Coffee heat rising

Taking Care of Your Health Pays

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Lenten thanks, Day 32

Sure is nice to have the house clean…at last!

Staying healthy pays in the obvious way—lower healthcare premiums and fewer sick days—and it returns cash in less self-evident ways, too. It’s not just that you save you, your employer, and your health insurer money on doctor bills and absences. When you’re feeling even the slightest bit off, as a small entrepreneur you’re less able to function profitably. This is true of anyone who earns money through several income streams, from IT consulting to yard-saling. When you don’t feel like working, you don’t; and when you’re not working, you’re not earning.

Yesterday was the first full day that I’ve felt pretty good since I caught the cold that’s been going around town. After a decent night’s sleep, the energy levels were almost back to normal, and I got a lot done, from housecleaning to paying work.

Even a minor ailment can leave you so wrung out you just don’t feel like doing anything: not cleaning, not cooking food for yourself, not shopping for food, and most certainly not actually working. I’ve managed to hold my own in the work arena only in the most tenuous way. A newsletter that I do on a volunteer basis didn’t get published at all (and in fact, now a new month’s issue needs to be done tomorrow!), student papers didn’t get graded on time, and some papers classmates claim to have submitted got lost in the shuffle. A woman I would like to interview for Funny’s “Entrpreneurs” series has never been called (gotta do that today, when I get home from class!).

I should have been more careful about protecting myself from a severe cold that everyone knew was making the rounds. Of course, it’s hard to avoid these bugs, especially when you’re in the classroom with hordes of people carrying hordes of germs. But I did run out of the hand wipes I like to carry in the car, which meant that every time I walked out of a grocery store, climbed behind the steering wheel, and rubbed my itchy nose, I dosed myself with whatever viruses were on the shopping cart handle. And rubbed them all over the steering wheel.

You can’t walk around in a bubble all the time. But you can do a few things to protect yourself:

• Eat well. That means plenty of veggies and fresh fruit, as well as those fine greasy hamburgers we all secretly love.

• During the cold and flu season, when you dine in restaurants, eat only hot foods. Because restaurant workers may not get sick leave, the person preparing your salad in the kitchen could be shedding viruses into it. Heat kills germs, and so it makes sense to stick to hot foods and drinks.

• Drink plenty of water. You can be a little dehydrated even if you’re not thirsty, and dehydration can leave you open to any number of ailments.

• Get some exercise every day—outdoors if it’s not snowing and blustering, indoors if the weather is inclement.

• Try not to hang around people who are coughing and snorting.

• But if you have to, wash your hands frequently and be careful not to eat or drink out of utensils the sick person has handled.

• Keep your hands away from your face! Cold and flu viruses are commonly transmitted when people rub their eyes, scratch their nose, or put their hands in or near their mouths.

• Away from home, carry a package of antiseptic hand wipes in your car and in your purse. As soon as you leave a public place, immediately wipe your hands with one of these.

• Wash produce well. This not only will help to remove chemicals and microbes picked up in the field and at packing plants, it also will eliminate viruses that land on food while it’s sitting in grocery bins.

• Get a flu shot every year. I used to get sick as a dog every winter. Since I started taking flu shots, I haven’t been seriously ill with a respiratory virus once, and I rarely even catch colds.

If you do get sick, stay home as much as possible. Please don’t spread the misery. Drink plenty of liquids, try to eat something, and go to bed.

Long Days, Long Nights

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Lenten thanks, Day  30

Thank God I don’t live in Iowa!

Lenten thanks, Day 31

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would be 100 years old today. I’m glad I had some time in my life with her, and thankful that most Americans no longer buy the products of the people who murdered her. But I do wish my son, who came along just a year after she died, could have met her.

Time to quit complaining because a minor cold has caused me to fall so far behind that I’m working every day to catch up and still falling further behind! Things could be worse: way worse.

Take a look at this incredible footage from Iowa:

Those are just two of the ten tornadoes confirmed to have struck the state. Makes a little hailstorm seem as nothing.

Seeing this news reminded me that I haven’t seen the $650 supplemental check that was supposed to be forthcoming from The Hartford. Just sent off a reminder to the claims adjustor, but I’ll bet he has his hands full with other issues just now. Many other issues, no doubt.

I’m still playing catch-up with the work that piled up while I was sick. With Blackboard deciding not to play nice with anyone who had the temerity to update their browser, student papers have gotten lost in the vast tide of e-mail that floods my in-box every day. Yesterday I tried to sift through all that stuff, but evidently lost some of them, since several students who never miss a deadline turned up with no papers. That means that on top of the full class of papers I have to read today—also belatedly—another four or five dreary freshman comp papers will come thudding in today or tomorrow.

To gild that lily, the chronic insomnia is back with a vengeance. Haven’t had more than four hours’ sleep in a good two weeks. Yesterday after I planned to spend the afternoon reading the rest of the comp papers so I could spend today reading the journalism papers, but after lunch I was so tired I couldn’t hold my eyes open. So laid down for an hour’s nap. Two hours later M’hijito called and jarred me out of a comatose sleep. By then it was 4:30 and I was so groggy I could barely move around the house, much less think clearly enough to read an awful paper, figure out what’s wrong with it, try to explain what’s wrong with it, and try to attach a fair grade to it.

He invited me to dinner. Shouldn’t have been driving the car, but I never turn down that kind of invite. On the way to his place I realized nooo, right about then I was supposed to be headed to evensong. So when I got to his house I e-mailed the choir director to weasel out of that. Really didn’t want to cop out, but I wouldn’t have been much use in those parts.

So while M’hijito shopped for food and then cooked it, I read two papers, both of which were pretty bad. Still was too stunned to eat much…couldn’t get around all of the wonderful dinner he fixed. Then back home to read the rest of the stuff. Finally into bed around midnight.

Dropped two Benadryl by way of drugging myself back to sleep. It worked: slept till 7:30 this morning.

Guess I need to get off the coffee again. And off the wine, which probably doesn’t help things. And off the whine, too! 🙄

A perfect storm of stoont papers doesn’t hold a candle to a perfect storm of 165-mile winds.

A “Gift” from Sears

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Lenten thanks, Day 29

A gray morning; a soft soaking rain falls from the sky. Blossoming plants shiver with joy at the last good drink of fresh rainwater before the blast of summer comes up. Not bad, God! Definitely an A+.

So some time back M’hijito needed a new dryer. Since he pays cash for everything, we put it on my AMEX card so I could rack up a little more in the annual rebate kickback, and he forked over the dollars to me. Sears’s come-on to buy appliances just then was an $80 mail-in rebate offer.

I always figure those are a rip. “Mail-in rebate” too often means “no rebate”: even when you remember to gather all the ditzy pieces of paper required, fill out a form asking for information that’s none of their business, and stuff it all into an envelope, half the time you never get any money back. But nothing ventured, nothing gained: shortly after we acquired the dryer, I shipped off the paperwork. That was several months ago.

Now comes in the mail from Sears the rebate…in the form of a debit card! It’s a preloaded Mastercard debit card.

No cash. Noooo….  You’re expected not to drop the money in your savings, but to diddle it away at restaurants and the like. You can transfer the money to your bank account, but this requires you to go online and share all the details of your bank account with Citibank’s Visa employees. You can get cash off the card, but only if you use an approved ATM. If you don’t use ATMs (as those of us for whom cash washes through the fingers like water tend not to do), you’ll just have to spend it.

Okay. So it’s M’hijito’s birthday. I figure $40 apiece would buy us a very nice dinner at a much tonier greasy spoon than we are accustomed to frequenting, and I propose to invite him out to celebrate.

Then I start to look at the swath of fine print that comes with this thing.

It has a $3.00 “account management fee,” which kicks in if you don’t start using the thing. If you use the it outside the U.S.—say in Nogales, a 90-minute drive from here—you get dinged 3% per transaction. If you have not used up the money by the expiration date, they apply a $3.00/month gouge. You are limited to a maximum of 12 transactions a day (“or your daily limit,” whatever that is). To find out what “your daily limit” of transactions is, you have to log onto their website, whose URL is not given. Under the federal anti-terrorism laws, you are required to give them your correct name, correct address, and correct telephone number. They will share this information and any other personal information they gather with whomever they please unless you fill out a separate form, put it in a separate envelope (which you supply) with a separate stamp (which you supply), and mail it off.

It is an “account.” You can reload this card with cash by depositing money with Citibank, and from now until the end of time can pay for junk with plastic. For a fee.

So, I wonder…if they nick you three bucks every time you turn around and this thing is an open “account,” presumably they’re going to start charging you a bank fee of $3 a month whenever it runs out of cash? And it’ll be quite a trick to figure out how much cash is on the thing, right? Because you’ll never know exactly what day of the month they decide to engross three bucks out of this “rebate” gift. And am I right in thinking that effectively Sears has set up a bank account for me, which I have not asked for, at an institution with which I do not choose to do business?

😯

Looking this gift horse in the mouth, I call the number on the card and after just one runaround reach one Duane, a human. When I ask how the $3 nick works and how I go about canceling this thing as soon as I can spend the $80 so generously “given” to me, he admits that on request they’ll send me a check. Great, say I: please do send a check.

Supposedly this vast lucre will show up in the mail sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ll believe it when I see it.

😀

Really, I do dislike mail-in rebates. They’re such a nuisance. And this new twist is plain annoying. What’s difficult about just sending the money in the first place? Or better yet: How’s about giving customers a fair price in the store, rather than making us jump through hoops to shave off a few bucks?

 

A Concatenation of Fools

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Lenten thanks, Day 28

Well, it was very kind of God to allow me to be born at the apogee of America’s influence and standard of living. But…contemplating the future for our children and grandchildren as we watch our country self-destruct is kinda sad.

The Republicans and their Tea Party infiltrators have dug their heels in the sand and are, no doubt joyously, awaiting the shut-down of the United States government.

Today’s AZFamily news website quotes one of our Republican senators, Jon Kyl, as saying “he believes his party is being reasonable and the other party is not.” Meanwhile the Miami Herald reports that “Republicans have not yielded on their bid to bar federal money from going to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a favorite target of anti-abortion lawmakers because it provides abortion-related services.”

A message to Jon Kyl’s robot pacifier for his constituents:

No, Mr. Kyl, your party is NOT being reasonable. Shutting down the federal government because a bunch of extremists think a woman’s right to decide what she will do with her own body should be rescinded is not reasonable. A party increasingly dominated by those who think all government is evil and that we should cut all public services is a misguided bunch of fools.

What we’re seeing here is the worst kind of blockheaded demagoguery. As a voter, I am sick and tired of watching this revolting sideshow.

In a way, I hope you do succeed in shutting down the government. And please: do keep it shut down for a good long time.

This will make it clear to the 800,000 people you are about to put out of work what your policies will do to this country. It will make it clear to every vacationer and every well-heeled foreign tourist who’s already paid heaven only knows how much to travel to spend time in a national park, only to find the public lands closed down. It will make it clear to every contractor who does business with the federal government, and to every employee of those contractors. It will make it clear to every business that supplies those contractors, and to every employee of all those businesses. It will make it clear to every supplier of products and services to the federal government, and to every employee of those suppliers.

And maybe, finally, when their own oxen are gored, the voters of this country will figure out what’s wrong with the Party of No.

Don’t agree? Fine. Let us agree to disagree. Go here to write to your elected representatives. And by all means…urge them to shut the place down. Please! 😉

Found Treasure: Fancy frying pans and how to care for them

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Lenten Day thanks, Day 27

Thanks to God for the lovely gentle rain She blessed us with last night. The air is cool and clean, and this morning all the flowers are shivering with plant joy.

So I was mulling over the All-Clad Frying pan issue, Frugal Scholar having triggered a certain amount of coveting with her discussion of the treasured gourmet cookware and its worthy alternatives. Way in the back of the vast cabinet under the stovetop, I had stashed a pan I’d picked up at an estate sale. A ten-inch stainless pan, just the size of the nonstick Cuisinart that’s about seen its duty and done it.

After I’d bought this thing, I’d thought how can I put my old friend down? Sentimental about a frying pan…think of that! And then instead of putting the new-to-me stainless pan to immediate use, I stashed it and kept on using the tired Cuisinart.

Well, yesterday I pulled that stainless pan out of the back of the cupboard, and what should I discover? Lo! It is an All-Clad!

It looks practically brand-new, but apparently its former owner was one of the ninnies who posts rants at Amazon to the effect that food sticks on the stainless because they don’t know how to cook in a real pan. It has some scratches on the inside as though somebody had scoured it with steel wool, and the bottom looks bunged-up a bit, as though it had been scraped back and forth on a metal burner. But it’s not badly damaged…I think it’s more than serviceable.

We’ll find out soon, ’cause I’m going to try it at the next opportunity. Not just this minute though: I’m still too sick to eat much more than a piece of toast and a cup of tea for breakfast.

Amazon’s price on the 10-inch All-Clad is significantly less than Williams-Sonoma’s, where you’ll pay 110 bucks for the thing. Given the quality of All-Clad and that it has a reputation for standing by its products—even one of Amazon’s complainers noted that he got a brand-new pan, free of charge—a mere $75 for a brand-new one might actually be a good buy.

What do you suppose would possess a person to take steel wool to a hundred-dollar frying pan?

It’s pretty easy to clean a high-quality stainless pan. You need one or all of these:

• Barkeeper’s Friend (find it with the scouring powders in the household cleaner aisle)
• Ordinary dishwashing liquid
• Powdered or gel dishwasher detergent
• Baking soda and water
• Blue (not green) sponge with nonscratch scouring surface

So. First, if the pan is just ordinarily dirty with a little stuck-on stuff, pour water and a few drops of liquid dish detergent in it and let it soak while you’re eating your meal. Then wash it in hot water with more dishwashing liquid; often after a soak it will wash right up with no scouring. Alternatively, simply run it through the dishwasher.

If this doesn’t work, scour it with Barkeeper’s Friend. Apply BKF to the interior surface; add enough water to form a thick paste. With the soft side of your sponge, rub firmly in circles, moving from the inside to the outside. This will usually clean most dirt and stains off a good pan.

If this doesn’t work but you haven’t seared grease on in enamel-like black spots, rinse the pan well and sprinkle in about a tablespoon of dishwasher detergent. Add enough hot water to cover the soiled areas, stir to dissolve, and leave the pan to soak at least overnight. Use the hottest tap water you can get, because dishwasher detergent is activated by hot water. Next day, discard the soaking solution (do not put your hands in it!), rinse the pan well, and scrub it with Barkeeper’s Friend.

If this still doesn’t work or if you have enameled grease onto it, place a handful of baking soda into the pan and fill with water. Put the pan on the stove and heat the liquid to a boil. Turn it down to a simmer and let it cook in there for about 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it—you don’t want the liquid to boil dry! It will ruin your pan if it does. Also, this stuff sometimes wants to boil over, so you’ll need to be close at hand to regulate the heat. After about 20 minutes of simmering, turn off the heat and let the pan sit until the baking soda solution cools down completely. Then, at your convenience, scrub well with Barkeeper’s Friend.

You can use the type of sponge that has a nonscratch scrubbing pad. These are made by Scotch Brite and are commonly available. Just be sure the packaging actually says it’s a no-scratch scrubber. These are usually colored blue. The green heavy-duty scrubbers will scratch the toughest stainless steel, so do not use these on your cookware. Never use steel wool on a good stainless pan.

It’s pretty easy. Soaking is always better than scouring. Gentle abrasives are always better than fierce ones (try substituting baking soda for the Bartender’s Friend, BTW—it doesn’t work quite as well but sometimes it does the job).

When you’re using a really high-quality pan, you don’t have to and you should not turn your burner to its blow-torch setting. To fry or sauté in a stainless pan, place a small amount of oil or butter in the pan and put the pan over medium heat. When the butter is melted or the oil is hot, add your food. Let meat sear fully before trying to turn it over—if you try to flip it too soon, it will stick. To cook bacon in such a pan, always cook it over low heat. Although this takes longer, you’re less likely to burn the bacon, and when cooked over a low flame bacon does not splatter all over the kitchen.

I do not sear beef on salt over blast-oven heat when using a stainless pan, the way  you can do with a cast-iron surface. I suppose you could, but it seems old-fashioned, and besides, it’s a pretty brutal way to cook a steak. If I’m not grilling it over propane or charcoal or broiling it in the oven, I’ll fry it over medium-high heat in butter.

Have a little respect for a good pan, and it’ll treat you well. 😉

Still Sick and Got Too Much Work!

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Lenten thanks, Day 25

Thank God for bad cowboy music to fill up the empty air in the car when NPR’s local talkathon shows are dull as old chewing gum and NPR’s local pretend-classical station is playing Strauss waltzes and Souza marches.

Lenten thanks, Day 26

On the rare occasions that You decide to allow a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, your Godship, that’s very nice. It would be even nicer if You could manage a few more events like that…

Neither time nor energy for much blogging today. This damn virus is still hanging on—unless I’m mistaken, we’re into the fourth week with that now. Tiresome. I swear, every bug takes me twice as long to throw off as normal people seem to need.

One of my students said the disease tends to come back on you, and that when it does it brings on gastrointestinal symptoms. Well, dunno if that’s true, but yesterday I had a bitch of a bellyache and projectile diarrhea. Could’ve been from the cheap hamburger I picked up at Safeway for the dog, though. Night before last I barbecued some of it for me as well as to feed the pooch, and my chunk of it came off the grill on the high side of rare. So it could have been contaminated meat, something that seems to get more common as the days pass.

Speaking of students, I’ve fallen way behind in grading stoont papers, what with being too sick to think, dealing with the eternally ongoing Blackboard fiascos, having the Carnival of Personal Finance take up two full days of my time, trying to cope with not one but two clients on ridiculous deadlines, and then getting distracted with the Macy’s flap. So, I’m going to have to spend the entire day reading papers.

Meanwhile, for your eclectic delectation, here are a few things to read.

Check out this exceptional shopping tool Money Beagle discovered.

While I was trying to figure out if the current viral complaint actually does a) relapse and b) entail gut symptoms, I came across this interesting site from a Columbia professor of virology. Check out the guy’s podcasts!

Here’s a handy thumbnail guide for car buyers. Great pointers for how to hold your own with those dratted salesmen.

And this has gotta be a bookmarkable: eight low-tech ways to revive broken electronic gadgetry.

And once and for all…