Crime Pays, Rats Play, and Nobody Cares

A friend pointed out to me yesterday that I hadn't posted a blog since February 20. There's a reason for that: I usually only blog when I feel I have something to say. Of course, I do have thoughts running through my head all the time about various topics and think about writing them down but don't for whatever reason.

What I've been thinking about lately is the death of newspapers and the effect it has had on society. It is harder to know what the important stories of the day are now that there is no print product to speak of to pore over while having breakfast or coffee. In the early 1970s, I lived in California. The favorite part of my day was reading the Los Angeles Times, where I did my writing internship in college. At the time, it was considered one of the top four newspapers in the nation. The others being The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. I was lucky enough to spend a decade as an editor at the latter.

With that being said, I guess I could be considered somewhat of a news junkie and am not a fan of what is considered "news" in the 21st Century. That is, I don't really care how much Botox or how many implants the Kardashians get or how many kids Brangelina acquires. I care more about news that matters. And, of course, I care about news of the weird. You know, those outrageous stories that make you sit up and say, "What the hell?!"

For example, earlier this week, a friend in Florida told me about a law a D.C. councilwoman had passed two years ago to save rat families from extermination by relocating them. Virginia officials worried they would be sent over the Potomac River to infest their state. I Googled the story, as I am wont to do, and sure enough, my friend was correct. Honest to God. I thought it was just a bizarre enough tale of how screwed up local government was that I had to post on my Facebook wall. I thought for sure my friends would be commenting like crazy on that post, but none did. I posted it three times only to get one "like" on it by my niece's fiancé.

I decided that people did not want to click on any links that directed them to any sort of news stories and tested that theory again by posting a link to a story about a convicted murderer in Los Angeles who had drawn more than $30,000 in unemployment checks, which his family cashed and put into an account for him. Again, I thought this was an outrageous example of how a bureaucracy can make a major mistake that goes unnoticed. And again, the only people who noticed or even cared about the story were two cousins of mine in Minnesota. One even pointed out what I was thinking: Why wasn't anybody commenting or getting outraged about this story?

Post something about Ashley Judd's chipmunk cheeks, though, and everybody is all over that story in a heartbeat.

I'm sorry, but I grew up in an era when we had the Huntley-Brinkley Report on television and we had the Vietnam War for supper every night. Our young men were being killed over there and we cared. In recent years, the same thing happened in Iraq, but nobody seemed to care. Supposedly, President Obama announced the end of combat in Iraq and started bringing troops home in December 2011, but does anybody know that?

So, I am wondering when did things change? When did people stop caring about real news? Where is the outrage?

Something From Nothing

My painter friend in New York, Billy, is the reason I'm writing this blog. He even thought of the title. Normally, I wouldn't write about how to save money, because I am no expert in finances and/or the economy. I have always been good at surviving and getting by in tough times, however, so I am going to offer some tips on how to get by on more for less in a time when prices rise by the minute.

For years, I have saved every receipt, even for sodas at the Mapco, to track how I spend my money. I also keep a spreadsheet on sales tax so I can see how much my local governments wrench out of my pocketbook in addition to property tax. In 2011, I spent $1,200 on sales tax alone and $928 on property tax. 

Yesterday, I reviewed my monthly expenses for February, and realized I had spent $94 for gasoline and only $11 on food. What is wrong with this picture? Not to mention, the higher cost of fuel translates to higher food costs.

When you make as little as I do, you don't have much wiggle room and when the price of something such as gasoline rises, something has to give somewhere. In my budget, groceries are where I cut.

Billy wanted to know how I could get by on spending so little on food in a month that is almost over, so I told him a few things I do to make my food budget stretch.

First, I make my own bread, which can cost around $4 a loaf. I can buy a five-pound sack of bread flour for almost $4 and I can get at least four loaves out of a sack. I'm no good at math, so I'll let you do it, but I know I am saving some money by baking my own bread instead of spending it. I also make my own pasta with a hand-crank pasta maker from time to time. And I can tell you this much, there is nothing healthier or tastier than homemade bread and pasta.

Second, I have always been a stockpiler of staples, canned goods, and food I can freeze for use during the lean months. I shop at wholesale places such as Sam's Club and Costco to load up on things I use a lot, i.e. ground chuck, pinto beans, rice, dog food (for the dogs, not me), coffee beans, toilet paper, bottled water, heavy whipping cream, onions, potatoes, and so on. Any meat I buy, will be divvied up into Ziploc bags and put in the freezer to use later.

Being single and somewhat on the smaller side, I am not a huge consumer. I don't waste anything. Any leftover food that I don't eat goes to the dogs. I know, I know. I can hear some of you screaming that I am not supposed to give dogs people food, but I ask you: What did dogs eat before dog food companies invented kibble? Well, there you go.

Third, I am mostly vegetarian and learned to cook working in a vegetarian cafeteria. I do not eat a lot of meat, but when I do, it is chicken, Black Angus ground chuck, flank steak, chuck eye, and chuck roast. These are versatile cuts and although chuck may be fattier than other cuts, all you have to do is cook it until the fat reduces down to nothing, which doesn't take long.

As for eating, I tend to be conservative there as well, preferring a small breakfast snack with a cup of black coffee over a full breakfast and a snack of an apple, raw carrots, pickled beets, and/or green olives at suppertime. My main meal is midday, around 1 or 2 p.m., and it usually consists of something healthy with beans, lentils, soy products, or one of the aforementioned meats as a protein.

These are the three main things I do to save money at the grocery store. At present, my home is paid for and I am debt-free. My biggest expenses are health care and, of course, the ever-rising cost of gasoline.

If you wanted me to offer tips on how to run either the economy or government, I would tell you the same thing: Less is always more. 

White Trash

The other day I walked Huey for the first time in a while and noticed more litter than usual by the roadside. I am not sure what possessed me to snap photographs of every piece of trash up and down the ridge, but I did. I took 59 photos. Here are a few:

At first I thought I might post a photo of everything people had tossed out their car windows, but decided against it because it would make this blog too long. Instead, I used them to analyze and profile the habits of the resident redneck litterers. Some findings such as the beer cans, soft-pack cigarette wrappers, and Slim Jim wrapper were to be expected. Others such as the pumpkin seeds and V8 juice container were not.

Here are the highlights of my modern-day archeological expedition:

• Beer drinkers are the worst offenders.
• Bud Light is the beer of choice, judging by the five cans and one bottle cap I found.
• Natty Light, Budweiser, PBR, and Michelob Ultra scored only one point each.
• Smokers are the second-worst offenders.
• Marlboro is the smoke of choice, as evidenced by the five crumpled wrappers I found.
• Camels are the second choice with only one wrapper in the mix.
• Soft packs rule.
• One empty round of Grizzly chewing tobacco.
• McDonald's beat out Taco Bell in the fast-food category, and surprisingly, Sonic didn't have a showing.
• In the soft-drink category, Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew tied with two showings each.
• Two empty water bottles.
• One BP coffee cup.
• Minute Maid Orange and V-8 also tied at one each in the juice division.
• In the snack food department, there was one each of Slim Jim, pumpkin seeds, a Power Bar, Snickers, a Sponge Bob patty, Doritos Nacho Cheese, and salted peanuts.
• Under miscellaneous was a pile of junk mail under a mailbox and a phone book.
• One electronics ad.
• One empty live bait package.
• One piece of aluminum pipe.
• One strip of nylon package binding.
• One Matchbox racer.
• One Kong squeaky tennis ball for dogs.
• One marker for a begonia plant.
• Several used tissues, straws, Styrofoam cups, plastic wrap, and a dried wet nap.

Surprisingly, no condom wrappers or spent condoms were found on this expedition. Although three coat hangers were found clustered together, which hopefully were not used as methods of de facto birth control. But you won't catch me complaining if these people stopped breeding altogether.

How I Broke a Fingernail (or What Happens When a Stray Shows Up in My Yard Before I've Had My Coffee)

I realize the title of this blog is a mouthful, but welcome to my world.

The story starts out with a poor night of sleep, because I was hacking, wheezing, and coughing in spite of the NyQuil I took to keep me from ripping out sutures from a recent surgery. Suffice it to say, I spent most of the night by the fire on the sofa trying to sit up and sleep to old Frasier episodes on Netflix.

Sometime around 4 a.m., I went back to bed to try and sleep, which I was finally able to do. Then at 6, I got up and let Sally and Delaney out because Sally was whimpering. Then I went back to bed. I thought it was around 8 a.m. when all the commotion started, but the battery is dying on my alarm clock so it was more like 9, which means it was probably more like 7 when I let the dogs out.

Huey was barking and wreaking general havoc in the great room so I leaped out of bed to see what was wrong. First thing I saw was fresh blood tracked all over my flooring, from one of Delaney's claws that had broken. Out of my front window, I saw Delaney and Sally prancing about with a new dog, something that looked like a husky mix with calico cat markings. So I grabbed my iPhone so I could snap a photo of the stray and post it on Facebook and opened the door. That is when the fun began. Huey charged at the crack in the open door and was trying to burst out. I tried to grab his choke chain, but my reflexes were too slow and off he went. He ripped the nail on my middle finger (a fitting metaphor) of my right hand way down in the bed and left some nice skid marks with his claws on my left foot on his way out the door.

And they were off.

I won't tell you the words running through my head that I was thinking about the dog owner because I knew someone would be thinking the same about me because Huey would soon be in their yard chasing chickens or worse.

So I grabbed my keys and wallet and jumped into the trusty Outback to hunt down the little bugger. All this before one sip of coffee, too.

I drove around the loop twice searching for him, only to be chased by the wild pack over on the corner of Bald Eagle and Whippoorwill.

I didn't see him at either of his two girlfriends' houses or the Chicken Lady's house, so I came back home. That's when the phone rang. He was over at Bootsie's, his old running buddy. When I drove up, he came running and hopped in the back seat as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

And, of course, it hadn't.

Old? Who are you calling old?!

I've been kicking this topic around in my head for a couple of weeks ever since I went to my dermatologist and he asked how I was doing. When I told him I only felt like I was operating at 50 percent capacity he said, "Well, isn't that how the elderly say they feel?" I don't think my brain was firing on all synapses that day, or I would have asked him point blank: "Are you trying to tell me I am old?"

Ask any old person and they will say that you are only as old as you feel. Even my soon-to-be 89-year-old mother wonders how she came to look so old but still feels so young at heart.

So today, I was asked to fill out some forms at the doctor's office and the first one was titled, "Geriatric Depression Scale," or something like that. I'll admit, I got a bit rankled when I saw the word "geriatric." I didn't think I was depressed when I walked through the door, but I sure as heck was when I saw that.

To make matters worse, when the nurse was placing the thingies on my body for my EKG, she said, "Lift your left breast, please."

"Oh, sure. No problem. Can you roll a forklift in?" I thought in the little bubble over my head. I then began to laugh uncontrollably.

The nurse smiled and said, "I'm sorry, it took me a long time to learn how to say that without laughing, but we aren't allowed to touch certain body parts."

I told her that coming right after the Geriatric Depression Scale that her request had struck me as funny. Hell, I was elderly two weeks ago, then downright geriatric, and now I was being asked to hoist my breast over my shoulder like the proverbial continental soldier.

When did this metamorphosis from young babe to old hag happen anyway?

The other evening, my gal pal Silvia called me from Las Vegas and bemoaned the fact she had recently celebrated her 65th birthday. Silvia once lived in Hollywood and managed rock stars. She's hip and cooler than cool still. "When did I get this old and not know it?" she wailed.

I empathized with her plight. It seems I, too, have gotten old and everybody knows it except me.

I have always looked younger than my years, which I attribute to a lifetime of fairly clean living. No cigarette has ever touched these lips and I only drink occasionally. I've never been a druggie either and I rarely eat meat and ingest my fair share of soy. In fact, twenty-somethings hit on me on a regular basis. I guess they don't see what the doctors see.

There are days when I feel my age and I do take advantage of my senior discounts because I have earned them, I will admit. But I like to think that I am still hip and cool and hang with a hip and cool crowd, even if we are getting to be a bunch of old farts.

So there!

The Flight From Hell

You know it's a bad flight when a father tells his 16-month-old son, "You were such a good boy. You were better than some adults on the flight."

Sad but true.

Of course, it was my luck to be sitting in front of the adult in question. The adult who talked nonstop for an hour and half all the way from Phoenix to Burbank. Never mind that nobody on that plane, save for the woman who encouraged the diatribe, gave a shit about what she had to say.

So how bad was it?

It was so bad that the woman sitting a seat away from me leaned over at the end of the flight and asked in sotto voce if I had had an enjoyable flight, too. It was so bad, that I could hear her voice projecting and echoing throughout the cabin even though both my ears were stuffed up. It was so bad that I took pity on her poor Corgi that she had stowed under my seat. Doggone it, doesn't she realize dogs have more sensitive hearing than people? I imagined the little bubble over the dog's head saying: "Why me Lord? Of all the people who could've been my owner, I had to get this one!"

Oh, wait.

Maybe that was in the bubble over my head, Except substitute "fellow traveler" for "owner."

Of course, I knew why I was led to sit in front of the loudmouth: material.

Ah, yes. The stuff of which a writer's life is made. Material.

I must say, I learned more in 90 minutes about her life than I learned in years from ex-husbands. Yep. She revealed that much about herself. Hell, I even learned her email address, which I am sorely tempted to print here, but I know some of my smartass friends might email her and say, "Why did you make Eileen's flight so miserable?"

I told the woman a seat away that the one in the row behind us was someone who talked the talk instead of walking the walk.

Here are a few things my fellow travelers and I learned about Ms. Blabbermouth:

• She is the mother of four.

• She has accomplished nothing but everything in her life.

• She is married to an Australian film producer of westerns.

• She has dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Australia and also spends time in New Mexico.

• She is from Tennessee and supposedly is a great-granddaughter of James Robertson.

• She is certified to do permanent makeup, i.e. tattoo makeup, and charges $250 for brows alone.

• She prefers country to city life.

• She is 5 foot 6.

• Her daughter has lips that are all hers.

• Her daughter is going to take care of her Corgi while Mommy Dearest is in Australia for the next month.

• The Corgi breathed a sigh of relief at this point.

• Elton John has Corgis.

• Australia has strict quarantines on traveling dogs, which is why both she and Elton John won't take their Corgis there.

• The daughter is going to buy the Corgi some Rodeo Drive bling.

• The daughter is a model and has two agents.

• The woman loves kangaroo steak, which tastes like elk.

• The woman grew up eating all sorts of wild game, which her father trapped and killed. We're talking turtles, catfish, frogs, venison, and more. (Sorry, I was getting visions of the dead buck my father hung on my swingset by its hind legs so he could gut it and let the blood drain, which is why I couldn't remember anything after the word "venison.")

• The husband refuses to live in the U.S. (Three guesses why and the first two don't count, OK?)

• Her father was also a rodeo cowboy.

• She critiques her husband's work, which led to write her first screenplay, which Paramount offered her $3,000 for but she turned it down because she did not want to lose control of her work.

• So now she has no buyer for her film, but she plans to produce it herself and hopes to get Harry Connick Jr. to play the lead, and she is getting funding for it now.

• It is going to be the greatest film of all time, a movie about gay cowboys who compete in the International Gay Rodeo Association.

• Final Draft is a screenwriting program, which she had to learn to use to write her screenplay.

• She got a millionaire to agree to invest in it, but he wanted to have control over her script if the film was not made in a year.

• She could not agree to those terms unless he paid her $60,000.

• The film budget is set at $10 million.

• All her gay friends who have read it think it is wonderful and better than Brokeback Mountain.

• She is meeting on Monday with a couple of agents, one for Aaron somebody, whom she also wants to star in her flick.

• Yes, she and her husband are quite successful in the film biz.

• So successful, in fact, that they are in debt, even though they own two homes, one in Tennessee and one in the wine country near Melbourne.

• Most people in the entertainment business are poor.

• So what she and her husband do is vacation in places by caretaking other people's properties in different countries.

• Did you know you can stay for free in Ireland if you just take care of someone's cat?

• You can order a catalogue of caretaking vacation places for only $30.

• She is going to the coast of Australia this coming week.

• Her film would be great if only people who say they want to back it would show her the money.

• Her email address is ...

I could go on, but you get the idea. Plus, I would like to take a nap, which I couldn't do during the flight for some reason.

In closing, I would just like to say that if you do hear of a movie about gay caballeros anytime soon, it is because I stole her idea and gave it to my screenwriter son.

Psychic Drains

This blog has been kicking around in my head for some time and comes from a term my dearly departed friend Kris Black used a lot: psychic drain. In short, anything that creates a negative, emotional drag on your life is a psychic drain.

Lately, I've had my share of psychic drains and most seem to be issues caused by simple misunderstandings. People don't read things they way they were meant to be taken and then overreact by "unfriending" or "blocking" the other person. I must say, when someone does this to me, it comes as a huge relief. That means I don't have to put up with any crap anymore. Lucky me!

For some reason, the Internet and social-networking sites in general seem to bring out the middle-schooler in people. I, for one, don't have time for such antics.

Here are two recent examples of my own psychic drains, courtesy of Facebook:

Today, one "friend" I've had since the 1990s blocked me and said he liked me better when I wasn't a "celebrity." He had posted something inane on my wall about a door being ajar. Excuse me for questioning why it was posted on my wall in the first place. Call me dense, but I didn't get it. If this guy wants to end a friendship over that, then fine, it wasn't a friendship in the first place. So, go on. Have a nice life without me.

Another recent psychic drain had to do with my youngest brother, who mistook the title of a birthday invitation my oldest son had set up for me. My son, who happens to love me, had planned a party to introduce me to some of his friends because he is proud of me. My youngest brother took the invitation as a slam against the family name and then told me and my two sons to "watch your backs!" Okey-dokey then. My turn to block.

People, life is too short for this crap. Excuse me if I don't engage in negativity and walk away from it. I know some people think they have won whatever "fight" there was, but I don't like to fight and if I have to, I choose my battles.