Coffee heat rising

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Knocking Off…or Not

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So I’ve done exactly zero paying work today. Several things needed to be done today, not least of which was to update the Copyeditor’s Desk website to reflect the kind advice of Jackie Beck, our Pinterest guru. She has some good suggestions, which I’d like to apply forthwith. And to figure out a client’s complicated manuscript layout, which I inflicted on a subcontractor but succeeded only in setting her head a-spinning. Those two things really did need to be done today.

But…well. No.

At dawn’s first light, it was off to Scottsdale, to the weekly networking meeting of the Scottsdale Bidness Assn. From there I flew back into town, did some bookkeeping, answered a  phone call from one of the PoD guys that clarified a little mystification.

Then it was off to the credit union to deposit incoming checks and make the Copyeditor’s Desk reimburse me for fees I had to put on my debit card (because the vendor won’t take an AMEX card). Got about halfway up there when I realized…yeah. I hadn’t brought the goddamn checks!

So I had to navigate some impossible road construction, turn around, shoot back down the freeway to the Funny Farm, grab the damn checks, and start…all…over…again. Extracted a chunk of dough from savings for a workman who craves to be paid in cash. Hid that in my jeans pocket, lest my purse get lost or snatched while I’m traipsing around the city.

The desired lightbulb
The desired lightbulb

Went by Home Depot and learned that they no longer carry the type of incandescent lightbulbs I use in my garage. Both ceiling fixtures are burnt out, so I need to buy bulbs. Annoyed.

Thence to Costco. Buy gas. Fly into the store. Grab dog meat. Grab some of those wonderful yellow mangoes that I like to eat for breakfast.

Decide to break with custom and buy some prepared foods.

Thanks to the ongoing bellyache (or whatever one would call it), I have not been eating. Last month the AMEX bill, which is budgeted at $1100 to cover all expenses except utilities and insurance, came in at $770…mostly because the cupboard is totally bare. The only thing I’ve been eating is ice cream.

That’s right: I’m gaining weight even though I’m barely eating, because the only thing that quells the GERD phenomena is a bowl of ice cream. Quite a few bowls of ice cream have been consumed over the past two or three months.

Not only do I not want to eat, I absolutely positively do not feel like cooking anything to eat.

So I figured I’d better look for something that’s already cooked. Like Costco’s highly creditable sous-vide lamb shanks.

Found those. Also found a package of “Irish lamb stew” that looked pretty tasty…and it has some vegetables in it, something that has not passed these lips in weeks.

And a package of scalloped potatoes, which I love and which can be guaranteed not to kick off any fireworks.

When I got home, I had to find room in the fridge for these fine items. It being filled with spoiled food, I had to shovel the thing out.

Ended up hauling literally the whole refrigeratorful of food out to the garbage. The refrigerator still stank, so I moved on to taking it apart and cleaning it (long as it was already empty!).

Fortunately, I felt pretty good, for reasons unexplained. Didn’t sleep well last night and had to get up at the crack of dawn, but hitting high gear seemed to make the physical manifestations go away. Or at least become unnoticeable.

So the refrigerator got emptied and scrubbed down and the Costco loot stashed and the mildewy emptied-out containers packed into the dishwasher.

Then I opened the lamb stew. Put about a third of it in a bowl to microwave (the preferred cooking method, according to the package instructions) and stashed the rest of it in a tupperware. That and a piece of Costco “country-style” bread filled the belly like a lead ball. Six hours later, I’m only just beginning to feel normal again.

The stew was pretty good. Salty, like all prepared foods. SO salty the stuff leaves your lips puckered up. That’s not going to help the weight gain problem: oversalted food always packs on the water weight. However, I figure the trade-off is either I eat something that’s not ideal but has some meat and veggies in it or I keep subsisting on ice cream. Water weight is a lot easier to get rid of than dairy-&-sugar weight. 😉

What I really need to do is go out and buy some beef, lamb, or pork and make a real stew. It’s just not that hard to do, and I what I can cook up sure as hell tastes better than something that comes out of a box. Doesn’t drive your blood pressure into the stratosphere, either…

At any rate, along with this exotic meal, I decided to have a bourbon and water. It’s the first alcoholic drink that’s passed these dainty lips in three months. Actually, not quite: I had a glass and a half of wine at M’hijito’s house last week and a small glass of white wine with friends on Easter. Neither of these caused any noticeable upset, so… Lacking a bottle of wine to swill I figured it was worth risking one drinky-poo.

Probably not a good idea. It hit the gut with a reverberation, but that was soon quieted by stuffing in some food.

Yesterday, I made myself good & sick by eating an orange. One very small orange. Fresh-picked off the tree. One. Orange. Small. About the size of a tennis ball. Swallowing a mouthful of orange elicits a sensation like a blow-torch going off in the belly.

So it looks like my orange-eating days are over. That’s very sad, because the Arizona sweets that grow on the two trees in the backyard are just like candy. I love them! Next spring, they’ll all have to be donated to charity.

Anyway, in brighter news, the bourbon had no extended repercussions. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

However, one b&w and more food than I’ve eaten in weeks pretty much put me in a coma. I’ve spent the afternoon playing games on the Internet. :-/ And buying things…

Amazon had the desired lightbulbs, for two bucks apiece. Ordered a dozen, figuring they soon will disappear from the market altogether. Since these things last about a year, 12 of them should last me six years. With any luck. Maybe I should buy more?

spotlightsAlso ordered some solar-powered, motion-activated spotlights, which I intend to put on the wall over the Bum’s Latrine outside my back gate. Got three for the price of one (much fancier but more cumbersome) such light at Costco. Many positive reviews, at least some of which appear too good to be true, but a number seem to real assessments and are pretty positive. Complaints are that they don’t dim, they don’t come on dim and brighten (not needed: I want to spook the bums) and they cast a ghastly blue light (good! the creepier the better!). And that they don’t last…which one would expect, given a price of 11 bucks apiece.

They probably don’t have to last long. If they help to chase the current occupants off, that may end the problem.

But along with the evening, in comes an email from our networking group’s webmaster announcing he’s retiring and, surprise! He’s taken our site down. He’d be happy to give the files to us on CDs for us to figure out what to do with.

Thanks for the advance notice, pal!

Peeved, I unearthed the site’s cached versions, which I downloaded as HTML files; also pasted the pages’ copy into Word. My plan is to create a WordPress site, preferably on my host’s server (as opposed to WP.com), update the contents, and paste it into the proposed site. Voilà. We can transfer the old domain name, or get a new one: two that fit are available, conveniently enough.

A couple of the pages need to be updated, anyway. So this will be a good opportunity to do that. And it’ll be a lot easier to ride herd on the thing if I’m doing it from my computer.

Yeah. I really needed something else to keep me busy. 😉

Thank You, Amazon Reviewers! $$$$$

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Reading the comments by reviewers on Amazon can save you a bundle. I’ve learned to look up products that I intend to buy locally just to see what Amazon’s reviewers have to say about them.

Case in point: I took it into my fuzzy little head to purchase a slow cooker with a nonstick surface. Whenever I cook the dogs’ chicken or pork, which I do in a crockpot because it can sit in the garage (keeping the smell out of the house) and because I don’t have to tend to it, some residue always sticks on the ceramic container. No amount of soaking will loosen the baked-on gunk. I always end up standing over the garage utility sink, scrubbing with scouring powder. And scrubbing. And scrubbing. And scrubbing. Getting it clean is an unpleasant nuisance of a job.

So I figure to order this contraption from Amazon, the path of least resistance. And here’s what I learn from the reviewers:

  • Nonstick coating bubbles up and peels off
  • Contrary to advertised claims, can’t brown foods in it first: nonstick coating will bubble up and peel off
  • Contrary to advertised claims, can’t be put in dishwasher
  • Lightweight, cheaply made, flimsy
  • Cover doesn’t fit
  • Cover doesn’t fit
  • Cover doesn’t fit, dammit!
  • Ew! Nonstick gunk flakes off and ends up in the food!

In amongst all this commentary, up pops a message from a woman who says she also found the new products unsatisfactory and so decided to fend for herself. She had a large Le Creuset doufeu. Le Creuset pans are enameled, and that surface is effectively “nonstick.” They’re very easy to clean. Thought she, Why not? She loaded the thing with the same stuff she’d put in a slow cooker, set it in a 200-degree oven, and went away. A few hours later: voilà! A slow-cooked  meal!

doufeuAhem. A 7¼-quart Le Creuset doufeu will set you back $420. Plus shipping, which you can bet will be hefty for a 7-quart cast-iron pot. A 4½-quart number only costs $300.

That of course doesn’t count the cost of the crane you’ll need to move it in and out of the oven, once it’s fully loaded with food. (You’re supposed to put ice or cold water in the strangely shaped lid, to enhance condensation inside the pot. Alternatively, you can cook other foods, such as potatoes or cornbread, in the lid.)

A crock pot typically holds about 6 quarts. And I need that much volume to cook a giant package of Costco chicken or pork.

Plus a friend who’s a truck driver recently gave me 20 pounds of ground turkey, because the packages were “damaged.” The dispatcher told her to throw it out, but she couldn’t stand that. We took most of it over to the local food bank, but I held back two 10-pound rolls of the stuff for the dogs.

As I thought about the commenter’s idea, it occurred to me that I must have something like that, somewhere in the house or the garage.

And yea verily! What should I find but two huge stainless-steel, copper-bottomed stew pots! Vast! The one I pulled out of the back of a cabinet holds 6 quarts.

Loaded 5 pounds of meat into the thing and set the oven for 300 degrees. I normally set the slow-cooker on “high,” which will cook most potsful of meat in three or four hours. So I figured 300 would be better than 200.

Actually, if anything it was too fast: in three hours, I’d say the meat was a little overcooked. Next time I’ll set it on 200, which should slow the process into the crockpot realm.

Once the ground turkey was cooked, there was plenty of room to add some oatmeal, which cooked in 20 minutes atop a burner, and then the food-processed mixed veggies. Let it cool, packed it into containers, and a week’s worth of fresh dog food was in the fridge and freezer.

Yes, stuff stuck to the sides, same as it does in the crockpot. But this was easy to clean off. You can put a stainless-steel pan on a stove burner. So all I had to do was fill it with water, toss in a handful of banking soda, and let it simmer for awhile. After that, any leftover gunk washed right off in a minute or two: no overnight soaking, no pan in the way when I want to run the clothes washer, and no endless scouring!

I wouldn’t have thought of this (rather obvious!) solution if I hadn’t taken time to read Amazon’s customer comments.

If I had read the reviews of the Samsung clothes washer that drives me nuts, I wouldn’t have bought it. That was when I learned to read Amazon reviews before buying anything, locally or online.

It’s a good idea to start with the three-star reviews, because those are the ones that are most likely to be objective. Five-star raves are likely to have at least some paid posts among them. And, as it develops, one-star rants are often posted by competitors who are trying to tear down the seller’s product. Most people who post three-star reviews will give the product’s pro’s and cons, and some will allude to problems described in worse reviews, either agreeing that they exist or explaining what the complainer did wrong to get a negative outcome.

I’ll usually read three-star reviews first, then go to the one-star reviews. If I’m not put off the product after that, then I’ll look at five- and four-star reviews. If there’s a “Questions Answered” section, be sure to read those, too.

These days, I read them for things I intend to buy here in town as well as things I order online. It’s almost as good as Consumer Reports!

Bargain Find at Williams-Sonoma!

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Williams-Sonoma was one of my favorite stores back in the day when I was a corporate wife and rarely gave a thought to how much I spent and where. Not the sort of place where you’d expect to find a bargain. But…miracles happen.

Yesterday I had to traipse to the Apple store, located (where else?) in one of the city’s ritziest shopping centers. While I was there, I wandered into the Williams-Sonoma to see if they had some salad plates in the type of pattern I favor. They didn’t — my taste is now royally out of style — but they did have some in a plain navy blue that would do the job.

These plates are for the dogs. The ones I had, from an old set from Pier 1 that looked great in the store but not so great on the table, have been dropped on the floor and chipped so many times, it was getting time to replace them. Both dogs, being corgis, feel compelled to hoover up every molecule of dog food off their plates, which means they vigorously lick their dishes so clean it’s hard to tell the things haven’t been through the dishwasher. So a chipped rim risks slashing a doggle’s tongue.

So anyway, as you can imagine, I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending much on dog dishes.

Williams-Sonoma is having a 20% off sale on everything in sight…including things that are already on sale. In the back of the store, they have a clearance section. Some of the things there, mostly odd items, are quite pretty.

Lo! On the clearance shelf, there were a half-dozen coupe-style salad plates, very handsome and very un-clunky, already marked down to something under six bucks apiece. Though not exactly what I had in mind, they would do the job.

BluePlate

Couldn’t believe it! I got six for $23 and change! That’s less than $4 apiece.  That’s on a par with the similar but much cheesier dishes available at the Fry’s or the Target.

Blue plate specials!

Is Costco “Amazon-proof”?

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Here’s an amusing squib from SFGate, ruminating on a recent report that some analyst has dubbed Costco an “Amazon-proof” entity. Deutsche Bank upgraded Costco’s ratings from “hold” to “buy” and raised its target price from $152 to $200.

SFGate’s Business Insider ruminates on the possible reasons for this, and concludes that “Costco has been able to hold its own because of its membership model and ability to incentivize visits to brick-and-mortar locations.” A vague comparison is made with Target and Walmart, which lag far behind the warehouse giant.

How does one “incentivize” visits to a real-world store when convenience and selection are so much greater at the virtual “store” that is Amazon? Besides the fact that Costco is often (but not always) cheaper than Amazon, Costco has one policy that in fact makes it more convenient than ordering items from the comfort of your keyboard: it lets you return anything without an argument. No wrapping stuff up and returning it to UPS, no deadline (except for some electronic gear), no written explanation of the problem: if you don’t want it, you don’t have to keep it.

And in our parts, Costco underprices just about every other gasoline seller in the city. Often as I’m driving away from Costco’s gas pumps, I’ll see prices at neighboring stations that range from 8 cents to 20 cents(!!) a gallon higher than what I just paid. Where they sell propane, they underprice everybody, too. Obviously, if you have to schlep to Costco to get a good price on fuel, you might as well pop into the store to buy whatever you need — or think you’re about to need.

Costco does not impose arbitrary rules that make it difficult or annoying for customers to shop there (“free shipping” if you buy enough junk you don’t need to rack up a $35 bill, or if you pay an exorbitant annual fee) and difficult for vendors to sell their products through the company’s stores.

However, I think the corporation’s greatest strength over its competition is that Costco has human beings. Ask them, and you’ll find most of them actually LIKE working at Costco. Then consider the recent NY Times article about the miseries of working at Amazon.  Look around inside a Walmart and ask yourself if you’d really want to work there: in our parts, 99 percent of the stores are dingy, depressing, and inhabited by real-world “Walmart People,” who are less funny when you’re elbow-to-elbow with them than they are when you’re watching them on YouTube. Walmart employees, if you can find one, act like they don’t care whether you live or die; Amazon employees, if you can find one, behave like rule-bound automatons. Costco’s employees are always pleasant and usually helpful.

Is Amazon hard to beat? Sure. But is it invulnerable? I doubt it.

Whole Foods Underprices Safeway

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As I mentioned in my last, having cut back on routine Costco shopping seems to be saving a ton of money. To give you a clue of how many tons, consider the fact that I’ve been doing most of my grocery shopping at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Sprouts, and September’s bills came in at about 2/3 of budget.

Whole Foods is not cheap. But…its reputation as “Whole Paycheck” is suspect.

Couple of days ago, I stopped by the Safeway on the way to Whole Foods, figuring to pick up a couple of low-brow items that can’t be had in those more politically correct and environmentally self-conscious pastures. While I was there, I spotted the SAME baggies of red seedless grapes that WF sells. Thought, Might as well grab those here, because Safeway is bound to be cheaper than Whole Foods.

Well. No.

Paid $2.99 at Safeway. The very same product in the very same bags in the very same size was $2.69 at Whole Foods.

It’s not the first time I’ve found Whole Foods can have pretty good prices compared to other retailers. The only store that underprices WF on the prepared dog food I had to give the beasts when I was too sick to  make real food for them is Fry’s, a decidedly downscale chain. Whole Foods’ price for the same product is about half that of Petsmart.

On the same trip, I spotted a few other items priced the same as or more than Safeway’s cost. The only thing at WF that’s consistently higher than Safeway is the meat. But Whole Foods’ meat is undeniably superior to Safeway’s. Usually the wines are higher, but WF always has a sale on something in the $8 to $10 range that’s not the usual California plonk. Veggies are all organic and so appear to be higher, until you compare the prices of Safeway’s bug-sprayed products with the prices of the organic produce in the same store.

So. Maybe shopping at Whole Foods is not bound to drive one to bankruptcy, after all.

 

w00t! Out with Costco, Out with the Big Amex Bill!

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Last month’s Costco AMEX bill showed up a couple day’s ago. It was only $660!!!! That’s about 2/3 of its budgeted figure, and probably the smallest AMEX bill I’ve ever had!

The reason for this miracle, I think, is that ever since the last of the endless round of surgeries, I’ve lost interest in eating well and lost interest in shopping at Costco.

Any trip to Costco is likely to turn into an impulse-buy carnival. Whenever I’m in that store, I’m tempted (and usually cave to temptation) to buy 18 times more stuff than I need at the time and three or four things that are just too, TOO neat to pass by. Because, after all, we know they’ll be gone by the next time we get to Costco, eh?

Instead, I’ve been buying at grocery stores, Walgreen’s, and Target, and only buying as much as I need at any given time. Whereas you’d think that buying in bulk would represent a cost savings, apparently it doesn’t. At least not in the short run. It might, if you only bought things that are cost-effective in bulk — the paper towels and the toilet-paper, for example. But Costco’s meat (for another example) is no cheaper than grocery-store meat, and most of the other stuff, while appealing, isn’t something that you just have to have.

A second, probably lesser reason is that I’ve taken to occasionally paying for things with a debit card, so as to get a few dollars back in walking-around cash. Without the teaching job, I have no reason to traipse to the credit union to deposit checks twice a month (after the District gave away all our private information to hackers, forcing me to close my checking account and get a new one with a new account number and to put a freeze on all my credit-bureau accounts, I canceled the direct-deposit). So a debit payment works to provide a little cash now and again.

But I don’t think I’ve paid more than about $150 or $200 that way. Even if I put $200 on the debit card, that’s still only about $860: way under the $1100 budget.

Telling, eh?