February 2011

Moments of Fame

February 9, 2011

This week Funny’s Whole-grain Oat Bread made it into the Festival of Frugality, hosted by Money Obedience. A number of fine posts appear in this week’s festival, among which these especially caught  my eye: Donna Freedman, writing at Get Rich Slowly, has an outstanding post on stockpiling food, which she calls building your own food [...]

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Where Education Goes, There Goes America

February 8, 2011

Down the tubes, that’s where it’s going. Education, I mean. Especially higher education. And by extension, all that we know as America the Beautiful is in the toilet, too. Mercifully I don’t have to teach in the lower grades, where administrators and taxpayers feel teachers should work for poor pay in worse working conditions and [...]

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Excel vs. Quicken

February 7, 2011

So…how’s the bookkeeping working, after a year of using Excel instead of Quicken for Mac? Last January I switched to Excel for tracking my bank accounts, budget, and credit card charges. After years as a Quicken customer, I’d really lost patience: data vanished in the transfer from Windows to Mac, Quicken for Mac was clunky, [...]

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Stir-fry That Broccoli

February 6, 2011

Okay, okay, broccoli-lovers take exception to my having cast asparagus at their favorite veggie. Several people remarked that the idea of stir-frying the stuff (my strategy for making it palatable) sounds pretty good. IMHO, it’s even better when converted into soup, a plan for which follows. Here’s the thing: you can stir-fry a pile of [...]

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Solitude Is Precious

February 5, 2011

Isn’t it interesting, the number of widowed and divorced women who choose to stay single? One recent study showed that among Europeans, a man lives longer if he’s married and a women lives longer if she’s single. Whatever the reasons, a lot of women seem to intuit this and, about midway through life, begin to [...]

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The High Cost of AARP Delta Dental

February 4, 2011

Well, I expected the AARP Delta Dental plan I enrolled in last December to cover little more than the occasional cleaning, which, when paid for out of pocket, is $93 at my dentist’s office. But what I didn’t expect was to have the plan effectively land me in a hole that would take two years [...]

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