We tend to get our money’s worth out of things.

Here are some things which we have used to their value many times over.

The Guitar — We have an old acoustic guitar that we bought from a friend here for $35. I have revived my guitar skills, and Doodle is learning. It’s a much appreciated instrument.

The Kindle — Our Amazon Kindle is being used all the time. There’s so much competition for it, we came up with “priority” rules for different parts of the day. We’ve considered trying to get a second one. For us, It was an absolute steal at $70.

The Computers — Even our 11 year old Dell laptop is still hobbling along, in (light) use. It’s had a hard drive partition to accept Linux, and I’m taking an edx course on Linux right now with that computer as my guinea pig. Our Macbook pros are absolutely invaluable to us. And I mean absolutely. With so much of our time spent coding and making deals in lands far away, having a machine that’s this fast, this efficient, and this reliable is a must. We have a 1-year-old HP laptop that runs Windows, and getting on one of the Macs after using it is like a breath of fresh air. Or maybe more like getting out of prison. Seriously…. if you have the money, get a Mac. You won’t understand how clumsy your Windows computer is until you do.

The Bicycles — Having bicycles always on hand is really valuable to us. It’s loads faster than public transport once you really know your way around, and it’s also free. The bicycle mecca of Chile is only a 8-10 minute ride from our dwelling, and I go there fairly often to get parts for whatever fails on our bikes. When our bicycles got stolen a couple months ago, we were significantly hindered by the loss of them until we got new ones.

The Garden — The local garden in our apartment complex is worth way more to us than the premium we pay for it. We play volleyball almost every day and Doodle and Rosebud go play with friends almost every day. It’s really great, and it makes us wince to think about living in a normal building with no private green space.

The Sofa — We have a cheap three-part couch that we bought used for around  $250.  We’ve put about six years of use on it in the 1.5 years we’ve had it. We’ve even had to put in extra bracing! I am writing this blog post from the couch. We probably average two and a half hours per person every day sitting/laying on the couch as we read the Kindle, or play the guitar, or have a business meeting, or…  you get the idea.

La Vega Crates — When we go to La Vega, we usually come back with a nice wooden crate that we got from one purchase or another, and now we have a nice collection of them that we’ve made bookshelves and coffee tables with. They cost us $2 each.

That’s all for now folks. There’s probably some more things that I haven’t thought of yet.