Coffee heat rising

w00t! Rain! And a moment to reflect

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Another best-laid plan gone awry: I had determined not to post today, but instead to spend Sunday doing other things, most of which entailed getting some exercise and schmoozing with actual humans instead of hanging out with a small dog.

BUT… It’s almost 9:00 a.m., and it’s just 80 degrees here on the back porch! A light breeze is pushing fresh air through the house, and the hummingbirds are jousting over the sugar water ten feet from my table. The houseplants, sated with rainwater, are glorying in the morning sunlight filtered through a layer of pearlescent clouds.

Weather like this is too miraculous to waste sitting inside a church. God, I’m sure, meant us to appreciate Her creation in the experiencing of it.

Sometime around 5:30, Cassie and I awoke to a lovely steady rain. Last night 80 degrees was so damp and sticky as to be gummy; this morning, with the moisture finally dropping out of the sky, the air is fresh and delicious.

After stuffing the dog with leftover chicken, veggies, and quinoa, I realized the indoor plants needed to be watered today and so hauled them out into the rain, and also put the big old five-liter vinegar jugs now used for fertilizing plants under the eaves to collect runoff. (Did you realize it’s against the law to collect rainwater runoff in many Western states? Yesh. Usurps the water rights of downstream and water table users!) So now we have two and a half big jugs of illicit water, capped and stored for the next round of houseplant watering activities. Another jug and a half are empty, but the skies promise still more rain; no doubt those will soon fill, too.

So, it was breakfast on the back porch, for the first time in many a week. How can I express my joy? LOL…maybe this guy can:

You realize, this meant I managed to actually read part of today’s Times! Speaking of the which, did you read Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” this morning? She holds forth on the sad devolution of the ScienceBlogs network from its former Elysian eminence to what she describes as a culture of one-liners, and its break-up over a tacky blog, a creature of PepsiCo, that the administrators, for reasons comprehensible only to those who have worked for commercial print periodicals, decided to put on the site. Heffernan notes a break-down in civility that echoes, sadly given the expensive education and supposed sophistication of the scientists and science writers involved, the tone of far too many much lower-brow sites. She even grouses at GrrlScientist, one of my favorite science blogs, for a crack about the “hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors” of the megafauna visible in any of America’s public places.

Alas, if you track down the quote and visit the post to check out what was really said, you get a blank page (or at least, you do at 9:30 Sunday, August 1, 2010); presumably, either the author has taken it down or traffic is maxing the page. However, it appears that Heffernan took GrrlScientist’s words out of context, or at least so says Kathy Gill at the Moderate Voice. She cites the protrusions and the jigglings along with the words around them. Said GrrlScientist:

It’s taken me a few hours to cool off enough to write coherently and without using (too much) profanity after I learned that ScienceBlogs added a corporate PR “blog” about nutrition written by PepsiCo. I think I’ve learned all I care to know about corporate “food” giants’ definition of what is “nutrition” by being confronted daily by a flock of hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors everywhere I go (yes, even here in Germany).

LOL! B-a-a-a-d journalist, Ginnie. No treats for you today! Yea verily, we might even say “go to your crate and take your lawyer with you!”

Nevertheless, as GrrlScientist and many others report, the schism over Seed Media Group’s move to install a crassly commercial fake blog mounted by a crassly exploitive megamanufacturer of fake food is real, and the result is more than sad for the blogosphere. It may rise to the level of tragic: it represents the destruction of one of the most successful blog networks the Internet has seen, one that has worked to clear the cobwebs of error and fuzzy thinking out of the corners of our collective mind.

True: if many of us are to make a living as Internet writers, particularly on our own sites, some mechanism has must be invented to make blogging profitable. As I’ve observed before, AdSense, which runs a particularly annoying ad on this site displaying cartoon protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors, occasionally returns something in the six figures: if the figures represent fractional pennies. But it takes a month of the coldest days in Hell for FaM to reach that Olympian height. Most of the time it earns between two cents and three bucks a day.

But still. One wonders. To make a living, do we have to sell our souls?

Memo to self: figure out how to get rid of the animated fat lady diet ad.

Maybe we’re on the wrong track, most of us, when we think of blogging as a potentially profit-making enterprise. Maybe writing these things, which really are on the order of diaries or writer’s journals, should be regarded as a labor of love. Any money to be made off them should be generated from more highly developed spinoffs, in the form of print and electronic books. Or, if we’re Uncle Jay or Ramit, from mugs, T-shirts, and online courses.

Ahem. Would any of you like to buy a Funny about Money mug? How’s about a nice T-shirt?

FaM Logo Here! For just $2 extra, get your mug personalized with YOUR NAME in cheery acrylic craft paint!! (Not responsible for Pepsi Cola logos.)

Frugal Habits: When routine maintenance saves a bundle

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Here’s a real simple way to save money on home repairs: maintain things according to instructions.

No-brainer, eh? Well, easier no-brained than not.

Recently the water has been draining out of the pool’s pump pot every time the system shut off. Nothing I could do seemed to fix it: no amount of cleaning, adjusting, or fiddling around stopped the pump and filter from sucking air whenever the timer turned the pump off.

This? Bad. You don’t want the pump to come on when the system is full of air. It can blow the lid off the pump pot, causing the expensive damage we all can imagine and inflicting serious bodily harm to anyone who might be standing nearby. If the pump runs dry for any length of time, it will burn out, another event that comes under the heading of “expensive damage.”

Argha! I figured this looked like another pricey visit from Leslie’s. For quite some time, there’s been a little seep from a connection between a large pipe and the pump. The Leslie’s guy has insisted it’s not worth fixing, because, he said, the plumbing job would be expensive. This tiny leak been going on for a while—as in “several years”—so I expected the time had come to repair it.

Figures. Every outlandish expense tumbles down on your head when you can least afford it.

But since the system was draining water only when it was off and seem to work fine while it was running, I’ve been turning it on and off with the breaker switch instead of letting it run on the timer. This way I can bleed the air out each morning when I turn the system on. The plan was to continue operating the system manually until this until fall, when I have an income again, and then hail the Leslie’s guy back over here as soon as my first paycheck hits the bank.

Early in the morning while I was contemplating this state of affairs, it occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I lubricated the O-ring that serves as a washer for the pump pot lid.

Hm. You don’t suppose… Could it be?

It’s been so long, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t even find the goop, which I normally keep out there by the pump. Probably Bob the Leslie’s Dude accidentally walked off with it, thinking it was part of his tool set.

This morning I had to join the choir to sing a at a funeral. So, this taking me out of the house, on the way home I dropped by the Ace Hardware and picked up a container of silicone grease. Pulled the pump pot lid off, cleaned everything well, smeared this sticky gunk on the O-ring, and put the thing back together again. Primed the pump, let it run for half an hour, and shut it off.

Very nice. The pump pot was full of water, with hardly a bubble of air visible.

Went away for an hour. Came back.

Hallelujah! The water hadn’t budged! The pot was still full, and there was no sign that even a drop  had drained out of it.

A six-dollar investment in silicone goop averted a $300 repair bill.

Or, we could put another way…

Several months of idle neglect almost caused a $300 repair bill.

Or even…

A stitch in time saves nine.

Translation: Get off your duff and take care of things around the house. Fix stuff before it’s ready to break, not when it’s on its last legs. Keep mechanical devices clean and maintained according to their manufacturers’ instructions. A small fix now saves a big, costly fix later!

Celebrating the Big Purchase

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So Thursday M’hijito came over and helped wrestle the latest extravagant purchase out of the car, having agreed to do so in exchange for the opportunity to partake of the first meal cooked on the thing. He hauled the big charcoal grill off the pad I want to use for cooking and over to the ad hoc flagstone patio(?) I built some time back, and then positioned the new gas grill in the desired spot.

Naturally, it was raining. Monsoon season is finally here, driving temperatures into the 80s and 90s for the evenings…and driving a lot of wind, dust, and rain, too.

But so happy was I that he was coming over for dinner that I went a little overboard with the meal planning. At the better Costco outlet up on the I-17, I came across this incredible steak:

The cost was not unreasonable—about what I would expect to pay for a thick choice ribeye in the grocery store—and so I didn’t notice that it was prime until M’hijito arrived and pointed that out. Wow!

On the way home through the muggy heat (by midday it’s 105 or so, and still very wet), I stopped by the Safeway to pick up some frozen veggies for future reference, and there picked up some garlic, a yellow onion, and a bunch of little green onions. When I got here, I was so whipped I forgot about the fresh produce in the plastic grocery bag and, anxious to sit down, rest, and cool off, just dropped the whole thing in the freezer.

By the time M’hijito got here, the produce was frozen.

Rather than throw it out, I chopped it up and used it before it could turn to mush (which it was rapidly doing as it defrosted!). The result:

A tomato sauce containing a couple big cloves of garlic and the entire bunch of green onions…

Slowly, sweetly caramelized yellow onion to go over the steak…

…And an exuberantly garlicky lemon vinaigrette that we used for cooking. M’hijito carved out the stems and seeds of a couple of red peppers and then poured some of the vinaigrette into the interior. These went onto the grill along with a small eggplant (also basted with the garlic vinaigrette) and a couple cobs of corn.

OMG, what an awe-inspiring dinner this made. The frozen garlic and green onions dissolved into the gently simmered tomatoes, which we used to smother the sliced eggplant, and the onion cooked down to make an intense kind of compote for the grilled ribeye. Eat your heart out, Ruth’s Chris Steak House! With the moderately priced Merlot I picked up at Costco and a very nice salad, we couldn’t have had a more wonderful feast in the fanciest eaterie in town.

So this bodes well for the plan to eat better. Yesterday evening, still craving red meat, I defrosted a smaller, lesser piece of beef and grilled that along with some more corn. Some leftover salad filled out the menu. I still have some shellfish that can go on the grill, and there may even be a piece or two of salmon or mahi-mahi in the freezer, along with a lifetime supply of chicken thighs.

Thanks to the rainstorms, we had another amazing sunset. You really can’t get the full effect in this snapshot—the entire western sky was suffused with neon peach light. The lower the sun dropped, the brighter the light grew, until finally at the end the heavens slipped through coral red into darkness.

It was a great way to launch the new ’cue. And so, to get on with life. A happy Sunday to you all.

😀

Changes in Your Credit Card Statement

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The other day Five-Cent Nickel sent an alert to the effect that he was posting a very interesting graphic on the changes you’ll be seeing in your credit-card statements now that the new law has gone into effect. It’s quite a creation, built on information from the federal government.

My AMEX bill came a few days ago. It took me a minute to figure it out—Nickel’s graphic with its mouse-over captions could be very helpful to the complication-impaired among us. But right up at the top is the “Minimum Payment Warning,” explaining in no uncertain terms what will happen if you just let your balance float.

If I made only the minimum payment on the $864.17 due and never charged up another penny, it would take eight years to pay this month’s bill! And the privilege would cost me about $1,456 in interest. The annual percentage rate for this loan is a  usurious 15.24%, and an even more criminal 25.24% for a cash advance.

Well, if that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

Those of us who are long in the tooth have known these factoids for a long time. But maybe forcing the credit companies to explain, quite literally up front, what a credit-card balance really means will forestall having so many young people end up in debt they can’t handle.

Because I pay my bill in full every month, not only do I not owe AMEX anything, it owes me $77.17 toward this year’s annual rebate.

Interestingly, the busy design of the statement makes it difficult to follow. AMEX has installed a ditzy, squirrelly background inside textboxes that present this information. The account summary, for example, is typed directly against this hectic pattern, small black figures against a dizzying gray background. The law must require credit-card issuers to print the minimum payment warning clearly, because that section lacks the eyeball-spinning textbox fill. But many other key pieces of information are obscured by this graphic device: the amount of the late fee, the account summary,  the credit limit, available credit, cash advance limit and available credit, the days in the billing period. And, most tellingly, the customer service number.

At least now the customer service number, hard to read though it may be, is on the front page of the darned statement. Before this you had to sift through the fine print on the backs of several pages to find a number to call.

This is an improvement. The fact that the credit card company is doing its best to make it difficult to figure out suggests just how big an improvement it is for me and you.

A Dollar a Mile?

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So this afternoon I drove up to Home Depot to pick up the gas grill, which that worthy big-box store had assembled for free.

M’hijito allowed himself to be put up to helping me wrestle it out of the van and set it up in the backyard, in exchange for a share of the first dinner cooked on it. Yesterday I’d picked up some steaks at Costco, but today I wanted to acquire a few salad items and also some frozen veggies, to fit into the new scheme to eat better and live better.

My fevered little brain thought I could go up to the HD at Cave Creek and Cactus and then double back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, it being far too hot to leave food in the car for the indefinite period required to stand at the service desk and then wait for someone to come forward with the grill. (You can tell I’ve done business with HD before, eh?)

But then I realize, nooooo. I bought the darn thing at the HD at Thunderbird and the I-17. Damn.

Drive across Thunderbird to the I-17, an extra two-mile drive. No problem (quite) getting the grill. But this left me a long, long, long way from a decent grocery store. Or, as far as I could tell, from any grocery store. Truly I didn’t want to drive all the way back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, seven miles out of my way, as the crow doesn’t fly.

Cruising back toward 7th Street from the HD on the I-17, I decided to drop into the AJ’s at 7th Street and Thunderbird. How overpriced could they be, anyway? This was directly on my way and would obviate having to drive an extra 5.8 miles to the south. A dollar or two to avoid having to fight my way through more of the homicidal traffic…so worth it!

Once inside the store, though, I could not believe the prices of the most ordinary vegetables: $3.69 for a small package of plain peas or corn. Holy mackerel! I could grow the stuff myself for less than that!

Moving on…and on, and on, and on.  At the Safeway, the same veggies—and even some so-called “organic” varieties of the same—were selling for $1.59 a package!

LOL! I was glad I’d made the extra drive. At a savings of $1.86 a package, the three bags of frozen veggetables cost something over $6 at AJ’s than at Safeway. Almost a dollar a mile! That’s how much the extra trip out of my way saved me today.

🙂


Sometimes it’s worth it to go the extra mile (or seven) to save a few pennies.

Beautiful, beautiful place

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Hideous Jan Brewer
Arizona State Governor Jan Brewer

It’s true, sometimes—these days, often—the inner character of my state’s leaders shows forth in their faces, and too many of my fellow citizens reflect that inner character like dark mirrors, still…before humans came here this was a beautiful place, and despite the worst that the European variant of humanity has managed to inflict, it still is beautiful.

Last night Cassie the Corgi and I went for a stroll in the early evening, as the monsoon storms struggled to overcome the heat island effect of our fair city, whose beauty rivals that of the state’s governor. All around us mountains of clouds reached toward the stratosphere, the setting sun lighting them like absurd neon paintings. Truly. If you tried to paint it, no one would believe you. Here’s what we saw, only much, much bigger and much more spectacular.

Jan Brewer, image by Krantzstone. Link to Photobucket.