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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
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: Read the remainder of this entry »
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. Read the remainder of this entry »
I’m typing this right now with a napping toddler in my lap, so if mid-sentence I start waving my foot around to knock out the pins and needles, I hope you’ll understand.
That’s just one of the little adjustments you have to make when you become a parent, I suppose. It’s been a year since Alexandra was born, and it’s certainly been an adjustment. Without a doubt it’s the most amazing experience I’ve ever had, but there are a few things I’ve had to learn over the months. Some of this stuff we’ve discussed elsewhere on the forums, but I figured the one-year mark was a good point to try and pull some reflections together.
Sufferin’ Sleep Cycles!: I’ve definitely whined about this before, but one of the more frustrating elements of fatherhood has been the degree to which my already-fragile sleep cycle has been blown to bits. Since she was born, Alex hasn’t stuck to one sleep pattern for more than a week, and she has always slept less than every source we’ve consulted suggests she will. A few times we’ve been lucky and she’s settled into a 10 PM-to-6 AM pattern for a few days, but before long we’re jumping to 9 AM-to-3 PM or 1 PM-to-8 PM. Attempts to follow the old ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’ credo have met with limited success, because my body doesn’t snap around as easily as hers does, which means that when I do lay down, I often crash harder and longer than I want to. (That’s part of why I’m writing this now, while she sleeps. I’m hoping that if I can start forcing myself into a rhythm, I can get her to follow along. Even if it doesn’t work, I might get a little more work done.)
The problem is compounded somewhat because we’ve adopted a parenting style that Pattie says is called ‘attachment parenting,’ and which I call ‘carrying the kid everywhere.’ Alex has disliked her crib almost from the get-go. Her first night home, she kept us both up until 7 or 8 AM, howling whenever we put her in her bassinet. Things haven’t changed much in the last year, and we never were able to bring ourselves around to the ‘let her cry it out’ approach. I admit, there are times when I’ll put her in her crib out of frustration, but never for more than twenty minutes or so, by which point she’s only gotten warmed up as far as a crying jag goes. If you were to say we were spoiling the baby, at this point, I’m not sure I’d argue with you. But I think there are benefits. Alex is an enthusiastic, happy, outgoing kid. She smiles and waves at people, laughs and smiles a lot, and seems to have a lot of confidence as she’s exploring the apartment.
They Learn Fast: One thing that has amazed me is how quickly Alex has come to notice patterns and recognize things. I’ve mentioned this before, but she knows the sound of Pattie walking up the steps on her way home from work, and gets so excited when she hears it. She also has seemed to recognize music almost from day one. From an early age, she has registered a preference for up-tempo music, and her favorite lullabies appear to be Pete Yorn’s “Life on a Chain� and Joie Calio’s “Stupid Songs About Love.� She also recognizes television theme music. She loves the ‘Across the Stars’ video from my Attack of the Clones DVD, and waves her hands excitedly at the themes from Farscape, Babylon 5, and, um, Trading Spaces. (That one’s more from Pattie.)
She also recognizes much of the music from Sesame Street, which she’s started to watch in the last month or so. It’s clearly too early for her to be recognizing many of the concepts, and I’ve even seen a newspaper story where one of the show’s producers thinks that 2 is a good minimum age for watching the show. But she recognizes the music and the characters and seems to enjoy watching them. Of course, this has led Pattie and me to watch the show as well, which often induces nostalgia for when we watched the show. Many of the classic Muppet performers have left the show, leaving the characters in the hands of quite-capable replacements . . . but sometimes it still feels a little off. And of course there’s Elmo, the Muppet embodiment of some kind of generational dividing line. At least Alex has shown an equal fondness for Ernie.
Daddy on Board: Being a stay at home dad has its own challenges, as does being the gainfully employed mom. It’s just not the expected breakdown of roles, and it tends to throw people off. Usually it’s just a matter of the odd comment or two, which is no big deal. But sometimes I run across more concrete reminders that we just don’t seem to expect dads to be heavily involved in the early years of child-rearing. We got a few volumes of a well-known series of parenting books as gifts while we were expecting, and when I sat down to read them I quickly found myself putting them down. The books were completely written to the point of view of mothers, and just about the only mention of fathers was in the ‘If your husband wants to try and help you out for an afternoon, here’s how to keep him from screwing up too badly, given that he doesn’t know anything’ vein. Lest you think I’m being overly defensive, Pattie’s made the same comments. And, illustrative of how lucky both Alex and I are, she made sure to do something about it, getting me a copy of Armin Brott’s The New Father: A Dad’s Guide to the First Year. The book covers the different emotional issues that fathers tend to experience whether they’re stay-at-home dads or more traditional working dads. But it still includes enough general advice and information that Pattie has read the book herself a couple of times and found it helpful. It just feels to me like we need to be doing a better job of adjusting our expectations when it comes to parenting and gender roles.
Keep Those Hankies Handy: The last thing I’ve noticed is that parenthood has stripped away whatever sense of emotional restraint I might have had. I tend to get overcome with emotion a lot more easily these days than before Alex was born, and I was never all that restrained to begin with. But now, it’s almost comical how easily I can be moved to tears. I should have known this was coming – my mother tends to be the same way – but it’s hard to estimate the impact of a small person snuggling up to your shoulder and falling asleep until you experience it. And that’s worth all the missed sleep in the world.