So the dogs are walking the human this morning when we come upon the gay guys who live up the street. They’re dragging a garden cart behind them, filled with full recyclable shopping bags.
I say, “Did they make you walk home from the airport with your baggage?”
They laugh and say they just came from one of those migrating food sales — the sellers are camped out in the church parking lot at the corner of Feeder Street East-West and Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
Hot diggety!
What happens is that grocery stores will take produce that’s reached the end of its (brief!) shelf life and, instead of throwing it away, donate it to organizations who distribute it to neighborhoods at an outrageous discount. They dispatch a semi truck filled with produce to a distribution center — usually a church or nonprofit — and set up shop for all comers.
The men got 60 pounds of produce for $10. Apiece.
The moveable feast was to be there from 7 to 9 a.m., said they.
As soon as the dogs had perambulated their daily mile, I flang them in the house, jumped in the car, and shot out the door.
WHAT a mountain of food I came back with! Videlicet:
The bag of lemons and the artichoke came from the Sprouts, where I went to pick up some onions and things so as to process this bounty. But the rest of it: hand0uts.
A gigantic pan of eggplant lasagne awaits in the fridge: my son is coming over this evening to help eat some of this stuff.
Made a marinara sauce for the lasagne with some of the giant tomatoes and some of the frozen hamburger found at the bottom of the recently shoveled-out freezer. That’s going to be very nice.
Also cooked one of the little acorn squash and stuffed it with some of the hamburg: breakfast. I’m thinking the rest of them (eight of the things!) can be fixed the same way and then packed in baggies and frozen. The summer squash and the beautiful eggplants can be made into a mountain of ratatouille. The rest of the tomatoes: soup! Hey: gazpacho!
Between this bounty and the several bags of meat I found hidden in the freezer, I shouldn’t have to go to the grocery store for a month! Except to buy some salad greens.
So I was finally reduced to cleaning out the chest freezer that resides in a back room. It was due for a clean-up when the whole stupid boob thing arose. During the year of surgeries that ensued, that chore was relegated to such a back bar that it was forgotten. And since then I haven’t much given a damn about anything unrelated to staying alive from day to day without losing what remains of my mind.
But now that I’m well again — for the moment — it seems good to catch up with the 87 gerjillion jobs, chores, obligations, and minor survival tasks that have gone by the wayside. One of those was shoveling out the freezer.
Quite a job: but it’s now done, and to finish up all we’re doing right now is waiting for the thing to cool back down into the sub-zero range so we can haul the food out of the refrigerator’s freezer, where we jammed it, and put it away neatly.
How so, serendipitous? Well, because this freezer, itself a Costco product, accrues Costco purchases as a closet breeds coat-hangers in the dark. Videlicet:
Click on the image for its full detailed glory
Whenever I buy a lifetime supply of meat — say, steaks or pork — I cut up the contents into meal-size portions and freeze them in individual packets, which go into small ziplock bags to be stored inside larger ziplock bags. Very handy.
Problem is, after the late, great gut surgery, a physician’s assistant informed me that I would neveragain be able to eat grilled meat, fried meat, roast meat, crisply cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, or salads. Whatever I would be able to tolerate would have to be cooked into mush, puréed, or dumped out of a can. Since I had subsisted on grilled meat, grilled veggies, and salad for quite some time, as you can imagine this bit of news rather killed my appetite.
So a great deal of food that was stashed in the freezer has just sat there for the past year or so.
Recently, though, it has come to my attention that
a) salad greens make the belly feel better, not worse;
b) grilled steak, grilled chicken, grilled fish, and grilled veggies have no ill effect;
c) I no longer give a damn one way or the other, anyway; and
d) To avoid going broke at the Costco and the grocery store, I might as well eat whatever is in the house.
Hence, the freezer-cleaning frenzy.
When I shoveled the thing out, this is what I found:
17 pieces of steak
4 hamburger patties
2.5 pounds of ground bison meat
2 gigantic bag of sea scallops
3 open packages of fish, each containing several servings
1 serving of leftover barbecued spareribs
4 packages of doves
1 pair of lamb ribs from a deconstructed rack of lamb
4 pieces of vacuum-packed yellowtail tuna
All told, these came to 43 servings of fancy protein.
This doesn’t count any of the other stuff in there: the collected bags of expensive flours donated by a choir friend; the sacks of frozen veggies; the this, that, and the other.
Since I don’t eat meat or fish every day, 43 servings amounts to at least two months’ worth of dinners. Probably more.
So…what is my freezer trying to say to me?
Quit buying food at Costco! Moron! Do not ever spend $396 on groceries in a single month, ever again!
Seems like a fairly clear message…
LOL! Clearly, I won’t have to buy any meat except the usual cheapo dog schlock for the foreseeable future (at my age, “foreseeable” does not stretch not very far into the fog).
Have you cleaned out your freezer lately? Does it have a message for you?
So on the corgi forum where I hang out, I’ve read about this harness that hooks to the leash in front, instead of up at the back. The strange positioning of the leash clip discourages your dog from surging forward and dragging you down the street.
Perfect, think I, for Ruby the World-Class Iditarod Champion.
Yesterday I happen upon a new-to-me locally owned pet store, which just opened next to my habituated Trader Joe’s. When I go in to shoof it out, I run across one of these exotic harnesses. Naturally, I buy it: size medium. The cost: $39.99.
I put this on Ruby early this morning, when it’s cool enough to walk — along about 4:30.
Amazingly, it works as advertised: Ruby walks right along with me. Right from the git-go! She does not try to haul me to Yuma.
But, even though I tighten it as much as possible, it just doesn’t fit Ruby. In fact, it’s so loose she manages to climb out of it.
Luckily, Cassie heels as a matter of course. So I take her collar off her and put it on Ruby, who would take off for Yuma on her own if she got free for an instant.
Back at the Funny Farm, I happen to look up these Easy Walk harnesses on Amazon, by way of seeing what commenters have to say. And there, what should I find but that the things are going for $23, and one vendor is offering it for $17.99! Free shipping, one and all.
Well sh!t. I am royally irked.
I take the thing back and tell the manager the it’s too large. She says do I want an exchange or a refund. I say a refund, I guess, since I can get it for $17 at Amazon. Not looking even faintly surprised, she says, “We match prices.”
I think, Isn’t THAT sleazy? You’ll rip off your customers as long as they don’t wise up, hm? But since I’d like to have one of these things and not wait several days to get it, I exchange it for a size small.
Can you imagine? They know they’re gouging and they have the effrontery to, in effect, admit it by dropping their price to the lowest bid…but only if you’ve gone and searched it out.
Brought the “small” size home. Doesn’t fit Ruby: way, WAY too small. So now I’ll have to traipse back up there again to return it.
Y’know, I prefer to shop local. Given a choice between a locally owned retailer and some faceless mega-chain, I’ll buy things like this from the local store. And yeah, I’m willing to pay a couple of dollars more for the privilege, understanding how business works.
So the only thing I’ve done today besides work, work, and more work is to run out to the Walmart just up the road from the ‘hood. After the Fall of the Bush Economy, the fairly shiny Food City in that shopping center (shiny as Food Cities go) was shut down as the owner of the local grocery chain struggled to keep his company in business at all. The anchor tenant’s space was vacant for awhile, and then finally a Walmart Neighborhood Market went in there.
I’ve stayed away from it because I get quite enough of the slum-parking-lot experience at the nearby Albertson’s (where a bum once actually chased me around the cars — did the same to a neighbor, too, I later learned) and Sprouts (where you can watch a hooker pick up a john). But the other day when I happened to be at the Walmart shopping center, I noticed they have a couple of pretty fierce-looking security guards patrolling the place. So, being in a hurry and not feeling much like driving way to hell and gone to the nearest safe Walgreen’s or Safeway, I decided to dart in there this morning.
And was pleasantly surprised!
The Walmart down near M’hijito’s house is just like the scene depicted in a YouTube video: dark, grody, and full of strange downscale specimens:
This store was more like a regular grocery store. It was clean, brightly lit, and didn’t have a single avatar of “Walmart People” as far as you could see. Staff were friendly and didn’t seem especially put-upon. And the shelves were well stocked.
Prices were not noticeably cheaper than other grocery stores around here. To my amazement, they carry Talenti ice cream — at exactly the same price as Sprouts charges. That would be the stuff that ran up the $15 bill the other day. Picked up a fistful of fresh asparagus — about the same price as Safeway. And a couple of other things.
No money was saved, but I was pleased to find a place that seems reasonably safe to shop in a lot closer to home than my usual haunts.
One thing they do have is paletas — Mexican fruit popsicles — and the gringo version, which sell under the “Outshine” brand name. Made by Nestle, of course they’re sweet. But mostly because the fruit purée in them is sweet. The regular line has some sugar — pretty far down on the list of ingredients — but they sell some that contain no added sugar. I can’t tell much difference between them. They’re really good, and pretty light on the calories.
One of my students contributed a bunch of paleta recipes — the alcoholic variety, actually. But that’s an extra embellishment. The real ones are basically fruit. Get a copy of the 30 Pounds/6 Months cookbook for the recipes!
Certainly lighter on the calories than the Talenti sea salt caramel ice cream I’ve been using to soothe the bilious belly.
Almost finished preparing Honored Client’s book to post at the print-on-demand press’s web page. Actually, I uploaded the contents and soon observed that, because the template we’re using has very narrow margins, the guy’s footnotes were getting truncated. He loves footnotes. {sigh}
So I set about converting those to endnotes after each chapter. Ducky. This process, naturally, fucked up all the work I’d done fixing 436 pages’ worth of widows and orphans, a chore that occupied most of yesterday. So I had to delete all the fixes I made yesterday and enter a whole new raft of fixes.
Then back to marking up page proofs for the current index. Needed to get to page 134 today. Didn’t make it.
But I have made it into bed…and now am about to go to sleep.
Y’know, I haven’t read a Consumer Reports in years. Occasionally I’ll look at Consumerist, a related website, but I do not pay to access Consumer’s Union product reviews online. A few days ago, The Atlantic commented on the apparent decline of the venerable magazine, noting that it hasn’t done well in the computer age. The Atlantic itself being in a bit of a decline (IMHO), the article wasn’t very deep, although its author, Paul Hiebert, did ruminate on a study that pointed out some rather obvious differences between CR’s involved, systematic, and highly comparative reviews with the off-the-cuff user reviews you see online and cited the public’s tendency to give undue credence to online reviewers.
More telling were the comments to the article, in which readers complained about CR’s political biases (and yea verily, many a review there is informed by one sort of political correctness or another), about the paywall blocking access to information that can be had for free elsewhere, about the drop in quality of CR‘s content… and in amongst those comments is a reply from one of the magazine’s former editors, pointing readers to two articles describing the dissatisfaction of the many former staffers and the disgust of a former reader.
To that I’d have to say “yup.”Consumer Reports lost me the time SDXB and I purchased the same model of high-end Hoover vacuum, enthusiastically high-rated in the magazine. At the time, he was living in a house a block from mine. He could get into the Base Exchange at Luke Air Force Base, and when he came home with his, I noted his delight with it. A week or two later I bought one for myself at Sears.
My standards for vacuum cleaners are high but not astronomical. I had a German shepherd and needed the thing to extract dog hair from Berber-style synthetic carpeting that was easy to clean. SDXB liked his house clean but was not what you’d call Suzie Homemaker (not if you wanted to live, anyway…).
I found myself not very pleased with the machine’s performance. It was sad compared with my old Hoover, which had died of old age. But I’d spent a lot of money on this top-rated machine, so I stuck with it.
A year or so later, within two or three days of each other, both machines dropped dead! It was altogether too clear that we were looking at planned obsolescence. He had figured out by then that the things left a lot to be desired (like, say, quality). I had never been nuts about mine but was amazed when both machines broke in identical ways. They were just shoddily made.
So are consumers crazy to put more faith in Amazon reviews than in the decrepit Consumer Reports?
I doubt it. Most of us know that a lot of 4- and 5-star reviews are written by shills. We all know that many of the 1-star reviews are actually complaints about delivery or customer service. As grown-ups, we can generally parse out a pretty clear view of the typical consumer experience by reading enough reviews and winnowing out the ones that don’t appear to be a) real and b) valid.
Many of Hiebert’s commenters enunciated what we said just a few weeks ago: they start with the 3-star reviews, then peruse the lower- and higher-rating reviews. With the most credible-looking of all these in mind, they form a kind of “big picture” of what consumer experience is likely to be for a given product. Scientific? No. As good as the OLD Consumer Reports‘ hands-on testing? Probably not. But just now it seems to be better than whatever else is out there.
Image:
Consumer Reports modification of Harvey Balls. By Stephen Schulte.
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
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?
Also 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. 😉
