Letters From Home

I’m probably the billionth person to ask why banks love to take money out of your account at the speed of light, but when it comes to putting it back in, they’re all Scarlett O’Hara clones and they’ll think about that tomorrow.

F’zer accidentally paid the dentist with the debit card instead of a credit card today. He caught the mistake before he’d even signed the receipt and the receptionist said she’d cancel the transaction right away.

I happened to log into the bank web site about the same time and saw that our “available balance” was in parentheses, which is never good news. So I, not knowing what had happened, called the bank, got a very cheerful and helpful lady who explained what had happened (”Your debit card has put $450 on hold”) and immediately transferred money from our money-market account to cover that and make sure we didn’t bounce the transaction.

I just looked at the bank’s web site again, twelve hours later, and that whole transaction is still out in limbo somewhere. Our “ledger balance” shows the balance-plus-$450, and the “available balance” shows the balance-minus-$450. And now, of course, we’re headed into a weekend when heaven only knows what will be done to fix the mistake.

I wonder if the banking system was set up like that deliberately? It’s been going on so long that I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t. Grrrrr.

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I know we’ve all seen the standard advice for grocery shopping–make a list, shop for a week’s worth of groceries at a time, try the store brands, etc–but I’ve developed a few more strategies over the years that are a little off the well-worn path.

1. A few communities are now talking about making grocers change the kinds of bags they use, or putting restrictions or mandatory recycling in place. Truthfully, there is no kind of grocery bag that doesn’t come without some kind of environmental hazard involved, and there’s no easy answer to the problem of paper-manufacturing pollution or plastic bags fouling up the ecosystem. About all we can do is take steps to reduce the sheer number of bags we consume in the course of a year.

So, for a month or two, every time you go to the grocery store, make a note of how many bags it takes to contain your cart full of groceries. Some stockers will cram the bags full and some will put only one or two items in each bag. Keeping track over several weeks will give you at least a general average of bags-per-trip. Buy about that many reusable grocery bags. They are not very expensive, most grocery stores sell them now, and if you buy one bag per week you can keep the economic impact on your budget to a minimum.

Then start using your bags. Toss them in the trunk of the car after you’ve taken the groceries out of them so they’ll be ready for the next trip. Some stores will even give you credit for bringing your own bags. Trader Joe’s puts your name in a drawing for $25 worth of stuff. And so forth. The stores are beginning to try to make it worth our while. If we make it worth their while, too, it might just end up saving everyone money.

2. You know, there’s no cosmic law that says you have to serve something completely different for dinner every night. I’m not saying eat the same thing every day, because that would provoke outright rebellion. But why not make extra of your dinner entree and put the extra away to eat another night? Not everyone has a big freezer, so sometimes the “another night” will have to be in the same week–but if you serve the meal with different side dishes, or combine the ingredients from the previous meal into another recipe, you can definitely save some money. Just as an example, I used to make pot roast, stew, and soup out of the same big pot roast in days gone by. When we had only about $20 to spend on groceries each week, things like that made the budget stretch a long way.

Try planning to make two dinners out of each one you’ve got on your list. It’s not as hard or as boring as you think.

3. Every other week, take a good look in your cupboards and see what you’ve got on hand. Plan one night’s dinner around what you’ve already got. That way you only have to buy a few ingredients, at most, for that one night. And there’s less chance of something languishing in the back of the cupboard till way, way past its expiration date.

4. There’s also no cosmic law that says you can’t have pancakes for dinner. Try it. If you make your own, you can make them healthy, but the pre-packaged mixes aren’t terribly bad and they’re definitely convenient.

5. This one’s for people who like to keep track of details. Make yourself a spreadsheet, and every time you go shopping, take the receipt and enter each item and its price into the spreadsheet. Average them up from time to time. You’ll then be able to see at a glance how much things cost and where the big budget busters are. Some weeks when the grocery budget isn’t exactly unlimited, you can plan your week’s meals around the ingredients that cost less.

6. Get a small clipboard. Take any kind of 8 1/2 x 11 paper that has one blank side, cut or tear it into quarters, and clip those on your clipboard to use for writing shopping lists. Hang the clipboard from a hook somewhere in your kitchen so you can write down stuff you need to buy. Or, if you get those icky “personalized” note pads from some organization or other who thinks you’ll send them money in exchange for tacky paper, clip those to some convenient surface in the kitchen and use them to write down things-to-buy. That way you can transfer those items to your shopping list on shopping day. When you go to the store, it’s a lot easier to cross things off your list if it’s on a clipboard than if you’re trying to wrap it around the handle of the shopping cart. Plus you can write notes to yourself about other items you may have to pick up elsewhere.

7. Finally, here are some cookbook suggestions–tried and true!

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It’s taken me a long time to put this down coherently, but reading in the paper how the other kids picked on the Virginia killer finally gave me the push I needed.

You see, for several years in grade school, I was that kid. The one excluded and sniped at by the popular cliques. The one who found little notes “accidentally” left lying around, with lists of people in various categories, and my name somehow always turned up among the worst.

But let’s be honest about it: I wasn’t blameless. Some of it was my fault, for being smarter and more articulate and absolutely fearless when it came to saying what I thought (OK, tactless in the extreme, sometimes). By the time I hit the sixth grade I was being kept after school every week for something or other, put out in the hall now and again and sometimes sent to the principal’s office for a talking-to, so it wasn’t just the other kids I was way too mouthy to. I would not conform. I wasn’t interested in the kinds of things the popular kids were interested in, so we had little common ground. I’m the only person I know who got kept after school on the last day of school, when everyone else was dismissed after picking up their final report cards and cleaning out their desks.

Some of it, though, was not my fault. My parents were both off in their own little worlds. My life at school was outside their frame of experience, since both of them had gone to upper-crust boarding schools where everything was regimented for them. They had no idea what public school was like and they really weren’t interested in knowing. They didn’t pay attention to the fact that I hit puberty way earlier than my classmates and my clothes didn’t fit right. They didn’t notice that I needed to wear a bra. My mother pooh-poohed the idea that I needed to wear deodorant. So I dressed funny and I smelled. Remarks were made about my personal hygiene. There wasn’t much I could have done about that.

Fortunately, in the summer before I went to junior high, we moved to a different state and I got to start over with a whole new group of kids who hadn’t gotten into the habit of hating me. I told my mom that if she didn’t buy me my own deodorant I’d just use hers every day. She started buying me better clothes. From then on I was adequately popular and a lot of the kids who were “in with the in crowd” were my friends. I’m one of the few people my age who looks back on junior high and high school as being a pretty good time, instead of remembering it all with the tragic angst of having been too hip for the room.

But I never forgot those early years. People who were outcasts in school generally don’t forget it. You wouldn’t think that a sixth-grade kid could inflict lasting damage on another person with the power of a few words, but yes, they can. You wouldn’t think that an ostensibly grown-up person could look back forty years and find un-healed wounds, but yes, they can.

Once when my daughter was in grade school I caught her starting to say to another girl “I’m having a party and you’re not invited.” I smacked her before I realized what I was doing. I think it startled both of us equally. Later on I explained to her that I was that kid who was pointedly not invited and how much it hurt to have people tell me so.

I wish every parent would make a point of telling their kids that contrary to the “sticks and stones” statement, words can always hurt. I wish every parent would make a point of telling their kids that they’re free to think whatever they want to about other kids but they darn well better keep those thoughts to themselves and have the guts to tell other kids to knock it off when they hear it. As the song goes, “Don’t laugh at me, don’t call me names, don’t take your pleasure from my pain.”

Every teacher should be telling every class, “You may think it’s funny or smart to make fun of other kids. We don’t. It won’t be tolerated here.” Whether they follow it up with “Some kids who get picked on grow up to kill other kids, and if that happens in the future to someone you think it’s funny to treat badly now, you’re going to have to take the blame” is up for grabs.

That Virginia killer was mentally ill. He might have gone round the bend and started shooting no matter how he was treated when he was younger, because if his mental illness was long-standing he might well have seen things from a completely warped perspective from an early age and imagined enemies where there were none. But the news reports say that he was mocked and ostracized. Add real persecution to mental illness and you get a bomb waiting to go off.

I grew up in central Virginia. Some of my classmates went to Virginia Tech. I have no doubt some of their kids went there too. I hope none of the victims was related to anyone I know–even if they were the kids who shut me out.

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Yesterday when I was at the gym I was watching CNN while I was on the treadmill, just as Wolf & Co. were talking about the package mailed to NBC news by the Virginia killer. It certainly made those ten minutes go by in a flash.

When I got home, I turned on CNN to see if there were any further news (there wasn’t) so I started flipping channels to see if any of the local stations had anything more. Most of them were into the usual afternoon reruns, but Channel 9, which has more news programming than any other station, was into a news report, so I settled in to watch.

A few minutes later, they happened to do a report on plantar fasciitis. The doctor they consulted demonstrated a stretching exercise that’s supposed to help, and it’s pretty simple–just press your toes back, firmly, for a count of ten, and do that about ten times a day.

I’ve since tried it, and while it does provide some fairly immediate relief, my foot still generally feels like it’s mildly on fire most of the time and if I have to walk any distance at all I’m clearly going to have to start using a cane again. If the stretching exercise doesn’t help in a few days, I guess it’s time to get a referral to the podiatrist. Sigh.

But that kind of foot pain does sometimes change one’s mind about things. While I was watching TV I was also browsing through the day’s mail. And even though my daughter will probably disown me shortly thereafter, I’m considering buying…

Crocs.

Or maybe I could get away with Crocs deck shoes.

Or maybe I’d get a little less flak if I bought Crocs Mary Janes.

Sahalie offers the best selection of styles and colors, and although FootSmart promises free shipping on the regular Crocs, they charge ten bucks more for them to begin with.

Oh, what a world, what a world.

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Whether you believe or not, you owe it to yourself to read this book. This link will take you to Amazon.com

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When the kids were little, we did not, as a general rule, allow candy in the house. For one thing, I didn’t want them to end up with lots of cavities like I did. And for another, F’zer and I didn’t think that consumption of mass quantities of candy was a good idea even with good teeth.

The results were predictable, though–on the holidays where the consumption of mass quantities of candy was traditional (Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween) the kids tended to go berserk eating the stuff. (No, we did not celebrate Easter in any other way than playing bunny with the products of Hershey, Brach, Mars et al.)

Of course, the fact that we were usually flat broke during those years meant a delicate balancing act between having candy available to be eaten On The Day and buying the same candy at half price or less The Day After. A kid who expects a stuffed Easter basket is not going to be happy with the same chocolate bunny a couple days later when Mom and Dad find it on the clearance shelves. In fact, the kid might just come roaring in on Easter morning to castigate the parental bunnies at the top of her lungs for gross Easter basket deficiencies.

We also gave out non-edible treats on Halloween for many years (and, believe it or not, got mostly favorable responses from the kids at the door) but this caused major grumbling from the kidlets in the house who then did not get mass quantities of leftover Halloween treats to snarf along with the bags full of stuff they’d collected on their own nightly rounds.

Even now when the kids are more or less old enough to be parents themselves, we still get poked at now and again for our Candy Rules of the past. I don’t suppose any parent really gets it right.

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When I was a kid, growing up in central Virginia, I noticed that it always rained on Good Friday. My mother noticed that too and was certain there was a cosmic significance to it.

Of course, my mom was always looking for proof that the things she had been taught to believe were really true. I, on the other hand, had read Greek mythology and the Bible at pretty much the same age (starting at about age six) and viewed them as pretty much the same–history plus an ancient people’s explanation of the way the world worked. So I was no more prone to believe (or disbelieve) that it rained on Good Friday because it had rained on the original Good Friday than I was to believe (or disbelieve) that thunderbolts were thrown by Zeus.

I’ve been re-reading a really extraordinary book, The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor. The book is too complex to do justice to in a brief summary, but the author takes a look at what the evidence suggests really happened 2000 years ago, and it’s not quite what people have come to believe. Among other things, Jesus didn’t die on Good Friday.

I wondered early on about that business about “and on the third day,” because there’s really no way to get a “third day” between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. Christians assumed that because Jesus had to be taken down from the cross before the Sabbath started, he must have died on Friday. But the start of Passover is also a Sabbath, and Passover began on Thursday that year.

So Jesus died on Thursday, was taken down… and on the third day he wasn’t in the tomb. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what really happened (the Gospels don’t even get the story straight among them). The tomb was empty. How it got that way is a matter of facts or faith.

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