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Blast from the Grocery Past!

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cross-creekSo this evening searching for television content, any content ( 🙄 ), I come across some sort of ersatz redneck cooking show. They’re going on about down-home Southern cookin’ and this makes me curious to look up deviled crab and buttermilk pie in an old regional cookbook that came down to me from my mother.

Yea verily, I find the original recipes. And they’re singularly uninteresting — dull compared to the recipes the show’s producers had tracked down, heavy, and pedestrian. But what should fall out of the book but an old, yellowed grocery receipt. A long, LONG old yellowed grocery receipt.

Though it’s faded and hard to make out, it has a hundred entries on it! And all those purchases, marked as meat and produce and “groceries” (whatever that is) came to a grand total of $89.85. No single item in this piled-up shopping basket came to more than a few dollars. And no single item is named: just the price next to a code showing the merchandise classification.

Imagine buying 100 grocery items for $90 today! A beef roast would have cost around $3.50; a pound of bacon, a buck or so.

Oddly, the receipt shows sale after sale after sale of 21-cent items.

What on earth?

The thing was dated September 28, 1978. Issued by Madison Pay ’N’ Take It, once the best grocer in town — back in the day when you couldn’t buy a decent chunk of cheese in a supermarket and most Americans thought table wine was called Blue Nun or Boone’s Farm.

In September 1978, my son was less than 18 months old. Possibly all those 21-cent items were bottles of baby food?

Unlikely. I used to make his food: I’d use the blender to purée whatever we ate, if it wasn’t too spicy, plus frozen vegetables and fresh fruits. Might have bought one or two baby foods, but certainly not two dozen bottles of baby food. The stuff was full of all sorts of adulterants and fake flavors. That was why I went to the trouble of mashing up piles of real food.

Ah yes: Not baby food, but tiny one-serving bottles of baby juice.

Fake baby juice.

In 1978, I had fallen for the “we’re sooo NATURAL” advertising campaign of a company called Beechnut. It still manufactures baby foods. At the time, it boasted that it was selling wonderful, healthful, all-“natural,” 100 percent pure juice.

In fact, what it was selling was 100 percent sugar water with a little dye added to make it look like juice. Eventually the company was fined $2 million for this particularly nasty scam.

Not, however, before their “juice” had rotted out my son’s baby teeth. The dentist, having had to drill half a dozen of his little teeth, yelled at me for feeding him sugar. I had no idea what he was talking about — I had been downright obsessive about keeping sugar away from him. To the point where relatives and babysitters thought I was crazy!

To this day, my son hates dentists. To this day, I hate big corporate food producers.

That probably was the first clue I had of how evil some of these companies are, and how shabby the food-like products that fill our grocery store aisles really are.

But in 1978, there we were, still in the Organic Garden of Eden: yet to discover the snake was harvesting the apple tree.

Halcyon days.

Is the Republican Party Bad for Business?

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Well, I never thought I’d say it, but here’s what we’ve come to: The Republican Party is bad for business. It’s not only bad for business, it’s bad for anyone who has a 401(k), a 403(b), or any other instrument for equities investment.

How, really, does a major political party get to be captured and held hostage by a bunch of crazies? Well…one explanation may be gerrymandering. Arizona’s district 5, for example, in 2011 was merged with District 6, solidifying Republican control of the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area’s East Valley suburbs, which have historically been dominated by the Mormon church.  Hence, Matt Salmon, one of the smuggest of the crazies we’ve sent to Washington. Other Arizona districts have similarly been manipulated to give Republicans an edge.

Another is probably poor education. You’ve heard me comment on the deplorable products of my state’s K-12 system. Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, who was largely responsible for bringing his company to Arizona, has said that had he known how bad the educational system here is and how blithely the legislature cuts funds to schools, he would not have suggested that Intel build here.

Only a blindly ignorant electorate could possibly vote in clowns like Matt Salmon and Jeff Flake. One almost wonders if the Republican determination to underfund education in this state has an ulterior motive: uninformed, gullible voters = Republican wins.

My own business only just started to recover this year from the recession engendered by misguided right-wing theories about the economy and ill-advised military occupation in the Middle East. Now the fundamentalist crazies are at it again. The Republican party, driven by an extremist minority that in many ways can be likened to conservative Muslim extremists, has succeeded in shutting down the most powerful government in the world. And it is about to cause us to default on our loan payments.

Taken together, these two blunders will drive our country and the world into another recession. My business certainly won’t sustain that, and I’m sure many others won’t either.

As I write, eight hundred thousand people are furloughed from their jobs, thanks to the extremists in the House.

You understand: that’s 800,000 people who are bright enough to figure out that their livelihoods are threatened by a bunch of doctrinaire fools. It’s 800,000(!!!) responsible, hard-working, taxpaying citizens who, if they have any clue which side their bread is buttered on, will NOT vote Republican in the next election.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of children are locked out of HeadStart programs that, for many children of the working poor, provide the only square meal the kids get in a day and the only affordable day care for minimum-wage and underemployed parents. Not, I suppose, that we should care about the Underclass, eh? But hey: these are freaking children!

I used to be a Republican myself — was a fan of Barry Goldwater, amazingly enough. Actually campaigned for the man when he ran for president. He signed my first straight-A report card from the University of Arizona.

But the party diverged from my way of thinking (and, I believe, from Mr. Goldwater’s) years ago.

I am still not a doctrinaire liberal, although in the current atmosphere the crazies like to paint people like me as far to the left. That’s simply untrue. As a business owner, I probably would vote for Republican policy if it supported my company’s interests. I happen to believe in the Second Amendment, and if all things were equal (i.e., if all candidates had full control over their marbles), I would vote for a Second Amendment candidate and against a gun confiscation candidate, no matter what the party.

However, a policy that brings down the government is not good for business.

 In my opinion, it’s sedition.

When exactly are the sane men and women of good will who remain in the party going to wrest control away from the nut cases?

Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing
demand compromise.

—Barry M. Goldwater
November 1994

Fast One from Apple

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Comes in the e-mail from Apple Corp this little notice:

As a thank you for being a former MobileMe member, you received a 20 GB complimentary storage upgrade when you moved to iCloud. Your upgrade has expired.

Your iCloud storage has been automatically adjusted to the free 5 GB plan. You are currently using 1 GB of storage.

For more information, see this article.

The iCloud Team

Heh. Isn’t that cute?

What happened was that when they created the rather useless iCloud (if you want to store your photos there, I’m sure it’s very nice — but I don’t) (want to, that is), they took away the free storage space that came with MacMail.

Naturally, no one was interested in paying Apple for e-mail space when Google gives wads of it away for free. So to entice people to join up, they made a “complimentary” offer of free space. Then they urged everyone to automatically store all their iPhoto images in this space. Those of us who use Apple’s word processor and spreadsheet could also store those files there — the thing isn’t compatible, though, with the industry standard, Microsoft.

While 20 gigs sounds like a lot, it’s not as much as you might think if you don’t clean out your e-mail in-box fairly often — especially if you have friends who insist on sending you forwarded-forwarded-forwarded junk containing images, no matter how many times you ask them to quit it. My Mac mail, which also fields messages from three g-mail accounts, is set to automatically route messages come from Facebook, the neighborhood association, a Linked-in discussion group, Amazon Associates, and various businesses and individuals that keep spamming me directly into the trash.

Sixty unread messages are in the trash this morning; four on the Mac account. When you open a message on the Mac server, it doesn’t affect the incoming on the Copyeditor’s Desk partition, so you have to manually go in there and delete those — doubling your pointing and clicking for that task, to say nothing of doubling the number of  judgment calls about which messages really should be saved. Seventy unread messages reside there. MacMail doesn’t count “sent” messages, but since those date back to the beginning of May, I’d guess it’s probably several hundred.

Because of this steady, rather rapid accumulation, I actually have come up against that 20 gig ceiling. When that happens, Apple freezes your e-mail. Cute, eh?

And  5 gigs is only a quarter of 20 gigs… Right now, according to Apple, I’m 3.94 gigabytes remain of the 5 gigs.

One reason for the build-up is that I often need to find past e-mails, especially ones that I’ve sent to clients, and so I tend not to delete items from the “Sent” folder until I absolutely have to. And because of my innate laziness, I tend to forget to throw out the trash, too.

So this means I’m going to have to stay on top of cleaning out the mailboxes.

I figured the “complimentary” 20 gigs was a maneuver to get people to load images and documents on Apple’s server and then put them behind the barrel: pay up or lose your data. So I ignored their generous offer of “free” space for all my iPhoto images. As a result, the only thing that matters is my e-mail account: no photos, videos, or valued documents are up there.

 Still. Even though I won’t be seriously harmed if they jam up my e-mail — as long as the hang-up is temporary — something about it I don’t like. It just seems…sleazy.

 

 

What’s Your Least-Favorite Financial Task?

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Hereabouts, it’s not the budget. Not economizing through tight times. Not even paying the bills. My least-favorite financial task is scanning checks and depositing them electronically.

A close second — about neck-and-neck, come to think of it — is driving to the credit union to deposit checks. The only branch on this side of town is up at the Great Desert University’s west campus, about as far off my beaten track as possible. Literally, nothing calls me in that direction anymore, and I deeply resent having to burn gas and time to schlep a few checks up there. Hence: electronic deposit.

Two factors contribute to turning this task into an exercise in frustration. First is the exigencies of the credit union’s software system. Second is the endlessly annoying, ditzy HP ScanPro software.

To begin with, the CU demands that checks be scanned in black & white JPEGs, 200 to 300 dpi. NOT color, my scanner’s default (it likes to brag about its “millions of colors”! The CU’s system just hates that). Try to deposit a check accidentally scanned in “millions of colors,” and you’ll hang the credit union’s software. Nor does said program care for grayscale: a check scanned in grayscale is instantly rejected.

So this means you have to remember to fiddle with your software to persuade it to do a b/w scan. But that’s the least of your headaches.

To please the credit union, your check must be scanned JUST SO. The image has to be cropped to exactly the size of the check, with no border around it. And the image of the check’s backside has to be exactly the size of the front image. If it’s not, your deposit will be rejected.

This means you have to set the check on the scanner’s flatbed exactly straight. That is 100% straight straight. The scanner then copies the entire flatbed, and you have to crop the image to the edges of the check. The cropping tool, of course, appears as a rectangular box with right angles all the way around. Set the check on there cattywampus, and you get part of it cut off and part of it with the hated border.

The inside of the scanner’s cover is white, right? Ohhhhkkkaaayyyyy…. If your check is white or pale gray or pale beige, it’s extremely difficult to line up the edge of the cropping rectangle with the edge of the check’s image. Get that wrong, and the CU rejects your deposit because it thinks you’re trying to deposit a fake check, because the size of the front doesn’t match the size of the back.

The first time I rescanned a check four times and couldn’t get the goddamn software to accept a deposit, I called the CU and asked what was wrong with their software.

Nothing, their CSR said. “But here’s a suggestion: scan the check on a black background. Then it’ll be easier to see the check’s edges”

Black? Say what? Am I supposed to paint the inside of the scanner’s lid??????

Well, I had some black card stock from an art class I’d taken some years before.

Set a small piece of paper on a glass plate — dare you to get it straight in the first place! — and when you lay a black card over the top of it, what will it do? Scootch around, of course.

So, you have to tape the damn check to the damn piece of black paper.

And you have to get it straight. Really, really straight. And sometimes when you align it with the edges of the paper, the scanner fails to pick up the edges of the check.

How to do that? Well…scout up a white pencil and use it to draw rules on the damn piece of black paper, so that you can line up the check at right angles to the edges of the scanner glass. Like so…

BlackThingStarting to get time-consuming, eh? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Okay, now you have your check and you have your annoying black background template sheet thing. Now you have to tape your check to the black sheet. Very, very carefully, because of course you’re going to have to take the tape off one side and turn the check over for a second scan, meaning you dare not rip the damn thing.

BUT…

One piece of tape will not suffice. If you tack the check to the black card with a single piece of tape, the check will…yes!…scootch when you set the card upside down on the scanner bed. No. The scanner software will NOT straighten the image. No. Not a chance. So, you have to affix two pieces of tape, very, very carefully, one to the check’s top edge and one to its bottom edge.

Now, at last, you have the thing in place and you tell HP ScanPro to run “New Scan.” Obediently, it does so, producing a kind of preview that you have to adjust as necessary before scanning to disk. It scans the entire flatbed, meaning you have to grab the cropping tool and reduce the image to fit the check’s image.

BUT…

For unfathomable reasons, if the cropping rectangle that comes up touches the left-hand margin of the flatbed image, HP Scanpro will not allow you to grab the left-hand corners or edge of the cropping rectangle!

This means that if it produces a rectangle that runs all the way from the left side to the right side, you have a little headache. No two rectangles, BTW, are ever the same size or shape. Sometimes ScanPro will produce a cropping rectangle that’s almost the size of the check; sometimes much smaller; sometimes horizontally wide enough to run from edge to edge of the black image but otherwise fairly normal; sometimes deeper than the check but not as wide; and on and on and on to infinity. Sometimes it throws two cropping boxes at you, and then you have to figure out which one will work and delete the other, in a process that is not obvious.

If you have the misfortune of finding a rectangle that spans the black image, then you have to TRY to grab the right-hand side, reduce the rectangle horizontally, then move the rectangle rightward to align with the right-hand edge of the check image, then grab the left-hand side of the rectangle and size horizontally. Then you can get around to sizing the thing vertically.

Very carefully.

Now you scan the thing.

HP ScanPro presents you with FIFTEEN CHOICES for what to do with this check.

The credit union, by the way, also has software that supposedly will scan your check. It will not work with FireFox; it will not work with a Mac. So you have no choice but to scan your check to disk and then upload it to the CU as a JPEG.

As it develops, the best of the 15 choices is to scan it to an Apple e-mail message. This works handily because Apple has the annoying quirk of insisting on inserting JPEG and PDF images into the body of an e-mail message. This actually shortens the increasingly aggravating process you’re enjoying, because you don’t have to open the e-mail and download an attachment: all you have to do is right-click on the image, which pops up automatically in ScanPro, and save to disk.

First, though, you have to check the image to be sure there’s no significant amount of border around the outside of the image — i.e., that you got it straight, and that you cropped it as tight as possible to the check’s border.

If there’s any border to speak of at any edge, or if the JPEG is not straight, you’ll have to go through all of the above to scan it over again. And, quite possibly, again.

And no,  you can not export the image to iPhoto and crop & straighten it there. If you upload the check’s JPEG image to the CU from iPhoto, it will be rejected faster than you can type FO*K! on your keyboard.

So, you finally get this right.

Now you have to trudge through the same process for the other side of the check, making sure that you place the back side on the flatbed in such a way that the endorsement will show on the right-hand side of the image.

By now, you’ve spent about as much time on this process as it would take to drive to the credit union. But presumably you’ve saved the amount of time required for a round trip, eh?

Well. Maybe not.

Why, you ask, don’t you just put the checks in an envelope and snail-mail them to the credit union?

Why, indeed. The last time I did that, some chucklehead there lost the goddamn checks! Yes. They lost a thousand dollars’ worth of checks from my clients!!!!!!!!! Weeks later, just as I sat down to call each one of those worthies and ask them to go to the time and expense of stopping payment on their checks and sending me new ones, the credit union finally managed to find the things.

And that is why, my children, we never send checks to the credit union by snail-mail.

Okay. Now it’s time to upload your images to the handy-dandy Deposit from Home program.

Including the hassle of signing in to the credit union (it often thinks my password is wrong and then I have to go to a special page to convince it otherwise), uploading one check takes SEVENTEEN STEPS PER SIDE!

Got that? You have to jump through those hoops twice for each check (less the two-step sign-in and the navigation to the Deposit-from-Home page): front side, back side. That’s a total of 31 hoop-jumps! Per check!

😆 😥 😆

By the time I’d managed to deposit the two checks that evinced the present rant — one from Medicare B and one from my Medigap insurer — I still had not paid their total toward the Mayo Clinic bill they were intended to defray. But I had killed about as much time as it would have taken to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus, deposit the checks, and then plod all the way back home.

Remaining to do: Exit Deposit-from-Home; boot up Bill-Pay; remit the total amount of the two checks to the Mayo electronically; print out a report proving I’d done the same; file the stack of paper from Medicare, the Medigap insurer, the Mayo, and the credit union.

The only thing this process saved was about a gallon of gasoline.

Et vous? Do you have a least-favorite financial chore?

This post was included in the October 24 edition of the Yakezie Carnival at Figuring Money Out.

De-Greyhounded…

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It was weird, actually: the moment I saw the dog, I knew this was not gonna work. Hard to say exactly why. Gut feeling? Dog mental telepathy?

Friday afternoon, right at the height of the homeward-bound traffic, I schlepped Cassie, as bidden, to the darkest depths of a vast suburb that feeds the Valley’s ever-more-unholy rush hour. At a Petco store there, we were to meet a rep of the greyhound rescue group, who was to bring the candidate pooch to be introduced to me and Cassie. Presumably, that very evening we were to spirit him away in the Dog Chariot, to live doggily ever after here at the Funny Farm.

paduak_webPadauk is a pretty hound, not very big, with a rich brindle coat. He has the kind of neuter personality of a kennel dog — they don’t develop what we think of as “personality” until they’ve been around humans for six months or a year. But he did have one trait that marked him distinctly: the instant Cassie walked into the room, his eyes dilated eagerly and he watched every flick of her hair.

THAT looked like dinner to him, and he wanted to catch it.

After a while, he settled down a bit and actually sniffed at her as though he recognized she was a dog…upon which she tried to bite him.

Not a match made in doggie heaven, I’m afraid.

It was a little hard to tell how they might have gotten on, because the organizers had four or five hounds in the room where we met, along with four other prospective greyhound adopters and several people from the rescue group. It was a strange place for Cassie, it was crowded, and all of the dogs were no doubt a little stressed.

However, after observing Padauk’s initial response to the corgi, I realized that they could never be left together unsupervised — every time I walked out the door, even for a few minutes, they’d have to be separated with a door between them, or he would have to be crated (I really don’t want a big old dog cage sitting in my living room or family room…). And I figured the minute that hound saw Cassie shoot off down the hall after Ball or fly across the yard after Other Daughter’s cat, he would be right on her.

So Padauk was left on the far end of Tempe. Oh well. Probably for the best.

If Cassie is to have a live-in pal, it looks like she’d better get him as a puppy and he’d better be about her size when he’s grown. Then she can train him up to her own exacting standards…

 

Why?

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why, why, WHY…..

…when you get on the road, does every moron in the land get in front of you?

…when people see you backing out of a parking spot and must be able to grasp that if you’re creeping out from behind some honkin’ huge opaque SUV you can’t possibly see them coming, do they drive right behind you?

…do they do the same damnfool thing when they’re on foot?

…after the first idiot almost gets walloped in this maneuver, does the next idiot coming up behind him do the same goddamn thing?

…on the day you decide to get a flu shot, does every Walgreen’s in the city run out?

…do people pay Safeway $4.33 a pound for apples that are available, in the same variety, a half-mile down the road at Sprouts, for $1.99 a pound?

…do people pay Safeway $1.99 a pound for old yaller onions that can be had, less than three minutes down the road at Sprouts, for 58 cents a pound?

…are customers who shop in Safeway so fuckin’ rude? (Oh…I know: because they’re getting ripped off every which way from Sunday!)

…if Safeway can get small, ripe avocadoes, can’t Sprouts get them?

…when your patience is short and your temper is frayed, do two HUMONGOUS flatbeds loaded with heavy equipment elect to occupy the only two lanes on the road, side by side?

…does a radio station that has a decent format and plays cowboy music pleasing enough  to provide an occasional break from the nonstop NPR yak-a-thon decide to change that format and schlock it up?

…do the onions frying on the stove decide they’re cooked when you have exactly half your hot rollers pinned to your head?

…does algae grow on the bottom of your Brita pitcher?

…do the greyhound rescue people have to trot out their dogs at a suburban pet store halfway to freakin’ Tucson, and do it during the accursed, mega-gawdawful rush hour?

…would anyone deliberately choose to live in Tempe, Arizona?

…on earth did I ever imagine a full-grown coursing hound would be a good match for a short, squat herding dog that looks a lot like a rabbit?

P1010966Rabbit

Corgi
←

Rabbit
→

paduak_web

↑Large hunting dog
Not a corgi
Not a rabbit