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Common sense

Hamburger: 12 ways to keep your family safe

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Because chuck and rump roasts often go on sale for 10 to 50 cents a pound less than the grocery store’s hamburger, I look for bargain roasts and ask the butcher to grind it for me. Not only is the resulting hamburger cheaper, I find it invariably tastes much better than preground burger. Well… did you see the Sunday Times‘s exposé about the gross ways hamburger is prepared in slaughterhouses and the unholy results on public health? Add another good reason for asking the butcher to grind a single roast: ground beef from a source you can see is safer and you know what’s in it!

I’m not going to dwell on the horrific facts reporter Michael Moss uncovered, except to point out that the single burger that poisoned a 22-year-old woman and left her in a wheelchair for life likely consisted of “products” from four different meat packers, some of which define meat in ways you and I would define “garbage.” One of them contributed “lean finely textured beef,” which consists of “trimmings” put through a centrifuge and then treated with ammonia to kill microbes. Yummie!

This explains why the custom-ground hamburger from a butcher’s counter tastes better than even the best of preground burger. It may explain, too, why neither the dog nor I have croaked over from food poisoning. Yet.

Other than abstaining from hamburger, what can you do to keep your family safe? Nothing is 100 percent, but a few habitual strategies will help:

• Buy preground meat at Costco, one of the few retailers that tests meats for bacterial contamination before marketing them.

• Buy beef roasts at a butcher shop or at a grocery store with a staffed butcher counter. Select lean cuts and ask the butcher to grind them for you.

• Never buy preshaped, prepared hamburger patties. Ever.

• Before preparing burger for cooking, place a bottle of dish detergent next to the sink, so it will be handy.

• Use a plate or a synthetic, dishwasher-proof cutting board as a surface for shaping hamburger patties. Use a dishwasher-proof bowl for mixing meat loaf or meatball ingredients. Never use the counter as a surface on which to prepare raw hamburger.

• Never, EVER leave frozen hamburger out on the counter to defrost!!!!! At normal kitchen temperatures, it takes just 45 minutes for E. coli bacteria to double in number. And since just a few cells can make a diner very sick, indeed, the longer meat is out of the freezer or fridge, the greater the likelihood of food-borne illness.

• Each time you handle raw hamburger, go to the sink and use the dish detergent to wash your hands thoroughly before touching any other surface in the kitchen. This is extremely important!

Do not touch the kitchen cabinets, dishes, glassware, silverware, doorknobs, or anything else without washing your hands first.

• After the burger is in a pan or on a grill, place the plate, bowl, or cutting board on which you prepared the meat directly into the dishwasher. If you don’t have a functioning dishwasher, fill the kitchen sink with hot water, strong dish detergent, and about a quarter cup of Clorox. Immerse all tools used in hamburger preparation in this solution and allow them to soak for 10 or 15 minutes before scrubbing, rinsing, and draining.

• Cook hamburger well done. If, like me, you can’t stomach well-done barbecued hamburger, find something better to eat.

• Never reuse the same plate that carried the meat out to the barbecue grill to bring cooked meat back inside! Put that plate directly into the washer, or scrub it well with strong detergent and hot water before reusing.

• Use detergent to thoroughly clean the countertop on which you did the meat prep. Then scrub down the faucet and sink, and also wash doorknobs and cabinet knobs that might have been touched with contaminated fingers. Don’t forget to wash the outside of the dish detergent container.

• Clorox is an effective disinfectant. If your counter will tolerate Clorox, use it. If not, use a strong solution of concentrated Windex, or make your own by mixing rubbing alcohol and water in equal proportions with an added dose of ammonia. Wipe down all countertops, sinks, faucets, doorknobs, and cabinet knobs with this product.

It’s a shame that regulation of the meat industry has grown so lax that we have to take extreme measures to protect ourselves. But of course, when you kill the beast, you take the chance that you’ll kill the consumers the beast was created to protect. That seems to be the case today. If we American carnivores want to live and we want to see our children spend their lives mobile and in good health, we need to take steps to keep our kitchens safe. Let’s bear in mind: we don’t live in Europe!

Image: American Beef Cuts. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

“New” car heaves into view

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Honda_Civic_SiM’hijito has been driving a decrepit wreck ever since some teenaged brat crashed into his parked Camry in San Francisco, totaling that beautiful car and two other vehicles. The amount her insurance company paid him came nowhere near enough to buy a comparable car, and so he ended up replacing it with a sporty-looking but aged four-banger convertible with a leaky roof and shredding plastic seat covers.

Although the car runs, we suspect that at any time it’s going to fall apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay. Wind whistles in through the splits and cracks in the roof and around  nonfunctioning side windows, which is just as well, because the natural blow-dryer effect helps to dry out the rainwater that seeps in with every light sprinkle.

Recently one of his dad’s partners surfaced with a 2002 Honda Civic that he’d like to unload. It belonged to the man’s son, who has gone off to fight in the Middle East. Despite a a fender-bender in its past, it appears to be in good condition, and the guy is willing to sell it for $5,000. With only 64,000 miles on the odometer, that’s a bargain: the Kelly Blue Book private seller price is over $8,200. And it gets a cheering 30 miles per gallon!

In his heart of hearts, M’hijito craves a Toyota pick-up, the better to fulfill the labor-intensive role of the Happy Homeowner. These babies, however, are pretty pricey even in older models. And they are so beloved by their owners that a decent used Tacoma rarely comes on the market.

The little Civic is such a bargain and such an improvement on the clunk he’s driving around, he’s about decided to buy it. It seems like a smart move. He can always borrow my Sienna when he wants to tote things around or if he wants to go on a road trip or camping expedition. I’d love to drive a 30 m.p.g vehicle for a few days!

😉

Images:
Honda Civic, Public Domain, Wikipedia Commons
Toyota Tacoma, Public Domain, Wikipedia Commons

OTC Drugs: Not necessarily harmless

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Just because a medication or nostrum is sold over the counter does not mean the Food and Drug Administration has certified it harmless. Some meds that we take routinely and think of as benign (because after all, if they weren’t, wouldn’t they be available by prescription only?) have all sorts of strange side effects.

We all know that aspirin can rot a hole in your gut if you overdo it or use it to pre-empt a hangover after a night of drinking. And most of us are probably aware that acetaminophen, taken in excess, can damage your liver. But it’s amazing what some of the other commonly available goodies will do to you, and how innocent we may be of their baleful effects.

Take, for example, ordinary cough medicine. Did you know that Robitussin with dextromethorphan can give you quite a high? Teenagers competing to win a Darwin Award swill it down in industrial quantities. This stuff can cause such entertainments as irregular heartbeat, vulnerability to heat stroke, nausea and vomiting, itchy skin…and so on to infinity. Literally…

But you don’t have to take some of these things in off-the-label doses to experience some surprising effects. When M’hijito was a wee babe, a quack pediatrician we were using prescribed Sudafed for a minor cold. This was one of the first colds he’d had, and since he was our only child, we hadn’t a clue that his inability to sleep was not part of the cold. Three days and nights went by without his sleeping more than ten minutes at a time. He would scream and scream and scream, finally doze off if one of us laid on the bed next to him, but if you wiggled so much as to scratch your nose, he’d instantly pop awake and start to shriek again. The pediatrician shrugged and said “babies cry.” By the time we stumbled into an emergency room, all he could do was lay on the mattress and writhe. The ER doctor didn’t have a clue, either.

Meanwhile, I had also developed a galloping case of insomnia, which had been hanging on for several weeks. Even before the kid started keeping us up all night and all day, I’d been sleeping three, maybe at the outside four hours a night. As I was laying there next to the half-dozing infant trying not to move a hair, it suddenly struck me that there might be a connection.

What was the only odd thing we had going in common?

Prescription decongestants.

His father had hay fever and was taking pills for it. We’d had cats for several years. Although I found new homes for them before the baby was born, they’d slept on our beds, lived on the furniture, and infested the house irremedially with cat hair and dander. What I didn’t know is that I was allergic to cat fur. I did know my nose was stuffed up all the time, just like my husband’s. So I had been taking his decongestant so I could sleep at night.

I leapt from the bed, leaving the kid shrieking again and the husband mad as a hornet, and streaked to the bookcase where we kept the PDR. And lo! Both the Sudafed and the prescription contained pseudoephedrine, which has listed among its side-effects “central nervous system stimulant.” Videlicet: pseudoephedrine causes insomnia!

Within hours after we took him off the quack doctor’s meds and me off the husband’s pills, peace was restored to the house. I slept for two days, and so did the kid. We soon found another pediatrician.

Pseudoephedrine is sold over the counter, and it appears in a number of allergy, sinus, and cold nostrums.

Recently I made a similar discovery. With my doc’s complicity, I’ve been using Benadryl as a sleeping pill. The stuff knocks me for a loop, and when I can’t sleep at night—which is most of the time—it sometimes allows me to get six straight hours of shuteye. Sometimes. So it seems.

Exhaustion will do the same thing.

The other day when I was at the fancy Costco near the upscale community college, I picked up a mess of magnificent king crab legs. Naturally, one can’t have king crab without a glass of wine, right? So walked out of the place with a nice bottle of white wine.

My habit is to pour wine as long as food remains on the plate. Since breaking into crab legs and fishing out the meat is time-consuming, I topped off a few more glasses than I thought. Cleaning up after dinner, I looked at the bottle and realized I’d consumed two-thirds of it. That explained why I was weaving around the house like a drunk: I was drunk.

Any more than a glass or two of wine will set my internal alarm clock for 3:00 a.m. sharp. An all-day choir workshop was slated for the next morning. If I woke with a hangover at three in the morning, I was gunna be a zombie through the entire event. So, along about 11:00 p.m. I dropped two Benadryls, following the instructions on the label.

And fell asleep…for about twenty minutes.

Every time I closed my eyes, I had the most horrific nightmares! At my age, you pretty much quit dreaming—or if you do, you rarely remember it. Older people have less REM sleep (and, in my experience, less sleep altogether! Caveman tribes must have used the elders to guard the campfires at night). So a nightmare is a weird occurrence. I’d doze off, be jerked out of sleep by some hideous image, toss and turn for twenty minutes, and repeat. Finally turned on the light and got up: 1:00 a.m.! I’d been dozing fitfully and miserably for all of two hours. And the rest of the night never did get another wink of sleep.

The next day at the choir workshop, I was OK (I’m always functional the day after a sleepless night: it’s the following day I’m out of it), but along about 2:00 in the afternoon I had another of the damned anxiety attacks: pounding heart that feels like it’s skipped a beat, breathlessness, dizziness. These are very scary episodes. The only reason I don’t call an ambulance when they happen is that I’ve already spent a full day in the ER, where I learned they’re (probably) not heart attacks or impending strokes. I’d had several of these in the preceding two weeks, including one that happened while I was standing in the Apple store talking with a salesman.

Since I’m not particularly stressed, this has seemed odd. We have hardly any work at GDU—so little, as a matter of fact, I rarely go out to campus. The community college courses are easy and fun. No deadline pressure. No work pressure. No personal problems. Everything I’m doing in life right now is entertaining and pleasant. My overall mood: a general feeling of well-being. Sooooo…why am I having panic attacks?

Sitting here in front of the computer between the end of choir practice and the start of the evening party, it occurred to me to google benadryl side effects. And what should come up but this:

Diphenhydramine may also cause low blood pressure, palpitations, increased heart rate, confusion, nervousness, irritability, blurred vision, double vision,…

Holy mackerel! Palpitations and a speeding heart are the hallmark signs of these “anxiety attacks” I’ve been having. And irritability? Let me tell you irritability. Between my house and choir, I was cussing at other drivers who had the temerity to get in my way on the road. Double vision? Sumbitch. Last time that happened out of the blue, the opthamologist speculated I might have Parkinson’s disease. To keep the insurance companies at bay, he entered “ocular migraine” in the record…but that’s not what he thought.

Like most doctors, he never thought to ask me what OTC meds I take regularly and then to look up the side effects. They’ll ask you, and they’ll write down the drugs you say you take: they just don’t think about what the stuff can do to you.

Double-checking the Google search evokes this:

Serious Side Effects

Some Benadryl side effects are potentially serious and should be reported immediately to your healthcare provider. Although generally rare, some of these side effects may actually be fairly common, particularly in young children or the elderly. These include, but are not limited to:

• Low blood pressure (hypotension)
• Heart palpitations
• A rapid heart rate (tachycardia)
• An irregular heartbeat
• Anemia
• Low blood platelets
• Confusion
• Blurred vision or double vision
• Loss of balance, especially if accompanied by ringing of the ears (tinnitus) or hearing loss
• Seizures
• Difficulty passing urine
• Hallucinations or delirium
• Worsening of ulcers or gastroesophageal reflux disease
• Worsening of glaucoma

Signs of an allergic reaction, such as:

• An unexplained rash
• Itching
• Hives
• Swelling of the mouth or throat
• Wheezing
• Difficulty breathing.

Itching? My face still itches, in spite of the pints of olive oil I’ve used in lieu of soap for lo! these many months. Heart palpitations? Tachycardia? Loss of balance? Tinnitus? These are part of everyday life around here. So is Benadryl…

Even though the FDA rates Benadryl as a class B drug, meaning it’s supposedly safe for unborn babies, clearly this is not an altogether benign substance. Yea verily, the University of Maryland Medical Center lists among its potential effects:

• Cardiovascular: Hypotension, palpitation, tachycardia

• Central nervous system: Sedation, sleepiness, dizziness, disturbed coordination, headache, fatigue, nervousness, paradoxical excitement, insomnia, euphoria, confusion

Lovely. So all this time I’ve been trying to beat insomnia by dropping these pills, with my doctor’s approval, I’ve probably been making it worse and evidently have created the cardiac symptoms diagnosed as “stress attacks.”

Stress attacks, my ass. My Christian Scientist forebears were right! Don’t drink, don’t consume caffeine, and never take meds.

♦ ♦ ♦

If you have unexplained or intransigent symptoms, think about what drugs you’re taking, including the over-the-counter variety. Look them up either on the Internet (avoid those whiny patient wailing walls, which are anecdotal and provide no real proof that the patients’ complaints have anything to do with the meds they’re taking), in the Physician’s Desk Reference, or in Worst Pills, Best Pills, the most accessible reference work on drugs and drug interactions you can buy.

Preparing for the worst

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If you were killed or incapacitated in a car accident, if you had a stroke or heart attack that put you out of commission, would the people who had to take over your affairs know where to start?

Would they know where your bank accounts are? What insurance you have? Where your paycheck is deposited? What bills have to be paid? And if you have minor children, will friends, relatives, or the authorities know where you want the kids to stay?

If the answer to any or all of those questions is either “no” or “I dunno,” now is as good a time as any to start writing down the answers. I’m in the process of compiling a complete record of all the things my son will need to know if anything happens to me. It’s a pretty big job, one that will take several days to complete. The product will be two three-ring binders, one to keep at his house and one to keep at mine.

Here’s what’s going into it:

1. My employer

Healthcare card (whereabouts; ID number, group number)
…..User names and passwords*
…..URL of page to access pay information*
Amount of my salary
Benefits
COBRA and how to get it

2. Community colleges

Salary for adjunct teaching
…..User names and passwords*
…..URL of page to access pay information*

3. Insurance: vendors, policy  numbers, and telephone numbers

Health
Life
…..Including credit union & other groups with membership policies
Homeowner’s
Automobile

4. Credit union

Accounts
…..Direct deposits
…..Automatic transfers
…..Location of statements
…..User name, password, & URL for online access*
Automatic bill payments
Hard-copy bill payment
Credit-card payments

5. Credit cards

List of credit-card vendors and customer service numbers
Photocopies of cards, front & back

6. Social Security

List of necessary documents, and where to find them
Instructions for how to get SS started
Phone number and address of local SS Administration office

7. Medicare

Documents needed to start Medicare; location of originals
Information on how it works
Instructions for what is desired

8. Investments

Whereabouts of statements
Contact and phone number at management firm
Usernames, passwords, and URLs to for online access*

9. Financial records

Personal
…..Quicken
…..Excel
Corporate
…..Excel
…..Quicken
How to generate tax reports in Quicken & Excel

10. Lawyer/tax preparer

Name, phone number, e-mail, & address

11. Taxes

Whereabouts of past income tax returns
Taxes for S-corporation
Property taxes; fund for paying

13. Deed to house

14. Will

15. Living Will

16. Doctor

Name, phone number, and address

17. Dog

Feeding, care, eccentricities
Veterinarian’s name, phone number, and address

18. Downtown house

Loan documents
Homeowner’s insurance policy
Legal documents

19. Blog

Username, password, & URL for dashboard*
Adsense
…..Username, password, URL*
…..Arrangements for pay
Bluehost
…..Username, password, URL*
Name & contact of tech consultant

20. Freelance clients

Names, phone numbers, e-mails
Instructions to advise that deadlines will be missed
Where to find work in progress
Name & e-mail for subcontractor(s)

21. Final arrangements

How to dispose of the remains

* Important: Don’t save any pages with this information to a computer or a flashdrive. As soon as I finish typing a section, I print two copies for the two binders and then close the file without saving. Another strategy: simply delete the sensitive information before saving to disk…but be sure you’ve erased every reference to a Social Security number, user name, password, or any other vulnerable data.

Kids

If you have minor children, you should make arrangements for someone to care for them should both parents be killed or incapacitated—something that could easily happen in a car wreck. Decide who should be the caretakers and discuss it with them. Once they’ve agreed to take responsibility for your children in an emergency, put it in writing. Have them sign it and you sign it in front of a notary public. Give them a copy and keep a copy for your own records. If the person who will take charge of your affairs is different from the person or couple who will care for the kids, be sure that person also has a copy.

You should also name the desired child caretakers in your will. The person who is to take charge of your affairs should be named as your will’s executor, unless your lawyer advises otherwise.

If you have sole custody of children from a divorce and you do not want the child’s other parent to assume custody in an emergency, you should state the specific reason that this is undesirable (abusive? drug user? alcoholic?) in the document that designates the emergency caretaker.

Security

By the time you finish, this binder will contain some very sensitive information. You don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. My son is very responsible, and so I feel comfortable about giving him a binder full of printouts containing my Social Security number, usernames, and passwords; however, my name and address will not appear in the thing. If your adult children can’t be trusted, consider hiring a lawyer to handle your personal affairs and storing the information at her or his office. Alternatively, choose a trustworthy friend or relative, ask him or her to take charge in an emergency, and give that person the information.

Surprising, isn’t it, how much a person needs to know if she or he is to take over your personal affairs in a pinch? My life is quite simple: no minor children, no child custody decrees, no alimony or child support, uncomplicated investments, no special healthcare issues, no homeowner’s association, no mortgage or rent, no employees, no vacation home, or the like. A young or middle-aged couple or a single parent’s data would be considerably more involved.

As circumstances change, you’ll need to remember to update certain pages. If you’ve saved those pages that contain no sensitive information, this task should be fairly easy. If not, you’ll have to retype entire pages…a hassle, but better than having them reside on a computer that could be hacked or stolen.

Plan to spend several days to a week thinking through and compiling the information another party would need to access important accounts, pay your bills, get  your insurance to cover your costs or collect life insurance; deal with doctors, lawyers, and your employer; care for your property; and find accommodations for your children and pets. With any luck, it won’t be needed. But if it ever is needed, someone will thank you.

A$K…

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One of the freelance writer’s (and editor’s!) mottoes is “A$k and ye shall re¢eive.” It was coined (as it were) by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the best of the few truly useful writer’s groups in existence. The gist of this bon mot is that you should not accept just any lowball offer a publisher tries to inflict on you, but instead should insist on being paid fairly for professional work.

Well, I just landed a client that pays a moderate but more or less acceptable rate. Only problem is, this company expects contractors to sign a nondisclosure agreement that contains not one, not two, but three onerous indemnity clauses. In a nutshell, the contract proposes that the penniless freelancer will pay all the legal bills for any claim even vaguely related to her or his work that is brought against this international corporation by any wretch who thinks he or she should feel aggrieved.

I’ve been going back and forth with the company’s rep for the past ten days or two weeks over this, they offering one modification or another and me repeating that I’m not signing any agreement to indemnify.

Amazingly, they sat down and rewrote their contract to delete the offending clauses! The thing arrived in the e-mail this morning. So… I guess we’re on.

This is the second time I’ve stood my ground on indemnity clauses, expected to be told to take a hike, but prevailed.

The take-home message here is that if you own a small enterprise, you should stand firm on negotiating your terms and your price, and never accept a deal that puts you at a disadvantage.

Holy water bill, Batman!

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This story is getting strange.

Last week, as I reported earlier, I got two water bills from the city’s water department: one for $130, about a normal bill for this time of year, and then another marked “corrected bill,” for $87. The larger bill was completely unitemized: number of gallons consumed: 0; units billed, 0. If both of these held water (heh!), my total July water bill would be reach an all-time high of $217.

Figuring this had something to do with the recent snafu in which someone canceled my water service and restarted it in their name, I called the water department to inquire. After an especially annoying and noisy phone tree maze runaround, I finally got to a customer service rep.

She pointed out that the date on the $130.14 bill was 2008, and the account number ends in -09; the $87 bill is dated 2009 and ends in -11. To fix the mess that occurred when the chucklehead canceled my water service, they had to create a new account for me, the one ending in -11. The other bill was something the department emitted as part of the process of zeroing out the defunct -09 account. It was, she said, a duplicate of the July 2008 statement. The corrected bill of $87.34 is what I owe this month.

I said it didn’t seem likely that a bill spanning the hottest and thirstiest part of the year would be $87. Though I’m happy to get a wintertime bill in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record, I really don’t want to cheat the City. She assured me that was what I owed.

Ohhh-kayyyy….

The only explanation for this—other than the obvious one, that the City made a mistake—is that last winter I turned off most of the watering system and since then have been watering nonxeric plants by hand. That’s one of the reasons for yesterday’s rant about the unholy amount of work around this house: hose drags are not my favorite form of entertainment. But the June bill was $109; it covered much of May, when the weather was much cooler. It’s mighty unlikely that the bill dropped $22 when temps rose to 115, every plant in a pot had to be watered every day, and 10 roses in the ground had to be deep-watered twice a week.

To add to the silliness, the July 2008 water bill was not $130.14; it was $128.72.

So, much as I’d like to imagine I’ve found a way to cut the water bills, I doubt it. I think the City screwed up. Whaddaya bet this isn’t the last we hear of it?