, we’re just going with the original Y’s Buys price. Finally, the bracelet. It’s the coolest thing ever: it’s made of out of this super bendy wire, so you can shape it however you want. I got it at one of my favorite places on earth: the Brookings Summer Arts Festival, where you can find good food, good people watching, and great crafts/jewelry/paintings/woodwork/whatever.

t-shirt – Target – $3

scarf – Charlotte Russe – $9.50

schooner charm – Hobby Lobby – $2.50 (40% off coupon)

jeans – Savers – $6.50 (half off day)

sandals – Target – $5-ish 

belt – Target – FREE! 

button bracelet – Claire’s/found button – $.50 

TOTAL = $27

I’m a big fan of Hobby Lobby. They sell all sorts of crazy charms (like this one – a schooner), and I can just slap them on a chain and call them jewelry. The jeans (you can't see in this picture, but they have sparkly back pockets! oh boy!) came from Savers on that fateful half-off day, and my belt is one of those freebies that came on a pair of pants (not shown, because they’re actually kind of dorky and were sent to the consignment store ages ago) that I bought at Target. But let’s talk about the bracelet. Years ago, my mom and I had gone to the Claire’s store in the Watertown mall. I don’t know if they do this anymore, but at that time, Claire’s would have these big clearance sales where you could pick out ten items from the clearance rack and only pay five dollars. Most of that stuff is long since gone – as I was probably eleven at the time, my tastes have changed. However, this bracelet made it through. It’s made of this guitar string-y material, and even though I’ve lost some of the bands over the years (they sort of un-snap), there are four that remain. I threaded a button on the bracelet, and it’s one of my go-to bracelets. But it’s not just any button: it’s a button from an Arlington High School band uniform. I found it on the ground in the band room in 2003-ish, and it’s been on my bracelet ever since. What a dork.

 

My pants look way too short in this picture,
but they're actually not. Trust me.

shirt – Younkers – $4.50

cardigan – Gap – $7 (40% off clearance)

Seven jeans – Goodwill Omaha – $7.99 

anchor charm – Hobby Lobby – $.99 (1/2 off)

shoes – Target – $7-ish

TOTAL = $27.48

In my last cheap clothing blog, I talked about how it was tough to find good thrift store jeans – that’s why the last blog was heavy on dresses and dress pants. I would like to rescind my statement. Apparently, I was just looking in the wrong thrift store. This is the third pair of SIX cheap jeans that I’ll feature in this blog. All of them but one pair came from thrift or consignment shops, and the one pair that didn’t came from Forever21 (which might be a step below a thrift store, depending on whom you ask). This pair came from Omaha, and they were a little spendy for thrift store jeans (eight dollars, I KNOW), but let me tell you, they are comfy.

Seven jeans – Redeemed – FREE! 

shirt – Kmart – $5.50

scarf – Gap – $10.40 (40% off)

sandals – Gap Outlet – $7-ish

belt – JCPenney – $5

TOTAL = $27.90

I know what you’re thinking – Kmart? REALLY? Yes, really. This all came about because I wanted some new work shirts. I was flipping through a Redbook, and they have this super-handy section where they round up 50 fashion items for under $50. One of their examples was from Kmart, and I was downright impressed. So I went to Kmart’s website, found said shirt, and paid a pittance for it. This blue shirt came about because I needed to meet a minimum dollar amount to get free shipping. WORTH IT. And just how did I manage to wrangle a pair of free jeans? This, my friends, is quite the story. James and I went to Winnipeg for our honeymoon, and we spent some time exploring the different neighborhoods with all their neat shops and restaurants. Our travels led us to a consignment store called Redeemed – it was all women’s clothing, so James chatted up a woman working there while I perused. James let it slide that we were Americans – “Oh, we LOVE Americans!” and that we were on our honeymoon. I found two items to my liking – a blazer and a dress. When I went to pay for them, this woman (who we found out was the store’s owner) said, “Well, I’m going to give you a honeymoon discount.” My total – which would’ve been about $60 – was reduced to $20. She then wrote us a gift certificate for $20 and suggested that we visit Redeemed’s second location. Stunned by her generosity, we headed over to the second location, where I found this pair of jeans and a sweater. We presented our gift certificate to the cashier, and on it, the store owner had written “for their honeymoon!” Upon seeing this, the cashier said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was your honeymoon! I’d better get you a honeymoon discount!” After the honeymoon discount and the $20 gift certificate, the total for the jeans and sweater came to $9. The cashier paused for a second and said, “You know what? Don’t worry about it. Happy honeymoon!” Yep: a sweater and jeans, totally free. I was familiar with the stereotype of the super nice Canadian, and I’m here to tell you that it’s 100% true. The manager of our hotel bought us dinner when he found out we were on our honeymoon. We were greeted with smiles wherever we went. Cars happily made room for other cars to change lanes. Canada was so much friendlier that it was almost a different world. After our experience in Winnipeg, James and I are doing our best to be Canadian: we’re trying to be nicer and all-around better people. WWCD: What Would Canada Do?

jeans – Winnipeg Salvation Army – $5.99

tank – Younkers – $4.50

shoes – JCPenney – $13

telephone charm – Michael’s – $3 (40% coupon)

TOTAL = $26.49

The Salvation Army is one thrift store that I don’t really visit. We’ve got one in Sioux Falls, but every time I’ve been there, I’ve come away feeling like I need a shower and possibly some penicillin. The Salvation Army in Winnipeg was nothing like that. Sure, there were some less-than-savory characters roaming the aisles, but on the whole, it was clean and inviting. These shoes came from the sale rack at JCPenney, and I was originally hesitant about them – they’ve got lime green on them, after all. I bought them anyway, and I am so glad I did. Not only did I decide that the lime green is, in fact, AWESOME, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more compliments on a pair of shoes.

jeans – Goodwill Brookings – $4.25

Converses – Converse Outlet – $15

sweatshirt – Goodwill Brookings – $3.75

TOTAL = $23.00

Yes, another pair of thrift store jeans. I stumbled across these while trying on jeans at Goodwill, my goal being to find a pair that I could turn into cut-offs for the summer. These jeans were too good to turn into shorts, so they stayed whole (other jeans I bought that day did fall victim to my scissors). The shoes came from the Converse outlet store in Albertville, MN. Outlet stores can be a hit or a miss, but I consider neon pink Chuck Taylors to be a hit.

Forgive my pasty white legs. It is January, after all.

shorts – JCPenney – $7.99

belt – JCPenney – $1.99 

shirt – Younkers – $4.50

shoes– Charlotte Russe – $7

necklace – etsy – FREE! 

TOTAL = $21.48

I do believe this is the first pair of shorts that I’ve shown you on the blog. Well, I wanted a pair of green shorts, and JCPenney happened to have a super cheap pair for me. They also happened to have a dirt cheap belt (and it's REVERSIBLE - there are lobsters on the other side!), which I couldn’t resist. It is indeed from the men’s section, but it’s a belt. You can’t tell. You may be wondering how I managed to get my necklace for free. Online surveys, that’s how. Back when I was super poor, I signed up for these online survey companies. You take little surveys about new products or commercials or insurance or whatever, and you earn money. Not a lot of money per survey, but some. Once in a while, I even got a product test – and when you can barely afford shampoo, getting some free shampoo to test is a Godsend. Anyway, once you get to a certain dollar amount in your survey account, you can cash it out for a check, Amazon gift card, whatever. This particular go-round, I cashed out for PayPal credit, which I promptly used to buy this necklace. So technically it wasn’t free, but it’s my blog, and I’m calling it free.

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There you have it: ten outfits under $30. This time around, my finds came from 24 different places: eight clothing stores, five thrift/consignment shops, two craft stores, two big box stores, two outlet stores, one costume jewelry store, one real jewelry store, one summer arts festival, one online crafty/jewelry/a bit of everything store, and one band room floor. Not too shabby.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my latest thrifty-chic fashion show. Until next time, you can find me digging through your local Goodwill!

the Craigslist chronicles: the Plymouth garage/apartment.

I was living in New Orleans at the end of 2009 when I started making plans to move to Minneapolis. I had accepted an internship at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and my part-time job at American Eagle would transfer to one of the locations in the Cities. I was excited and ready to be back in the Midwest: I had spent three months in New Orleans, and previous to that, three months in Denver. I’d been away from my family, friends, and (then-boyfriend, now husband) James for long enough.

James was just finishing up his requirements for his music education degree, and it was time for him to do his student teaching. He was able to secure a student teaching job about forty minutes away from Minneapolis, and that meant that (hallelujah!) we could share an apartment. Neither of us could’ve afforded one on our own – James was student teaching full-time, and my part-time retail wages could only go so far. We decided we’d search for a place in Plymouth, Minnesota: a suburb that was about halfway between where I needed to be and where James needed to be. (We would later use this logic to buy a house in Luverne – we figured that it worked once – why not again!)

Since I was still in New Orleans, it fell to James to find us a place to live. Craigslist is the go-to apartment hunting site when you don’t have much money to throw around, so that’s just where he started looking. There were some affordable studio apartments in legitimate apartment buildings, but these apartments would only allow one person to live in the studio (that’s the price you pay for being a legitimate apartment building), but for maximum affordability and a more lax attitude towards fire codes, Craigslist was the answer.

James found something almost right away. It was a garage-turned-studio apartment located directly underneath the main house. The location was right and the price was right, so James got us that apartment… and I had never seen it.

We moved in on a frigid day in January. We only had two carloads: my Mercury Sable and James’s Oldsmobile Delta 88.  In order to get to our little apartment, we had to park sideways on a downhill driveway off-shoot thing and walk down some treacherous steps (which were always icy, no matter how often we salted them) to get to our door. That driveway was such a pain: since it was downhill, James’s rear-wheel drive car got stuck on the ice a time or two and had to be hauled out by my sturdy Sable.

The apartment itself wasn’t much to look at: it was about 400 square feet, and everything was brown. The kitchen and bathroom were recently remodeled, so those were actually quite nice. Sad to say, the kitchen and bathroom there were nicer than any kitchen or bathroom I’ve had since – including the house we just bought.

The nice kitchen and bathroom did little to disguise the fact that this place was SMALL. It was larger than the shed I lived in while in New Orleans (which is a story for another time), but I didn’t have to share my shed with another person. If there was ever a test for James’s and my relationship, this was it.

James and I did our best to make our little studio seem hospitable. We had no bed, so we got a free one from Craigslist – gross, I know, but desperate times call for desperate measures – that we tied to the roof of James’s Oldsmobile and hauled home. Our furniture was nothing but a fabric fold-up dish chair that I’d had in college, some white plastic patio furniture lent to us by the landlords, and some plastic crates that made do as a TV stand. It’s just as well that we didn’t have any real furniture, as we wouldn’t have had anywhere to put it anyway.

As you might imagine, this apartment didn’t have the amenities of a normal apartment building. That meant that we had nowhere to do our laundry. Whenever I went to visit my parents, I’d haul my laundry home with me and do it there. If I went too long without going home, I had to make the (expensive) trip to the (super creepy/dirty) laundromat. I wanted to avoid the laundromat as long as possible, so one frosty evening when I was out of clean jeans, I decided that I’d wash them myself. Since I am an idiot, I washed about five pairs in the shower. I soaked myself and the entire bathroom, and – realizing that I hadn’t thought out how I was going to dry these jeans – ended up hanging them up to dry outside. Soaking wet jeans. In February. Care to guess how this turned out? Frozen jeans, that’s how.

Shortly after we moved in, we noticed that our apartment smelled strongly of wet dog. We also found that our clothes had dog hair on them. But how? We didn’t have a dog. Well, it turned out that our landlords were dog sitters, and the dog smell and hair found their way in through the vents.

Speaking of the dogs, one of our landlords (they were a husband and wife landlord pair) would let the dogs out a couple of times a day. He didn’t work, so he was always around to take care of the dogs. Their backyard was right next to our front door, which wasn’t so much a front door as a big glass patio door with a curtain over it. The landlord would stand in the corner of the backyard and stare in those windows, sometimes even coming close enough to press his nose on the glass. Needless to say, we kept the curtains closed at all times.

We had only signed a six-month lease, so our time was due to run out at the end of June. James wasn’t as opposed to staying as I was: he liked the fact that it was cheap and that we were already there – no moving required. Sure, it was cheap, but with summer coming, I wasn’t sure if I could handle the dog smell in hot weather. Besides, I was tired of the landlord peeking in the windows. Not only that, but I spent my entire time in that apartment running from part-time job to part-time job, constantly worrying about how I was going to buy food. That apartment made me think of that sickening “will I make the rent this month” feeling, and I was ready to leave that behind. One of my part-time jobs had just turned into a full-time job, and that meant I could upgrade to an apartment where your bedroom and your living room and your dining room weren’t all in the same space. I wanted a fresh start my own real-person apartment.

Our decision was made for us when our landlords informed us that the tenant who had lived in that apartment before us wanted his old place back. He had been there for three years (!!!) and missed it. So, much to James’s chagrin, staying in the studio was no longer an option. Our landlords did have a proposal for us: would we like to rent space in their basement? We’d have to sleep on a futon, use a curtain as our walls/door, and share their kitchen with them, but they thought it was a great idea. The landlords were practically foaming at the mouth at the thought of having two rental incomes. We politely declined and immediately commenced searching for our real-person apartment.

That was the third and final time I trusted Craigslist to find me a place to live. I’ve covered the first (creepy landlord in New Orleans where I thought I might be murdered) and the third (what you just read!), but the second Craigslist living situation story (the shed) is by far the best. It’s one of those stories that is so ridiculous that I really have to think about how I’m going to write it lest you think I’m making it up – but trust me, this story is so bizarre that I couldn’t possibly make it up. It will be worth the wait.

guilty pleasures: Teen Mom.

I have something to admit to you.

I am not the sophisticated individual you think I am. (Did you ever believe that? On the off change that you did, I’m about to smash your illusions.) I have a secret – a shameful secret that only a few of my closest friends know. But it’s time for me to admit to the world that I have a problem.

I watch Teen Mom.

MTV lured me in with 16 and Pregnant, which is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a reality show about pregnant teenagers. Each show was an hour-long peek into these teenagers’ lives, and there was a pretty basic formula: teen gets pregnant + teen is sure she’ll be with her skeezy boyfriend forever + parents do not approve of skeezy boyfriend + teen haves baby and discovers taking care of it is harder than she thought + skeezy boyfriend flakes out + teen is left all alone with a baby + teen drops out of school and laments for her lost youth.

Every now and again, you’d have an anomaly: the baby daddy would actually stick around, or the teen would go back to school and graduate. More often than not, though, they would end up sad, alone, and plus one baby.

Teen Mom spawned (ha!) from 16 and Pregnant: MTV chose four of the twelve-ish teens to feature on their own spin-off show. The viewing audience got to see what it was like to be a teenager trying to raise a baby and all the (inevitable) drama that comes with it. Teen Mom has since been followed with Teen Mom 2 and 3, but it was the original that sucked me in.

So why did I watch? Honestly, I’m not quite sure. I started watching around the time I moved to Minneapolis. I lived in a tiny studio apartment/former garage, and I worked three part-time jobs so I could pay rent/eat/complete my unpaid internship at the art museum. I was barely eking by, but Teen Mom showed me that it could always be worse: at least I wasn’t living in a studio apartment with three part time jobs with a baby while trying to finish high school. Sure puts things in perspective.

I also watched because their lives were so different than mine. They were going through things I will never experience – “never” is a strong word, but I can confidently say that I will never be a teen mom (because I’m 26) and I will never have to try and raise a baby while in high school (because high school is far behind me).

I kept Teen Mom a secret for months – James didn’t even know I watched it, and we lived in the tiny studio together. The first time I admitted that I watched Teen Mom was to one of my fellow interns (who shall remain nameless just in case she doesn’t want the world to know that she watches Teen Mom). I don’t remember how it came up, but it was a “you watch Teen Mom? I watch Teen Mom!” moment. We bonded instantly.

We watched Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, and we compared notes after each show. We were always amazed at the amount of screaming and cursing, and we shook our heads at some of these girls who just couldn’t let go of the deadbeat dads.

What made Teen Mom 2 especially interesting to us is that one of the teen moms lived in Sioux Falls. My friend’s dad lived in Sioux Falls, so she was also familiar with the area. It was always fun when we recognized the place where the SD teen mom was eating or what part of town she was in. One day, my friend was visiting her dad when they noticed a film crew at one of the houses down the street – turns out that the teen mom and my friend’s dad were practically neighbors! Small world.

We knew that the teen moms had to be getting paid to be on the show, but it became significantly less fun to watch when all their money started showing. At the beginning of each Teen Mom series, you saw the real struggles: how to pay for diapers, what to do with the baby when you have to get a job, how to manage going back to school, how much to rely on your parents, etcetera. However, when the money rolled in, all you saw were the teen moms fighting with their baby daddies and whining about they never get to go out (but go out all the time anyway). They were no longer typical teen moms – they were buying fancy cars, living in huge apartments, getting boob jobs and elaborate tattoos… and almost none of them even held a part-time job. A couple of them started to go to college, but some dropped out – it could just be MTV’s editing, but it seemed the drop-outs left school because they just didn’t feel like putting in the work.

This is where MTV caught some flak for Teen Mom. Its critics argued that it made teen motherhood look too easy. I wouldn’t say it looked easy – as someone who doesn’t have the foggiest idea of how to deal with children, any interaction at all with a baby qualifies as hard work in my book – but it certainly wasn’t a realistic portrayal of what it’s like to have a baby when you’re a teenager. Your average teen mom isn’t going to be able to hop in her brand new BMW and eat out all the time and pay hundreds of dollars for her back tattoo – but that’s exactly what the MTV teen moms were doing. Their personal lives were still a mess – two of them spent time in jail/rehab, one of them got divorced six months after she got married, etc – but the real-life financial problems had all but vanished.

The original Teen Mom has reached its end, and I’m not sure what the fate of Teen Mom 2 will be. If they come out with another season of Teen Mom 2, honestly, I’ll probably watch it – if only to see what places I recognize in the Sioux Falls teen mom’s segments. I started to watch Teen Mom 3, but those teen moms are the whiniest bunch to emerge from MTV’s schedule, so it didn’t take me long to give up on them. Even I have standards.

let's talk about classroom pets.

I might sound like an old person when I say this, but do kids these days (there it is) have school pets?

School pets were a big deal when I graced the elementary school halls. Why? Because you had the opportunity to take them home for the weekend, and that was THE BEST THING EVER. Second grade and fourth grade were the years of the take-home-able classroom pets. (Not that there weren’t other classroom pets. We had fish in third grade and in the high school biology classroom, and the junior high science teacher had snakes, but those never left the building… except when the snakes escaped, but that’s another story.) I had the same teacher for second grade and fourth grade, and she liked rats and hamsters. I don’t remember the second grade hamster’s name, but there was a white rat named Whitney. In fourth grade, the class hamster was named Tiger, and there were two white rats named Snowball and Mitzy.

The hamster and rats went home with someone every weekend. If you were interested in taking a pet home, you’d sign up with the teacher and go through a rotation. When it was your turn to take your pet home, you’d just haul the whole cage home with you.

Enter the second grade classroom. I was a seven-year-old who didn’t think to ask her parents if it was ok to take the rat home for the weekend. I didn’t care about the hamster, so I signed up on the rat list. I eagerly awaited my turn to take the rat home, and when the day finally arrived, I dragged the rat cage home with me on the bus. Whitney the rat and I arrived home in one piece… until my mother found out that I’d brought a rat home.

I had no idea what the big deal was. It was just a little rat, and she was so cute!

Aww!

Mom – not one for rodents – disagreed. She conceded that there wasn’t much we could do now (as it was the weekend, and there was no one to take the rat off our hands), but I was under threat of death to NEVER bring a rat home again.

I loved having Whitney the rat for the weekend. Besides some ill-fated fish, I’d never had indoor pets before, and I thought it was great. Whitney had a plastic rat ball, and she’d roll around the house. That night, I set her cage on top of my dresser and placed her inside.

Now, I don’t know if I forgot to shut the lid on the cage or what, but when Mom came in to check on me that night, she found herself face-to-face with Whitney the rat. Whitney had gotten out of her cage and was sitting right on top. Mom quickly woke me up and told me that I’d better get that rat back in her cage. I snuck up on Whitney… but then she slid behind the dresser. Mom then had to go wake Dad to get him to move the gigantic dresser, and I was finally able to corner Whitney. From that point on, Whitney’s cage remained closed (with a bunch of books on top for extra security). The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully and on Monday, Whitney made it safely back to school. However, not too long afterwards (I’d like to say it was the very next week, but I could be wrong), another classmate took Whitney the rat home for the weekend – and she never came back. (Whitney the rat was an escape artist, after all.)

So that was the last time I got to take a pet rat home. I had to settle for going over to my friend Allison’s house for sleepovers whenever she got to take the rats home. In fourth grade, we had two white rats: Snowball and Mitzy. These rats weren’t simply classroom pets: they were science experiments. Before you get all animal rights on me, let me tell you that these were science experiments in the loosest sense. We did rudimentary tests like giving one sugar water and one regular water and measuring their tails to see how long they grew (in order to tell which was which, we marked them with those scented markers – one rat was red, one was purple). The rest of the time, they just got to roam around on our desks during free time.

The other furry occupant of the fourth grade room was the hamster named Tiger. While my parents had informed me that there was no way I could take the rats home, they decided that the hamster would be fine. I arrived at school on the Friday I was supposed to take Tiger home, only to find that his cage was empty. When the whole class had assembled, our teacher announced that Tiger was no more. We pressed her – what had happened to our beloved classroom pet? Our teacher reluctantly told us the grim tale: Snowball and Mitzy had gotten out of their cage and into the hamster cage, and they ATE OUR HAMSTER. Taking the pet rats home for the weekend suddenly sounded a lot less appealing.

And that’s where my experience with rodents ends. Thanks to that less-than-pleasant experience (and much to my parents’ pleasure), I stopped asking for white rats for Christmas (as substitutes, my parents brought me little rubber ones they got at the Grain Dealers’ convention every year). So if your kids ever ask you if they can take the school pet home for the weekend, make sure that a.) you don’t mind a white rat escaping in your house, and b.) that there are no bloodthirsty rats near the hamster cage.

let's talk about the Oregon/Amazon Trail.

Today, we’re going to embark on a delightful little blast from the past and talk about the best computer games of all time. I bet you already know what I’m going to say: Oregon Trail and its lesser known but completely awesome sibling Amazon Trail.

Sadly, my first encounter with Oregon Trail was NOT, in fact, in elementary school computer class. I feel like that’s where most kids first play Oregon Trail, but not us. The scene was right for it: we had this big computer lab full of brightly colored iMacs, and we would get to go in there every so often and play games. You could play Number Munchers (BLECH!), write a delightful novel with Storybook Weaver (remember that?), and I’m almost sure there was some sort of game where you destroyed asteroids with lasers. However, Oregon Trail was somehow not part of the repertoire.

Can't imagine why.

Like so much of my pop culture education, my first exposure to Oregon Trail was at my friend Allison’s house. She and her family were always a thousand times more up-to-date than I was. They’d had a computer (with INTERNET! WHOA!) ever since I’d known Allison (starting at age five), while my house didn’t get a computer until I was twelve (and internet was still a few more years off in the distance). So going to Allison’s house was like going to a whole new world full of crazy gadgets that did all sorts of crazy (yet amazing) things. I felt like ET.

Of course, one of the crazy/amazing things we could do on these computers was play games. Allison’s house was well-stocked with computer games, and it was here that I first learned of the glory of the Oregon Trail. Allison also had the Oregon Trail’s lesser known sibling, the Yukon Trail, but everyone knows that the Oregon Trail is far superior.

After I started playing Oregon Trail at Allison’s house, I was hooked. Since we had no computer at our house, I’d have to get my fix elsewhere. That meant it was time to expand my Oregon Trail horizons. I soon discovered (to my great joy) that the Brookings Public Library had Oregon Trail 2. They had this sweet setup where you could sign up for computer time and check out a game to play during that time – one of the many reasons I loved the library. Whenever I had the good fortune to make it to the library (which was whenever I found myself in Brookings – turns out that your parents and grandparents are usually willing to take you to the library when you ask), I’d gather up my newest stack of books and station myself at the computer for a good round of Oregon Trail.

First stop: the store!

You all know the Oregon Trail drill: you gather up your wagon party, buy supplies, and you’re off. You’re bound to encounter calamities along the way: someone dies of dysentery, you drown oxen when you try to ford the river, morale gets so low that your remaining travel companions overturn your leadership, and so on.

All disasters aside, what fun! Not only was Oregon Trail completely awesome, but it was more educational than it led you to believe. Sure, there were maps and historical places along the way with all sorts of informational tidbits. As you traveled through, you could also talk to all the locals and learn all about their experiences – I never did because I had trails to blaze (and I thought they were a tad boring, but that could’ve been just me). But the real education was in those real-life skills (and I use “real-life” loosely because, after all, it’s just a computer game) that you had to figure out along your way. You had better know how many pounds of lard to bring along, and you had to choose the right option when your wagon mate was bitten by a rattlesnake. You had to know when to caulk the wagon and when to pay the bridge toll, and you had better get yourself out to hunt and fish when your food ran low. (Remember the hunting part of the game? It could be MADDENING to sit there and wait for something to cross your path. Plus, I felt bad shooting at some helpless Oregon Trail bear and seeing it crumple to the ground. It’s no wonder I’ve never actually been hunting: I have neither the patience nor the stomach for it – not even in the computer game.) 

:(

In the later editions of the game, you also had to know what kinds of plants were poisonous when you went out to gather them. (And if you accidentally brought home a poisonous plant, you needed to know what you should do to un-poison whatever poor soul had eaten it.)

I always found Oregon Trail to be way more fun when I named my wagon mates after people I knew. I used to name them all after my parents and siblings, but I felt awfully guilty when one (or more) of them (inevitably) died.

On the rare occasion that I made it to the end of the Oregon Trail, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment – even though I had undoubtedly killed off most of my fellow travelers and oxen, lost or broken all my supplies, and was a whole lot worse for the wear myself. All that aside, I was the CHAMPION when I made it through the Oregon Trail in (more or less) one piece. 

While I was never fortunate enough to own Oregon Trail, I did persuade my dad to buy me Amazon Trail. This would’ve been around 1999: I was twelve and in the sixth grade, and we had just gotten our first computer. (I remember it well: it was a black Gateway laptop than ran Windows 98.) Sixth grade was the last year that we were sent home with book orders, and this was the first opportunity I had to buy a computer game (as buying a computer game and having no computer didn’t make a lot of sense). My parents would usually be willing to buy me a book, but this time, I wanted Amazon Trail 3. It was fairly educational, so I felt like I could make a reasonable argument. I went to my dad, and he made me a deal: if I beat him at a hand of blackjack, he’d buy me the game. If I lost, I’d pay for half. I won that hand of blackjack and got Amazon Trail, which remains the only thing I’ve ever won as a result of gambling – but when you consider the only other gambling I’ve done is a scratch card I bought when I was 18, those odds sound a lot better.

Amazon Trail was AWESOME. It was more hands-on than the Oregon Trail I was used to: while in Oregon Trail, you just watched your wagon roll on down the trail, you actually had to steer your canoe down the Amazon.

This is your view for an awful lot of the game.

There were rocks and sandbars to watch out for, so you had to pay a fair amount of attention – otherwise, you’d capsize and lose your stuff/get bitten by a piranha. The stops you made were more interactive, too – you had a list of things that you wanted to collect from the people you met along the way, so it was in your best interest to chat them up.

Sometimes they're famous - see the guy on the left?
He's supposed to be Henry Ford.

(They give you all sorts of weird stuff, and these items come in handy later on as the Amazon Trail is pretty treacherous – at one point, you have to use one of your gifts to poison somebody.)

Like the Oregon Trail, the Amazon Trail had you out finding your own food when your supplies ran low. However, the Amazon Trail took you a few steps further. You not only had to spear your fish (which was awesome), but you had to identify the fish upon catching it. For each different fish you identified, they were checked off in your field guide. The more animals you identified, the more points you got in the end.

The other way to identify animals from your field guide was to make your way into the jungle. There were three jungle scenes that you could stumble upon depending on your location on the river, and each housed different animals. The animals moved and ran/flew around, and your job was to take a picture of them and correctly identify them. This picture would be added to your photo album, and more photos meant more points. Edible plants were similar to the fish: you would gather them while you were in the jungle, and identifying them got you more points.

Just look at all the stuff there is to identify!

Unlike on the Oregon Trail – which led you right along the path –you ran the risk of getting lost on the Amazon Trail. Every now and again, you’d come to a fork in the river, and if you chose the wrong one, there was a good chance that you’d be cannibalized. (You could tell because the background music would switch to something ominous.) Once you learned to recognize the warning music, you’d just turn yourself around. When the music was normal again, you knew that you weren’t going to be eaten… FOR NOW.

It had been many years since I’d played Oregon Trail… until James scored me an old copy of Oregon Trail 5 from Goodwill. Miraculously, it worked on my Windows Vista computer (I know what you’re thinking: Windows Vista? get with the times), and I found that it was a lot less thrilling than it was when I was a kid. I ended up getting a lot angrier at the game than I had before – I yelled at the game when my wagon capsized in the river; I yelled at the game when no one would trade for a box of bullets; I yelled at the game when I died of starvation. Maybe some things are better left in the past.

I remember Amazon Trail as being totally awesome, so I probably shouldn’t tarnish my memories by playing the game again and getting really pissed off at it (which is practically a guarantee). However, now that I’ve written this article, the desire to play it again has become overwhelming. I came THIS CLOSE to buying the game on (where else?) Amazon, but I had to talk myself out of it. After all, chances are pretty good that it won’t work on my computer, and that would be a waste of ten dollars. I’m also pretty sure that my original copy of Amazon Trail 3 is floating around my parents’ house somewhere, so I’ll just have to wait patiently until I can dig through the treasure trove of old computer games.

In the meantime, I’ll subsist on my fond Amazon Trail memories… and if I get really desperate, there’s Oregon Trail 5 to play. If you hear cursing and the phrase “broken wagon wheel,” it’s just me. I’ll get over it.

top ten Tuesday: songs from the Current.

Remember how I have a serious thing for NPR?

We’re going to delve a little deeper into my love of NPR – specifically, MPR: Minnesota Public Radio. I told you about how I didn’t discover MPR news radio until I moved to South Dakota and spent the first month of my new job driving an hour each way. However, MPR news wasn’t my first rendezvous with the MPR family. It all started with the Current.

I moved to Minneapolis in January 2010: fresh from New Orleans, I had taken a spring semester internship at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. James was finishing up his final semester of school, which meant that he was student teaching. His placement was in Buffalo, MN, so we found a place to live that was approximately halfway between Buffalo and Minneapolis: the friendly suburb of Plymouth. We lived in a teeny studio apartment that was once someone’s garage, but that’s a story for another time.

My morning commute was about twenty minutes – long enough to require radio entertainment. I located the Current on my very first day of commuting, and I don’t think I changed the station during the entire time I lived in the Cities. What I had found was pure gold: a station that played a mix of everything from local musicians to obscure 70s rock to a shameless “No Apologies” segment at 4 o’clock (which could be anything from Meatloaf to N*Sync to Peter Frampton). And what made it even better? It was public radio, so that meant the absence of those obnoxious radio commercials (seriously, why are radio commercials so much more annoying than television commercials?). No commercials + guaranteed to hear David Bowie at least once per day = new favorite radio station.

During the first eight months of my stint in Minneapolis, my time with the Current was limited to whenever I was in the car. However, a promotion at my job meant a move to an office where it was permissible – even encouraged! – to have the radio on all day. It was already set to the Current when I got there, and it remained set to the Current… except for the brief time where a ditzy blonde girl changed it to Top 40 before we all got there in the morning. Not that I have anything against Top 40, but there’s only so much Katy Perry you can stand. We changed the station back as soon as she left the room, and she eventually got the hint and just started listening to Pandora.

That meant that I could have at least eight hours a day of the Current – what joy! During the day, they had all sorts of fun programming: the 930 coffee break where the hosts would suggest a topic and wait for suggestions from the listeners (they’d ask for songs about zombies, or songs that are duets, or songs featuring banjos, etc), the “My Three Songs” segment at noon (where the host would choose a listener-submitted set of three songs submitted), and the aforementioned “No Apologies” track at 4 o’clock – and sure enough, the host never apologized.

Since the Current played pretty much whatever they wanted, I was introduced a whole bunch of brand new (to me) music. During my time with the Current, and I really filled out my iTunes collection. Sure, like all radio stations, the Current did overplay songs, and they placed a great deal of emphasis on local artists that I thought were “meh” at best (I’m looking at YOU, Jeremy Messersmith). On the whole, though, the Current opened up all sorts of musical doors for me. And all without commercials.

My music from the Current has carried me through countless roadtrips, and it’s given me plenty of hipster cred with my friends (which can be good or bad). It was awfully hard to choose my ten favorite songs from the Current, but I did it. My friends, these are the top ten songs introduced to me by the Current.

Mumford and Sons – “The Cave”

I had no idea who Mumford and Sons were until the day that the Current started playing them. “The Cave” was the very first song of theirs that I remember hearing, and it was just one of those songs that I immediately fell in love with. I think I can blame that on the banjo playing. But really, Marcus Mumford (the lead singer) puts so much feeling into his voice when he sings this song (when he sings anything, really), that you can’t help but get angry/sad/hipstery with him. Plus, you can hear his English accent when he sings, which means bonus points. (Side note: I liked Mumford and Sons a whole lot better before I knew what they looked like… especially Marcus Mumford. He looks like Hitler if Hitler had been a greasy hipster. Even so, I can’t help but love them.)

Cloud Cult – “Take Your Medicine”

Cloud Cult is a rare example of a local band that I actually enjoy. Unlike Mumford and Sons – who I would’ve heard eventually, as they are now HUGE – without the Current, I very easily could’ve gone my whole life without hearing Cloud Cult. “Take Your Medicine” is a bit on the angry side, but it’s got some fantastic instrumentation and a very enthusiastic lead singer. No complaints here.

Teddybears featuring Iggy Pop – “Punkrocker”

Iggy Pop is known for all sorts of disgusting things (look up him up on Wikipedia if you’re curious, but you’re not going to hear it from me), but let’s forget about that for a minute and focus on how AWESOME “Punkrocker” is. When you listen to it – especially in your car, as it is about a guy driving down the street – you can’t help but feel like a punk rocker yourself. (Or what I assume a punk rocker feels like. If anyone knows, it’s Iggy Pop.) This song (along with “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Golden Years”) was one of the three songs I requested as a “My Three Songs” set on my 24^th birthday, and wouldn’t you know, Barb Abney (the host) picked me! We were all listening at work, and she not only wished me a happy 24^th birthday, but she pronounced my name correctly! NO ONE pronounces my name correctly! Barb Abney totally made my birthday that year – it’s been almost two and a half years, and I’m still happy about it!

Arcade Fire – “Modern Man”

I have to admit, I’m not a huge fan of Arcade Fire, as I find them to be generally whiny. However, “Modern Man” is light on the whine and heavy on the catchiness, so it makes the cut. Fun fact: the beat of “Modern Man” lines up almost exactly with how fast I walk. Therefore, it’s an iPod staple.

New Order – “Bizarre Love Triangle”

This song is a fine example of the Current playing a little bit of everything: “Bizarre Love Triangle” isn’t new by any means, but it’s a song from the 80s that I hadn’t heard before. It got me with its catchy electronic beat, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Listen to it and just try to tell me that you don’t want to dance. You won’t be able to resist.

Talking Heads – “Once in a Lifetime”

The Talking Heads are WEIRD – but good weird. They wouldn’t be the same without all the weird. Watch the “Once in a Lifetime” video for a good example. This was actually voted the best music video of all time. I was skeptical at first, but after a couple more watches, it grew on me. Now I can’t listen to “Once in a Lifetime” without picturing David Byrne’s crazy dance.

Temper Trap – “Sweet Disposition”

I feel as though “epic” is an overused word – not because people spend time talking about it in the literary sense (Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey = epics), but because nowadays (yes, I just said nowadays and am suddenly 50 years older), “epic” is synonymous with “awesome.” Example: I watched all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last week. It was epic. (I didn’t actually do this, but you get the idea.) Anyway, I tend to shy away from using “epic” in everyday speech unless it’s totally necessary. With this song? Totally necessary. The drums and the bass make it epic. Yes, even with the lead singer’s falsetto.

Magnetic Fields – “You Must Be Out of Your Mind”

Stephin Merritt, the lead singer of the Magnetic Fields, has this beautiful deep voice. The song is not too happy – it’s a rebuttal to his ex, who wants him back – but you almost forget while you’re listening to his voice. Throw in some clever lyrics ("you can't go round just saying stuff because it's pretty/and I no longer drink enough to think you're witty") and quirky instrumentation, and we’ve got a winner.

Tapes n Tapes – “Badaboom”

“Badaboom” is one of those songs that you can’t help but turn up. This one never failed to perk me up while I was working on timesheets at my job in Minneapolis – the Current always came through for me during the afternoon slump.

David Bowie – “Golden Years”

Have I mentioned that I love David Bowie? Lucky for me, the Current does too. Hardly a day went by that didn’t include a bit of Bowie on the Current, and you’d hear no complaints from me. While picking a favorite David Bowie song is like picking a favorite child (I’d imagine), if you made me choose, I’d choose “Golden Years.” I’m not too big on assigning slogans to my life, but the first line of the song has been a bit of a motto for me ever since I first heard it: “don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere.”  And you know what? You’ll never hear me say life’s taking me nowhere. 

I don't want to disappoint David Bowie.

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There we have it: ten wonderful songs that I first heard on the Current. Since relocating from the cities, I don’t get to listen to the Current as much as I used to – most of my radio listening is done in the car, and unfortunately, a St Paul radio signal is a tad too far to pick up. The Current does stream online, so I just need to get better at remembering to actually stream it. In the meantime, I have all these old favorites to keep me company – and there are way more where these came from. Three cheers for the Current!