For a brief shining moment, it looked very much like the winner of for Most Expensive Grocery Store in Town Prize was…not AJ’s (gourmet central). Not Safeway (two-for-one sale, wherein the first item’s price is inflated). Not Albertson’s. Not Costco (Home of the Impulse Buy). Not Trader Joe’s. Nay, not even Whole Foods!
Where could you buy a pound of apples for $7.++ per pound? Walmart!
I stood there staring at those Pink Ladies and thought…they must have mixed platinum powder into the fertilizer.
But no. Below the sign and hidden on the lip of the apple bin was a sticker claiming their price worked out 12.8 cents an ounce. There being 16 ounces in a pound: $.128 x 16 = $2.05 a pound.
That’s pretty cheap compared to the four bucks or so requested at AJ’s for premium apples. Oh, well. AJ’s had some exotic apple variety I’d never heard of, something called Koru. So we traded two $2.00 Pink Ladies (an excellent choice) for a $4 Koru.
Unfortunately, the Walmart didn’t have any of the dog food that I went up there to buy, hoping to avoid a lengthy trip to a more upscale store that carries the ridiculously expensive product that is the only thing I’ll feed the corgis when I don’t feel up for making their food.
So, I was going to have to traipse way to hell and gone down to AJ’s anyway, which sells the dog food for about $13 a roll, a buck more than Walmart charges, when Walmart has the stuff.
However… AJ’s has the advantage that it sells a very fine ready-made beef lasagne. Happening to be half-starved, I bought one helping, enough for two meals here at the Funny Farm. And naturally, a bottle of côtes du Rhone, on sale in the Summer Special.
So it looks like the economy is chugging right along just now. That’s nice. The skeptics among us, as we know, expect the current administration to bring the whole house of cards down on our heads — any minute now! But even cooler heads understand that what goes up must go down: the economy never stays “up” forever. Eventually it will sag, and we poor little sheeples will lose jobs, see pensions shrink, wonder how we’re going to pay for gas and food…
Well, take heart! Our friend Donna Freedman has come out with a second volume of her excellent frugalist’s survival guide, Your Playbook for Tough Times. She sent me a copy, and I have to tell you: it’s an amazing little book. In just 196 pages (counting the table of contents and lengthy thank-you’s), she covers the bases, even telling you how to find free and low-cost food.
In a sense, Donna argues that all times are tough times, or (if you have a brain in your head) you should at least treat them as though they were. Says she:
The feedback for the first book was interesting. Here’s a comment that really got my attention: “I realized that ‘tough times’ are no longer an isolated event. They’re pretty much like a fifth season, like hurricane season, and (something) one really has to prepare for.”
Some of us have always lived this way, in that we don’t take money for granted. Rather than spend every dime we earn, we put some aside in case something unexpected happens: job loss, say, or illness. And since these days a lot of workers have to fund their own retirements, that means making careful plans for their money.
Yup.
It has a such an array of ideas, strategies, and advice — all of it informed by Donna’s philosophy of “stealth savings” — that it’s almost encyclopedic. It addresses about every personal-finance challenge most of us are likely to face, and does so with common sense.
So once again I ran amok at our favorite clothiery, the Cottage Garden in Glendale. Three of us wymmen have taken to meeting there, going crazy, and then running around the corner to a sweet little restaurant called The Spicery and eating ourselves stupid.
As always, I was in the market for shirts to go with my uniform, Costco blue jeans. And I found, ON SALE(!), a handsome black tunicky sort of shirt, very nice looking. Some shirts, because of their architecture or their coloring or their pattern, hide the Boobless Wonder effect, and this is one that does so handsomely. It also, amazingly enough, hides the present pot belly created by my having mooned around for the past three months. Somehow, miraculously, it manages to make the flat top look unnoticeable and the belly look flat. 😀
Tomorrow SDXB is coming over for dinner and swimming.
Ahem. The problem is… When I go in the pool, I skinny-dip. I do not own anything that can be used to swim in the company of anything other than wild birds and tame dogs. The old swim suits sitting in the drawer (why? Why have these not been tossed out?) have built-in bras and so a) are ridiculous and b) would not fit even if they were not ridiculous.
The relationship with SDXB is past the skinny-dipping phase, so I wanted to find something I could wear with a black (non-see through) cami to jump into the water. She — the proprietor — had some lovely, cloud-soft knee-length tights. So naturally I had to buy those.
But probably, on reflection, I’ll just use the bottom of a two-piece swimsuit, since these sexy little pantaloons are way too nice to dip into chlorine water.
She — Mme. Proprietor — also had two of THE most gorgeous lace cover thingies, one in ivory cut much like a shirt, and one in black with wrist-length sleeves that looks, hevvin help us, very much like a Spanish mantilla. The latter is long enough to cover one’s tush, and so I believe it will look mighty amazing with black tights and a black cami or tank top.
$$$$$
But of course I could not stop there, eh? Ohhh nooooooo….
Whilst prowling around the store, what should I come upon but the niftiest little leather-looking handbags, with a wrist thingie to hang it from your paw or, alternatively, a long strap that you can hook on to sling it across your chest. It looks like leather (good) but it’s not leather (not so good). But more to the point, in addition to being compact and versatile, it is designed exactly as one would like to have such a baglet designed, if one had any say in the matter. It has two fairly generous sections AND six credit-card slots, each big enough to to hold more than one card.
My favorite and currently most used sandals are blue. Lo! they had one in exactly the color. But greed being the better part of valor, I realized I’d better grab one in black, so I’ll have something that will go with everything. Well. Almost everything.
Of late I’ve been trying to get away without carrying a purse at all. This can be done only if one wears something with pockets: to wit, jeans. But I’m getting mightily tired of Glorias, after all these years of wearing almost nothing else.
Most women’s clothes are short on pocket space. So these small, easily portable, minimalist bags will be just the thing. These things will allow me to wear stretchy tights, and they’ll be easy to hide in the car. It’s a nice compromise between no purse/full pockets and a hauling around a big old Coach bag.
Naturally I had to buy a pair of hand-crafted earrings. And a silver wire-wrap ring by the same guy.
Welp, much as I keep pounding at Death’s Door, they still won’t let me in!
Visited the pulmonologist this morning, just dead sure that the twelve weeks of gurgling, wet, sloppy, asphyxiating goddamn cough has got to be adult-onset asthma. This suspicion was aggravated by a recent check-up at the Mayo, where a physician’s assistant opined that it could be allergy-mediated asthma.
So the doc did a breathing test at the office: not asthma. Then he sent me off for an X-ray: nothing visible inside there. But I did get to see and play with two of THE cutest little kids you ever imagined could exist, whilst sitting around the lab’s waiting room. 😀
Still coughing, but it’s slightly better than it was a few days ago. He thinks it’s probably an infection, because on one (count it, 1) day of the 12 weeks this thing has run, I spiked a 102-degree fever.
There’s still still hope for a dire outcome — the hypochondriac never gives up… It could be GERD, which can cause a cough like this when stomach acid regurgitates up into your lungs. If that’s the case, then the fever would have been incidental, presumably caused by some other ailment.
Pollen, up close
But in fact, the wind has been blowing nonstop for the past three months — yesterday was the first in weeks that the wind wasn’t whipping around. After all that phenomenal winter rain, every plant on the desert has burst into frantic and joyous pollen-spreading bloom. So…even though this thing has never evinced typical cold or flu symptoms — no sore throat, no head congestion, no headache, no collywobbles — chances are it’s just a combination of a cold plus pollen allergies.
Dang it. I can’t lose!
Death image: Statue in the Cathedral of Trier, Germany; photo by Jbuzbee – CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4835571 Pollen: By Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility, Dartmouth College – Public Domain. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility ([1], [2]), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14840522
Dammit! I thought he was gone!But ohhh no! This morning when the dogs and I took our usual route around the ’hood, there he was, in front of the cat brothers’ house, dumping cat food on the sidewalk.
We have this old guy who makes a hobby of driving around Richistan during the early morning hours and feeding the outdoor cats. He’ll dump a pile of cat food in the middle of the sidewalk and then stand around waiting for the neighbors’ stray cats to come over and let him pet them.
He also carries pocketsful of large-dog Milk Bones, which he likes to dispense to passing doggy-walkers.
On the surface, this is cute and sweetly eccentric. But when you give it even just a little thought: not so much.
Today’s encounter marked the second time he handed my dogs chunks of Milk Bones after I’ve asked him not to, and the second time it’s caused Ruby to choke and fly into a ten-minute fit of frantic gasping for air. She tries to swallow the whole damn thing without chewing it up, and of course she chokes on it.
Apparently he can’t or won’t remember not to fucking do that. It was the second time I’ve had to pick her up and run with a 25-pound animal in my arms and another one in tow on a leash, hoping I could get to the emergency vet before she died.
Exactly how I imagine I’m gonna get to the emergency vet through rush-hour traffic escapes me, but I’m willing to try.
Fortunately, she managed to gag the stuff up out of her throat by the time I reached Feeder Street NW, and once again she turned out to be OK.
But one of these times, she’s not gonna be OK.
And realistically, there’s no way I can get her to veterinary help at 6:30 or 7 in the morning.
What is the matter with people? Wouldn’t you think the sight of an elderly woman RUNNING down the street with a choking dog would be at least somewhat memorable?
I haven’t seen the old buzzard for a long time. So I imagined maybe he had fallen ill or died — he’s very elderly and seems somewhat frail. Lulled into a false sense of confidence, I’d taken to walking on that street again.
But no.
The real issue is that I haven’t felt very well myself for the past several months and so just haven’t been walking the dogs at all; or when I have, it’s been later in the day. Now that three-digit temps are here to stay, we need to be out of the house by 6 or 6:30, or else we ain’t a-goin’.
So I guess we’ve just been missing him: he’s been there; we haven’t.
Obviously, it’s my responsibility to tell some nutty animal-lover not to feed random stuff to my dogs. But…
In the first place, it feels rude to yelp at some poor old lonely guy, “Hey! Don’t do that!” Which is about what you’d have to do to stop him. He charges at you with both hands full of dog “treats” and shoves them into the animals’ mouths before you can say no. And in the second place, I have asked him not to feed those things to my dogs. He either doesn’t remember or just ignores me.
When you say to him “I’d rather you not feed those to the dogs” or “Please don’t give that to the dogs,” his response is “Oh, pooh pooh! It’s just a little Milk Bone.” He thinks they’re harmless.
And they probably are. Tales that Milk Bone is full of toxic carcinogenic chemicals, it develops, are folkloric: they’re just not true. On the other hand, they’re not full of anything that’s very good for your dog, either. Sort of like candy bars for humans: empty calories. They do contain some kind of beef product, though…and Ruby is allergic to beef in all its manifestations, even cow’s ears and leather chew sticks.
Ruby and Cassie get plenty of dog treats: pieces of carrot, pieces of apple, cubes of cheese, pieces of high-quality kibble. They don’t need any more empty calories than they already get.
So anyway. The guy poses a problem. What he really poses is a road block to my favorite garden spot to walk the dogs. I don’t take my dogs to the park because of the large number of dogs, some of them aggressive, running off the lead. So that leaves Richistan as the favored shady dell in which to stroll. To get in there, I’ll have to walk two blocks north and then drop south a block. In theory we could get there by taking the street one block to the north of the Cat Dudes’ house, but that street curves south and debouches back onto our usual street…about one lot east of Cat Dudes. To avoid him, we’ll have to go way out of our way, and also avoid the prettiest streets in that part of the neighborhood.
Pisseth me offeth…
Milk Bone Ingredients Highlighted: Things you might prefer not to feed your dog
Wheat Flour, Wheat Bran, Beef Meal and Beef Bone Meal, Wheat Germ, Beef Fat (Preserved with Tocopherols), Poultry By-Product Meal, Lamb Meal, Salt, Chicken Meal, Dried Beet Pulp, Dicalcium Phosphate, Bacon Fat (preserved With BHT, Propyl-gallate, And Citric Acid), Brewers Dried Yeast, Whey, Artificial Color (Includes Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1), Vitamins (Choline Chloride, Dl-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate [Vitamin E], Vitamin A Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, D-Activated Animal Sterol [Source of Vitamin D3]), Malted Barley Flour, Iron Oxide, Casein, Natural Flavor (Source of Peanut Butter Flavor), Sodium Metabisulfite (Dough Conditioner), Minerals (Zinc Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Copper Sulfate, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide [Source of Iodine]), Soy Lecithin
This morning in comes news, first from a friend and then from a news story, of not one but two terrifying incidents of harassment and bullying of women.
On Facebook, a friend reported that some guy in a pick-up went off on her while she was on the road riding her Harley. One thing you should know about my friend — she does not keep this a secret — is that she is transexual; in her previous life she was biologically a male and a biker. Yeah: that kind of biker…though she always has identified, psychologically, as a woman, she was probably not the sort of person you’d willingly meet in a dark alley. In her present incarnation, she looks like a pretty normal woman whose presence strikes no fear into your heart. She writes highly entertaining novels whose protagonist is a wild-assed woman biker.
So this guy goes berserk and starts to follow her. She does everything she can to shake him, at high speeds no doubt, but she can’t get rid of him. Beginning to panic, she heads back to her house and parks her bike in the driveway. He follows her and informs her that he’s going to come after her. As you can imagine, she’s somewhat alarmed.
Even more alarmed is the woman in a Phoenix suburb whose home was entered — more than once, apparently — by a lunatic who left a note — while she was sleeping — to tell her he wanted to have sex with her.
Most women begin to experience threats and events of this sort starting at about the age of 12 or 14. I’ve repeatedly been followed, harassed, propositioned, and threatened by strange men — after six decades, it gets old. And “old” is an operative term: even after you’re no longer a juicy, nubile young thing, the creeps still think you’re fair game for threats and harassment, especially when you’re abroad in a car or walking across a parking lot.
This is how I developed my taste for German shepherds…
Seriously and no joke: After the downtown neighbors divorced and I got custody of their dog, all the harassment, all the cat-calls, and all the aggressive passes in public suddenly went away when I had her at my side. What a guy thinks a GerShep is going to do to him while he’s sailing past at 40 miles an hour escapes me…but as a practical matter, the nasty yells and lewd hoots stopped dead when I started taking that dog out with me.
But long before I got the dog, I learned a number of strategies to cope with this kind of sh!t. Note that I have never taken a “woman’s self-defense” course, except for one short session that was inflicted on us in a high-school P.E. class. These things generally scare you more than they help you: you’re told all the horrific things that a$$hats have done to women, and then you’re instructed in techniques that have about a snowball’s chance of working effectively for most women.
The trick is to avoid situations that put you at risk. Since you can’t avoid them all — just being female puts you at risk — you must be mentally prepared and you must always have a variety of emergency plans in mind.
First off, when you’re driving around, know where the nearest police stations, emergency rooms, and fire stations are along your beaten path. Mentally map routes to these places. In our parts, police stations are secured like a castle under siege, and so it may be difficult to get a cop’s attention without getting out of a car — but if that’s the closest refuge, go there and lean on the horn. If you have a cell with you, call 911 and report where you are.
Fire stations tend to be more open, and they’re usually populated by large, fit men. And they’re the kind of men whose altruism triggers their testosterone: show up at a fire station in distress, and they’ll all leap on their white chargers.
An ER is also likely to have someone around who will notice if you park by the door and lean on your horn. Often there are police or firemen around ERs, too.
Failing one of these outposts, always keep an eye out for places that have lots of people around: a crowded parking lot, a popular store, a busy strip mall. I once escaped a nut case by swerving left across oncoming traffic into a shopping center. The crazy kept on rolling down the road, unwilling to continue harassing me in the presence of others.
When driving home, watch your rear- view mirror. If someone follows me into the neighborhood and then stays on my tail after I’ve made the first couple of the turns I have to take to reach my house, I don’t go home. Instead, I take another route back out of the ’hood. If the person stays on my tail, I head for the nearest police station or fire house.
While in public, try to look dowdy. Refrain from dressing sharply (unless you have a man with you, of course), and certainly do not wear obviously expensive clothing or carry an expensive, name-brand handbag. I no longer carry a purse at all these days: too dangerous in the grocery-store parking lots near my house. I keep a credit card and a couple of store cards in a business card case, which I can carry in a pocket.
At home: equip your doors with heavy-duty, drill-proof, bump-proof Shlage or Medeco deadbolts.
Don’t know what “bumping” is? Mwa ha ha! Check this out:
As the “burglar” type in this video remarks, a bump-resistant lock ain’t cheap. But believe me: it is so worth it. Try to drill a Schlage or a Medeco lock, and it’ll break your drill.
Obviously, putting a fancy lock on a kitchen door with a window in it is self-defeating. Install your deadbolt on solid-core exterior doors with no window(!), or — much more cost-effective and handy for letting fresh air flow through the house — install security doors and put the high-end lock on those. You’ll need a top-notch locksmith for the job, because many metal security doors are too thin to accommodate this type of lock; the locksmith will need to special-order a type of metal ring that adds space to install the deadbolt.
Do not use double-cylinder deadbolts. These can trap you or a child in the house if a fire starts — if you can’t reach the key that you’ve stashed out of the burglar’s grasp, or if the person trying to get out doesn’t know where to find it, you’re done for. Remember, the likelihood that you’ll need to get out in a hurry is at least as high and certainly more urgent than the likelihood that some guy will try to get in.
Upgrade your windows. The new double-paned windows have more than one locking system, allowing you to complicate a burglar’s life. And if any of those windows are sliders, add a third “lock” by dropping a stick in the track. You also can buy stick-on battery-operated alarms, which will squeal like an enraged cat if anyone (you included) opens the window. Again, bear in mind: You don’t care if they get in, as long as you get enough advance warning to get out a different door or window.
Make friends with a German shepherd. Get yourself a dog, preferably a large one with a protective temperament.
The dog strategy, however, is problematic. German shepherd dogs are overbred and potentially dangerous — truly, too many representatives of the breed today are batsh!t. Pit bulls — pace, dear pit-bull-loving friends — are unpredictable and also potentially dangerous. You do not want a dog that has a higher than normal propensity to turn on you. This includes a number of purebred lines. The best strategy is probably to rescue a mixed-breed dog, preferably one that does not appear to be part GerShep or part pit bull.
German shepherds and many other large, assertive breeds are high-energy, high-drive dogs that require a lot of time, training, and physical strength to help them adapt to living in your home. You must be prepared to train and exercise these dogs — and to do so you will need training yourself that goes well beyond the YouTube variety — and you must expect to spend some time every day exercising and working your dog.
A smaller dog may be better: most dogs this side of a greyhound are walking burglar alarms. They can’t “protect” you the way most people imagine a shepherd or a Doberman will do…but that’s a fantasy. No dog can or should be expected to protect you. The only critter that can protect you is you.
And you do that with common sense.
Is keeping a gun in the house a manifestation of common sense?
Only if you’re fully trained to use it, if you keep in practice, and you keep the weapon clean and lubricated. And even then, only if you really, truly, deep in your heart of hearts are prepared to use it against another human being. Police officers and members of the military are specifically trained to overcome this scruple.
Most people who are not psychopaths will hesitate to shoot another person. And just a fraction of an instant can give an aggressor the chance to shoot you, if he’s armed or if he grabs your gun and takes it from you. For that reason, I personally think that for most people it’s pointless and, if you have kids around the house, dangerous to keep a gun in your residence. Keep your wits about you, and you won’t need a gun.
For a brief shining moment, it looked very much like the winner of for Most Expensive Grocery Store in Town Prize was…not AJ’s (gourmet central). Not Safeway (two-for-one sale, wherein the first item’s price is inflated). Not Albertson’s. Not Costco (Home of the Impulse Buy). Not Trader Joe’s. Nay, not even Whole Foods!
