Category: Life in Practice

So it’s 11:30 at night, and I’m out on my back patio grilling jerk chicken on my charcoal grill. This is not just a response to my rising gas bills, although it doesn’t hurt. I actually get a kick out of grilling, especially at night. The glow of the coals is just a neat visual, and the food tastes great. There are folks who think I’m nuts, my father-in-law included, and that a gas grill would be a lot easier to work with. But I like cooking over a fire I made myself (with help from a chimney starter) and navigating over the hot spots, moving food from the most intense heat to sear to cooler areas to finish cooking.

My fondness for charcoal is another thing I owe to watching Alton Brown and Good Eats. I don’t have the uber-grill he uses, with elevating charcoal baskets, but I have a pretty nice Weber kettle that my Mom gave me as a housewarming gift. And it smokes a pretty darn good brisket.

And if anyone’s wondering, the recipe for Jamiacan jerk paste in The Joy of Cooking is pretty good, but it ain’t kidding around in terms of heat. It’s the habanero peppers that’ll get ya every time.

If you have access to a source of quality Dutch-processed cocoa powder, I recommend Alton Brown’s recipe for homemade cocoa mix. I tried it last year with a so-so brand of cocoa powder, and was less than thrilled. But this year we found a new variety at Whole Foods, and it’s some good stuff.

I’ve been using personal finance software for years to track my expenditures and have some sense of where my money is coming from, as well as going. I tend not to use too many features beyond the electronic check register and the occasional simple report or graph, but one thing I have become quite accustomed to is the ability to download transaction information from my credit card company. It saves some typing, allows me to keep things synchronized, and is in many other ways simply nifty. So I was slightly perturbed when I learned that Intuit would stop supporting that capability in the version of the software I own, which I bought a little over four years ago. I would need to jump ahead at least to the 2002 version, and I’m sure deep down Intuit wanted me to go get the brand spankin’ new 2004 edition.

The most significant problem with that strategy is that Amazon reviews and Usenet comments achieved the almost unanimous conclusion that Quicken 2004 was best suited for use as a coaster rather than an actual piece of software. (The problems seemed to be largely felt by people upgrading from prior versions with years’ worth of accumulated data – in other words, folks like me – and so they didn’t show up as much in the professional reviews I read in the computer press.) Further research suggested that the 2002 version was probably the most stable, so I snagged a copy of that from eBay and bought myself at least another couple of years.

Truth be told, even if 2004 had been a good year for Quicken, I still would have tried to go the secondhand route. The idea that a part of the functionality I originally purchased could be turned off in order to get me to re-purchase something just rubs me a bit wrong. Yet I can’t deny that it seems to make perfect sense in an upgrade-happy culture whose economy depends on folks always going out and Getting More Stuff, a world where it’s cheaper to throw out an appliance than it is to get it fixed. To get a sense of the cultural impact this has had: the producers of Sesame Street recently turned the Fix-It Shop into a Kinko’s/post office hybrid called the Mail-It Shop, because kids today just can’t relate to the notion of getting their toaster repaired. Continue reading “On the Up and Up(grade)”

One of the blessings, and curses, of the Net is the access it gives to information. Properly harnessed, it’s a great research tool, as many traditional sources of information are easily accessible while millions of everyday people record their own contributions to humanity’s collective knowledge. (Indeed, David Brin has argued in The Transparent Society that in an upcoming “Century of Aficionados,â€? the effect of “armies of individuals pursuing their own private, passionate interestsâ€? will ensure that “almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about the human past or present will ever again be lost.â€?) The trick is in using those tools effectively. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about that over the years, so I thought I’d discuss some of the sources I’ve found most effective. Continue reading “Knowing Things”

It’s easy for city folk like us to laugh heartily at the antics resulting from taking a couple of millionaire heiresses and dropping them into the middle of a farm community. I have to admit, I passed up my opportunity to watch The Simple Life on Fox, but it had more to do with my general dislike of reality shows than anything. I didn’t know who the show’s two stars were, but I was more than aware of the nearby city of Altus.

Where the actual so-called simple life is concerned, though, I can more than relate to being a fish out of water. The thought of being a part of that life never occurred to me until one evening in 1998, when the woman who wasn’t even yet my fiancee’ asked me if I wanted to be part-owner of a horse. Quite innocently, my response was, “Which part?” Curiously enough, she didn’t press the matter further. (I thought it was a valid question.)

Now, six years later, I’m married to her. And I’m not the part owner of a horse. I’m the owner of four horses. And our four horses live on my in-laws’ farm with about sixteen or seventeen other horses. On Sundays, to pay off the “debt” incurred by having my wife’s parents board and feed our critters, we show up early in the morning and often stay until late that night to feed the horses, haul hay, clean stalls, do some grooming, and generally admire their beauty. Continue reading “Opening the Barn Door”

I like to eat. Quite a bit, actually. Whenever Pattie and I talk about taking a trip, one of the top items on the agenda is, “Where are we going to eat?” Going to restaurants has always been one of our preferred forms of recreation. As much as I like food, though, for a long time I wasn’t particularly comfortable in the kitchen; I knew how to make a few basic meals, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t have a whole lot of variety, and I didn’t have the basic knowledge to vary the recipes I did know and have much confidence in the results. I mean, yeah, I could whip up some mean English muffin pizzas and pork roll-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, but man can not live on these alone. Not without significant cholesterol-lowering medication, anyway.

My limited knowledge was sufficient during my college years, and even during the one year I spent in New York after graduation. I didn’t have a lot of time or money to put into cookware or ingredients; in college I was sharing a fridge with five other guys and whichever of their girlfriends were living in the apartment at the time, and when I graduated I had a kitchen roughly the size of my desk with equipment that almost certainly posed a fire hazard to myself and neighboring counties. But once I moved back to Philly, into an apartment with a ridiculously nice kitchen for a rental apartment, I knew it was time for change. I had to learn to really cook. Continue reading “How I Learned to Not Burn My Roast”

The public response to the recent ephedra ban (which is also this subject of this month’s Public Policy article) puzzles me to no end. Reminiscent of the Today sponge episode of Seinfield, people have responded to the FDA’s banning of the potentially dangerous supplement by hoarding the stuff.

ABC News reports that health food stores were cleaned out of products containing the supplement within hours of the announcement of the impending ban. Though GNC, the nation’s largest retailer of supplements, stopped selling products that contain ephedra in June 2003, there are still hundreds of thousands of pharmacies, health food stores and gyms who are more than willing to sell Metabolife, Speed Stack, Ripped Force, and others, by the case, if necessary.

Longtime users credit ephedra supplements with helping them to stay in shape, fight fatigue, perform better in sports, and, of course, lose weight. More than anything else, ephedra supplements are marketed as weight-loss aids. On its web site Metabolife International claims its Metabolife 356, one of the most popular ephedra products on the market, increases the body’s metabolism so users burn fat faster. A well placed asterisk warns the reader that these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA and that the products is not intended to cure, prevent, treat, or diagnose disease. It’s a catchall disclaimer that supplement manufacturers use to remind users which side of the DSHEA Act of 1994 they are on. Continue reading “Better Supplement Controls No Great Loss”

My dusty college marketing textbooks define brand loyalty as the “degree to which a consumer intentionally and repeatedly chooses one brand over another.” My mother just spent a week with me, helping Dave and I prepare for my first Thanksgiving at my new house. I now define brand loyalty as “the length of time one person will fight with a blood relative in the middle of a crowded grocery store before making a purchase.” I’ll spare you the bloody details but let’s just say that my mother and I have agreed to disagree on most of the decisions that one makes when one wheels their cart into a supermarket, namely brand decisions. (Come to think of it, we even had a brief spat over the choice of shopping cart but that’s neither here nor there.)

For many people venturing out on their own, the thrill of buying your very own Cocoa Puffs and dish detergent wears off pretty fast. Grocery shopping, whether you do it daily, weekly, or monthly, becomes a relatively irksome, repetitive, and expensive task. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average consumer unit (new government speak for household) spends about 14.5% of its annual income on food and grocery items. (However, this figure does include meals eaten away from home.) That’s quite a slice of pie. Continue reading “Behind the Brands”

A few weeks ago, Dave and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary. Fourth. Not fifth or tenth. Fourth. I’m not even sure what one receives for a fourth wedding anniversary. Wood? Tupperware? Nevertheless, most people I mentioned it to were politely unimpressed. Some even went so far as to ask if we have started planning how we were going to celebrate next year’s “big one.”

To some degree, I can understand their feelings. To people who have been married for twenty or twenty five years or longer, four years of marriage seems like no big deal. To me, however, four successful years with the same person, is something to raise a glass to – particularly in an age where society’s collective attitudes about marriage seem a bit schizophrenic.

I woke up this blessed date, October 17 (yes, women do earn points for remembering the date, too), and stumbled downstairs to begin my day, which went something like this: Continue reading “That Dream Within a Dream”

When we first learned that we were going to have a baby, we thought about renting a house. Eventually we came to our senses and realized that moving plus becoming parents was one more life-altering even than we were equipped to handle and decided to stick out the apartment one more year. This had another benefit, because when the next year rolled around, we were in a position to eschew renting and purchase a home of our own.

Now, let me make something clear from the start. I’m not one of those people who think that renting is ‘throwing away money.’ I can see a lot of circumstances where renting just makes more sense – you don’t need a lot of space, you don’t want to be tied to an area, you don’t want to worry about the maintenance, you’d like to take the money you save on a mortgage, property taxes and so on and invest in some other fashion, whatever. But we had reached a point where we wanted to have a little more sense of permanence and stability along with additional space, so for us, buying seemed the way to go. And being the 21st-century couple that we are, we wanted to use the Net and modern technology as much as possible. A pity it didn’t quite work out that way. Continue reading “Virtual Estate? Not Quite Yet”