Coffee heat rising

Get OFF the flickin’ PHONE!

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This morning as I was strolling home from the daily walk with La Maya, a woman passed me in her car on a neighborhood road.

She caught my  attention because she was driving too fast for a residential street. She had both hands off the wheel and her eyes off the road while she pawed frantically through her purse, which she had balanced on her lap. Presumably she was searching for a ringing cell phone. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see my dog. All she could have seen was her purse and the junk inside it.

I wish I had a loud blatting air horn to blast at chuckleheads who drive while yakking on the phone. Folks. If you’re driving, get off the phone!

In a study recently reported in the New York Times‘s science section, researchers sent a gaudily got-up clown on a unicycle pedaling around a town square. Afterwards, they collared pedestrians and asked them if they’d seen anything unusual.

A third of walkers who were listening to music or (weird!) walking alone in silence said they’d noticed a clown on a unicycle. Even more—almost 60 percent—of those who were walking with a friend remarked on the clown. But only 8 percent of pedestrians yakking on cellphones said they’d seen the clown.

Think of that. Two in 25 cellphone yakkers were alert enough to their surroundings to notice a guy with a red nose perched on a wheel and wearing a purple and yellow outfit with polka-dotted sleeves.

What it means is that when you’re driving down the road or walking on a sidewalk next to a road, only two in every 25 drivers on cellphones see you! Maybe fewer, unless you’re wearing a red nose and a garish costume.

Damn it. Get off the phone! No one needs to be “connected” (grr!) to the entire world every living, breathing minute! It can’t be healthy for you never to have a moment of privacy, not even when you’re alone inside your car where you should be paying attention to your driving.

Very, very few items of personal or corporate business can’t wait until you get home or to the office, where you can sit down and focus solely on the person on the other end of the line. And fewer still can’t wait until you can at least find a place to pull off the road.

Even if you don’t care about the rest of us who are on the road with you, for your own personal sanity and health turn the phone off while you’re in the car. Don’t allow the cutesy ring tones or annoying jangles to intrude on your privacy, especially when you’re behind a steering wheel.

I never replaced my cell after canceling it during the Qwest Wars. Though I occasionally think it would be good to have something in the car to call for help in an emergency, I’ve never missed the thing. I have, however, watched my friends be interrupted in mid-word by jangling phones, which they feel compelled to answer while they’re crusing down the freeway or in the middle of a conversation. Some act apologetic but pick up the call anyway; others seem oblivious to the basic rudeness of leaving a face-to-face friend hanging while they turn on a phone to respond to something that, about 99 percent of the time, is trivial and could wait until after the conversation ends.

It’s just plain bad manners to drop a real-life conversation to yap on a telephone. Unless some real emergency comes up, there’s no excuse for it. You understand, the message to Friend Interrupted is “what you have to say is even more trivial than the trivial message that’s coming in on this phone. You are less important than anything else in my life, no matter how petty and transient it may be.”

And when it comes to yakking on the phone behind the steering wheel, it’s not bad manners: it’s homicidal.

What does this have to do with money?

Your insurance premiums…
My insurance premiums…
Our insurance premiums…

Your car wreck…
My car wreck…
Our car wreck…

Your medical bills…
My medical bills…
Our medical bills…

Please. Get off the phone!

Mansef: A Middle-Eastern feast dish

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Arabs cook meat—most often lamb, goat, or chicken—with a variety of aromatic spices and then add yogurt to make an ineffably delicious sauce. The feast based on this dish is called mansef. Recently in my collection of magazine and newspaper clips I came across a late 1960s Americanized version of mansef. Authentic mansef is boiled lamb with sweet spices and yogurt. The Yankified version substituted cream cheese for yogurt, probably because few Americans would eat yogurt during the 1960s, and those who would were unlikely to find it in a grocery store. The flavor is quite lovely…but not having any cream cheese on hand, I decided to try yogurt and also  substitute freshly made beef/chicken broth for the original recipe’s water.

Re-adapting it backward for authenticity and forward for the crockpot, here’s what I came up with:

• about two pounds raw lamb, cut into 1- or 2-inch chunks
• beef or chicken broth
• about 3/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 10 or 12 cloves
• salt and pepper
• a little olive oil
• juice of a  lemon
• 2 containers or more of plain yogurt (about 4 cups; Greek-style is recommended)
• rice
• pine nuts
• a little chopped parsley
• tortillas or pita bread

Season the meat with salt and pepper. Skim the bottom of a large frying pan and brown the the lamb pieces nicely on all sides. Then place the browned meat in a large crock pot.

Sprinkle cardamom and cloves over the top of the meat, and tuck the cinnamon sticks in around the meat. Cover with beef or chicken broth. If there’s not enough liquid, add some water to cover. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into the pot with the liquids.

Place the lid on the crock pot, turn the pot to “low,” and let the meat cook until tender, about four to six hours.

At dinner time:

Prepare some rice—for a large group, you might want to cook up two or three cups of dry rice, which will make quite a lot of cooked rice. Judge the amount of rice you’d like by the amount of meat you’re cooking. While the rice is steaming, gently brown a handful of pine nuts in some olive oil or butter. Watch: don’t let them scorch.

Remove the meat from the crock pot and set aside. Place a cup or so of the juices in a blender, and add about a cup of yogurt. Cover the top and place a towel over the top to protect your hands, in case the hot liquid tries to escape. Blend the ingredients well. Repeat to incorporate all the yogurt into the juices.

If any juices remain in the pan, pour the yogurt mix back into them and stir well to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. If desired, add more yogurt, using the same mixing technique. But don’t turn the heat on under the pan with this yogurt-meat sauce, lest it curdle.

Pile the rice in a big bowl. Toss the meat and toasted pine nuts into it. Then pour the sauce over the rice and meat mixture. Garnish with chopped parsley sprinkled over the top.

Serve this with some warm tortillas or pita. Diners place a bit of mansef into the center of a piece of flat bread, wrap the bread around the meat mixture, and eat.

About the tortillas. They’re not cooked (exactly) when they come from the store. One way to finish them is to dab a little butter on each tortilla, stack them up, wrap them in tinfoil, and warm in a 250- to 300-degree oven while you’re preparing the sauce. Another way is simply to heat a griddle over a moderately hot burner and flip the tortilla on it until the tortilla is hot. Stack them on a clean table napkin or piece of waxed paper and keep wrapped until you take them to the table.

Image: Nickfraser, Mansaf as Served in an Ammani Household. GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia Commons.

Another little roommate

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{sigh} A new little rat has moved in behind the washer and dryer, out in the garage. She (I’ve decided it’s a girl, for no good reason) was wooed by the garbage, which I keep in the garage, just on the other side of the kitchen door. She’d carried various delicacies to her dining table behind the dryer, where she evidently enjoyed them with gusto.

The last roof rat who lived out there came in to eat the dog food. That was when the German shepherd and the greyhound were consuming about 20 pounds of kibble a week. I murdered him—the rat, I mean, not one of the dogs. Pizzened the little guy. He croaked over under the dryer. I had to drag the machine out from the wall in order to retrieve his ripening remains and inter him in the garbage can.

Anyway, the neighborhood is enjoying quite the roof rat infestation just now. On the phone yesterday, La Bethulia said she’d found not one but two of the little charmers…inside the house!!! One of them was after the dog food—her house has an indoor utility room, not a washer-dryer hook-up the garage. And the other was, hevvin help us, nestling in the linen closet.

Augh!

Another neighbor e-mailed to say he’d found rat signs around his house.

Well, what to do with Our Rattie? She was out at the time I discovered her dwelling behind the washer and dryer. I’d had to move my car out of the garage, because the tree guys’ equipment and debris blocked the driveway. This provided an opportunity to break out the shop vac and thoroughly clean the garage. That was when I discovered her pellets and the remains of her lunch.

She must have been utterly terrorized, between the unholy racket the men made cutting down the huge tree outside the garage, the banging and thumping of the washer and dryer running (it was a multitasking day), and the roar of the shop vac. She ran off. One of the men pulled the washer and dryer out so I could clean up the mess behind them, and there was no sign of her underneath the machines.

So I hauled the garbage to the alley and determined to keep each day’s kitchen trash in the kitchen and trot it out to the alley each evening. I really don’t like to go out there after dark—don’t know which I’d less rather encounter: a four-legged rat or a two-legged one. But obviously nothing even vaguely edible can be left in the garage.

Poisoning rats is not the ideal strategy. If one of the little guys passes not through the Veil but through a hole in your wall, you’ve got a major stench that you can’t easily get rid of. Rat traps are supposed to be effective, but I can’t set a mouse trap without slamming my fingers…just imagine what a rat trap would do to a finger! I picked up a pair of glue traps at Home Depot, but they seem inhumane, to say the least.

But I had an idea.

This is gross. If you’re already grossed out by this conversation, by all means avert your eyes here!

It occurred to me that a dog is a predator. A rat, which is much like a rabbit with short ears, is prey. No prey animal with will sleep in a den decorated with fresh predator markings. Dogs mark their territory not just with urine but also with feces—the glands around the anus dispense pheromones that say “I was here.” Or, more precisely, “Get off my property!” Cassie’s little mounds, in contrast to those of a 90-pound shepherd or hound, are so small they’re fairly inoffensive. To the human nose, that is. But what if…

Next time I took Cassie for a walk and gathered one of her gifts off the neighbor’s yard, instead of tossing it in the nearest garbage can, I brought it home and deposited it in a disposable paper bowl. Slipped this into the nest area behind the washer and dryer, and then snuck away to wait.

I think Rattie may have been back once or twice—a few more of her pellets showed up around the washer. But they could have been old ones. She certainly isn’t hanging around, because there’s nothing to eat.

Gerardo blowered out the garage when he came by to clean up the yard, removing those last few pellets from sight, and I deposited a fresh dose of predator pheromone behind the washer. So now we shall see if this scheme works!

Neighborly Hallowe’en

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This Hallowe’en Cassie and I will hang out in the neighborhood just to the south of us, where a nifty thing goes on.

The neighbors decorate their yards with orange lights and weird hoo-dahs. Then they bring tables and chairs out to the driveway or yard, stack the candy on the tables, and sit outside to greet the trick-or-treaters. This strategy serves all sorts of excellent purposes:

♦ They have an impromptu, loosely organized block party. Neighbors get to know each other and each others’ kids, and a good time is had by all.

♦ Everybody gets to enjoy all the kids frolicking around in their costumes.

♦ The kids are safer, because a lot of grown-ups are outside watching.

♦ The grown-ups are safer, because no one is opening their doors to strangers.

♦ The obligatory vandalism goes someplace else, where fewer eyes are upon the perps.

It really is a great idea. It combines the fun of door-to-door trick-or-treating with the relative safety of an organized party. As a single woman, I never open my door to anyone I don’t know, and so on Hallowe’en I  turn off the lights and hole up in a back room. But I love to see the children showing off their costumes. This is a fine opportunity to do that.

Image: Toby Ord. A Jack o’ Lantern made for the Holywell Manor Halloween celebrations in 2003. Creative Commons.

How dumping your credit cards can keep you on budget…

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…even if you’re a credit-card “deadbeat” who pays off all charges in full every month.

As I was saying yesterday, if and when my credit-card issuers try to sock me with annual fees just for carrying their plastic around in my purse, the cards will go away. Substituting cash, purchasing cards, and checks for credit cards will, on the surface, add an extra layer of complication to my bookkeeping: I’ll have to go to Costco and Safeway to buy the purchasing cards, and I’ll have to keep track of amounts spent with each of these spending tools.

Or so it seems.

In fact, though, I think a credit-card-free system might be no less involved to track than what I’m doing now: budgeting $1,200 (down from $1,500 after the furlough; an amount that will drop to $1,000 when my job ends) for all expenses other than monthly recurring charges (such as utilities), and staying on budget by trying to spend no more than 25% of that amount in any given week. To make this work, I have to enter each week’s bills against the week’s microbudget, a recurring Excel tedium.

Allocating a specific amount of monthly income to each of the three tools would work much like the “cash envelope” system favored by many frugalists. The idea is that you set aside a specific amount for each category in your budget—in cash, physically in an envelope—and when an envelope runs out of dollars, you have to stop spending on that category until you get more money. The psychological message is You’re out of money!!! Stop spending!

Well. A purchasing card with X amount of money on it is effectively the same thing as an envelope of cash. Run out of money—quit spending until you have more money. You could, in theory, regard the other two tools in exactly the same light: cash is easy; checks would be simple if you kept only enough money in your checking account to cover your monthly check-writing budget.

My plan is to have one purchasing card from Costco and one from Safeway, the merchants where I buy most of my food and household goods. Then to pay in cash for meals out, entertainment, and small incidentals, and to cover all other more-or-less discretionary expenses (such as house and pool maintenance, clothing, etc.) with checks.

In a way, this plan would be simpler than my present scheme. Instead of balancing all these expenses out of one “envelope” (the credit-card budget), each category would be strictly finite, and spending would have to stop when a given month’s limit was reached.

Right now I spend about $425 a month at Costco, about $68 a month for Costco gas (by far the cheapest source of gas in town), and about $80 a month at Safeway. Averaged out over the past nine months, I’ve spent about $48 a month on clothes at emporia other than Costco, my favorite purveyor of jeans and knit shirts; about $20 a month on haircuts; and about $68 a month on all pool care, including repair bills. Some of those costs aren’t going away after the job ends: I have to buy gas, for example. Others don’t happen every month—I get my hair styled about once every two months, and repairs on the pool happen only a couple times a year. Money set aside monthly for those categories would accrue until a need arose.

Regarded in this way, my base costs actually come to less than $1,000 a month:

Current predictable expenditures come to almost $870 a month. In the new, ascetic regime, regular expenditures (above and beyond monthly recurring costs such as utilities) will drop to around $815 or $820. Distributing these expenses among several payment tools, some of which (such as payment cards) are finite, might force me to stay within this restricted budget.

As a practical matter, of course other expenses will arise: veterinary bills and medical copays, for example, and the unending repair bills on the house. But those will just have to be paid from emergency savings, since Social Security plus teaching income won’t provide enough cash flow to cover such costs.

And also as a practical matter, some of these costs don’t happen every month: I rarely go out to eat, and when I do I certainly don’t spend fifty bucks. I don’t buy clothes often, and in any event, I obviously will have to cut expenditures there—I can’t afford to spend $600 a year on clothing.

I suppose I could take out the $190 a month—the amount to be spent by checks—for a total finite cash budget of $260. But I really dislike carrying cash around. It only took one theft from my purse to demonstrate that carrying cash is a fair way to lose it. That and the fact that cash runs through my fingers like water have always been my objection to the much-ballyhooed envelope system.

It’s an obvious idea: abandon the single, amorphous monthly credit-card budget and allocate costs to finite, tightly defined “envelopes” to be used for specific costs might limit total expenditures. The question is, with less flexibility can one stick to these straitened categories over time?

Time to dump the credit cards?

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Credit-card lenders, as predicted, are using the new credit-card consumer protection law to upgrade their profits. For a round-up of the latest “improvements,” take a look at Karen’s post at Smart Spending. Some of them are enough to make you consider canceling your credit cards altogether.

Citibank, for example, has raised its interest rates to almost 30 percent! Think of that. And especially think of the tricky ways credit-card interest is applied, so as to soak you on new charges made after the interest kicks in.

Karen reports that Citi proposes to gouge an annual fee of $30 to $90 from customers who have the temerity to charge less than $2,400 a year.

It’ll be interesting to see what else develops on this front. Personally, I never carry cash. I charge most purchases on Costco’s American Express card because AMEX gives a nice cash kickback; the very few merchants who won’t accept American Express get paid with a Visa from Chase. Every month I pay off the charges in full. Neither of these worthy organizations charges a fee.

Yet.

The minute one of them does, though, the card gets canceled. IMHO, credit-card lenders already earn plenty of cash from my purchases, even though I never pay a penny of interest. For every card transaction, the merchant pays the card issuer a fee. The truth is, you and I and everyone else pay the fee: of course, the merchant’s cost is passed along to the customers. The card issuer’s contract forbids the merchant from offering a discount for cash purchases. This means that everyone, even people who never charge anything on a card, has to pay extra for every item in the store. In other words, Dear Reader, we’re all already paying for the privilege of living in a credit-card culture. Card issuers earn quite enough from usurious interest rates and nicking merchants—they don’t need to zing you’n’me with annual fees to make a nice profit.

Evidently I’m not alone in that opinion. Karen’s Smart Spending article notes that a third of credit card customers have canceled their cards, half of them specifically because of changes such as higher interest rates or new fees.

Ever ask yourself how you would get by without a credit card?

If you travel a lot, it could be a challenge: you really need a credit card to make plane and hotel reservations. But they’ll probably take a debit card. You lose some of the advantages of a credit card: deferral of the payment date and some element of recourse if the purchase doesn’t work out for one reason or another. Still, if you were determined not to pay the additional rip of an annual fee, it might be worth the inconvenience.

But otherwise, it’s not horribly difficult. You have four fine alternatives to the credit card, at least one of them guaranteed to keep your budget running in the black:

• Cash
• Checks
• Debit cards
• Prepaid merchant purchasing cards

Each has its pros and cons. Videlicet:

Cash: The Good

🙂 Fast
🙂 Universally accepted
🙂 No need to memorize PIN numbers
🙂 No paper trail: protects your privacy
🙂 Hassle-free: no fights with banks or credit-card issuers
🙂 Built-in spending limit: keeps you on budget

Cash: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Too easy to spend
🙁 No paper trail: hard to track spending, no proof of tax-deductible purchases
🙁 No recourse in dispute with merchant
🙁 Easy to lose or steal; no recourse to insurance if stolen
🙁 No good for Internet shopping or phone transactions
🙁 Bulky to carry around
🙁 Unsanitary

Checks: The Good

🙂 Relatively easy to use: no PIN needed
🙂 Most merchants accept them
🙂 Check register: easy to track spending
🙂 Hard to use if stolen; no $50 liability limit for ID theft
🙂 ID checks at register: added theft protection
🙂 Paper trail; unarguable proof of payment

Checks: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Easy to overdraw account: stiff overdraft fees
🙁 Checking account fees: Need to use credit union to avoid bank gouges
🙁 Time-consuming hassle at check-out
🙁 Bulky and heavy to carry around
🙁 No good for Internet or phone transactions
🙁 Paper trail: accessible to those you’d just as soon not have knowing your business
🙁 Can be forged by thieves who know what they’re doing

Debit Cards: The Good

🙂 Lightweight, easy to carry
🙂 Fast
🙂 Widely accepted
🙂 Good for Internet shopping, phone transactions
🙂 Paper trail: statements show purchasing record

Debit Cards: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Many nicks and gouges from bank fees
🙁 Also some merchants’ gouges
🙁 Merchant-instigated holds on bank accounts
🙁 Vulnerability to ID theft, armed robbery
🙁 Paper trail: little privacy from intrusive merchandisers and other uninvited observers

Merchant Purchasing Cards: The Good

🙂 Budgeting device: Limit monthly expenditures by limiting amounts on card
🙂 Fast
🙂 Easy
🙂 Lightweight, easy to carry
🙂 No fees
🙂 Relatively little hassle

Merchant Purchasing Cards: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Recurring inconvenience: Recharge as money runs out
🙁 Limited to specific merchants
🙁 Stealable: great windfall for thieves
🙁 Little use for Internet or phone shopping
🙁 Hard to track purchases
🙁 But easy for merchant to track your behavior: privacy issue
🙁 Various merchant scams and limitations

Each of these devices has its uses. Personally, I distrust debit cards—too many opportunities for banks and merchants to zing you with incomprehensible fees, too vulnerable to identity theft. If things come to such a pass that I decide to get rid of my credit cards, I think I’ll use merchant purchasing cards as “cash envelopes” for certain kinds of recurring purchases and then use real cash or checks for everything else:

Purchasing Cards:

Costco

• gasoline
• lifetime supplies of household goods
• bulk food purchases
• wine and beer
• casual clothing
• office supplies
• books

Safeway

• fresh food purchases
• bargain meats
• small incidentals

Cash:

• eating out
• entertainment
• very small incidentals

Checks:

• workmen
• veterinarian
• doctors’ copays
• all goods not purchased at Costco or Safeway (such as clothing, linens, decorating items, prescriptions, etc.)

It’s interesting to contemplate, because abandoning credit cards would force me to rejigger my budget. Right now I budget a certain amount (it’s been $1,200; is about to drop to $1,000) for spending on all costs other than regular recurring monthly bills. Those costs are all put on the card. So, I use two debiting tools: automatic bill-paying and the credit card, each of which has its own sub-budget ($840 for monthly bills and monthly savings; $1,000 for all other spending).

If I dropped the cards, I’d have to budget for not two but four spending tools: automatic bill-paying, purchasing cards, cash, and checks. Drawback is an added layer of complication. However, the trade-off is that such a system mimics the cash “envelope” budgeting strategy, and it might be a great deal more effective at keeping one on budget.

More on that topic tomorrow!