Category Archives: personal

Over at feMOMhist’s blog, it’s Work, Labor and Money week. Among the topics that she’s tackled? Extreme Couponing.

I confess to being a tiny bit of a fan of both the show and the philosophy. (Note: Canada has a much less robust coupon culture and opportunity than in the states, so even if I did go crazy, I wouldn’t be saving and stockpiling like those folks on the TV show.) I haven’t bought into the idea all the way, but I’ve found ways to make coupon and loyalty points work for me.

My biggest score’s been a Wii system bought entirely with loyalty points earned over a three month period of strategic shopping at our local pharmacy. I didn’t spend all that much to stockpile those points! I’ve gotten free bananas, free ice cream and free ground beef. Toilet paper’s always purchased on sale and with a coupon to boot. There’s a whole shelf in the bathroom cupboard with a small stockpile of deodorant, shampoo and other necessities which has also relieved me of reacting on short-term need to buy something at a high price.

Still, my time’s too much in demand for me to spend a lot of time on couponing. Yet you need to approach couponing with insight and information, or you’re just collecting slips of paper that don’t do you much good or thinking you have to buy stuff you don’t need or want to save money.

So how do I save some bucks but only spend on what I need? I rely on the group-mind of internet coupon sites. Here in Canada, there’s one great web community, Smart Canucks, and another wonderful blog, Mrs. January, that I follow. (In the states, I’d recommend following my wise friend Denise, at Blogher.) These sites alert me to all sorts of avenues from which I can get useful coupons (circulars in the paper, printable coupons or others I can order from manufacturer or retailer websites) and also track hot deals in weekly flyers. They’ve alerted me to coupon codes for the book store and favourite clothing stores.

I also learned about how to better use store loyalty programs. One pharmacy offers a 20x loyalty point event every few weeks. If I buy necessities on those days at a good sale price and with a coupon to boot? I’m laughing and buying that Wii with my points. I’ve saved that many points again to use on another bonus redemption day and that’s just since August.

Everything I’ve saved, I’ve done so because of their guidance. If I didn’t have these sites, I’d have to work a lot more to save even half as much and I just wouldn’t find it worth my while. Not when there’s editing, writing and marking to be done. Speaking of which. . . .

Canadian-style, that is! There was turkey and pie and fall leaves turning beautiful colours and I got to spend some time with family.

Pretty darned great, even if I don’t have all the marking done and out of the way.

Haven’t we heard this before? Margaret Wente’s recent column explains the dearth of women managers as an issue of individual choice. “What glass ceiling? It’s the mommy track” trots out that tired explanation to let us know that not only are women not being excluded from the boardrooms, it’s that they want it this way!

According to Wente, what’s important is that women want to have things that are incompatible with a business career. Like children, for instance. Apparently all those male managers are childless. Because having kids is systemically incompatible with business success. Clearly! Since anything otherwise would be unfair and the system isn’t unfair, is it, Ms. Wente? Funny, but it seems I’ve read lots of research that shows that fatherhood in a management-track employee can be seen as a sign of stability and suitability whereas motherhood is a sign that woman’s just not committed. Because those maternity leaves are a real hassle, I guess!

Wente also suggests that maybe it’s because full-time managerial work is haaaaard and women don’t want to do that. Instead, they’re making rational choices to not go for that promotion. Tracy Robinson, a successful executive at CPF who’s also the mother of four kids? Apparently she’s just craaa-azy and no smart woman would want to do what she’s doing. That’s why she’s one of a tiny number of women executives, says Wente, while pointing to the recent study that shows three-quarters of Dutch women working part-time.

I have a radical suggestion. Maybe all of these outcomes are a tiny bit influenced by that old patriarchal equilibrium that criticizes women for not being like men or for being unwomanly when they act like men?

Nah. Couldn’t be. It’s just women’s nature. When confronted with all the choices in a perfectly equitable socio-economic system, women just say “that’s man’s work!” and go put on their pearls, get ready to do some vacuuming and pop a few bon-bons as they enjoy their work-life balance.

Wente also thinks this will all only change, get this, when women change. See? The problem’s all on our side. If we just manned up, we’d all be in the executive suites, sure as shooting! But since we just make these silly choices, we have no one but ourselves to blame when we aren’t all sitting in that spiffy corner office at the top of some office tower.

Now for a refreshing contrast? Ms. Robinson, that manager-mom at CPR? She’s on record with quite a different viewpoint from Wente:

Tracy Robinson, a vice president at Canadian Pacific, says companies need to institute a plan to ensure qualified women are recognized with promotions.

“More than 50 per cent of the workforce — the emerging workforce, the emerging talent — is female,” Robinson said. “If you haven’t put some thought into how to make your environment friendly to women and other visible minorities then you’re at a competitive disadvantage.” (CBC.ca)

Guess whose analysis I find more compelling?

As term approaches, I become serious about getting ready for teaching. I tweak my syllabi (four for this fall plus another reading course I’m going to have to map out with my new graduate student). I make a last stab at getting as much research and writing done as possible. I set aside a day to catch up on all the filing. Last but not least, I tackle the weighty concerns of wardrobe.

I’m not a fashionista. Not in any way, shape or form! (My colleagues who might be reading this blog will be nodding in heartfelt agreement at that characterization.) No, my interest in my wardrobe comes from the simple concern of not being the figure of fun I occasionally encountered in high school and university. You know the situation: if this is Tuesday, Professor X must be wearing green. If this is Thursday, we see the grey suit! (And we all know that if this is seen as charmingly eccentric on the part of a male professor, it’s seen as profoundly weird and incompetent on the part of a female academic.)

To this end, I pay attention to my clothing so that I rotate and refresh the wardrobe in such a way as to not become utterly predictable. Or so I hope. Every teaching day, I keep note of what I wore so that I’m not too closely repeating the same outfit when I’m back in the same class. Having a dozen different jackets means never having to say “I’m boring!”

Summer means culling the wardrobe of clothes that needs must be retired. Farewell, beloved boiled wool jacket, wearing out at the elbows. Au revoir, jeans with a nascent rip at the knee. Auf wiedersehen, black and white printed skirt that I never should have bought in the first place!

Summer is also a time for clothing repair and maintenance. I need to take my favourite pair of black winter boots to a shoe repair kiosk in town and get the leaky seams repaired. (This is not so much because I am cheap as because the boots fit remarkably well and have a helpful non-skid sole that’s saved my bacon more than once in winter.) I have a button to replace on a jacket, another on a pair of pants.

Summer also means shopping for new clothes. Since May, I’ve scored five tees, one pair of sandals, a pair of khakis, two skirts, two pairs of yoga pants and a funky print jacket. I have not found the right pair of replacement jeans, yet. My favourite store for dress pants is turning up nothing that fits. I’ve failed utterly in my attempt to find comfortable navy dress shoes. (I may have to retire that lovely pair of navy dress pants for want of suitable footwear. This is galling.)

It certainly doesn’t take as much brainpower as it does to wrangle a syllabus or design a new assignment, but it’s one more bit of preparation I don’t dare neglect. I can’t be the only one. How do you handle the back-to-school wardrobe situation?

Eldest drove the car for the first time today. She’d practised parking it several times over the last few months but now, fresh from her driver’s education classwork and with the appropriate license in hand, she was ready. Her father took her to the university parking lot to practice the feel of turns at somewhat greater speed than a crawl. After their return, I let her take the car all around our neighbourhood.

A classic suburban subdivision ‘loops and lollipops’ residential design, our neighbourhood provided plenty of opportunities to practice stops, starts, turns and politely edging over when other traffic came in the opposite direction. Her confidence blossomed as we travelled the streets.

Later in the day, she got to drive from a nearby neighbourhood onto one of the larger local arteries to a nearby shopping plaza and then, after our errands accomplished, I agreed to her suggestion that she drive us home.

She’s going to be a good driver, already taking control of the car with care and skill. I will gracefully, I hope, cede control to her in this and all those other rites of passage.

Missed me? What I thought would be a brief hiatus in blogging due to some technical problems with my old host turned into a months-long silence due to problems with their version of WordPress. The entire academic year has gone by without a blog post from yours truly: what a tragedy, no? Well, not really, but I’ve missed it.

Twitter was a bit of a lifeline: check me out at Twitter if you’re on there, too. I also have to thank Historiann, Another Damned Medievalist, Bardiac, Dr. Crazy, Inktopia and many other bloggers for providing moral support as well as a virtual place to hang out during my long hiatus.

Rather than futz around any longer, I’ve switched over to wordpress.com for my blog hosting needs. It’s a bargain when all you really want for your domain is blog hosting and a tiny bit of file-hosting as the only cost is your domain mapping with wordpress.com and registration elsewhere.