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Celebrating!!!!

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Yahoo! Since June 1, nine pounds have disappeared from my fat little body — I no longer look like I’m three months pregnant (only two months) — the blood pressure is down in the normal range, CardioDoc says I can have a couple cups of coffee in the mornings, and he doesn’t want to see me for another six months. w00t!

This morning I jogged a mile, walked (fast!) for a mile, and walked a half-mile to and from the park. Last night I swam thirty-three laps, which comes to a half-mile of breast strokes, back strokes, side strokes, and (mostly) Australian crawl. After that, the dog ran the human around her usual .66-mile course.

QTonic_So this evening I’m celebrating: breaking the vegetarian fast to have a nice little piece of steak swathed in (salt-free, MSG-free) adobo. And, by gawd, I’m having a swiggle: a nice gin and tonic, sloshed together with pricey but perfectly delicious Q Tonic Water. So, so  marvelously delicious and cold and refreshing and it’s 112 degrees out there!

Yes. And therein lies the reason why I deserve this gin and tonic so richly. By way of gearing up for said celebration (ohhh steak, ohhh brocolini, oh colorful little new potatoes said to push your blood pressure down, ohhh salad with verboten blue cheese on it), I went out to start the propane barbecue, which also has to hold a passel of cheap meat for the Queen of the Universe.

Starter switch was dead.

Okay. I know what that means: change the battery.

Go in the house, get new battery, install.

Nope.

Huh…

Try to light grill with butane fire-starter thing.

Uh uh.

Change the propane tank — it is low enough to maybe even be out.

Nope.

Noooooooo gas barbecue tonight!

Damn. This means I have to fire up the charcoal grill, which is, to say the least, a chore on the best of days and a species of penal hard labor on a 112-degree day.

Gerardo’s underlings have rolled it a little too close to the massive hanging gardens of catclaw for comfort. Normally I would put the charcoal-lighting “chimney” on the smoker’s rack, but I’m afraid sparks from the mesquite, of which there are likely to be a-plenty, could set fire to said jungle plant. I can’t move the thing…it must weigh at least 100 pounds. So I have to dream up some way to start the chimney without defiling the landscape or initiating a 911 call.

Finally construct a platform from a cinderblock placed in an aluminum steam-tray liner (I use the steam trays to cook Cassie’s meat in the grill, when it’s working). Meanwhile I take the hose and soak the nine-foot-high cat’s-claw vines.

This considerably slows down the preparation of the proposed magnificent dinner.  And as we scribble, the accelerated imbibulation of the gin and tonic is greatly speeding up the intoxication of the human.

Oh well. Meat cooked over a real charcoal fire is infinitely tastier and juicier than meat zapped over propane.

At the corner of Tatum and Shea (lissen up, Abby!) is a gaggle of entertainingly upscale food purveyors: a Whole Foods; the jewel in the scabbard of Fry’s Sword of AJ’s & Whole Foods Destruction; a white-bread but well stocked Trader Joe’s; and (of all things) a Penzey‘s.

Bereft of salt in my annoying diet, I decided to use curry as a substitute. But…the scrumptious Madras curry I picked up from the local Asian supermarket is more salt than curry — one teaspoon whacks you with 13% of your sodium RDA. And I dispense it by the tablespoon. The generous tablespoon. After tablespoon after tablespoon. Who knows? Maybe even by the cup…

So I determined to make my own curry powder mix, something I used to do in my misspent youth as an idle corporate wife, to excellent effect. My spice stash was exceptionally stale — a decade or two old. So decided I’d better replace all that stuff.

This required the acquisition of a fresh new collection of exotica:

turmeric
cumin seeds
fenugreek
white peppercorns
coriander
dried ground ginger
whole cloves

The rest of the ingredients I had in the cabinet. Eventually I will disgorge a curry powder recipe. But not just this minnit. Watch this space!

After gathering about a half-million small jars of spices, I discovered Penzey’s has a salt-free curry. However, a sniff of the stuff suggested a less-than-exciting concoction. I can do better than that.  So the purchases stayed in the analog shopping cart.

To my delight, Penzey’s also has an adobo spice mix. And it’s sodium-free! Who’d’ve thunk it? The grocery-store adobo in my cabinet, by Durkee, is full of MSG:

Sal, ajo deshidratodo, oregano, glutamato monosodico, pimienta negra, fosfato tricalcico, aceite vegetal (de soyo de semillia de algodon), partialmente hidrogenado.

Lovely. That would be…

Salt (the main ingredient!!), dehydrated garlic, oregano, monosodium glutamate, black pepper, tricalcium phosphate, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean and/or cottonseed).

YUCK! At least Spanish speakers have the decency to refrain from the and/or monstrosity. But whatever language you put it in, this commercialized “adobo” is freakin’ poisonous. Penzey’s version would be helped by the addition of some turmeric, but it’s quite respectable as it is.

§ § §

The sun is going down, the dinner is cooked and consumed and was awesome, and now it’s time to clean up and chase the dog down into another neighborhood and back and fall face-first in the sack.

Ghosts of Stupidity Past

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P1020425Lordie! Looking back over all those defunct financial statements made me wonder where on earth I left my IQ during and after the divorce. I did sooo many stupid things back then, not the least of them leaving the corporate lawyer in the first place.

Shortly after the divorce was final, I hired a financial adviser who was the ex-wife of one of my husband’s ex-partners. Inexplicably, I imagined that these characteristics plus an ambitious post-marital career made her magically trustworthy.

In the first place, she was charging me through the wazoo, and in the second, she gave out bad advice. She had me dump a bunch of money into a mutual fund that was…well, OK, but just OK. And it, too, had high expenses — the word “Vanguard” was never mentioned.

But the worst thing she did screwed me over royally.

The ex- was five years older than I. When the alimony ended, he would be 59½ and I would be 54. Under the IRA rules, because together we would have been eligible to take withdrawals when he turned 59½, at that time we each could draw down from our respective halves of the fund. But, unknown to me, this largesse did not come without strings.

I figured I could get my freelance writing and book packaging business up and running in five years, particularly since my business partner was experienced in publishing and public relations and well known in Arizona. By the time the alimony ran out, I expected to be able to support myself with the business and the interest from this large IRA and a couple of smaller investments.

The IRA resided in the now defunct First Interstate Bank of Arizona. Their investment department also left something to be desired. A few years later, they freaking lost a municipal bond by dropping it, unregistered, into the snail-mail.

Long before that, though, my friend/financial advisor was lobbying me to move the IRA from  First Interstate to the care of her firm, thereby allowing her to start charging lots of money. Understanding exactly nothing about mutual fund and financial management costs, that’s exactly what I did: I rolled it over to a new IRA with her company.

A-n-n-n-n-d… Guess what? In the eyes of the law, rolling my half over made it “mine,” not mine and the ex’s. And so this move — effectively creating a “new” IRA — meant now I couldn’t withdraw a penny until I was 59½!

Well, of course, once the alimony stopped, there was no way I could reliably support myself on a freelance income alone, and I knew it. Ultimately, the upshot was that I had to go out and get a full-time job, selling the business to my partner. That’s how I ended up at the Great Desert University.

Why did I stay with her after that? What on earth was I thinking? I don’t even recall registering that this mistake was, after all, hers — a CFP with an MBA in finance and a brag that she specialized in single women’s money management should have known better. Later, the fact that she migrated from firm to firm to firm should have been a tip-off that her competence might not be the best.

Eventually I did walk, straight to the very excellent, indeed brilliant, financial manager who founded the firm that today is known as Stellar Capital Management. The guy had been there all along. I knew about him. Why on earth didn’t I turn to him first?

Here’s a weird one: I was so terrified of debt that, to ensure that I would never charge more than was in the checking account, every time I made a credit-card charge, I would write a check for it, enter it in the checkbook, and subtract the amount from the balance. Then at the end of the month I would stuff all these checks — sometimes 15 or 20 of them! — into an envelope and send them with the payment coupon. Gaaaaaaaahhhh! Please: steal my identity!

What possessed me to do that? Well, it was more than just fear of being unable to pay the month-end bill. Cash flowed through my fingers like water, and paying with checks or a card allowed me to keep a better grip on spending, mostly because both of those methods generated a paper trail. Writing a check at every cash register was a pain…it actually was easier for me to write a flurry of checks to the credit card. And I had no idea how to use Excel. I’d never even opened the program. ’Twasn’t until I went to work at GDU that my opposite number there showed me how to use it to create a grade book, and from there it didn’t take long to figure out that if it would keep track of grades, it would also keep track of a budget.

Speaking of stupid, revisiting all those old pay statements by way of grinding them up also unearthed a lot of correspondence over the fiasco that occurred when GDU’s leadership decided to switch from bimonthly to semiweekly pay at the same time as they made a switch from whoever was our payroll vendor to PeopleSoft. Creating and inflicting the subsequent chaos, described by a Wall Street Journal reporter as “all part of the plan,” cost the university $30 million.

My god! What a mess! Repeatedly, despite screams of rage from me, they would fail to withhold my 403(b) contributions and then, with the following check, hit me with a double whammy — leaving me to scramble to pay my bills that month. PeopleSoft decided that because of my job classification I had no right to vacation time (!!). They erased my accrued vacation time — which amounted to five or six weeks, since I hardly ever took time off — and stopped tracking vacation hours. And I was one of the lucky ones. At least I got paid, even if the amounts and statements were wrong.

Some people didn’t get paid for weeks. At least one guy got a paycheck in the amount of $0.00. Some got double-paid and, when they tried to return the redundant paychecks in person to HR, were told their pay would be docked that amount the following pay period. Some got double-paid, and PeopleSoft never noticed — if you kept your mouth shut, you just might get away with banking an extra paycheck.

Great plan, dear bosses!

Windy City Gal (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!) remarks that she’s taking riding lessons — so that, among other reasons, she can take a couple of wonderful riding excursions when she visits Scotland later this year. Wow! How cool does that sound?

Reminded me of how much I miss the ranch outside of Yarnell, where we had a small herd of horses. My favorite was Babe, a neatly trained quarterhorse on whose capacious back I performed some of the stupidest stunts of  my entire life. Flying down the Kirkland Junction road at a full gallop…bareback. What was I smoking?

Well you might ask! Next to me on the left was my best friend on Old Stewball, a retired racehorse that wanted nothing, nothing other than to proceed at a dead run. When a horse falls or bolts and I need to get off fast, I tend to jump to the left…don’t know why, just instinct. If I’d fallen or jumped off Babe, I would’ve gone right under Stewball’s hooves.

WTF. I survived, and Babe survived, solely by the grace of God.

Presumably that’s how we all survive, by Her grace.

Decluttering Hell: File Cabinets

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Lookit this…

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And this…

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And this!!!

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This weekend I spent seven hours shoveling out file cabinets!

The accountant, who’s also doing my bookkeeping, would like to get file folders that contain only a few months’ worth of statements and receipts, rather than a pile that requires me to rent a llama to get the junk to her office. These are records that need to be saved for seven years, and so to accommodate her wish, I had to break free some space in the file cabinets in the office and the garage. The current bank account and charge card records reside in my desk file drawers, which have just enough room to hold them. Having to create duplicate files and add them to yet more hanging file folders ain’t gonna work.

The four-drawer garage file cabinet was jammed, and the two-drawer model in the office was also about maxed.

Problem is, I never know what to keep and what is safe to throw out. The ex- (the corporate lawyer, who presumably should know) kept every scrap of paper having to do with finances, jobs, etc. all the way back to before the beginning of our 25-year-long marriage. He kept every check he ever wrote — and in those days that was quite a few. I expect to this day he has some set of bureau drawers packed full of that kind of stuff.

That sort of imprinted me with the importance of keeping anything for which, by the remotest chance, you might be called to account.

All right…so, it was off to the Accountant from Nirvana to get the facts on record storage. Via e-mail, the Q&A:

•  What about statements and paperwork for homeowner’s and auto insurance, dating back to the mid-1990s? Can that stuff go? I have a new insurance company. Is there any reason I might be asked to prove that I had a car or house covered in the past? If I have to keep some of it, how much to I need to keep?

Keep for 3 years.

• Statements from old, long-closed investment management accounts? Statements from the 403(b) at GDU, which has now been rolled into my big IRA? Statements for mutual funds that I no longer own? These go back 15 or 20 years. At one point Reimer (investment manager) asked me to come up with evidence for the “cost basis” of some Vanguard account. I don’t even know what a cost basis is, much less how to find it in that mountain of paper. Apparently he wanted to know how much I had originally invested, back in the 1980s. I managed to unearth what I thought was the first statement from Vanguard, but he said that wasn’t it. Do I have to keep all these stacks of old statements? 

Keep the December statement only (or whatever month shows a good summary for the entire year).

• Bank and credit union statements for accounts that have been closed? Some date back to the 1990s. Some are more recent. 

Save for 7 years.

• How about pay stubs dating back to my first pay period on the job at GDU? At one point my first paycheck came in handy…at retirement, GDU tried to claim I’d started a year later than I really had, thereby trying to screw me out of a year’s worth of RASL credit, to the tune of several thousand dollah (yeah, i know it’s a huge faceless mindless institution, but in my paranoia i do not believe for a minute that there’s no agency behind that kind of thing). Should all those job records be kept? Some of them? Which ones, if only a portion?

Toss them all once you receive your W-2 for that year.

• How about records of annual reviews, student evaluations, CYA notes on formal proceedings with a particularly nasty colleague that could have led to a lawsuit? Don’t know if anything could still come out of it — the student involved has since moved on, and there surely must be some kind of statute of limitations. What on earth to do with THAT pile of paper???? 

I don’t know about those types of professional issues.

•  Evidence of malfeasance on the part of a former chair, notoriously incompetent but now retired? Is there a statute of limitations that might apply to colleagues and former ASU employees who might have a grievance against this woman?  

Again, I don’t know about how  long you would save these items as they relate to standards that are part of the education profession.

Well, this was all very informative. Also very work-making. It meant I had to go through yards of hanging files, sifting out the December statements for many more investment accounts than I can add on my fingers. The ex- and I divorced in 1992. Over twenty years of obsessive document-filing resided in those cabinets! Two of the banks that issued scores of monthly statements no longer exist. Neither do two or three of the investment firms that managed my money before Stellar came on the scene.

I threw out 18 or 19 years’ worth of home and auto insurance paper, 11/12ths of 21 years’ worth of old investment statements, 14 years’ worth of old bank and credit-card statements, five credit cards from long-defunct accounts, and any number of miscellaneous archaeological finds.

An Internet search brought up the specifics of Arizona’s statutes of limitations. For most civil cases, it’s one year. The litigious student who got into the fight with my scoundrelish former colleague is now a successful real estate agent, so she’s unlikely to file a lawsuit even if she could. Other former colleagues who still have gripes against GDU have missed their chance to include the noxious chair in their complaints. My former secretary, La Morona, whom I managed to force out by riding her to do the job right until she finally gave up and quit, also has missed the boat, which sailed four years ago.

So I threw out everything that had to do with GDU.

Then it was into the house to clear out the office file cabinet.

This thing has fast become overwhelmed by the constant flood of dead trees from Medicare’s ancillary insurance companies. Medigap carriers AND Part D drug plan carriers, it develops, send you a three-page (minimum) document called an “Explanation of Benefits.” These things list Every. Single. Doctor’s appointment; Every. Single. Test you take; Every. Single. Procedure that is done on you; Every. Single. Prescription you fill… every goddamn thing any medico or para-medico can think of to charge you for, world without end, amen.

These documents are well-nigh incomprehensible. Without training in the intricacies of the medical bureaucracy, the only way you could figure out what the things mean is to spend several hours poring over each one, studying every entry, looking up the mysteries on the Internet, and trying to relate the mess to reality. Such as it is.

Look up a question like “how long to save EOBs” and you discover nothing is said about when to dispose with this tsunami of paper. Indeed, at least one federal site implies that you should keep the litter forever by remarking that you can use past EOBs to reconstruct your health history, in the event of some question or catastrophic illness.

Another site states that insurance companies are required to store EOBs electronically and can disgorge copies on demand. Uh huh. So, in theory, you should be able to discard them as soon as you’re sure your medical provider has actually been reimbursed.

But yet another source (sorry, didn’t have time to save URLs while heaving paper) tells you that you should match each EOB with the medical provider’s corresponding bill, checking to be sure that the correct procedures were charged (it’s your job, as it develops, to ride herd on Medicare fraud) and searching for reasons to challenge any denials of coverage. Then you are to clip each EOB to each statement and save them until tax time. If you’ve been sick enough that you might be able to claim a medical deduction, then you have to haul all this stuff out, revisit it, and use it to document your deduction. If not, then you should save it for at least a year.

Why not? Who has anything else to do with their time, eh?

By the way, each EOB conveniently includes your name, address, birth date, and Social Security number. 🙂 Ain’t that grand? So all of those things have to be shredded or burned.

They’re not the only offenders. Bank One and Chase Bank print your credit-card number (!) on their statements along with your name and address; American Express does not.

Shoveling all this crap out resulted in a mountain of paper  that completely filled the 18-cubic-foot recycling barrel.

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And that was just the stuff that didn’t need to be obliterated.  The pile of paper spread all over the floor around a trash can and the dining-room chairs, pictured in the third image above, is all stuff that has to be shredded or burned. Then there’s this stack of paper from a prior, half-baked file-drawer purge, which I just haven’t had time or energy to figure out what to do with:

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I was going to burn those five (!) folders full of defunct documents over the winter, but we had no-burn regimes every night when it was cold enough to use the fireplace. And besides, burning paper in the fireplace results in a godawful mess to clean up. And it stinks.

My shredder is already on its last legs. So the options are

a) to pay someone to shred the stuff, which I’m just too ornery to do;
b) to go buy a new shredder (which I probably ought to do, since mine has to be coaxed); or
c) burn the whole pile in the backyard charcoal barbecue.

Undoubtedly, c) is the cheapest option. However, as we scribble it is 105 degrees in the shade. The barbecue is  parked in the full sun. Outdoor stuff around the neighborhood is, as you can imagine, quite dry, and that raises a concern about hot ashes floating around.

So, I suppose I’m going to have to get up off my duff and drive to OfficeMax or Costco to get a goddamn shredder.

Lord, how I hate this kind of thing! No wonder my blood pressure is through the freaking roof. Whose isn’t?

How to Game the Coupon System

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CVS drugstore gameAmanda Grossman, proprietor of Frugal Confessions, has published an interesting and informative e-book explaining, in full detail, how to work coupons from CVS Pharmacies to get free or nearly free goods. Enthusiasts call this the CVS game, and so, appropriately enough, Amanda has titled her book The CVS Drugstore Game: Strategies to Turn Pocket Change into Thousands of Dollars Worth of Free Products.

If you’ve never tried the drugstore game, you really should take a look at this thing. Even if you’re not especially interested in power-couponing at the corner pharmacy, you should see it. The book is a real tour de force.

I knew some couponing aficionados were doing this, but until I read Amanda’s book I had no idea how they pull it off — and do so with a minimum of clipping. The strategies Amanda describes have, of course, a natural appeal to us frugalistas. They would be especially useful for consumers with large families, and also for groups of friends or neighbors who band together to buy products in large quantities by way of generating large savings.

Well worth the $4.99!

Biking as Exercise Shortcut

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So I have to be at the doc’s office for a blood draw at  7:30 this morning. That doesn’t leave enough time to jog around the park and get cleaned up, so I decided to ride my bicycle instead. Four times around the park = four miles. Left the house at 5:10 a.m.

Bad idea. Too many morons with dogs off the leash. What IS it with these people? If you want to let your dog run loose, take it to a dog park! How hard is that? Several residents here have been bitten by large loose dogs as they (the residents) were jogging or running around the park. Dogs chase prey. That is their nature. When they see someone trotting along, they think the person is something to eat, and no amount of calling your overindulged “baby” pooch will call it off.

Also, at this hour the workmen laying train tracks up Nineteenth Avenue are arriving to park in the vacant lot the city has rented for them. This means you have loose dogs to the left of you and smelly cars driven by guys texting while drinking coffee to the right of you. Lovely.

And four miles of biking on the flat is really not enough exercise. It hardly raised a sweat.

At any rate, the other fauna are pretty interesting to watch. There’s a gaggle of older women who gather around 5:00. They don’t jog around the park. They don’t walk around the park. They amble. Very slowly. And they chat. Very busily. One of them, who must be having her aches and pains, appears on a motocross-type bicycle, but because she can’t go slow enough to keep pace with them, she pushes herself along with her feet on the ground. It’s a hoot.

There’s a walrus-shaped nerd — pure nerd, for sure — who seems to be walking for his health. He wears a bright orange T-shirt every day, and he, too, ambles along very, very slowly. He plugs himself into earphones from which tinny music emanates, loud enough to catch your attention way across the street. Must be blowing out his hearing.

Harriet walked by with her dog, who’s getting on in years now. She was surprised that I wasn’t on foot this morning. 😀

Several rather handsome, immaculately groomed middle-aged men, the types who look like they can afford those houses around the park, also jog at that hour. Scenic.

It’s supposed to reach 111 today, and so waiting until I get back from this morning’s moment of grand fun would not do. By 8:00 it will be too hot to throw oneself around outdoors.

And at 11:30 some friends are coming over for lunch and to lounge in the pool. I still have to vacuum the floors and clean the bathrooms and shock-treat the pool with a non-chlorine oxidizer and water all the outdoor plants before they get here.

In an Arizona summer, it’s too hot in the evenings, too, to charge around outside. I’ve been trying to do the roadwork in the early morning and then swim at sunset. Last night, got 30 laps in. One lap is only 80 feet…but according to my English-major math calculations, 33 laps would be half a mile. My goal is to get to 50 laps a day, by adding five laps every day or two. Very, very boring activity, but at least you don’t make yourself sick trying to exercise in the heat.

Made some bean soup last night with one of Sprouts’s 10-bean mixes. Result: less than optimal. Most of the beans are actually lentils, which is nice, except that lentils cook in a fraction of the time it takes for the pinto beans and black beans they’ve mixed in there. So by the time you get the larger legumes cooked, the lentils have melted into a thick, unappetizing mush. Also, without salt, it’s pretty bland. You’d need to dump a fair amount of salt in there to make it at all palatable. I added half a can of tomato sauce for flavor, but that stuff is way too full of salt. One-quarter cup socks you with 12% of your sodium RDA, a figure which itself is probably high. So that was disappointing.

Gotta get going! Have a tolerable Friday and a great weekend…

Less Meat…but Better Meat?

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CowSomewhere during the past several weeks — don’t recall where, exactly — I came across some food pundit’s advice that if, as anyone with any conscience must, you feel the production of meat and chicken in this country is inhumane and unsafe but you can’t afford to eat grass-fed, hormone-free, humanely slaughtered critters every day of your life, you should use your monthly meat budget to buy the highest quality meat you can find, but less of it than you’re used to. Don’t eat meat every day, or else eat lots less of it per meal.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

One of my friends, who’s had a couple of heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, and a stroke, appears to be the picture of health. He attributes his amazing recovery  and present good health to a strict vegetarian diet.

We know that red meats and dark portions of poultry add cholesterol (thereby contributing to your hardening arteries) and raise your blood pressure. We know that vegetarians are much less likely to suffer hypertension and may be less prone to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). But…total, unrelenting vegetarianism is not my style. I like meat, I like cheese, and I’m not gonna quit eating them.

However, I’m open to compromise.

Why not eat a lot less meat — maybe only a couple of servings a week — and use the money you save with that strategy to buy better quality products?

Earlier this week I tried it with a pricey little whole chicken from Sprouts.

Chicken. It’s one of my pet peeves. Like tomatoes, chicken has been stripped of flavor over the past few decades. Factory-farmed chicken is as bland and blah as soggy cotton.

Believe it or not, folks, chicken is supposed to taste like something. And not like the onions and garlic and gravy you dump on it. No. Chicken is supposed to taste like chicken. Same is true of turkey, which is about as flavorless as anything you can buy from the shelves of the food deserts we in America call supermarkets. In some European and Asian countries, you still can find chicken that has a flavor; that’s how I know it’s not just that my taste buds have gone numb in old age.

No, indeed.

In the U.S., you can find chicken with a flavor at Sprouts and, to a much more pronounced degree, at Whole Foods. Splurge a little and buy yourself an organic, free-range, no-hormone, no-antibiotic, no-torture chicken at one of these markets. Sprinkle some herbs over the top of it and bake it in a 350-degree oven or over a slow barbecue grill for 45 minutes or an hour, until it’s done.

You will be amazed.

I also discovered, by serendipity, that humanely, cleanly raised pork available at Sprouts is pretty damn delicious, too.

Meat, chicken, and fish that taste better would make a fine treat, to be consumed on special occasions and with restraint in day-to-day life.

Never have thought I could afford the fancy humanely farmed beef at Whole Foods. But…if I weren’t scarfing a piece of beef a day, I sure could.

Right now the freezer is jammed with Costco rib-eye — I buy a package of the stuff and cut each steak into three pieces, providing enough for at least 12 or 15 servings. Cutting back on the number of servings per week will extend that supply to cover a month or month and a half. Or more.

But after that’s gone?

It’s off to Whole Foods.

CowHindu

Images: Swiss cow. Daniel Schwen. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Hindu cow. From “Ten Questions People Ask about Hinduism …and Ten Terrific Answers!” (p. 6). © Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.