DSW? Is that a vendor of high-end clothing and accessories that are no longer quite the latest thing? For me, yet another business to avoid.

My monthly expenses have taken a nose-dive since I stopped eating in restaurants (except my weekly bacon fix at the diner), and impulsively shopping for clothes and household stuff. Deleting the Ebay application from my iPad has probably saved me several hundred bucks by now, and I sure don't miss restaurant staff who address all patrons as "guys" and can't pronounce the French and Italian names of dishes on their menus.

I'm no minimalist, God knows, but these days some aspects of my lifestyle have a distinctly stripped-down look.

One area where I am not cutting back is music and things with which to make it. The other day, I swapped a five-string banjo I don't play for a mandolin that I will play when it has had a bit of TLC from a luthier. Now I have to find a luthier who won't mind working on a mandolin -- the guy who did my last instrument rehab job has gone and moved across the province to a tiny village in the Ottawa Valley, between Algonquin Park and the Petawawa military reserve.

The ancestral doohickeys are still spread out on the basement work table and most of them will almost certainly end up in another box. There's an interesting Victorian container that once held hair-dressing based on bear grease that could probably attract some antiquarian interest: it's a glass bottle in a tight-fitting case made of steam-bent wood. And the drawing instruments could probably find new homes, if and when I get around to marketing them. But the rest? No clue.