values

Is fine dining worth it?

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The other night I brought home dinner from Tastee-Freez: chicken strip basket for me, bacon ranch chicken sandwich for DF and curly fries for both of us. This is not most people’s idea of fine dining, but we enjoyed it immensely.

It didn’t hurt a bit that we were both pretty ravenous, but seriously: The food there is good. They get their burger meat from a local butcher, and are “proud to use” Alaskan cod, pollock, crab and salmon.

But there’s another reason. Dipping a chicken strip into the little plastic cup of honey-mustard sauce, I suggested that the reason we were enjoying it so much is that we hardly ever do it.

Once or twice a year DF and I visit a very fine-dining establishment called Kincaid Grill; one of those dinners is an annual tradition with a couple of friends. The rest of the time, “Where shall we go for dinner?” always has the same answer: “The kitchen table.”

Not just because it’s the frugal thing to do, either. We genuinely enjoy our homemade meals. (He says it’s because they’re prepared and shared with love.) In addition, we don’t have to get dressed up nicely, or even get dressed at all; we’ve eaten quite a few meals in sweatpants and T-shirt, or even in bathrobes if it’s been a long day. We don’t have to wait for a table, examine a wine list, tip a server, or figure out which ancient grain is being sauced up and marked up.

Dining out just seems like…a lot of work. I expect I’m not the only one who feels this way, especially since people have become so accustomed to DoorDash et al. bringing them meals in takeout containers.

A recent article on Grubstreet, written by food critic Adam Platt, suggests there’s another reason. Yep, it’s the pandemic, but it’s also a question of “relevance and tone.” 

“(With) people struggling all over the city and fashionable tastes veering – as they have been for years – toward three-star tacos, burgers and bowls of ramen, a fancy multi-course menu feels like the opposite of sophistication to a new generation of diners.

“‘All these places try to tell a story,’ an astute young Brooklyn gourmet told me the other day. ‘But in the end, they’re all the same. …I just feel like the world has moved on.”

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Financial gifts.

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A fellow named Brandon, of Rinkydoo Finance, posed this question today on Twitter:

“What’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you financially?”

The expected “parents paid for college” answer popped up a few times. Other responses were things I’d consider not mere kindnesses, but rather enormous advantages:

“Gave us $10k cash for a honeymoon. Loaned us $100k at 3% to refinance my wife’s high-interest student loans.”

“When they purchased my business.”

“Someone anonymously donated $13,500 to my brother’s medical fund when he was battling brain cancer. Never found out who it was. (The number was just under the gift limit for the year so they would not need to file any paperwork with the IRS.)”

Here’s mine: 

When I was a 21-year-old unmarried mom, preparing to move from rural New Jersey to Philadelphia, an acquaintance took me out to lunch. He asked how I could possibly keep the baby and myself alive on my “permanent part-time” salary. So I laid it out for him: I make X dollars an hour, rent and public transit pass are X dollars a month, child care is X dollars a week, I just bought a scrub-board and we’ll eat a lot of beans.

Then I excused myself to the restroom. When I came back, he’d paid for the lunch and said, “Well, I have to be going.” After he hugged me goodbye, he put a slip of paper in my hand. Unfolded, it turned out to be a check for a month’s worth of child care. Immediately I said, “I can’t accept this!  It’s too much!” 

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Missing out on the world.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! This piece originally ran on Sept. 9, 2018. Given how much time we’ve all spent on screens in the past year-plus, and given that the Delta variant might send us all back into lockdown, I thought the points in this post bore repeating.)

Nature Valley Canada recently asked three generations of families about how kids have fun. Grandparents and parents were asked what they liked to do when they were young. The third generation was asked, “What do you, a kid, like to do for fun?”

The grandparents and parents cited fishing, fort-building, gardening, berry-picking and other pastimes, smiling fondly as they recalled these simple pleasures. Their expressions changed as they listened to the answers from today’s crop of children.

Texting and e-mail. Video games. Binge-watching TV shows. A couple of girls, who looked no older than 10, noted they spend three to four hours a day texting and sending e-mails.

“I would die if I didn’t have my tablet,” one of them said.

A boy said that his video games are so engrossing that the real world disappears. He forgets his parents, his sibling, even his dog.

One child said that whenever he gets upset, he starts playing video games until he feels “normal.” Another boy said he can play for five hours in a row. Another mentioned having watched 23 episodes of a TV series in less than four days

A saddened parent responded in this way: “I actually feel a little sad, because I feel like he’s missing out on what’s out there in the beautiful world.”

Ditto. 

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34 discarded dimes.

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Recently I waited a long time at the supermarket, staring fixedly at the front of the store as the line inched along. That’s because an optometrist once told me to focus on things 20 or 30 feet away from time to time, as an antidote to all the screen work I do.

Thus I ignored the Kindle app* on my phone and focused on the Coinstar machine. In part that was because a big green rectangle is an easy thing on which to focus. It was also in pleasurable anticipation of stopping by that machine after I checked out.

As regular readers know, I glean lost coins in stores, on sidewalks, from vending machine change-return slots and, yes, from Coinstar machines.

These machines will spit out dented or otherwise compromised specie, as well as foreign coins. I’ve also found they’ll spit out U.S. coins if they’re too light to be recognized.

Which is what had happened: The rejected-coins cup was full of what looked like dimes. No other coins; just 34 dimes, all issued between 1946 and 1964. I e-mailed my PF blogging pal J. Money**, who’s also a numismatist with a site called Coin Thrill. Turns out these dimes are so common that they’re not worth much to collectors unless they’re uncirculated.

These were circulated. Very circulated. However, their condition doesn’t matter when it comes to melt value. 

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“Nomadland”: An elegy.

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From my first glimpse of the “Nomadland” trailer, I knew that pandemic or not, I would eventually see this movie. For starters, I’ll see anything Frances McDormand is in. The actor is a marvel of nuance. I have loved her work since “Blood Simple.”

Besides, the topic – people imperiled by the Great Recession – is one that I’d written about over and over for MSN Money. I was curious as to whether a director could truly capture that, rather than paper it over with a requisite Hollywood resolution.

Thankfully, director Chloe Zhao didn’t slap on a typical amor vincit omnia verdict – or even a happy ending as such. “Nomadland” represents  everyday life for a lot of people, whether they live on the road or not.

Working as many hours as they can get at whatever job will have them. Wondering whether the money will hold out. Hoping no one gets sick. Banding together with others who are living the same kinds of lives, and supporting one another insofar as it’s possible.

The film moves at a measured, almost mournful pace. In a sense, “Nomadland” is an elegy: not for the American Dream as such, but for the notion that any working person can ever truly be safe.

The fact that some real-life nomads play themselves in the movie is a case in point. It’s doubtful any of them ever thought, “Say, you know what would be cool? Losing everything and having to shovel sugar beets for minimum wage while living in a van in my 60s!” 

 

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Some frugal Christmas parodies.

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(Happy Throwback Tuesday! Yes, I know it’s supposed to be Throwback Thursday, but my sandbox, my rules. This article originally ran on Dec. 23, 2017. Get ready to sing along!)

This close to the holiday I’m still feeling the pull to buy, buy, buy. Even though we don’t have a television to deliver marketing copy six times per hour, consumerism creeps into our lives in other ways:

Ads on the classical music station (fun fact: a local shop packed and shipped more than 10 tons of Alaska king crab last Christmas).

Displays of holiday foods and gifts at the supermarket and drugstore.

Signs outside other stores.

Christmas decorations at restaurants and my neighbors’ homes.

Never mind that everyone on my list has been bought for and that all the gifts have been wrapped and either mailed or delivered. I still feel that I haven’t bought enough. That somehow I should be giving lots more. That maybe tomorrow on my way to a friend’s house I could just stop in somewhere and…

Noooope, as Lana would say on “Archer.” So I decided to banish those thoughts with humor.

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My first virtual funeral.

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It happened one week after my first Zoom farewell. Dad’s funeral took place today at 10 a.m. Eastern (6 a.m. Alaska time), with a family viewing starting at 9 a.m. My sister-in-law called me via FaceTime so that my niece and I could attend.

In fact, she called at 5:45 a.m. so that we could attend the viewing as well. Obviously itwas painful and jarring to see Dad in his coffin. Yet it was actually an improvement over the last time I’d seen him, unconscious and on a ventilator. He looked the way I expected him to look: recognizable as my father, yet not much like him. There, but not there.

My niece and I were also there, but not there, thanks be to technology. I’m not being sarcastic. It was hard, of course, and we cried, but we also got to be part of this ritual from afar. Funerals aren’t actually for the dead. They’re for the living. The dead don’t much care what you do to them. The grieving survivors, however, need some kind of ceremony to come to terms with the reality in front of them.

It was of course surreal to hear the eulogy from 4,300-plus miles away. And it was heart-wrenching to see family photos displayed: Dad as a kid with his siblings, as a teenager with his brand-new ham radio set, as a high-school senior at the prom with my mother (both of them looking sophisticated yet impossibly young, like children playing dress-up), as a father of young kids (us) and then as a father of adult kids.

Dad with dance friends. Dad standing out in front of his Christmas-tree farm. Dad at his wedding to Priscilla.

And nearby, Dad in his final repose. Watching Priscilla kiss him goodbye and gently tuck a light blanket around him brought me to my knees: I will never see my Dad again in this life.

 

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Goodbye, too soon.

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How quickly one’s world can change. Last Wednesday my father had a fairly comfortable night’s sleep at Cooper University Hospital. But early Thursday morning I got the call no one wants to receive.

I am heartbroken to report that Dad died at 5:09 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, Nov. 5, after nine days of hospitalization with COVID.

As I write this it has been fewer than 48 hours since he left us. It seems like centuries.

That call was from my sister, telling me that organ failure had set in and Dad would soon be removed from the ventilator, per his stated request. Before that, the hospital was willing to arrange a “Zoom farewell,” a particularly modern invention. Because of the COVID protocol, no one could visit. But we could dial in on our phones, laptops or tablets.

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All Souls’ Day, with refreshments.

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(Note: I originally put this up as a Facebook photo and post. Because of the reactions, I decided to expand it a bit and post here for those who don’t do social media.)

Monday being All Souls’ Day, my partner constructed his usual altar to the memory of dead relatives. It’s hard to make out the details in the picture above, but in addition to photographs, a rosary, Mass cards and newspaper obituaries, there’s also a shot glass of whiskey, a cup of coffee, a glass of water, a pipe full of tobacco and a candy bar.

(The framed photo at the top left is of my mother, at age 11 or 12.)

Shortly after I took this picture DF added a Mexican Coca-Cola for Great-Great Grandma Myrt, who hated coffee but adored Coke. It had to be a Mexican Coke because those are made with sugar rather than the high-fructose corn syrup that U.S. bottlers use.

His 4-year-old granddaughter, whom I’ll call “Daisy” to protect her privacy, visited for a short time that morning. A child prone to wild flights of fancy – mostly in a good way – she was immediately fascinated by the idea of “the ancestors.” Possibly that’s because she’s a big fan of the animated film, “Coco,” which features the Mexican celebration of El Día de los Muertos.

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Monday miscellany: Murder houses.

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Want to pay less for real estate? Look for a place where someone died.

Myles Ma of Policy Genius has written an engaging piece called “How death can haunt (or help) your house hunt.” According to one of his sources, you can expect a 10 to 25 percent discount a house where someone died.

Morbid? Yeah, a little. That is, if you can actually find out what happened there. In 32 states you don’t have to disclose such information; in 15, you have to disclose if the buyer asks. The toughest laws are in California (death within past three years) and South Dakota and Alaska (one year prior).

It doesn’t have to be murder, incidentally. Some people just want to know if a person breathed his last in a place they’re thinking of buying.

One of the most geekily fascinating parts of the article has to do with the so-called “Murder House” – a Los Angeles manse where a season of the television program “American Horror Story” was filmed. The folks who bought the place are suing the realtors for allegedly not telling them that some creepy fans of that very creepy TV show known to, um, haunt the place. Some of them sleep just outside the property line and others have frequently trespassed to the point of actually trying to get into the house. Yikes.

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