Your Children Will be Reading This Someday

The Wall Street Journal's De Gustibus column laments the rise of the wife-at-the-expense-of-the-husband tell-all memoir.  In particular, he complains about Cleaving, the new memoir out by the author of the very charming memoir Julie and Julia, Elizabeth Weil writing for the New York Times, and Tsing Loh's Mother on Fire.  I haven't read any of them, and I don't see why anyone would want to.  They appear to be the literary equivalent of reality television, which I also don't watch because it bores me to tears.

What I really don't understand, though, is why the women with children (in this case Ms. Loh and Ms. Weil) would do this to them.  The internet preserves everything for eternity, so in a few years Ms. Loh's children (and all their classmates) will be able to read that she "would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor [with whom she committed adultery] with the more suitable image of my husband" because of his sub par sexual ability.  Ms. Weil's daughters can read that she "never quite shook the feeling that my role in [her husband's] life was to be the steady, vanilla lay. We never discussed this. We just had a strenuously normal sex, year after year after year."  I know that children have to accept that their parents are sexual beings nowadays, but this just seems over the top. 

I don't have any children myself - I am basing this entirely on how I would have felt had I (and my peers) read such things about my parents in my teenage years, and what it would have done to my psyche.  Am I overreacting?

It is so cold here that the cats are cuddling up with the goats for warmth!

It is nothing but cold, rainy, and nasty here.  I am taking my sweetie out for his birthday tonight anyway, though!

This may not break the law, but it breaks all of Mr. Coopers 4 rules ...

plus the common sense one about intoxication and guns.



According to my local newspaper, though, it doesn't actually violate any laws.

I'm glad that Louisiana has lenient gun laws, but I sure wish idiots like this wouldn't give us all a bad name. Even if this video is funny as all get out.

Why bother to save?

The Wall Street Journal has an article about 2 families that have abandoned their mortgages to rent in the same community that they once owned.  They've used the increases in their incomes to "buy season tickets to Disneyland, ... take a Carnival cruise to Mexico in March, ... and [one of them takes his] girlfriend out to dinner more frequently."  He also "kept his black BMW 6 Series coupe, which has payments of about $700 a month."

My first thought is that they are living in a fantasy land, but my second thought is that maybe I am.  When we're all in retirement, these people won't have any savings.  And they have every expectation that the government will finance their lifestyle with Social Security and Medicaid.  Since their current payments are being spent today, they'll have to "tax the rich" to fiance this system.  If I spend my lifetime saving frugally, I will probably be among "the rich,"  at least before I start to draw down my retirement savings.  So these grasshoppers will be clamoring to take all the food we ants have put by.  And current events give me every indication that government departments at every level will be happy to do so, and never understand why they are destroying the economy in the process.  Remind me why I'm being frugal again?

Update from Sgt. Shaffer

Sgt. Shaffer reports that she'll be handing out clothing to ~125 Afghan children next week.  It gives me the warm fuzzies to think that I was part of the effort, even though a small part.  I'm continuing to focus on giving what I can afford, not what I'd prefer if I had the money to do it.

The perils of eating out

SS4BC has declared her 2010 challenge to be 345 days without eating out. It's a fantastic goal, and I'd make it my own, except that it would be cheating - I've aready pretty much stopped eating out myself.

Weight Watchers sells a book with the point values of various foods at various restaurants, or you can get the information on the internet if you subscribe to their web services.

It blew my mind how much of the stuff I ate at restaurants was twice the points as cooking it myself, with half the taste.  I already knew that they were twice the price, but that hadn't stopped me:)

To keep myself from the restaurants, I've had to learn to make what I crave.  For instance, I adore Chinese.  So I keep a pound of frozen chicken and two pounds of broccoli in my freezer at all times.  That way I can easily satisfy my stir-fry cravings any time I want them, and I'm not desperate to buy a pile of greasy food.  If I must go to a Chinese restaurant, I fill up on hot and sour soup.  It's one of my favorite things, it's 2 points a cup, and its cheap.  Even if you order two bowls of it, you're not shelling out like you are for the all you can eat buffet (in points and dollars).

My mom loves pizza.  She makes her own whole-wheat crust pizzas with roasted red pepper, Canadian bacon, and olives four at a time, then freezes the three she doesn't eat that evening.  Once you've eaten that for a while, I assure you that you don't want what Dominoes puts out even if it's available.

My favorite book for figuring out how to cook what I used to purchase is Weight Watchers Take-Out Tonight! : 150+ Restaurant Favorites to Make at Home--All 8 POINTS or Less.   It might be a diet cookbook, but the foods don't come out tasting diet.  And this is a cookbook aimed at those who don't particularly want to cook, we just want to eat.  Even if you aren't doing Weight Watchers and could care less about the point values of food, this book is worth a read.  It covers Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Italian, Greek, Japanese and Deli foods.  I mostly make things from the Chinese and Mexican sections, because they are my favorites, and almost every recipe I have tried from the book was delicious (and even the couple of misses were still OK).

Once you get the trick of it, you won't be giving up as much time cooking as you think you might.  By the time you drive to the restaurant, order, wait for your food, eat, and pay - well, it's not quick.  Even ordering in pizza takes some time; get a pre-made crust, tomato sauce, some light cheese, and the toppings of your choice and go to town - save yourself calories and money.

Orkin and The Samuel Vimes "Boots" Theory of Socieoeconomic Unfairness

In Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms, a character, Samuel Vimes, describes how the wealthy remain wealthier than the poor because they can afford items with a larger upfront cost and greater durability.  As Mr. Vimes says "A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." (Pratchett, Terry, Men at Arms, 29, emphasis in original).  (If you've never read the series, you're missing out in a big way.  Skip the first two and start with Equal Rites, though).

I had a very similar experience with Orkin this week.  We've got termites.  And termites, of course, must be dealt with immediately; it only gets more expensive the longer you delay the problem.  The termite treatment cost us $958 paid immediately.

They also offered us three payment plans: $88.29 a month for one year, $55.85 a month for two years, or $46.12 for three years.  If we could not have paid up front, we would have paid an extra $101.48 for one year, $382.40 for two years, or $702.32 for three years.  To put those numbers in perspective, it would be better to pay the same amount monthly on a credit card with a 22% APR for the one year plan, 35% APR for the two year plan, or 42% APR for the three year plan.  I was absolutely gobsmacked when I ran those numbers.  In most states, it's not even legal for credit cards to charge that much.

Our EF is running very low, but December is a three paycheck month for us and we are going to scrape by.  For people unable to come up with that kind of money, with no credit cards or ones that are maxed out, well, Orkin is forcing them to dig themselves into an even bigger hole.  I'm glad I'm not an Orkin representative - I don't think that I could, in good conscience, offer this to people with no other options but to see their houses fall to pieces around them.