Oh, you poor rich people. Why do you have to suffer so in an economic downturn? We dare to whine about stupid things like “having to choose between heating the house or buying food,” when socialites are languishing in their penthouses, fretting over whether the guests will notice they’re serving domestic champagne. But there is an upside to the downturn. Rich people wrote this week’s top five for me. I’m not making these up. These are actual ways rich people are responding to the recession, taken from newspaper and magazine articles:

5. Cutting their 17-year-old daughter’s allowance back from $100 a week to $60 a week.

4. From the daughter: not getting take-out sushi for lunch every day.

3. “Letting Yolanda go, which means I’ll have to learn to iron my own shirts.”

2. From an article describing an elegantly-dressed woman approaching a shopper using coupons: “Oh, I’ve heard about those things. Where does one get them?”

1. From the same article: “Instead of paying $250,000 to take the private jet to Singapore, I flew commercial for $20,000.”

Speaking of money, I bought a lottery ticket in Kalispell the other day. So yesterday Dean says there was a $200,000 winning ticket sold in Kalispell. I checked the numbers and hey, I’m a winner! Of four dollars. On my five dollar ticket. Guess I’ll still be ironing my own shirts. Or would be, if I ever ironed anything.

It’s a list-y time of year. Shopping lists, to-do lists, year-end “best of” and “worst of” lists, naughty/nice lists. And as my friends and colleagues in the old home state are no doubt chanting today, “We’re number one!” North Dakota topped the USA Today’s recent list of most corrupt states. Then again, their formula was based on convictions per capita, and North Dakota can pretty easily top just about any per capita-based list. But it’s good to be number one, isn’t it?

Top five ways to bribe a North Dakota politician:

5. Twenty kilos of pure white primo stuff – fresh walleye, cleaned and filleted.

4. A big North Dakota junket: free tickets to the Medora musical, plus the pitchfork fondue and two rounds of mini-golf.

3. “That’s right, Senator. My kid will snowblow your driveway and shovel your sidewalk. For the whole winter.”

2. A chance to get out of the North Dakota winter and spend a week in beautiful, balmy South Dakota.

1. “Now see, we make these legislurters . . . logislatures . . . . these government guys a free website, and then in return we tell them we want it legalized, not just decriminalated . . decriminizated . . . what were we talking about again? Hey man, any Doritos left?”

Hmm. Maybe it’s not fair to use actual conversations overheard in the workplace.

Nearly there . . .

In our little remodeling adventure that started on October 8, we've gone from this:



to this:



We now have running water in our kitchen and everything. Making a cappuccino no longer involves trips to the laundry room, the downstairs bathroom and the garage. We still need to get hardware for the cabinets and put in a backsplash. The appliances are all in and functioning, the tile floor is heated and now we just have to clean everything up and put the stuff back in. We may actually have a real homecooked meal sometime this week.

I'll post more pictures of kitchen-y goodness later. It's almost done and for a couple of losers who had no idea what they were doing, I think we did okay.