Kara DuLac-Shields

I love my toaster oven. I’d even go as far as to say that it’s an essential piece of kitchen gear.

It’s not often that I endorse a specific piece of kitchen equipment. Many tasks have been accomplished over the years using nothing more than a good knife, a sufficiently-large cutting board and basic cookery equipment. I’ve never owned a food processor, nor have I wanted one.

Yes, using a food processor can save you a lot of prep time. You could process all the potatoes for a batch of potato soup in a matter of SECONDS. But then the time it takes to break down and clean the food processor offsets that time saved. It’s so much quicker to keep a sink full of hot, soapy water and wash the knife and cutting board as you go.

We DID have a juicer, once. Once. But it was such a complicated travesty of parts and disks and doohickeys that to use and dissemble it to clean it was a multiple-hour task. We weren’t dedicated enough to the idea of juicing to continue to use it.

We do have a breadmaker that I’ve begun to use again, just for the joy of freshly-baked bread. If you’ve read any of my past blog postings, you may recall my battle to make bread from scratch–I really do feel this is something I should be able to do by myself, without the help of a machine…but I’m lazy. I’ll work on the bread skills later.

I don’t want to mislead you–we do have kitchen equipment with very specialized uses. Of course we have a coffee maker, which just makes coffee, and we have several slow-cookers, which only cook food very slowly. We also have a blender, which is used very seldom, and a Fry-Daddy, which is used more often than I care to admit.

But our toaster oven is the most-used piece of kitchen equipment we have. It warms left-over pizza much more appealingly than the microwave, and if we’re having pasta it heats up to crisp frozen garlic bread in seconds rather than preheating the entire full-sized oven, using much less electricity in the process.

Hot appetizers and baked sandwiches can happen in the toaster oven with much less fuss than the full-sized oven, and I can prepare a hot Westminster dip before dinner even though the oven temperature is different than what’s needed for the entrée.

And anytime we feel like a fresh biscuit, we can take some frozen biscuit dough from the freezer and bake one (or eight) up in a snap. I’ve heard that one can do that same thing with cookie dough, but I’ve always just baked the whole batch of cookies rather than putting some aside to freeze.

All in all, a toaster oven with temperature control is a fast, efficient way to bake small batches of baked goods and not use lots of electricity heating the big oven and then cooling the house. I would strongly recommend a quality toaster oven for every small household.

I obsess about pet peeves that could be called achingly trivial. Then I obsess about finding a solution to those peeves. And I have  lot of peeves. All that energy wasted on stupid stuff that doesn’t really matter…oi vey.

But it finally worked!  I came up with a solution to something that’s bothered me for such a long time, and it’s a good solution!

In a bottle of lotion (or shampoo, or shower gel, or what-have-you) that comes equipped with a pump, there’s a lot of product left at the bottom when the pump begins to fail. Because the bottle has a PUMP it’s almost impossible to set the bottle upside down to let gravity help. And then you have to unscrew the pump to get at whatever’s left over, and you end up dumping the rest all over your hand and wasting it anyway.

My temporary solution was to vow to buy only flip-top snappy-type containers, which could be inverted and used efficiently without wrestling with a stupid pump. Hooray! Problem solved!

But when you’re standing in front of the lotions with a calculator in your hand, and you realize that the larger pump bottle is less-expensive per ounce, it’s difficult to stick to that vow.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Kara!” you’re thinking to yourself right now. “Just throw the whole mess away and get yourself another bottle of store brand lotion and MOVE ON. It’s only an ounce or so!”

Ah, Gentle Reader, there’s the rub (pun definitely intended). If I waste an ounce of lotion, that nullifies the savings I earned when buying the larger bottle, which cost less per ounce. And at that point, this whole soul-rending struggle becomes “a matter of principle.”

I’ve tried propping one bottle upside-down over the mouth of another bottle, and that inevitably ends in heartache with lotion spattered all over the mirror and faucet when the top bottle falls. Because it will fall–it always does. Stupid bottle.

Yes, I have seen those little plastic doohickeys that allow you to connect two bottles of different sizes mouth-to-mouth, so that you can allow gravity to transfer the remainder of one bottle into another. I just don’t want to pay someone $10 for their idea. (Yes, I’m petty and jealous that I did not think of it, patent the idea, get a prototype and market such a useful little plastic thingy for myself.) Plus, those little thingamajigs don’t fit every bottle well–I have an image of a couple of unsuccessfully-coupled fallen ketchup bottles, and a kitchen splattered with ketchup.

Anyway. I’ve been noodling on this particular peeve for many moons, and finally came up with a workable and elegant solution. Remove the pump top from the bottle, and place a plastic bag over the mouth of the bottle. Upend this, propping it in the corner of your vanity or wherever it will not be knocked over, and when gravity has done its job, squeeze the rest of the product into the bag.

Squeeze the air out of the bag, and fasten the top closed. Get your receiving bottle ready, and snip a small hole in the bottom corner of the bag. Aim, then squeeze, and you should be able to strip all the leftover product neatly into the new bottle. Et voila!

Think “piping frosting,” except you’re not piping something edible and it’ll be much easier because you’re just trying to squeeze the contents neatly into a bottle, not spell out “Happy Birthday, Pumpkin” in legible icing script on top of a too-hot cake before all the party attendees arrive in four minutes.

Greener members of the audience may say “But Kara, that wastes a plastic bag! You’re using all the product, but you’re needlessly using a piece of plastic–it becomes a wash!” Save it, brothers and sisters. If this matters to you, you can rinse the plastic bag and use it again for a similar operation–just don’t empty the next bottle into the snipped corner of the bag. Also, bonus points if you’re using an already-repurposed plastic bag, because then you can throw it away and not feel bad!

I should patent and trademark this blog entry, shouldn’t I?

I’m becoming quite a fan of measuring by weight rather than by volume.  It seems so much more accurate to say “8 ounces of shortening” as opposed to cramming an amount of shortening that you HOPE is sufficient and lacking any sizable air bubbles into a one-cup measuring cup.

And now that I’m buying butter in one-pound bricks from Sam’s Club instead of quartered, paper-wrapped pounds from the grocery store, I’ve had to get good at doing the math in my head to convert volume measurements to weight.  Instead of just slicing off “one tablespoon” from the quarter-pound stick, it’s necessary to run through all the math and weight equivalents in order to calculate that one tablespoon of butter weighs a half-ounce.  And one half-ounce of butter will always be exactly that, doesn’t matter what form it’s in, a half-ounce of butter will always weigh a half ounce. But if I’m slicing a tablespoon off the stick, and the quarter-pound stick wasn’t wrapped absolutely straight at the factory, I may end up with more or less butter by depending on those little lines printed on the paper.

But oi vey, the MATH.  It hurts me sometimes.

As a result I’ve gotten pretty good at guesstimating the volume of food to equal the desired weight.  Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a solid like butter or shortening, or a grainy powder like sugar or flour, I can get pretty close just by eyeing it up! Cool, no? Or does this count as a “stupid human trick”?

In my younger days I worked as prep cook under an amazing Hungarian woman who could pour an absolutely correct amount of seasoning into her palm straight from the package.  Need a teaspoon of salt? Here it is. A half-teaspoon of cinnamon? There ya go. She might not always wear her teeth to work, but the day she showed me how she could use her palm to measure out tablespoon after accurate tablespoon of parsley, I was her biggest fan. For a long time I worked on being able to do the same, and now after 22 years I might be getting close.

Anyway, I ran to Food City a few days ago to get some beans and cheese for a batch of chili.  Only bought a half-pound of cheese because the price wasn’t that great and I only needed a little bit to grate over the chili.  So I’m studying the cheese, which is labled as an 8-ounce brick.  I’m looking at it, and thinking that it doesn’t look quite like a half-pound of cheese, so I get out my trusty digital scale:

No, it's actually 7 and 8/10 ounces. Not quite a half-pound.

Hmph.  I KNEW it didn’t look like a full half-pound of cheese. Whatever that may look like.

So, what does it matter, you ask?  So I didn’t get a full eight ounces of cheese, even though I paid for it–so WHAT? The problem lies in the fact that if every package of cheese is 1/5 of an ounce short, then the cheese distributor is selling that 1/5 of an ounce twice. We’re being charged for it, but we’re not getting it. The cheese people are shorting the individual consumer so they can make a little more money.

It’s a small bitch, but it’s my bitch, nonetheless. And if everything is inaccurately packed like this cheese, think how much each of us consumers are being cheated.

It’s one thing to watch the size of a candy bar shrink from 3 ounces, to 2.75 ounces, to 2.15 ounces, and remain the same price. It’s a given that food will get more expensive, and either prices must go up or we must get less food for the same price–check out the big tubs of yogurt the next time you’re at the grocery store.  They used to contain 32 ounces of yogurt and now the same-sized tub only holds 24 ounces.  There’s a 3/4 inch gap between the yogurt level and the top of the tub. Mmmm…vanilla yogurt with wheat germ…had to get a bowl as part of my ‘research.’  But I digress.

I didn’t take my digital scale to the grocery store to measure each of the packages of cheese there.  It’s possible that each package of cheese differs slightly, either above or below the listed weight.  Sure, some customers may actually receive 8 1/5 ounces of cheese.  Maybe it was just my day to be on the short end of the stick. But that isn’t ideal, either.  You should get exactly what you pay for, whether it’s eight ounces of cheese or eight ounces of blasting powder, and that package stated that it contained eight ounces of cheese.

Wanna know what 2/10 of an ounce of cheese looks like?  Here ’tis:

Okay, so it's grated. Try to use your imagination and picture it as a chunk.

Yesterday I decided to make a pot of bean soup.  I learned two things as a result of my shopping trip that day: 1.) That it’s probably impossible to get a ham bone from the meat counter at a grocery store, and 2.) that a four-pound bag of dried Northern beans makes a HECKUVA lot of beans.

Talked with the guy behind the meat counter at Kroger, and he explained that they don’t save bones anymore, except for the really huge cow leg bones that people want as chewies for their dogs.  He did, however, point me in the direction of pre-packaged, smoked pork neck bones, which will work admirably for the meaty, smoky base.  You really do need the bone in order to get a good, appealing soup stock, in my little opinion.

Next came the beans.  Money’s still kind of tight, so I stood there with my calculator, ciphering the per-pound cost of dried Northern beans in the different-sized bags.  The four-pound bag brought the cost of the beans down to about $1 per pound, so that’s the one I went with.

Bear in mind that I’m not a stupid person.  Intellectually, I know that cooking legumes or grains will roughly double their bulk, i.e. cooking one cup of rice with one cup of liquid results in two cups of cooked rice.  But sometimes I have a little problem with spatial rationalization:  I knew that I’d end up with a lot of beans when I finally cooked them, but I didn’t stop to consider that if I soaked them all, I would not have a stock pot big enough to cook them.

And sometimes I’m just an absent-minded ditz.

So I start putting the stuff together for the soup, starting with sorting and soaking the dried beans.  If you’ve never worked with dried beans before, you should know that before you do anything else with them, you need to sort through them and pick out small rocks, bits of twig or grass, suspect-looking beans and any other ‘stuff’ that you don’t want to eat.  Then you rinse them thoroughly, and do either a fast soak or an overnight soak to rehydrate them.

It took me an awful long time to sort through that four-pound bag of beans.  That should have been my first clue to slow down and re-evaluate the situation.  It felt like I was hunched over that colander FOREVER, picking out discoloured and munched-on-looking beans.  But did I stop and think about what I was about to do?  Aw, hell no!

I got out my four-quart stockpot and dumped the beans in, and filled the rest of it nearly to the top with water.  Yeah, that was another moment in which I could have calculated the volume of beans I’d have to cope with, but I didn’t hesitate there, either.  I was thinking of other things, like our rescue’s Angel Trees at AgriFeed here in Knoxville and Smoky Mountain Feed in Maryville, and how best to print pictures of the adoptable fuzzies from Small Breed Rescue of East Tennessee and Cocker Companions Rescue.  It’s safe to say that I was a bit distracted–not enough so to screw up the soup, but sufficiently to miss the significance of the bean poundage.

To do a ‘fast soak’, put the beans in a large pot and pour roughly twice their volume of cool, clean water over them.  Bring the pot of beans to a boil and maintain the boil for two minutes, then cover the pot and remove it from the heat, letting it sit for the next hour.  Voila!  When you return to the pot, you’ll have rehydrated beans which you can then proceed to cook.

When I came back to check out my beans an hour later, the stock pot was FULL of them.  They’d gladly sucked up almost all the water and climbed almost to the lip of the stockpot, and they overflowed my big white colander when I drained and rinsed them.  All in all, that four-pound bag of dried Northern beans made 8.28635 pounds of beans.  Let’s just call it 8 1/4 pounds.  Which is quite a lot.  More than I had anticipated.  Don’t know what I was thinking.

Anyway.  I fixed a big batch of bean soup with half the beans, and then divided the rest into two big Gladware bowls to be covered with water and frozen. I couldn’t just toss the remaining four pounds of beans, because if I did that, I’d be wasting money–even though my original intent was to save money.  If you buy something in a large package because it’s less-expensive that way, but then you don’t USE it all, you’re not saving money in the long run.  You may as well have just bought a smaller package that didn’t scare you so badly to begin with, and avoided wasting the excess food.

Nice part of this little debacle is that the next time I want to make bean soup, I won’t have to go through the tiresome sorting-and-soaking routine again.  Nasty part is that I don’t really know WHEN I’ll feel like making bean soup again.  If ever.  *sigh*

Once upon a time, I had the ability to shop whenever I wanted. If I saw a fountain pen I wanted or a pair of sunglasses I ‘needed’ I’d buy them with impunity.

I included shoes, clothes, perfume, and for some odd reason bedding (sheets, pillows, blankets, bedspreads, lap rugs, etc.) in that compulsive shopping list. The clothes and shoes and perfume are self-explanatory. I think we Americans have been indoctrinated by advertising to look at self-adornment–or at least shopping for self-adornment–to be some perverse form of entertainment, right up there with reading, playing guitar or playing bridge.

But with the bedding, I think I might be self-medicating or maybe self-comforting by overpurchasing.  I enjoy making myself a lovely nest into which I can retreat at the end of a long day, with crisp sheets and a soft, fuzzy blankie.  It’s important to me to have a comfortable bed, and pursuant to that one must have materials with which to MAKE the bed.  So that particular shopping fetish kind of makes sense to me.  It’s still not healthy for me to want to buy new bedding all the damned time, because I HAVE plenty of bedding.  But having a lot of bedding is comforting to me, it fills a ‘hole in my middle,’ it meets a need that I haven’t identified yet.

But it doesn’t explain why I overbought all those clothes and jewelry and perfume, all of which I’m STILL ‘using up’ from shopping trips long past.  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t need all the sweaters I ended up with, or all the t-shirts, or shoes.  Many items I bought because I wanted to change my self-image by wearing different (more sophisticated) clothes.  But did I ever wear them?  No.  I usually went back to the sturdy and classic clothes I find at L.L. Bean and Land’s End, so all those forays into new fashions were a waste of money for me.

Back when I was in full shopping mode, I’d get excited just finding a new pair of jeans on sale, or finding a pair of earrings marked down.  I’ll never forget the rush I got one afternoon many moons ago when I bought a pair of earrings on sale for less than 1/4 of their original price.  That huge pair of gold wire hoop earrings was originally $225, and I’d had my eye on them for quite a while.  They got marked down to $52, and I snapped them up joyfully!  Never mind that they were SO large that they hit my SHOULDERS every time I turned my head, twisting my earlobes back and forth until they were aching.  Never mind that I went back and bought the other remaining pair just because they were also on sale (marked down even more a few days later–the word must have gotten out about how painful they were to wear).  I got them on SALE!  And I got quite a rush from getting them on sale, too.

I still have them–haven’t worn them for years, and of course now I’d never even get $52 out of them, even though they’re 14K gold hoops.

I didn’t NEED them, though.  I just got a thrill out of purchasing them.  I WISH I could say that I wore them frequently, and that they were ‘worth it.’  But actually, I bought them for the thrill of acquisition.  How twisted is it to enjoy purchasing new things just for the sake of acquiring them?  Why do I enjoy buying something new that I don’t really need in the first place?  Is it the thrill of the pursuit?  The idea that a “good buy” is a valuable, narrowly-won prize attributable to exceptional shopping skills is rather sad.  I’m not arguing that being a shopper isn’t a skill–I’m just wondering if it’s a valid skill to cultivate if you’re anything but a professional shopper.

Shopping as a hobby is a very self-indulgent activity which highlights our lack of insight and self-awareness.  Our love of acquisition as a hobby is wasteful and self-indulgent and our culture celebrates that, rather than saving money, consuming frugally, mending/repairing/recycling and living within our means.  Sure, it’s more FUN to be able to go out and get new ‘stuff’ whenever we feel like it.  But is it healthy?  Are we feeling more entitlement than we deserve to feel?  And why can’t we figure out what exactly WILL fill that ‘hole in our middle’ instead of Band-Aiding the emptiness with a shopping spree?

I’ve been reading a bit about Keynesian economics, and the gist I get is that the ‘health of the economy is dependent on people spending and buying more goods and services, rather than saving their money.’  In Keynesian terms, ‘excessive saving’ is BAD, and people need to keep buying stuff in order to buoy the economy.  Okay, save your rotting tomatoes, I KNOW I’ve oversimplified that.  But for Pete’s sake, people, this is the principle upon which our country’s economy is based!  Isn’t that alarming to anyone?

I’m guessing that if we never starting ‘spending money to make money’ that our economy might be a lot healthier today–it would be a HELLUVA lot smaller, but it would be healthier.

It strikes me, too, that the current mortgage crisis that blossomed into a full-blown depression kind of echoes that idea.  People were encouraged to borrow money for mortgages, to borrow more than they ever dreamed possible, and people who never believed they would qualify for a mortgage all of a sudden became homeowners.  Mortgage lenders couldn’t write the paperwork fast enough.  This was due to a demand from investors who wanted those huge returns on all those loans–there were so many investors wanting to invest in mortgage sales that the mortgage companies had to find a new “market”–all those previously unqualified applicants now could get approved for a no-money down mortgage with variable interest rates.

And look what happened–many of those people who didn’t previously qualify for a home loan got into trouble and couldn’t make their house payments.  They began to default on the loans.  And we all know what happened from that point on.

All because of greed.  People wanting more than what they have, more than what they can afford–maybe even not knowing what exactly it IS they want.  Why do we need so much, whether that ‘so much’ is measured in clothes, jewelry, a new car, a huge house?  What ‘empty place’ in ourselves are we trying to fill?

I’d like to say that I’ve just come upon these thoughts as a result of our recent season of privation, but I’ve known (and UNDERSTOOD) for a while that overspending and conspicuous consumption is unhealthy.  I just never wanted to really cut down on my spending so drastically–that’s no fun, after all.

But since January, we’ve been earning less than 1/4 of what we were accustomed to living on before Rick got laid off, and we’ve had to cut way back.  We weren’t living high on the hog as it was, but we’ve reached new heights of frugality in the months since the layoff.  It’s gratifying to experience that sort of self-control in consumerism.  We’re actively patching and fixing and living reeeeally frugally, and it isn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be.  Sure, it’s kind of sad not having all the primo movie channels on the satellite, and it’s a bummer not being able to buy the hard cider I fell in love with at a friend’s house (Hornsby’s Draft Cider is $8.65 a six-pack at Kroger–if you have the means, I FIRMLY recommend it; it’s as luscious as taking a bite out of an autumn-crisp apple, plus 5.5% alcohol content).  And we haven’t given up our subscriptions to World of Warcraft yet–I don’t know if I’ll ever be THAT hardcore frugal.

And as strapped as we are now, I know that things aren’t as bad as they were during the Great Depression.  My mother used to tell me about life as it was back then, how she and her sister had three blouses, two skirts, and five pairs of underwear that they’d hand-launder in between laundry day.  “And when the elastic wore out on your bloomers, you went and found a safety pin.”

She said that even if you had money to buy things at the store, that very often the stores wouldn’t even have merchandise to sell. I have a difficult time imagining that era.  I wonder if we will see that level of desperation, but I can’t help feeling that this is an example of a timely “correction” that we need to experience in order to grow more in the future.

In the meantime, I am enjoying some new socks I bought about a month ago.  They’re a ‘brand name’ footie sock, with the logo woven into the sole in a pretty blue yarn.  I bought a six-pack for $3, which comes out to 50 cents per pair.  I opened the package a month ago, and am using them one new pair at a time.  I only get a new pair out when I wear out an old pair, so I get the thrill of wearing clean, new, white socks about every other week.  Quite the change from the days when I refused to drive a car that was older than three years, huh?

Is it just me, or is it getting more and more difficult to find a decent can of tuna lately?  It seems that a few years ago, you could open up a can of ordinary tuna and see recognizable FISH flesh, not just mush.  Now, if you buy anything less than albacore tuna, you have a can of what looks like pureed fish mixed with water.  Hard to drain, no recognizable texture, kinda repellent.

So is it just me?  Was commercially processed canned tuna always like this?  Or has the quality fallen off in the past decade?  And if so, why has it fallen off?  Have there been changes in the handling methods that degrade the quality of the tuna, or is it just poorer quality meat that’s making it into the cans?

I admit that lately I’ve been springing for the more-expensive “albacore” tuna simply because it still looks like fish when it comes out of the can.  *sigh*

I love to read and used to spend a LOT of money buying books.  In the past, I belonged to two book clubs and had ‘frequent flyer’ cards for three bookstores. I dropped a lot of cabbage on the latest offerings by my favorite authors.  And that’s pretty much why I bought books–so that I could read the very latest release from the authors I follow faithfully.

Back then I also had quite a lot of books, which took up a lot of room and gathered dust and caused more than one strained muscle during household moves.  I have, however, learned a little bit from moving household several times over my adult lifespan.  The most important lesson is that something is only valuable as long as you’re willing to move it.  Accordingly I’ve pared down my book collection, keeping only those books that are truly irreplaceable to me, i.e. books that have been inscribed by the gift givers, autographed copies, my own ‘first copies’ of a favorite book.

With our recent changes in fortune I’ve also had to change my spending habits related to books.  I go through books like some people go through Kleenex, so it’s not really money-wise for me to constantly buy new books, especially now that we are an under-employed family.

In order to feed my habit, I’ve always shopped at used book stores, and as we’ve become more frugal over the past couple of years I’ve become a consistent patron of my local lending library.  McKay Used Books here in Knoxville is a true mecca for readers and fans of movies, music and video games.  They buy and sell all sorts of media and while it’s nice to be able to trade-in a used book or movie, it’s still a tad expensive to buy my weekly ration of books.  And the library doesn’t always have what I’m trying to read, which leads to a lot of delays in reserving a copy–or disappointment when the book just isn’t in the library’s stacks and isn’t likely to be due to budget constraints.  I’ve had to curb my desire for the latest and greatest and content myself with re-reading some favorites.

Just a little while ago, I started browsing the selection of hard-backed books at my local dollar stores.  These are brand-new books, not always best-sellers, and it’s not likely I’ll find something for which I’ve been searching, but many are interesting and for $1, they’re always a good buy.  Because of that bargain price I can be a little more venturesome in choosing a book by ‘new’ authors (or authors who are ‘new to me’) or in a genre for which I might not pay full price at a bookstore.

For example, my most recent shopping trip yielded “Beau Brummell The Ultimate Man of Style,” a biography on the dandy by Ian Kelly.  I’m not one to gravitate toward biographies unless they’re about someone I admire, but the man who was the origin of the modern-day business suit had a fascinating life, which Kelly manages to illustrate lushly.

I’ve also discovered a new author in Wendy Corsi Staub, whose series starter “Lily Dale:  Awakening” is aimed toward teenage readers, but her writing is quick and entertaining even for a 40-year-old teenager.  She sucks the reader swiftly into Calla’s life and the story for a quick and enjoyable read.

I just finished “The Mercy of Thin Air” by Ronlyn Domingue, a story about a forward-thinking flapper who lost her life in a swimming pool accident but continues to inhabit the living’s plane of existence while trying to discover what became of the love of her life.  And I also lucked out and found “Dancing With Dogs,” by Mary Ray and Andrea McHugh, a book which describes how to train your dog to perform basic obedience moves which you can then choreograph and perform to music.  I bought three of these, one for Karen, Leslie Ann, and myself.  What a treat, to be able to find such a fitting gift at such a reasonable price!  But I’m disappointed because the ones who REALLY need to read this book (my DAWGS, duh!) have not yet read it and are refusing to train themselves.  *sigh*

While new, the books themselves are not always releases from the current year, but that’s not an issue since I’m only after entertainment–I’m not getting tax code information or cutting edge technical tips from them. I’m having fun with this diversity of reading, and even better, the books are cheaper than buying a pre-owned paperback at the used book store.  And when I finish a one, I can turn it in for more credit at the used book store!  Give it a try.  You might find something new to read, as long as you’re flexible and adventurous!

So our gutters are clogged up (again) and my wonderful husband was about to climb up there and dig them out last Saturday.  He was going to do this hisself because we are underemployed right now, and cannot afford to hire someone to come and do for us.  He was hesitant about getting up on the ladder, so I went to exchange my faux-Crocs for actual, lace-up shoes and climb up myself.

Doesn’t sound like such a big deal, does it?  Just climb on up there and use the garden trowel and the hose to show those downspouts who’s boss.  And I’m way shorter than he is, so I’m naturally more nimble.  Well, it’s not all that simple. Ya gotta see our house.  We have a ranch-type house, which is actually a bi-level.

This means that one end of the house looks like a plain old ranch which is kind of built into a slope, and the other end of the house looks like a two-story home.  We have a six-foot folding ladder which we set up on the back deck, that allows us to reach the roof on that side of the house.  This does NOT, however, protect us from falling arse-over-teakettle off the opposite end of the roof, which boasts almost a 20-foot-drop to the hard-packed clay of our Tennessee yard.  Or to the unforgiving cement of our driveway.

And of course the downspouts that are clogged are the ones at the high end of the roof.  For Pete’s sake, there is a BIRD’S NEST on one of the downspouts at the high end, and I worry about the baby birds leaving the nest prematurely and splatting in the yard!  This is quite an unforgiving height, people!

I got to the top of ladder, had my palms touching the shingles, and then I looked off to my left, toward the high end of the roof.  I saw that drop, almost as if for the first time, and I contemplated the consequences of falling off that end of the roof and landing with an ominous thud sound on that hard-packed clay ground.  It struck me that if one of us fell off that end of the roof, that it would undoubtedly mean hospital time.  SERIOUS hospital time, if not actual death, or worse.

Keep in mind that in my earlier days, I was very adventurous and somewhat athletic.  I mountain biked, played softball, Rollerbladed, and in my spare time I served two communities as a volunteer firefighter.  In that capacity I did many silly things, including capering about on the roofs of peoples’ houses, and I did them with alacrity.  I’m not certain why I was so foolhardy back then.  Part of that bravado can be attributed to indestructible, fast-healing youth, part of it to not wanting to be seen as weak by the people around me.

And I can now acknowledge that I did have a delusional trust in my turn-out gear’s ability to protect me from any and all harm, although that might have been a tad naive:  I’m not certain how steel-shanked rubber boots and a fire helmet could protect me in the event of a 12-foot fall, but then again I never devoted a lot of thought to that potentiality.  I only knew that if I followed procedure and wore my equipment properly, that nothing bad would ever happen to me, ever!

Yep, I was delusional.

When I was a firefigher, I was much younger and therefore capable of withstanding more damage and healing more rapidly.  I was also covered by health insurance courtesy of my full-time jobs and the fire departments.  So just in case something awful DID happen to me, I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I’d have to try to walk off a 12-foot-drop from a steeply-pitched roof rather than go to the emergency room.

There was a combination of powerful forces influencing my decision last Saturday:  1.) I’m older and don’t bounce as well as I used to, so there’s a good chance of me being seriously injured, and 2.) I’m uninsured now, which means that I have to be careful about treating an embedded splinter with respect in order to avoid huge medical bills–much less DOING SOMETHING STUPID LIKE CLIMBING UP ON A ROOF TO CLEAN THE DAMNED GUTTERS.  Plus, I am a tad older now, and my flexibility, strength and reaction time is just a bit ‘lesser’ than it was at my peak.  I really shouldn’t be tempting fate.

I rationalized this all out and convinced myself I was being sensible and careful by forbidding Rick to go up on the roof, and declining to climb up there myself.  But there was still that little, smirky voice in the back of my head whispering “Chickenshit.”  The bullheaded, stubborn part of me wanted to push through this fear.  Even today, the bullhead still wants me to put some long pants and tie a long rope around my waist and drop it over the ridge vent to tie to the truck bumper in the driveway, and get this shite done.  And the chickenshit part of me says “Don’t be stupid.  Let it go.”

So I’m gonna just let it go.  The gutters can overflow until we can afford to hire someone to come and clean them out for us.  Now all I have to do is get over the shame of being chickenshit scairt.  But being chickenshit scairt and in one piece is better than being broken, or dead.

So my wonderful friend Dannette and I are of “a particular size” which we don’t want to maintain.  This size also makes it difficult for us to find clothes.  So we usually buy ONE pair of pants in this size which fit and flatter us, and insist that we’re going to lose all the excess weight, and hold ourselves hostage to this ideal by not buying any more clothes until we reach the desired size.

Unfortunately, the recession is hitting everyone hard now, and we’re all afraid to buy anything at all, which of course is perpetuating the damned recession…which would seem to be irrelevant to this topic, BUT IT’S NOT.  Stay with me for a moment.

Dannette lives in a very nice apartment building in Tucson, AZ, which boasts its own coin-operated laundry room.  She and I both are very conscientious about keeping track of our time in the washers and dryers when we use a communal laundry room, and although we will leave our laundry there while the cycles complete, we’re very prompt about returning at the end of the cycle to collect our laundry and free up the machine for the next user.

She did that last week, and was shocked and ticked off to find that two of her loads of laundry had been rifled through and plundered–someone had stolen her new capri pants and a blanket belonging to her dog, Zoe.  She said it had to have been someone intent on larceny because the pants and blanket were in two separate dryers.

“I can’t believe that someone actually stole my pants!”  she exclaimed.  “That’s so awful!  Honestly, if I see someone around the complex wearing, I think I’m going to rip them off of them right where they’re standing!”

The worst part of this is that the capris were in stock in many stores just a few weeks ago–and now all the stores are out of them in Dannette’s size.

“I’ve been to five stores looking for these pants, and how pissed am I that I have to buy another pair, anyway?!  But I can’t even FIND another pair of them anywhere!”

And how creepy is it that someone actually had enough GUTS to stand there in front of the dryers occupied by someone else’s laundry and sort through the contents to find something they wanted?  It’s not like a resale shop–you’re invading someone else’s privacy when you go through their laundry like that.  Just…creepy.  And weird.  I can only imagine that this sort of behavior is due to the recession–instead of going shoplifting in a store, you hang out in the laundryroom and pilfer someone else’s clothes?  Maybe you’re saving gas money by stealing close to home??

So you’ll recall that my Wonderful Pumpkin got laid off from his job last Thursday, and along with the paycheck, health insurance, and company PowerBook, he lost his cellular phones. Not just one, but two: A Crackberry and an iPhone.

Heh! I just thought about the title of my last post, “From two incomes to none” and realized that THIS post could be called “From two phones to none” as well! Aren’t I a card?

Anyway. Rick went to drop off some paperwork today and do some banking, and I realized after he left that I had no way to contact him when he was away from the homestead. No cell phone, no pager, nuttin’. And before you ask, no, we haven’t kept any of our old cell phones–we just a few months ago donated the old ones (the remaining phones that I haven’t destroyed) to charity. Isn’t that timely of us??!

So today we went in search of a cell phone for the Pumpkin. He’d LIKE an iPhone. Well, I’d LIKE to have a pony, and a Jeep Wrangler, and an ofume bathtub–but we can’t afford any of the above just now. We popped into a local AT&T store, because my cell phone is through them and we thought we could pick up a (free) bare-bones phone for Rick and add a line onto my account. Simple and low-cost, right?

Yeeeaaah. The guy at the store told us there really aren’t any free phones anymore. The very CHEAPEST phone we could get Rick (from the store) was $100, before tax. And it was NOT a great phone. I thought “Heck, if we’re gonna drop a hundred clams on a cell phone, why not drop two hundred clams and get him what he wants?”

I said that, and his eyes lit up, but then adulthood caught up with enthusiasm, and we agreed that we really couldn’t spend that much money on a cell phone. We decided to go home and noodle on it a bit. And search the web for cheaper alternatives.

We looked, and Rick tried to find an inexpensive phone that would also sync with his Macintosh, while I checked into pay-as-you-go phones from Target. As we looked, I commented it would be pretty ironic to get him all set up with a new phone and a new number on my account, and then for him to find a job at which they PROVIDE him a cell phone. He said “Then I could give YOU my iPhone!”

Dear Readers, you must understand that I do not need (or even really want) an iPhone that badly. I am very happy with my Motorola SLVR. I know how to enter phone numbers quickly into the address book, I can make my own ring tones and transfer them with a minimum of fuss (here’s one of my favorites) and I’ve learned the phone’s OS pretty thoroughly. My SLVR has survived several violent trips to the sidewalk/asphalt/tile as well as a dip into the (as-yet-unused) toilet, and has outlasted even a custom-made Vaja case. It has endeared me with its stoic nature. It is my electronic hero.

Plus, I fear that my reluctance to part from the familiar SLVR means that I have outgrown my nascent geekdom and become my mother. My darling mother, Norma, had a negative technological capacity–if we (her children) changed her radio from AM to FM to listen to rock & roll radio stations while we did dishes at night, she couldn’t figure out how to get it back on AM the next morning so that she could listen to the local news on WHAK (Radio 960 AM in Rogers City, MI, if you’re curious). We explained numerous times, but she never ‘remembered’ how to do it.

The clock in her car was always off, too. In order to find out what time it actually was, you had to know the algorithm that was currently in effect. One afternoon I checked the time in her car and said “No WAY is it already 10 minutes after five!” And she said “Well, of course not–it’s only 2:17.” I turned to look at her and said “Where did you get THAT from? Shadows on the ground? An invisible sundial? A little time-telling gnome that’s living in your earring??”

And she explained that the last time she tried to change the clock to the accurate time, she accidentally put the hour forward two instead of back one, and set the minutes seven too far in advance, and she didn’t feel like messing around with it any more at that point, so she just remembered how far off the time was and applied that formula with those variables every time she checked the clock. Er…wouldn’t it be easier just to figure out how to set the damn thing correctly?

Where things got cagey was when Daylight Savings Time ended or began, and she’d have to remember if she were adding or subtracting hours and if so, how many. Sometimes, in the spirit of making a fresh start for the new season, she’d try setting the clock again–and then she’d end up having to remember a new set of variables for the time formula. I’d like to think it kept her mind young, like doing crossword puzzles and word searches.

Anyhoodle. I feared I was becoming like my mother when I began to eschew technology. A few years back, when camera phones became popular, I found that I had a strong prejudice against them. Same for organisers that were supposed to do triple duty as your digital camera/videocam, and your telephone, too. NO. I want my Palm Pilot to do only planning, my telephone to be a telephone, and my digital camera to take pictures–and that’s IT. What if I were on the phone with someone and wanted to check my calendar and make an appointment? How embarrassing would it be to put someone on hold to find a telephone number or set an appointment time, and inadvertently hang up on them? And God forbid if I were driving or carrying grocery bags or doing anything else at the same time. If you have something that does everything, does it do any of those things WELL?

I told my sister Mary about the Jitterbug, a basic cellphone that’s aimed at senior citizens. It even offers a DIAL TONE. Isn’t that quaint? I thought it was a great idea, particularly for people like me who don’t want or need texting capability or camera phones or streaming video. She agreed. It’s official, I am a technophobe. Or at least, I don’t covet technology the way I used to just a few years ago. Or maybe I should sign up for a revival of The Golden Girls.

That’s why getting an iPhone isn’t the end-all, be-all for me. I just wanted to get Rick a PHONE, so I could call him if necessary, rather than setting a piece of furniture on fire and sending smoke signals from the front porch. I understand that he’s still in love (lust?) with technology, and I’d love for him to get an iPhone for his own self, but that will have to wait for a little while.

Fortunately, I’d sent out a plea to my Freecycle brothers and sisters here in Knoxville, and tonight a wonderful woman replied with an offer of two AT&T cell phones which she and her husband no longer use. We can just buy a SIM card for Rick and add a line to my account, and he’ll have a cellphone in case I flip out and need to hear his voice when he’s away from me. :)