chowmama
chowmama's JournalWhy should I support this economy?
I really don’t get some of the economic theory I hear. The biggest one is that our economy is based on ever-increasing amounts of sales, of everything. Not only do we need an increasing population (and we’re already at near unsustainable limits there), but each already existing individual needs to buy an increased amount of stuff every year in order for this system to succeed. And this on top of that, the price of everything keeps going up as well, while income doesn’t.
Does no one else see that we can’t keep this up forever? There’s a limit before the system falls apart – we can’t afford any more. We can’t sustain more population. We’ve been at the point for decades where we need a service that rents you somewhere to put the stuff you own that physically won’t fit in your home – George Carlin commented on that, for crap’s sake. I’d like to point out that if you’re not living with it, you can probably do without it. You’re already doing without it.
The accountant of an old boss I had kept telling him that it wasn’t enough to make a profit. If his profit didn’t increase by at least a specified (large) percentage above last year’s, it was exactly the same as failure. And this was after the increasing expenses were accounted for. Why?
There’s also the myth of ever-expanding, limitless productivity. There’s going to be a point where you’re doing as much as you can do. You have to sleep, you have to eat. You can only do more every single year for so long.
In the eighties, I worked for insurance companies and we had a particular business model come in. The first year, you got hired and hopefully met expectations. But in the anniversary meeting, you had to rate yourself on a number of areas, one to five. The supervisor would take this sheet and inform you, one by one, that you were wrong and not that good, and implying that you’d have to do significantly better to keep your job. People came out of these meetings crying. You had to list specifically the areas in which you could help the company more the next year. You got a little more than a cost of living raise.
So you told them everything you thought you could do. Next year, you did it all. Same meeting, same evaluation and same need to list several more promises you’d have to live up to. Same small raise. Now, you have to strain a little. Next year, same thing again. Eventually it became impossible. The raises stopped coming and the evaluations got lower and lower. You quit before you were fired.
The quitting was the point of all this. Some study had determined that long-time employees made too much. You needed to move them along approximately every five years and hire somebody else at entry level wage. We were interchangeable cogs and completely fungible. (A term my 4 year old stepson understood completely when something broke once – ‘Oh well. T’row out, buy new.” He was shocked to find out that didn’t happen everywhere.)
That program is still common. I shocked an immigrant one time by explaining it and how I personally beat it. No matter the questionnaire question, I put down ‘3’. Didn’t even read the questions. I knew I was ‘4 to 5’ on everything, and the interviewer knew it, too. They couldn’t possible defend a ‘2’ rating, but even if they had, I wasn’t emotionally invested. I gave them the minimum possible promises for the next year and I met them every time. I was there over ten years when the company closed our branch. I could have gone another five without breaking a sweat.
Yes, it was cynical as hell. In my defense, I’d have given them everything I could do, if the end game hadn’t been to get me to quit or fire me. I’ve never left another job where they didn’t have to replace me with two people. The insurance agency I left (to go to this corporation) brought in two clerks and a computer. The last time I saw the boss, he still wanted me to come back.
Anyway, productivity has a ceiling. Consumerism has a ceiling. None of this will work forever, because it can’t. And we’re wrecking the world trying to keep it going and trying to stave off the eventual end. We need to come up with a different sustainable theory and I don’t see anybody even trying to do that.
I’m quitting the system now. Actually, I quit some time ago. I work as hard as I can at my job. Then I go home and my at-home job is to figure out ways we can have a good-enough life while buying as little crap as possible. The current economy is going to have to get along without me.
I'd like to propose a new state motto
Having come home tonight to find the plow's been by again(!) and put >2 feet deep of water and ice soaked snow into my drive. Parked in the street, made dinner and went out and moved it all.
Given my husband's health (lotsa problems) and the equally elderly neighbors next door (one needed an ambulance last summer, but is home again), there are 3 stages to this task. 1) the ambulance personnel can get up the drive to render first aid. 2) the gurney can make it up the drive. 3) the car can make it into the driveway. It all has to be done ASAP. By me.
Minnesota - Not For Wimps.
Rant over.
Thank God(s)/Goddess(es) it's finally above zero
My moniker is ChowMama, but my lovely chow is long gone except in memory. The current little guy is really a little guy. Radar's a purebred Anybody'sGuess, although the coat is kind of minature schnauzer by way of poodle and the ears are pure papillion.
Anyway, one of his nicknames is Drama King and he comes by it honestly. This latest cold snap has a new routine. He goes out and does his business, then wanders away to the farthest part of the yard. I call him in and he begins to lift alternate feet off the ground, then collapses slowly down onto the ground where he lies looking piteously at me and continuing to lift his feet until I come to pick him up and carry him in.
This would be more effective if I didn't see the routine he has with DH. He's called in with the 'T' word (treat) and comes bounding in - not even leaping over drifts, but plowing through them like an icebreaker - sails up onto the porch without touching a step and beats the treat giver to the door.
If this dog was younger and in better condition, I swear I'd train him for film work. He makes Lassie look like an amateur.
Last day off
before back to the usual grind. I think I'll start with an archaeological dig in the kitchen. Ancient folk stories claim there's a sink in there somewhere.
Wish me luck!
Is there anyone else who never throws out a recipe?
Assuming, of course, that you once found it edible.
My recipe file consists of five 3-ring binders, divided by category: Breads and sweets, Starters, sides, soups and sauces, Main dishes, Pantry/preserving, and Alcohol. There are things in there that I haven't made in over fifty years.
Some are recipes I made for my family - the pork chops in mushroom soup sauce, distinguished by my completely unattended seven-year-old's venture into flaming with a little brandy. I watched Julia, Graham and every other cook on tv and it's a miracle I never burned the house down. It was one of my father's favorites and I can't imagine making it now.
My mom's stuffed pork chops - regular chops stood on end in loaf pans with the stuffing between; no butterflying for her - makes me smile because of the carefully minced and measured single tablespoon of green pepper. It was only in there for the color. She hated green pepper, but it was in the recipe and she never changed a recipe in any way. She wouldn't add more even if she liked it and she wouldn't leave it out even though she hated it. She worked with the sort of precision any bomb squad would envy.
The Marguerites we ate at the Notorious Commune. (A row house I spent a year in while at college. We were mostly theater majors and had no idea that the neighborhood crank thought we were a scandalous bunch until he wrote a letter to the editor. Scandal? Not hardly. It was probably the most innocent place on campus.) Marguerites are saltine crackers topped with full-size marshmallows with a dab of butter on top, broiled until they got good and melty brown. I think you had to be high.
Anyway, there are a lot of things I haven't made in decades. Some I've tested recently and have needed to adapt - both the stolen recipe for Henri's French (Catalina, now) and the stolen recipe for some major taco chain's taco sauces are horrifyingly sweet, but good if the sugar is cut back considerably. Some things - I just don't eat like that anymore.
But it's history, in a way. Some Fifties, a lot of Sixties and so on. If I throw them out, they're gone forever.
Why Sinema has screwed herself - my fearless prediction
Ok. she runs in two years as an independent. The Republicans will have their primary winner; probably a MAGA election denier, holocaust denier and general conspiracy theorist, because that's who shows up for Republican primaries these days. The Democrats will likely run a pretty moderate progressive who can appeal to a diverse electorate.
Who funds Sinema? Not the Republicans, not the Democrats. She can't even change her mind at this point and say "Hi, I'm back!" - can you imagine how that would play? There isn't a major primary she can run in, and the minor parties don't have any money to give her.
There are what I call the 'money conservatives'. Since one of their core beliefs is that they should neither pay taxes nor suffer under any regulation or oversight, they're not going to fund any Democrat - we generally tend to believe that everybody should pay their fair share and that nobody should be allowed to harm or kill people who don't live in their neighborhood, just to make one more almighty dollar. And they also know that the MAGAts are incredibly bad for bidness. (They really are Ferengis, aren't they?)
However, another core belief of theirs is to never throw good money after bad. Sinema would have to demonstrate clearly that she has a really good shot at winning before they'd donate a dime. I don't believe she can do that on her own.
I don't see her as spending her own money. She may have some, but she's not going to risk that. That's what you do with other people's money. And if the people who have known her for a while are correct, she's not the sort of person who will retire to quiet positions on boards and the odd speaking engagement. She's being summarized as an attention junkie, as well as an agent of chaos (not my description). So quitting isn't likely.
Get out the popcorn. I'll have a beer with mine, thanks.
Best Thanksgiving ever
My mom, as has been said before, was a wonderful person with many fine talents and qualities. None of them involved food. For one thing, she was anorexic at a time when that really wasn’t a common diagnosis, even if she’d ever gone to the doctor about it. She was also overworked and short of time in every other part of her life. She did her best and did what was seen as solely her job when it came to feeding us, but the results were largely unmixed. Mostly, they were the Four Basic Food Groups, executed average to awful.
So, Thanksgiving seldom went as planned. My father wanted the whole Norman Rockwell experience – the biggest turkey that would fit in our oven. All the sides, multiple treats and pies. Cold Duck for the adults. (Anybody remember Cold Duck? A sparkling mix of cheap red wine and cheap champagne, and not the slightest hint of dryness. It was the only alcohol my mom would drink and we all grew up thinking it was the height of sophistication.)
First – frozen turkey. Frozen behemoth turkey. Mom even hated shopping for food, so she put it off until Sunday, meaning that this sucker was still hard as granite by Thursday morning. We woke to the sound of water in the sink, running over the boulder to try to thaw it enough to pry the neck and giblets out of it.
It went on from there. We always had our dinner hours after it was scheduled, by which time Dad was in a foul mood and Mom was snappish and exhausted. The worst time, we ended up at 9PM carving underdone tough breast meat off Gargantua and microwaving it until it wouldn’t kill us – we hoped. If you ever decide to try this, don’t. It’s nasty.
So, when we grew up (four sisters, no brothers), we began to lobby Mom to let us do it for her. She’d done it enough, it was time for her to put her feet up and relax. She refused for years. We brought the pies, so at least she didn’t have to be up all the night before. We helped on the sides. But she just wouldn’t give up that damned bird. It was her job.
Finally came the year she’d had enough. We could do the bird. She had also bought a free-range organic turkey from a co-worker who raised them. It had never been frozen. We were pumped. This was going to be the best Thanksgiving ever!
Thursday morning, early. Coffee, rolls and get to work. Made the stuffing according to Mom’s recipe (which is, frankly, great. DH won’t allow me to use any other). Melted butter, prepped the roaster and unwrapped the brown paper from the completely unfrozen bird.
I’m not sure what was wrong with that bird, but I’ve come to theorize that they didn’t bleed it out right. Or at all. It was one giant turkey-shaped bruise. It looked like it had been beaten to death with a baseball bat.
We just stood around it, staring. Once in a while, somebody would say “Maybe if we trimmed…” “What if…” But there was nothing, literally nothing, to be done.
And then, being it was us, somebody snorted. And we all started laughing. Started calling in people from the other rooms. “Hey, you have got to see this!” Even Mom finally laughed.
Now this was a small Wisconsin town some time ago. No restaurants were open on Thanksgiving, no groceries. If we wanted something to eat other than what was in the house, the only thing available was some day-old egg salad sandwiches down at the gas station.
There was hamburger in the freezer and the makings of what my Mom called goulash – homemade hamburger hot dish. That was the Thanksgiving main dish. With all the sides, pies, treats and, of course, Cold Duck.
I had the loveliest evening with my house panther
After dinner, I had a bunch of dishes and some canning to do. This made the kitchen the warmest and most humid room in the house. The dishes were done, the canner was steaming and rattling away and Fast Eddie just sat on the folded towel on the island, doing his best impression of a bread loaf. (I was going to need that towel for the hot jars later, but whatever.)
I was sitting at the island with a nice mug of English tea with a good jolt of Irish whiskey. Listening to Butch Thompson on the cd, reminding me of how we used to tease my mom by calling it her 'cathouse piano'. She never could read music, but could play anything. Twelve bar blues with a walking base, boogie woogie, you name it. I'm sure Thompson is better, but I still hear some of her riffs in his stuff. It was so warm, calm, peaceful...you could actually forget that this cat came to us a half-feral kitten.
Then I got out the knitting and he went all Gollum on me. Wool is now, has always been and will always be, his Precious. It's not just the yarn or the ball - he just doesn't respond that way to cotton or other fibers.
I keep telling DH that someday I'm going to have a normal cat. Just as soon as I figure out what that is and where to get one.
Well, I'm happy in Minnesota
We didn't lose any of the federal seats, although I wish we'd gained a few. We've kept the governorship and the state House, and taken back the state Senate. Looks like we're going to keep our attorney general. State auditor will go to a hand count, so that's a ways off. Even got my choice on school board. As DH said, when he called me at work to let me know the latest, "Let the socialism begin!"
(That comment came out of a 'man on the street' interview from the news this morning. A nice silver-haired woman was asked how she decided her vote and she stated that it was the economy - gas and food was ridiculous - and besides, she didn't want socialism here. I thought it was very nice of her to voluntarily give up her Medicare and Social Security. Wait, what, not hers? Just other people's? Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit. Who could have seen that coming?)
Got my Ancestry DNA back
And I'm actually fairly impressed. My husband, who's more interested in it, has tried a couple different sites and included me.
The first was the Genographic Project, which was run by the National Geographic Society before they got bought by Rupert Murdoch. The data was interesting, but didn't get into actual families.
The second was a group I don't remember the name of. The results were really odd for both of us. Very romantic details - I mean, some Tuscan?? For both of us? Really? All DH's known ancestors go way back in Ireland on his father's side and his mother was half Irish, half Polish. He's been working the genealogy and has enough hard data to confirm this. We came to suspect this was a huge pile of crap.
My ancestry is a lot more obscure and further muddled by my paternal side's tendency to change stories to suit whatever they wanted it to be at the moment. Some of what Dad said may have been made up by him, some may have been stories he was told by his parents and grandparents, and some may have actually been true. I know WWII had him denying we were all that German - he placed our family in a border area that switched ownership frequently. Not so much; DH's genealogy research puts us a little north of dead center. The genealogy did verify one story, which was that Dad's paternal great-grandfather was a foundling. Knowing him, I never believed it. When we found it was true, I was dumbfounded. And my mother's side - her father had an Irish surname. When I asked her where they were from, she said "I don't know - Iowa?" So I could be anything.
Anyway, Ancestry ran the DNA and connected it with others, some of whom had family trees. No romance, no Tuscany. DH's is consistent with his research. Mine was mostly interesting because of the family trees. They had no way of knowing who I was, and still connected me to some very unique shared surnames. That kind of backs up the results.
Anyway, it's official. I am the whitest person in any room. And the most boring. I kind of suspected it - like George Carlin said, 'I don't even try to tan, I just try to neutralize the blue." But the better part of my DNA seems to be English, so at least I'm in a mixed marriage.
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