Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Chambray Shirt!

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So I’m sitting here contemplating the dermatologist’s orders (rather standard, but in these parts standardly ignored) that every square inch of skin must be covered up when one is out of doors.

Well, in a country where most women decline to wear burqas, that’s really not very practical advice… Oh well. Then I remembered: the chambray shirt!

Whoa! Literally… Back in the day, when we had a ranch and I used to ride a horse around the boondocks at every possible chance — which was usually a couple times a week — Phoenix used to host a store called Yellow Front. An odd emporium, it had features of a general store, a Sportsman’s Warehouse, and a blue-collar worker’s supply. I bought a pair of saddlebags for Babe there — very handy! And jeans and bandannas and fishing gear and a felt-covered canteen and…all sorts of cool stuff.

Among the cool things you could get there were men’s blue chambray work shirts. They were cotton plus some kind of synthetic, as I recall — so you didn’t have to iron the damn things, the way you had to iron your daddy’s khaki shirts once a week. And they were the bidness! Loose-fitting even in the smallest men’s size (which was the only size that would even remotely fit a 120-pound woman), they let air flow all around you (if you left the tails untucked) and so, much like an Arab’s white robes, would keep you cool on a warm day by blocking the direct sun while creating a kind of natural air-conditioning.

Yellow Front, like all things American and Good, is long gone, of course. In the past I’ve looked for the things at hopeless joints like Target and Walmart and found them…disappeared. Hmmm… chambray chAMbray chAMAZONbray! Why the hell not?

Off to the Web! Look it up, and lo! Wrangler still makes them!!! And Amazon has got them!

HOT diggety DAYum!

Order one up. Late this morning, stroll out to the front courtyard to imbibe the remains of the day’s coffee, and lo! There’s a package from Amazon. Grab. Rip open. And lo! There’s a good old chambray shirt.

This one’s fabric is a little heavier gauge than the ones I recall. It’s 100% cotton. And instead of being made somewhere in New England or the Midwest, it’s fabriqué in Bangladesh, which is too bad. Shame on Wrangler! Still…at least they’re still making them and still shipping them to…Amazon. Yeah.

And the “small” size does still fit. A little long in the arms, which as I recall was the case with the original. I used to roll up the sleeves, aping a handsome young man whose style I admired. For an old lady’s purposes, though, this is…umh, handy, because when left to their own whim, the cuffs slide down past your wrists and cover about half the back of your hand, thereby protecting the supposedly precancerous area from the dreaded sun.

This kind of shirt makes a great lounge-around-the-house cover-up when the weather’s cold, too. I don’t run the heat in the winter — saving the power then makes it marginally affordable to run the air conditioning in the summertime. So what’s needed here at the Funny Farm is something to keep off the chill that can be run through the washer and is not too fancy to wear while gardening and cleaning the pool and scrubbing down the kitchen and is sturdy enough to hold up to said activities. For the summer: all of the above, except substitute “keep off the sun” for the first desideratum.

Just the ticket.

Heh. Wrangler. I used to wear Wranglers jeans. That was SO outré! Lawyers’ wives did not wear Wranglers. No, nooo, dear, it was just not done! At the worst, you could wear Levis, but even that…tsk tsk. If it cost less than $50, it was just…no.

Well, being the sassy little broad that I was, of course I wore Wranglers, because the things fit. Levis do not fit a 120-pound woman with a 130-pound rear-end. 😀 Do not now, did not then, never will. Wranglers would fit real women, and they fit women who were given to riding horses. Not only could you breathe in the things, you could swing your leg up over a saddle and push yourself clear of a horse that was going down or trying to throw you. Not only did I wear the things, I wore them to teach in graduate school. So there!

Think I’ll order up a few more of these fine garments. Now…if only I could get ahold of another mare…

All-Time RECORD LOW on AMEX! Woo hooo!

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The American Express bills came in yesterday, for both the personal and the business cards. The tab for personal spending?

$207.35

Whoa!!!!! That is an all time low! Literally true: I’ve never had an American Express bill come in under about $850. It’s usually around $1200.

To what can we attribute this miracle?

Well, I’ll tellya: I think it’s the Costco “envelope” budgeting scheme. Apparently, that strategy is influencing other kinds of spending. Because of course, since Costco dumped AMEX for Citibank’s Visa (I refuse to do business with Citibank ever again — period!), I haven’t been able to use the AMEX card at Costco. So…

????

Why on earth would putting all my Costco purchases on a pre-purchased cash card affect expenses normally racked up on AMEX?

Obviously, it’s a psychological thing.

I think it works like this: Making a list near the beginning of the month of everything that I know I need, including the estimated prices of those items, and trying to keep the total cost to $300 or less forces me to think carefully about what I really do need.

That is, the envelope method causes you to plan for purchasing. And when you plan, you get a grip on spending.

By thinking ahead a full month, I’ve been able to restrict almost all my household and food purchases to Costco, and that seems to limit impulse buys at other venues. In other words, I don’t have to run to a grocery store to buy, say, a can of Comet, and so I do not buy a bunch of other stuff while I’m there. Ultimately, I buy only the things I really need; not the things I imagine, on the run, that I can’t live without.

Yes, there was one impulse buy at Costco last month: I bought a pair of black pants, because our choir director asked us to wear black this year under our robes. Did I have a pair of black jeans? Yup. At least two of them. Did I need a pair of black pants? Nope. But they did not push spending past the $300 limit on the cash card. And they do look a lot dressier for church, and unlike other stretchy pants, they do have pockets to carry credit cards and the emergency phone (which can’t be left in the car at this time of year).

What happened, it appears, is that because of that careful plan-ahead, I bought almost everything I needed at Costco, within the $300 budget (plus the $60 for gasoline). Not feeling any crying need to buy much else, the result was that I simply stayed out of other stores.

{chortle!} I’d seen that $207 balance in the online accounting, but didn’t believe it. Thought it must have been a mistake (mine, no doubt: if it’s online, I’m unlikely to get it straight). But NOOOOO!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Grocery Bags…Back to the Future?

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Have supermarkets in your parts begun to ration plastic bags? They’re hard at it here. Even Walmart prominently displays colorful (plastic…) tote bags near the check-out stands — for sale, of course; most certainly not for free. Whole Foods has been doing that for years, as has Trader Joe’s — no surprise there, given those chains’ overall zeitgeist.

Many stores offer a choice of paper bags or plastic now — Whole Foods gives you none, of course: it’s paper or else buy one of those totebags. Or you could pile everything in a grocery basket, roll it out to your car, and pack it in a piece at a time. 😀

How do you feel about that? Political correctness aside, do you sense even the slightest…oh…resentment at this shift?

Oh yeah? Well…can you remember when, back in the Day, grocery stores abruptly made the switch from paper bags to the filmy plastic bags that infest our landfills, our front yards, our streams, our lakes, our skies, and our oceans? And do you remember how you felt about it then?

{chortle!}

I sure do.

No choice was offered, during the Dark Ages. One day you went in, piled a week’s worth of loot into a grocery cart, arrived at the check-out stand, and…were presented with a grocery cart filled with limp plastic bags spilling out packages and cans and heads of lettuce.

And “spilling” was the operative term. When you were accustomed to a paper bag that could hold several days’ worth of food and cleaning goods, three wimpy plastic bags that together could barely hold the same amount were, shall we say, confounding. Where a paper bag would stand upright in the trunk of your car, these damn things would flop in there and disgorge their contents to roll around every time you turned a corner. When you got home, you had to gather all your purchases off the floor of the car trunk and pack them back into the wispy plastic bags before you could haul the groceries up the steps to your apartment.

Ohhhh GOD how I hated those plastic bags!

In those primitive times, makers of trash baskets turned out kitchen garbage cans designed to hold a paper grocery bag. You just dropped an empty bag into the trash basket — which fit under the kitchen sink (remember that?) — and when it was full, you browbeat your husband or a kid to take it out to the garbage bin. It was wonderful!

Halcyon times.

The accursed plastic bags, of course, did not fit into anything that even vaguely looked like a trash basket. About the best you could do was set a plastic bag on one side of the sink, use it to hold accruing debris as you cooked, then tie it off and toss it into the trash can, where it would sit there leaking and stinking until someone dragged it and a half-dozen other bags that collected with it in the old trash basket.

Note that I did not hate the bags for environmental reasons. In the Dark Ages, we didn’t get that kind of news. If we had any worries about the environment, they had to do with smog and nuclear fallout.What could a plastic bag have to do with those?

Unless plastic bags were manufactured in nuclear plants. Who knows? Maybe they were… They’re certainly radioactive now.

Switching back to paper bags, I must admit, elicits similar sentiments. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: now we get to change the way we run our kitchens AGAIN! at the behest of faceless corporations and bureaucrats who know better than we do. Always.

After all these years, I’ve arrived at a détente with the accursed plastic bags. I have a lot of uses for them. Uses that paper bags cannot handle.

• Kitchen sink cabinets no longer have room to accommodate a trash can big enough to hold a paper bag. So the plastic trash can is gone. Instead, wet kitchen trash gets stashed in a plastic bag, which lives in the refrigerator until I’m ready to brave the alley.

• Taking the garbage out entails retrieving a key, dodging the dogs, passing through two gates and unpadlocking one of them, dodging the occasional bum, wrestling a huge four-household bin, relocking the gates, putting the padlock key back, letting the dogs back out…good fun. Sooo….being able to refrigerate the trash so I don’t have to traipse out there every day is a great convenience. Not one I’m looking forward to losing.

• Nor do I look forward to having to keep a paper bag full of garbage in an expensive covered garbage can in the garage. This means every piece of trash or garbage has to be traipsed out through the kitchen door into the garage, and the whole mess has to be kept tightly covered to keep the rats out. That, I could truly do without.

And speaking of our little room-mates, have you noticed many sewer roaches dancing around the kitchen floor since the advent of plastic bags? Miss the little fellows, do ya?

• Paper bags nurture cockroaches. The little gals and their boyfriends ride the freighters and airplanes and trucks hauling foods across our borders and into the grocery stores. When they find those nice, dark paper bags, they lay their eggs in them. You bring those eggs home with you when you bring home the bacon. Pack those bags away in the pantry closet or the garage, and the babes hatch out and join the buggy can-can line!

This is totally the main reason I do not want to go back to the future with paper bags.

Well. Except for the dog mounds.

• Nothing beats a plastic bag for picking up dog mounds.

How, seriously, do our Respected Betters think we’re going to clean up after the beasts?

Never fails, does it?

 

 

New Knives? Or Old Folks’ Stuff?

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The honored Chicago chef’s knife…

{Chortle!} I remain bewitched with the idea of buying a gigantic set of fancy new German kitchen and steak knives (with white handles! oooooohhhh!) at Costco. The ridiculousness of dropping $200 on any such thing is manifest.

Still…if I don’t spend any more on anything else (and there’s no reason I should), by the end of this month (which it already IS, almost!) I’ll have $200 left in the budget. Why should I not spend it on myself?

Or, one might reasonably ask, why should I spend it on myself?

Thing is, a perfectly fine collection of fancy Wüsthof and Henckels knives is sitting right there in the drawer. I don’t need any fancy new knives.

But…but…the other thing is, every one of them is all scratched up, from the time I took it into my hot little head to use my father’s whetstone to sharpen the knives, which had gone mightily dull. This was an exceptionally bad idea. In my clumsiness, I ruined every knife in the house!

Except they’re not ruined. They look terrible, but they take a perfectly fine edge and there’s nothing wrong with the way they work. So what if they look terrible? Who sees them?

So, here’s another Thing:

Whenever you go to one of those uncountable estate sales out in Sun City, these scratched-up knives are the sort of thing you run into. Those, and the blue-and-pink furniture and the much-scrubbed Revereware pans and on and on. You find the leavings of the make-it-do, use-it-up generation: people who pay a middling-high price to get the best Stuff they can afford and who are then stuck with it, because it never wears out. By the time you’ve owned it half your lifetime and you’re tired of it, it really isn’t worn out.

These houses are full of tired, out-of-style Stuff that’s still perfectly serviceable. Serviceable outmoded furniture. Serviceable old-fashioned pots and pans. Serviceable mixers. Serviceable food processors. Serviceable blenders. Serviceable fans. Serviceable old analog scales and clocks. Serviceable towels. Serviceable sheets. Serviceable throw pillows. Serviceable half-bottles of Arpège and Windsong. Auuughhhh! So depressing it comes out on the other side of depressing.

So the question becomes one of WTF are you saving that two hundred bucks for, anyway?

I dunno. I’m so cheap I don’t want to part with it. Plus I like my knives. I’ve collected them over a lifetime. Handing them over to Goodwill feels like a betrayal. How can I even think of taking my knives to the pound? Auuughhhh!

One thing we can be assured of: despite all those expensive German brand names, the best knife in that drawer was made by Chicago Knives. It takes an edge like a razor blade and holds the edge forever with just light honing. A-n-n-d you cannot buy a decent Chicago knife anymore. That’s another fine American product that has gone down the tubes — though reviews at Amazon average in the four-star range, still some 11 percent of reviewers hate it. Here’s my knife: one guy says Chicago “must be the name of a town in China.” 😀 This one is particularly juicy: “After some very light use and cleaning, the wood on the handle SHRANK exposing the sharp edge of the full tang in the handle. The edge of the tang is sharp enough to cut my fingers.” Hee HEEEEE!

Okay. Yeah. Why, again, do I want to replace a lifetime collection of high-quality German and (real!) American cutlery for…what? Something made in China, like everything else? So my knives are old folks’ stuff. BFD: I am an old folk.

What’s a few scratches, after all…

Why I Bank at a Credit Union…

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A fine Day from Hell in every way: at five in the morning, temp on the back porch in the 90s and air so thick you need a spoon to breathe it. It rained during the night, so that did cool things off. But. Ugh.

First order of the day’s business, once business establishments opened, was to run up to the credit union and try to find out why all my accounts are scrambled.

Ugh, indeed!

You’ll recall that to reset my grip on the finances, I decided to use Costco cash cards and my existing credit union cookie-jar accounts to create an “envelope method” approach to budgeting. Purchases at Costco would stop when the current cash-card was used up ($300, though I may drop that to $200). And (as usual) set-asides for 2019 taxes & insurance, for incoming Medicare and Medigap reimbursements, and for an emergency fund would be doled out, monthly, among three credit-union savings accounts.

These accounts have always existed. You can make as many savings accounts as you choose at my credit union, plus your checking account. So I’ve always had an account called “Emergency Savings,” one called “Mayo” (for the medical reimbursements), and one called “T&I” (for tax & insurance).

At the time I make this decision, I figure I’ll live on my 401(k)’s Required Minimum Drawdown (or try to), and transfer all the Social Security payments into “Emergency Savings,” an account whose balance had dwindled to a little over five dollars. To accomplish this, I get on the phone and talk with a credit union’s CSR. I ask this person how I can arrange to auto-transfer the gummint’s monthly electronic deposits from checking to the account branded “emergency savings.”  SS payments come in unpredictably, roughly depending on what cycle the bureaucrats use to send them to you. Mine arrive sometime between the first and about the 12th of the month. I explain that I’d like this money set aside to build an emergency fund and I’d like not to have to do that manually whenever the SSA gets around to sending the money. She says she will make it so.

Good. Days go by.

Now I do some more budgeteering — and I realize that there’s no way I can possibly live on the RMD alone. While I probably can avoid suctioning up all the SS income, I’m going to need at least $500 a month of it. Probably more. When I go online to arrange an automatic transfer of $530/month, I’m astonished to discover the “Mayo” savings account has disappeared, and the chunk of dough set aside in there to pay the Mayo’s next bill has disappeared with it.

The money to cover medical bills has been moved over into my regular savings account (which I’d dubbed “Emergency Savings,” but which has been renamed “Share Savings”).

When I go to double-check the scheduled transfer of the SS funds, I can find exactly no trace of it.

So. You know better. I know better. We all know better: Never do your banking over the phone.

This meant I had to drive to the credit union, collar a manager or assistant manager, and find out WTF is going on.

  1. What happened to the scheduled transfer of the monthly Social Security deposit into Emergency Savings?
  2. If it didn’t get arranged, why not?
  3. If it did get arranged, why doesn’t it show as a scheduled transfer? Where did the transfer that was supposedly arranged go? Is that monthly deposit going to disappear into limbo?
  4. If it did not get arranged, can we arrange it? Can we be certain that we’re not duplicating a scheduled transfer that doesn’t show even though it  supposedly was made?
  5. Can we arrange an auto transfer on the 20th of each month from Emergency Savings (holding the SS deposits) to checking, enough to make ends meet?

Oh, those lucky people! We need to start a U-Tube Video series: Here She Comes Again!

So I get up there and discover…

  1. If a scheduled transfer was made from the CU’s environs instead of by you, you can’t see it in the online “scheduled transfer” function. (Naturally! Why did I ask?)
  2. He doesn’t have a clue what happened to the “Mayo” savings account.
  3. He suggests it would be simpler to transfer the difference between the total SS monthly deposit and the amount I need  into the “Emergency Savings” account. Keep whatever is needed in checking and transfer the rest to the savings account.
  4. He will rename “Emergency Savings” as “Mayo,” leaving the amount for the medical bills in that account rather than transferring them around.
  5. And he will create a new “Emergency Savings” account to hold a little over half of incoming Social Security deposits, leaving the rest in checking to cover cash flow. We hope.

Sounds OK, right? He says what I see at home is different from what he says on his monitor. He suggests I send him a screenshot, after I get back to the Funny Farm, so we can check that all this is working.

And so, off I go to retrace the 8.2 miles of my steps back to the house: it required driving 16.4 miles and about 90 minutes of my time to accomplish this.

A check-up revealed that we had it almost right. We ended up with…

  • a checking account  (Balance: one year’s worth of RMD plus a few bucks)
  • a savings account (“Emergency Savings, 00.” Unfunded)
  • a savings account, (“Taxes & Insurance, 60.” $8408)
  • a savings account (“Taxes and Insurance, 61.”  $538.95)

So what has happened is that the set-aside account to cover medical bills was redundantly named “taxes and insurance” rather than “Mayo.” But at least we have an account into which to stash Medigap and Medicare payments.

Gaaaahhhhhh! So I had to get on the email, send him the desired secreenshot, and ask him to rename account 61 in such a way that I can distinguish it from the real tax-&-insurance “envelope” at a glance.

Jeez.

Long as I’m wrestling with money online, I decide to check to see how much AMEX thinks I owe it as of this minute, to be sure it jibes with the $130 I believe I’ve charged up.

Well. No. AMEX’s website says I owe that fine outfit $682!!!!!!

WTF??????? Have they not received the seven-something I sent them when the last statement came in?

Go back to the credit union’s site and find that they have indeed paid last month’s bill, as directed. AMEX should have received the money on or about the 5th…four days ago.

Get a chat rep online at the AMEX site. After endless waiting and screwing around with typing out the question and explaining that it was paid electronically and should have been received, I learned that yea verily it had been received. It would take another 24 to 48 hours  before that fact registered on their website.

Ducky.

Q. So, I ask: how much have I charged up on the card in the current billing cycle — that is, how much do you see owing right now?

A. About $126.

That’s four bucks less than my records say I’ve charged — probably because this card applies an automatic cash kickback to eligible transactions. But at least their conception of reality is now close to my conception of reality.

What a bitch of a morning! And early afternoon.

Coulda been worse, though. Just imagine if all those cookie-jar shenanigans had been happening at, say, Wells Fargo.

Needing to pick up some one-pound bags of chlorine shock treatment this morning, I serendipitously discovered a Leslie’s about six blocks from the campus (where the CU office resides). And even more serendipitously, right next door to the thing was a Fry’s grocery store….where I could buy another breakfast melon, some grapes, and a few tomatoes to restock the larder.

And at the Leslie’s, I discovered that eight pounds worth of shock treatment in bags costs about $14 less than the same amount of the same stuff dispensed in bulk. Jeez. Such a deal.

 

 

Amazon the Addictive

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Returning home from an aborted trip to the westside (wherever you’re going in lovely Phoenix, ya can’t get there from here!), I found the door to the front courtyard standing wide open.

Gerardo and his crew were here early in the day, but if they’d left it open, I would’ve noticed it on the way out. Park the tank. Walk into the courtyard, check the front door and windows. No sign of breaking and entering. If anyone tried to get in, that hardened drill-proof lock stopped them. Enter through the garage, call the dogs, check the house: no burglars.

Drat! Never any fun around this place! Oh well.

I figured Amazon must have delivered the RV hose I ordered (the Depot has quit carrying them) and a porch pirate probably lifted it. Once ensconced indoors, called up Amazon’s “orders” menu and found the thing is not supposed to arrive before tomorrow.

When I looked at the list of things I’ve ordered from that place, I was amazed at the number of items!

It is just too damn easy to buy stuff on Amazon.

Or…is it?

Most of this stuff is “need it” items, not “want it” impulse buys. The hose in the backyard, for example, really needed to be replaced. Then: Birthday present for my son…very convenient not to have to drive across the damn city to get it. Crystal deodorant sticks: can’t buy them locally here anymore, not at Walgreen’s, not at Walmart, not at Target, not at Safeway, not at Costco. Bought enough to last the rest of my lifetime, with any luck. Le Creuset teakettle to replace one whose whistle gave up: no doubt one could get it at Williams-Sonoma, but again: wonderful not to have to do battle with traffic to get it. Three hard-copy books: there are no bookstores here anymore, except for one that sells nothing but detective stories. Bottle of bubble-wrap-free loperamide: not available here at all, anywhere.

True, I did NOT need a lifetime supply of diarrhea pills. But what the heck. Now I can give them away to friends. Or go to Mexico once a week from now until I croak over.

The prices seem to be within reason, and with Prime, Amazon sends them “free” (har har!).

When Amazon announced it was going to jack up the price for Amazon Prime, I was given pause. IMHO a hundred bucks a year is probably too much, since their video offerings can’t hold a proverbial candle to Netflix. Another $20 may be more than I want to pay. On the other hand, if you order a steady stream of stuff that you either can’t buy locally or can’t get without driving to Hell & gone and back again, over the course of a year you probably save that much in postage.

I’ll bet I’ve saved at least $20 in Amazon shipping fees since the first of the year. Probably more than that. But add to that the cost of gasoline, wear & tear on the vehicle, and wasted time driving from pillar to post: then you can be pretty sure that “membership” fee is paying for itself.

What think you? Is Amazon Prime worth the up-front cost?