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When Electronic Payment…Isn’t!

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Yesterday I discovered something that I had NO IDEA even existed. Did you realize that under some circumstances, when you set up an electronic payment through your credit union’s or bank’s BillPay function, the bank may send a check — that’s right, a paper check — instead of direct-depositing the payment electronically?

WHY one would want a function like this escapes comprehension. If you wanted to pay your bills with checks that take eight to ten days(!!) to be delivered, you’d get out your checkbook, write a check, tuck it in an envelope, address and stamp the envelope, and drop the thing in the mail. It defeats the whole purpose of electronic BillPay.

Oh, well. There it is.

And there it was, lurking in my credit union’s online pages.

So now I go to deposit a slew of checks others have mailed to me. By serendipity, I happen to glance at the list of creditors that I routinely pay online and notice  SIXTEEN-HUNDRED DOLLARS outstanding to Visa. Not only that, but last month’s bill, which should have been paid days ago, has not been paid, and Visa wants me to pony up $25 right this minute to avoid a late charge.

I call the credit union’s Visa vendor and ask WTF. The very charming young recent college graduate who answers the phone cannot figure it out, any better than I can, but she urges me to pay the twenty-five bucks. She says it can take eight to ten days for an e-payment to arrive. This, I reflect, seems to defeat another purpose: the purpose of specifying the date on which the bill is to be paid. In this case, I had set the electronic payment to hit Visa’s vaults a couple days before the due date.

We both study the system, but neither of us is really getting a grip on what is going on there and why Visa hasn’t been paid. She remarks that a check was sent. I say no check was sent: I arranged to pay electronically, as I always do. She says sometimes the CU will send a check instead of an electronic payment, and it says right there on the page that it takes eight to ten days to deliver a check. I say I never heard of such a thing, and what would cause them to do that? Neither of us can figure out what would trigger such a procedure. She seems to think it happens at random.

Holy mackerel!!! think I.

I jump into a pair of shoes, grab the car keys and a printout, and FLY out the door, headed for the credit union.

There I encounter yet another excellent young person. One thing you have to say about banking with a credit union: you DO get great customer service. And you get to meet quite a few admirable young men and women.

I explain the whole rigamarole again. New CSR agrees that the payment got made by check. She suggests that if Visa tries to gouge me for a late payment, I should come back, in person (ah, yes: another 40-minute drive!!), remind them of this side show, and they will forgive the gouge.

Just what I need to do with my time.

So I drive through the rush-hour traffic back to the Funny Farm, still puzzled. WHY would the CU randomly decide to write a check for an electronic payment? I most certainly DID NOT ask to have that happen. Making it happen requires a three-step hoop jump, and each step is very obscure.

First, you have to go to the section of your account — three pages into the website — to find the list of payments scheduled for the near future.

Next, you have to click on the yellow-pencil icon beside a current payment-in-waiting to allow yourself to “edit” the payment.

Then, you have to select “pay with check,” in the slot next to “type,” five lines down.

No way could you accidentally do this with a slip of the fingers. So I’m DEAD SURE whatever happened here was not a senior moment.

Whatever did happen, it surpasses annoying. It cost an hour or more of my time, driving through the homicidal rush-hour traffic to get not very much done. It may cost me a late-payment gouge and a ding on my credit report. And it got me freaking upset, no doubt pushing up the blood pressure. Again.

What is do be done about it? That also escapes me. If the CU can randomly decide, out of the blue, to convert an electronic payment to a snail-mail check payment, then that means I either have to schedule EVERY payment about 10 days in advance of the due date (which I can’t really afford to do: that will drain my checking account into the overdraft range before long), or else go online within a few days of EVERY scheduled payment to be sure it’s going to reach the creditor on time.

One thing’s for sure: I’m not giving Visa $25 out of this month’s living expenses as “protection” money against an unfair gouge. So that pretty much guarantees having to schlep back up to the credit union in another couple weeks. I’ll deal with that when it happens.

But it doesn’t make me happy…

Small Economies

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So yesterday I became so caught up in various small tasks that FaM fell into a dark pit. Oh well.

Over the weekend, some Friends Who Bead met at WonderAccountant’s house. My project was to rebuild a necklace I’d made incorrectly. Then, with nothing much left to do, I laid out some beads for a small bracelet and got advice on how to make a turquoise necklace look better: lose the cheesey fake-Native American decorative bead. With all that left out on the coffee table, come y’day it was time to put it together or put it away.

That took half the afternoon.

In the process, I reflected on how cluttered my “jewelry” box is. It’s actually a crafts box with a jillion little compartments. When I got the thing, it served well for my vast collection of DIY valuables. Over time, though, the priceless gem collection has grown so that it’s hard to find what I want in the jumble.

This box is kept in the office closet, which is behind a solid-core door with a bust-your-drill deadbolt on it — because the only thing of any real value in the house is my computer. They can steal everything else, but leave the damn Mac alone.

We’re told that when burglars break in these days, what they’re looking for mostly is jewelry. A friend of mine had a lifetime collection stolen — all pieces with sentimental value, many of them picked up on her travels with good friends.

In my case, though, they can take the stuff and good luck to them trying to peddle it to a fence or a pawnbroker. It’s all straight from Michael’s, Bead World, or Fire Mountain. 😀 But…it cost some work to make it and I’d just as soon not have it stolen. Plus the office storage is a convenient place to keep the junk.

Contemplating the clutter, it occurred to me that instead of buying another craft box — providing two boxes to have to paw through instead of just one — there was a simpler, cheaper alternative: Hang the necklaces on nails in the closet shelf braces, leaving plenty of room for earrings and bracelets in the box’s compartments.

So I tapped a bunch of tacks in there…and lo! It worked. And I can see the things at a glance. Best of all, it’s FREE!

Nothing like a FREE hack to warm the cockles of the Frugalist’s heart. 😀

Speaking of the small delights in life, the pink Easter Lily cactus in front is blossoming untimely:

That’s kind of amazing. What possessed it to blossom in October, I do not know. Probably the unseasonable heat: even though the nights are longer & the days shorter, temps are in the 90s and predicted to go into the low 100s this week. So I guess the plant thinks sumer is y-cumen in. Oh well.

Gerardo finally showed up — I suspect because I complained to La Maya, who regards him as a friend. And he is a friend…just a busy one. He and his underlings are out there now, banging and blowering around. He was surprised to see the new panel in the watering system. Not as surprised as I was to see the $300 bill to get it fixed…but what, really, did he think I was going to do? Just let everything die, or drag hoses from plant to plant, every day, on a quarter acre of trees and landscaping?

Oh well. I asked him to repair the quarter-minus, which has been trashed since we repaired Richard’s ill-advised river of rock. Whether he’ll do it or not remains to be seen: he has a lot of other yards to cope with these days, and I’m sure he’ll be wanting to get to them as early in the day as possible.

The pool is blossoming, too: algae. The chlorine level is so high it turns the test tube deep orange, so apparently that is not the issue. Exactly what I’m supposed to do about that escapes me. Probably today I should schlep a bottle of the water up to Leslie’s and listen to the guy tell me what he always tells me: take out the chlorine tabs (done: a week or ten days ago) and wait until it goes down. But…it ain’t workin’.

I’d like not to have to drain & refill the pool this winter, partly because it’s still too hot to do so — heat damages the plaster — and partly because I’ve had one big financial hit after another and just want the pricey little jobs to STOP for awhile.

Moving on, today I’ve got to deposit 87 berjillion small checks gathered by Funny about Money. It might be more time-efficient just to make the 40-minute round trip to the credit union. Then continue on to the Costco — I could do with a couple bottles of wine, I guess.  But…the Walmart grocery store has the same type of mid-range wines, and it does not present itself as a vast bazaar of impulse buys. I really do need to keep the spending down for the rest of this month!

One of our clients, a journal, changed editors. We stayed to review copy, which is good. The editor just sent page proofs. We don’t usually read the journal’s page proofs…but there they are. I’m finding things that I know we changed, which have been stetted and which will make the thing look kind of stupid. But I guess you can take a horse to water… Seeing a lot of changes that needed to be made have been ignored (these are not whims, but grammatical and stylistic issues), I am not inclined to read this stuff character by character and word by tedious word again. Especially since it’s not part of our job: we’re not proofreaders; we’re copyeditors.

I am, I think, going to ask to have our business name removed from the masthead. We will look like idiots if this thing goes to press with every third edit overridden by someone who doesn’t know how publishing works.

Onward: Gerardo out, coffee made, breakfast under way.

How DO we survive?

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Ever have one of those blood-stopping moments that make you wonder how you got lucky? When you imagine that if there’s a god, She must be looking out after you?

Yesterday I was right here, flying low across Glendale on the way into town from the Westside, right at this time. Needed to reload the gas tank at the local Costco, which is on Bethany Home. At about 35th Avenue, I debated whether to go south on the 17 to Bethany Home, cutting maybe a minute and a half off the drive. Given my dislike of freeway driving, I decided it wasn’t worth it and went south on a surface street.

If I had entered the freeway at that moment, I could very well have ended up in the middle of whatever this was. Who knows what caused the woman’s vehicle to roll: maybe a tire blew out, maybe she swerved to avoid a fellow homicidal driver or debris on the road, maybe her attention wandered.

Amazingly, no other cars seem to have been caught up in this wreck. Four in the afternoon is pushing high rush hour here — freeways can be bumper-to-bumper at this time of day. And, it being Arizona, “bumper-to-bumper” does not mean “correspondingly slow speed.” Arizona drivers will go 60 or 65 mph right on the next guy’s tailpipe. We think that’s normal behavior.

But even if you weren’t in the wreck itself, can you imagine being anywhere near it? With five little kids in the car and the mother dead on the road?

Sometimes…you just have to wonder.

Please come to Yarnell in the springtime…

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So dawn is cracking and I’m headed east toward the Pima Reservation — which is a LONG way from the Funny Farm — to attend the weekly bidness networking meeting.

God, God, GOD how I hate driving through the awful traffic this damn city has sprouted. Time of day no longer matters: rush hour or not, it is ALWAYS a bitch to drive around the city streets.

Is it just me getting old?

Well. No.

Over Labor Day, everybody in the city but me left town. Or parked themselves in front of some televised sporting event, presumably. That afternoon I happened to jump in my car to run a couple of errands. And thought good grief! What’s wrong here? The streets are not full of crazies; no morons are getting in front of me and doing stupid things like turning left out of the right-turn lane or yakking on the phone through the green light or whatEVER they can dream up. Whaaa? I was actually having a good time driving my tank down the road.

And the thought came to mind: This is what driving in Phoenix used to be like: once it was actually fun to drive your car. When I was a young thang, I often would while away a moment of boredom by getting in my car and just driving around. Because, yes, it was fun to drive in those days. And that Labor Day afternoon, with the streets half-empty, it was — for a few precious moments — fun again.

Most of the time, though, it’s a species of Hell, every time you get on the road.

So I’m cruising east on Gangbanger’s Way thinking how much I hate cruising east on Gangbanger’s, or cruising north or south or east or west on any other street in Phoenix, when a Thought (!!) crosses my mind:

I wonder if there’s any way I could move back to a ranch up around Yarnell.
Can I get back to Yarnell?

Well, no. Of course not.

In the first place, what WOULD I do there? Sit around and sniff the clean air?

I’m too old to run a ranch. I’m really too old to ride a horse: if Babe threw me in the riverbottom today the way she did once when I was a young pup, it would bust every bone in my body. I’d have to hire someone to do not some but all of the work. That would mean I’d have to turn a profit in the cattle biz. Not that it’s impossible to do so: we owned the Gold Bar as a tax dodge, intending to lose money on the thing. We failed: the damn thing ran in the black every year. But ranching is a lot of work. You need an honest foreman to handle just about everything…and honest foremen are few and far between.

Live in town? Really? Seriously? What would I do? Write? Edit copy? Spend half my lifetime driving into Prescott or down into Wickenburg and west Phoenix to keep a freezer provisioned? Hm.

Maybe not so much.

About then yet another revelation came to mind: I’d left my credit cards back at the ranch house.

Shee-ut! This meant I couldn’t do the shopping errands planned for the return trip from the Pima Rez.

Besides the company of our band of merry bandits, the weekly eastward junket has just one other blandishment: a Home Depot within walking distance of the restaurant, and on the way home an Albertson’s, a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe, a Penzey’s, a Fry’s… Just about every routine household purchase — and then some — can be had along that route.

No credit card? No errands done. Two hours’ worth of driving through hair-tearing traffic for an hour’s worth of socializing.

Did I really want to do that?

Well, no.

I turned around and headed home, thinking I’d grab the cards and shoot out to Scottsdale, arriving only about a quarter-hour late. And along the way thought why do I want to do that?

The morning was gorgeous, painterly clouds decorating the dawn sky, a virga dropping its veil over the southeast.

Why do I want to do that?

I don’t. I want to walk the dogs.

Which is what I did.

Speaking of honest foremen, it appears that Gerardo has given up the ghost. Haven’t seen nor heard from him and his cousins in over two months now.

The yard is a mess: needs blowering, raking, and trimming in a big way. Cost almost $300 to get a zanjero out here to repair the irrigation system, something Gerardo was keeping shored up, within reason.

So I’d decided that the next time I saw some guys working on a neighbor’s yard, I’d ask if they’d like to pick up another job.

Over in Richistan, the crew that works on THE most gorgeous shack in the entire neighborhood, bar none, rolls up to the jobsite, about an acre of irrigated lawn with vast, lighted towering trees, a gazebo, a burbling fountain, and on and on and on. I know better than to ask: any outfit that calls itself “Paradise Ponds and Gardens” and does what they do at that place is, by definition, out of my price range.

The hounds and I continue up the neighborhood street, where we find another crew’s truck & trailer, with a couple of workers mowing an emerald ryegrass lawn. And holy mackerel: they’re not lawn men: they’re women!

And ay caramba, they’re not just women, they’re Latinas!

Two women, nicely dressed women decked out as though they were at the yoga studio or at the gym instead of pushing a mower around a half-acre of lawn. They look smart — not just in a stylish way. They are, to coin an old Texas saying, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

I ask if they’d like to take on another job. The younger woman says, “Sure. Write down your address.” I have to take the dogs back to the house and retrieve a bidness card for the purpose — which I do forthwith.

On the way back, I see the neighbor’s lawn guy is also on the job. He’s a gringo — a down-at-the-heels sort of guy dressed like he slept in the alley last night. Upwardly mobile? Sooo not!

Fleetingly I consider asking for a bid anyway…until I’m reminded of why I would not hire a gringo yard guy for love nor money. Call me bigoted — you’ll be right. But my one-on-one experience with White landscape workers has been uniformly negative — well, except for one ex-convict who trimmed palm trees. Unfortunately he went back to jail and so has not been around recently. They steal any tools that are not red-hot or nailed down. They cheat you. They try to injure or poison your dog so they can come back and burgle your house.

I’ve yet to meet a Latino yard worker who proved to be, overtly, a thief.

How am I reminded? Because a few minutes after I get back, I find the jerk dragging  debris from the neighbor’s house — across the road — hauling it up the alley and dumping it into our garbage bin!

The guy does this all the time, because he’s too effin’ lazy to open the neighbor’s back gate and drag the front-yard debris through the backyard into HIS alley and dump it in his trash can.

Today it didn’t matter, because today is trash pickup day and the garbage truck (running late…) hadn’t yet come by. But he doesn’t always show up on trash day. Nor do the garbage trucks always run late. And when he fills that garbage can all the way to the lid, the four households who are assigned to use it can’t put a thing in there. We have to walk all the way down the alley to the trash bin assigned to the next set of four neighbors.

Not that it’s a big deal. But it’s the kind of petty dishonesty, petty laziness that speaks to the man’s character. And what it says in speaking is “don’t hire this one!”

Godlmighty.

Yarnell. But only if you can find an honest foreman…

Lazy…

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I’m never what you’d call very ambitious…not anymore, anyhow. But lately it’s getting to be a tussle, just to get my rear into gear. Nothing: that is what I want to do. NOTHING.

Maybe it’s spring fever. Fall being Arizona’s second spring, after all.

Nevertheless I did manage to drag myself out of the sack and wash the car before the heat came up — which is fairly early. It’s almost 90 degrees right now, at 10:45 in the morning.

…wash me, Seymour!

My enthusiasm for washing the car, even though I know I can do a lot better job than the nearest surviving commercial car wash for about fifteen bucks less, has faded to nil. And really, poor Phryne has needed a bath for quite some time. She got black tarry gunk all over her when Our Honored City Parents finally elected to resurface the neighborhood streets. Layer atop layer of dust settles on her, as on all cars in the Phoenix area. When SDXB and I drove to Prescott, we ran into swarms of flying insects, so she was peppered with squashed bugs. And some moron decided to scrape a shopping cart all along her right flank, leaving some handsome slate-colored racing stripes.

Normally I would wait until it rains briskly,  park the car in the driveway for awhile, then pull it back into the garage and wipe it down. This has the dual advantages of a) avoiding a hose-drag, and b) not even racking up the cost of city water.

However, it hasn’t rained lately, at least not when I’ve felt inclined to get out in the stuff. And the car was beginning to look pretty disreputable.

The main ingredient of products billed as bug-and-tar remover, it develops, is elbow grease. Took exactly the same amount of vigorous scrubbing to lift the petrified bugs and the road tar with the chemical as without.

At any rate, the car is now radiantly clean and the 17 microfiber rags used for the car wash and yesterday’s house-cleaning have been run through the washer and tossed in the dryer.

The eight-inch-deep pile of paper marked “Attend to this NOW” has been dusted off and finally sifted through. What a LOT of trash. I hate, hate, HATE shuffling paper.

Downloading the PayPal, credit union, and credit-card statements direct into Excel without passing “Go” will eliminate at least some of the paper-pushing. There’s not much you can do about the mounds of paper Medicare, Medigap, and Social Security send, other than simply forget it. I cram all that stuff into files, which are now bursting.

How much of this debris, really, do I have to keep? Godlmighty, there are SIX legal-size file drawers in my office, full to overflowing. And that doesn’t count the chuckablock-full four-drawer cabinet in the garage!

Alas, trying to figure that out and then, once figured, shoveling out the mess represents Work, which I decidedly wish to avoid.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

Next task: figure out (have you noticed HOW MUCH TIME is spent on FIGURING OUT???) how to measure out the granulated chlorine I bought in bulk from Leslie’s yesterday.

You know how Leslie’s does love to sell you untold zillions of dollars worth of chlorine tablets, supposedly to keep your pool sanitized & algae-free? Well…. It appears the things are unnecessary if you use granulated chlorine and know HOW to use it.

Just read through the lengthy, extremely fine-print instructions plastered on an 8-pound package of granular chlorine purchased from Our Beloved Leslie’s dealer. Planned to use it as I’ve learned to use the same stuff that comes in 1-pound plastic packets: dump it in about once a week, all the while floating a couple of (fast dissolving!) chlorine tablets around the drink.

Well. Comes the Revelation…

It turns out you can use this stuff not just for shock-treating but also for routine day-to-day chlorine maintenance. Purchased in bulk, it is MUCH cheaper than either the tablets or the “shock treatment” packets (which contain the same stuff).

Even at the extravagantly profit-seeking Leslie’s it’s cheaper, and even cheaper still at Amazon & Costco. I just paid about $3.75/lb at Leslie’s; Amazon has it for $3.30/lb. At Leslie’s, the one-pound handy-dandy packets are about $4.17 apiece. Apparently Costco no longer carries bulk granulated chlorine — at least not in the off-season.

How much less this would be than floating chlorine tabs escapes me — the math would be way over my fuzzy little head. But since one bucket of those things costs about a hundred bucks and you only have to throw in about 3 ounces of the granulated stuff a couple times a week, my guess is…a lot less.

So the Pool Task of the Day is multi-pronged:

1. Thoroughly wash out the measuring cup used for doling out chemicals into the pool. This supposedly holds 16 ounces (i.e., one pound), but those are fluid ounces, not granulated dry toxic chemical ounces.
2. Trot the kitchen scale outside and measure granulated dry toxic chlorine into said measuring cup until I can figure out how much one pound would really be. And how much 3 ounces really are.
3. Sweep the pool and clean out the various pots, a much-overdue job.
4. Shock-treat the pool at dusk, so as to beat back the re-nascent mustard algae.

Because daytime temps have been around 100° for the past week or so and really have never dropped out of the 90s since the “end” of the summer, the water may be warm enough for a swim today. If so, it will be a brisk swim, because the nights have been nice and cool — and pool water cools quickly when the night-time temps drop. But we shall see.

I’ve been too lazy to experiment with that, too.

Next: fart with state university paperwork for a client, so I can get paid.

Then: fart with concocting a statement for another client, so I can get paid.

After that: write.

If there is an after that.

Talk about Indian Summer…

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Seriously! It’s 100 degrees on October 17 here.

Actually, it’s kind of a nice day…a dry heat, y’know… 😀 And a mere 100 degrees is not hot enough to overcome one’s second-spring planting instincts:

Sweet little posies, eh? Picked those up this morning at the nursery, while running around in that part of town. Do LOVE that pot! The bulbs I put in there last winter pretty much fried over the summer. So I picked up a dwarf foxglove, a geranium, and a salvia, which kind of pick up the colors in the pot.

Salvia grows really well out in front over the winter (assuming we get a winter this year). So I may go back and pick up a few more to stick in the flowerbed under the olive tree, which remains sadly neglected.

One thing at a time.

Few days ago I stuck some seeds in a few other pots, also out in front:

They’ve already sprouted! Well, actually, only the two pots on the right have sprouted seeds: lettuce and beets. In the center: a baby rosemary plant; on the right, a thyme plant and a volunteer tomato.

I came unstuck in time today, thinking it was Wednesday and not Tuesday. As I’m thrashing around thinking I’ve gotta send out a weekly meeting notice and go buy enough gas to get to the Pima Reservation through the Thursday morning rush-hour traffic and dayum! I didn’t wash the car this morning so won’t be able to see into the rising, GLARING sun tomorrow morning and how could it possibly be time for choir practice AGAIN, it crossed my feeble little mind:

…well…no…wait…it can’t be time for choir practice again.

And… Well. No. It isn’t time for choir practice again. Mirabilis! It’s actually Tuesday!

This left a great deal of time to get stuff done:

  • Strip the bed and
  • Wash the sheets and
  • Wash the blanket and
  • Wash the dog covering and
  • Bang the dog hair out of all the above, in the dryer
  • Wash the bathroom rugs and the doggie floor rags
  • Bang the dog hair of the rugs and rags, in the dryer
  • Drive to the nursery to buy some new posies
  • Dart into Safeway and let them know a telephone scammer is spoofing their pharmacy’s phone number
  • Fly to the pool store and buy 8 pounds of shock treatment
  • Clean the pool pots
  • Thin out the lettuce & beet seedlings
  • Plant the new posies
  • And even write a little on the latest chapteroid of the current noveloid!

Think of that. And it’s not yet 1 p.m.

The other day I made a nice impromptu ratatouille, which served handsomely as leftovers-for-breakfast this morning. Ratatouille, a dish from the south of France, sounds very fancy to the American ear in the same way that anything spoken or written in French sounds fancy (mais non?). But in fact it’s good peasant food, on the order of pot roast or Yankee stew: simple, cheap, and deliciously satisfying.

All you need is a nice little eggplant, a summer squash (any of the thin-skinned variety like zucchini or crookneck), a little onion, a bell pepper, a bit of garlic, and…whatever else you have laying around. Celery is nice to add. Herbs of various callings — I dumped the rest of the herbes de Provence into the stuff, maybe all of two or three teaspoons. Thyme is always good. Whatever. Got some carrots? Good. Mushrooms? Fine. WhatEVER. And you’ll need some tomatoes — either a bunch of chopped up fresh tomatoes or a nice can of your favorite brand of chopped tomatoes.

Coarsely chop the onions and garlic and celery if you have it. Pour a little olive oil in a large skillet. Slowly cook the aromatic veggies until they’re transparent and beginning to brown. This should take about the length of time required to consume a small glass of wine slowly whilst reading the news. Get up a couple of times and stir.

Before sitting down with the wine, though, also coarsely chop the other veggies and set aside. You might want to sprinkle some salt on the chopped eggplant, as this is the traditional way: leaches out extra liquid, which if the eggplant is mature can add some bitterness to the flavor. If you decide to do this, pat the eggplant pieces dry on some layers of paper toweling before proceeding with the post-wine step.

Remove the aromatic veggies from the pan — just spoon them out onto a plate next to the stove.

Add a little more olive oil.

Apply the rest of the vegetables to the olive oil in the pan. Pour another glass of wine and, while beginning to consume this, allow the vegetables to cook a bit, stirring occasionally, until they’re starting to brown a little.

Next, stir the onions, celery, and garlic back into the sauteed vegetables. Carry the wine glass over to the stove. Add the canned or boxed tomatoes. Stir well. Pour part of the wine into this mixture (red is better, IMHO, but either is just fine) and mix together well.

Cover the pan. Turn the heat to medium-low. And just let it simmer for 45 minutes or so until all the lovely flavors are combined.

This is good all by itself, or served over pasta, or as a side for grilled steak, chicken, or fish, or whatever you please.

There’s a full-blown fancy recipe for this in the cookbook. And it’s never too late to buy the cookbook! Want a hard copy? Lemme know in a comment and we can conduct business by email.