A Thing of Beauty

Last weekend was the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) in Indianapolis. It was my first time being there since 2019 as PASIC 2020 was canceled and I did not go with Warren in 2021. In past years, I have enthusiastically attended a number of the sessions and performances; this year, not so much. I still have Covid concerns, which I will always have with my compromised immune system and, not surprisingly, I was very uncomfortable being in a large-attendance setting. Even without the Covid concerns, I have not socialized for so long "in a crowd" that I seem to have lost some of that skill set. So I was off-kilter for most of PASIC. 

As a non-percussionist, I often drifted through the Exhibitors Hall in years past, looking at all the shiny cymbals and drums and such. I did some of that this year, especially at times when crowds inside the Hall were down because attendees were busy elsewhere. Still lots of shiny objects: fun to look at, of no use whatsoever to me. On the second day, Warren and I roamed through the Hall together, then he went on to a session. I read for a while in a remote lounge then wandered back into the Hall, looking at a few things, talking to some old friends.

And then I found the Turkish crescent that Cooperman Company was exhibiting in its booth. I had not noticed it on my first pass through the Hall, but I noticed it this time. I did not even know what it was called, but I was drawn to it immediately. It was about six feet tall, a tall, slim wooden rod with a crescent on top and then some saucers (my word) with bells hanging on the rim, and a trombone bell and another instrument bell (a trumpet, possible) below that, with more bells hanging off of them. It was brass, it was shiny, and I wanted nothing more than to take it home and put it in the garden (which would be heresy of the highest degree and destroy the instrument in the course of a season).

That's the Turkish Crescent leaning against a support, its top splitting the "d" and "e" of the sign behind it.

I struck up a conversation with one of the booth's attendants, an older man who saw me eyeing it. He explained what it was was, how it was used historically (with Turkish Janissary bands in battle) and in classical music (Mozart and Berlioz, among others). "We could make you one," he said, smiling. "We have one behind the curtain that someone is picking up at this convention. But we could sell you this one."

How much? $3500. But if I bought that one and took it, I wouldn't have shipping expenses (a not inconsequential factor when it comes to shipping percussion instruments because of their sizes, weights, and special needs). 

 I started laughing. "I live on a small retirement pension." 

The gentleman didn't miss a beat. "Eating is overrated." And then we both laughed as I walked away, looking back once over my shoulder at that thing of beauty and joy for ever. (Note: yes, Keats spelled it "for ever" (split) in Endymion. I checked.)

But the Turkish crescent stuck with me in a weird way. Not in my window shopping an exotic instrument. Not in my inquiring how much. No, my weird experience was I spent the next 30 minutes debating myself about buying that Turkish crescent, rationalizing that I could take the money from an account I have that was funded by a bequest from a former beloved client and friend. I went between "I know she would have wanted me to buy something that gave me so much pleasure" and (having known the client and her fiscal habits very well) "I know she would roll over in her grave at the thought of my spending that much money on something of no use to me whatsoever." 

I was still arguing with myself when I met up with Warren coming out of a session. When I told him of the instrument, he at once volunteered that he could make one. (My husband's side business is he is a custom percussion instrument builder, with highly prized skills.) No! I didn't want just any Turkish crescent. I wanted THAT Turkish crescent. 

I got a little teary. And then I let out a huge breath and said, truthfully, "There's no way I am buying it. I just can't spend that kind of money on something I would never use." (And Warren immediately pointed out that the Turkish crescent on display would rot in the garden.)

Warren suggested we walk over and look at it again. He is the one who took the above photo, which I refused to be in. (Although I had made my decision, it still brought out my worst inner toddler: "If I can't have it, I don't want to stand by it.")

But once he shot the photo, I let go of it. It was just another pretty, shiny, way cool object in Percussion Universe, and I was fine leaving it behind.

But I still think it would look way cool in the garden. Indeed a thing of beauty, albeit a joy for only a season.

Long Time Passing

 I knew it had been a long time since I had posted, but I didn't realize it had been that long.

Lots to say, lots to share, but not yet. Not because I am being coy, but because the tsunami of school attendance mediations has not yet finished. The run-up has been extensive due to the devastation the pandemic has wrought on our families. The five of us who make up the Juvenile Court school team are exhausted; after today we are in the 4th quarter for the 2020-2021 year. 

Yes, we are counting weeks (10). And days (48).

I hope to be writing more regularly come later spring. About money, about retirement, about my family out west (no, even with the vaccinations, we cannot travel safely because of my overarching cancer status), about baking, about...everything.

For now, here are some loaves I made last night. The recipe still needs tweaked; it came from King Arthur Flour and you can find it here.

Catch you all later.

Last night's baking

Food Spending in December

Well, was that a year or what?

And I'm just talking about groceries.

Way back in the old, pre-pandemic days, I set a goal of our spending $180.00 a month in 2020 on groceries, including household items such as detergent and toilet paper.

That seemed reasonable. More than reasonable. That was a little higher than the $175.00/month we'd been overshooting, and not that far off of what we averaged in 2019.

Easy peasy. 

Well, okay, we overshot that amount the second month in, but I was pretty sure we could rein our spending in and go through the year hovering around $180.00.

Excuse me while I roll on the floor laughing.

I just finished tallying our December grocery purchases. Food? $278.39. Household? $7.99. Grand total? $286.38.

I can explain some of the December spike. Meijer (a Midwest grocery chain) had a great pre-holiday sale on smoked, spiral-sliced hams. We bought two, making one for Christmas and freezing one for later. That was about $20.00 right there. Towards the end of the month, Kroger had fresh salmon on sale. That was another $40.00. (Yes, we have a lot of meat right now in our freezer!) I bake a lot of almond biscotti in December, and this year baked other cookies as well for the musicians performing in the remote  holiday concert. Baking supplies on one outing ran over $26.00. And that doesn't count the almost $14.00 spent (again at Kroger) after the holidays when we discovered that Kroger had discounted much of the extra supplies it brought it for holiday baking: coconut, semi-sweet chocolate chips, semi-sweet Baker's chocolate. 

So, yeah, it added up. And, to be fair, we have a lot of items that will carry us through January.  (Heck, on the meat front, since we only eat meat a few times a week, we can probably go until June or later.)

Monthly average for 2020 when all was said and done? $237.12, or about $58.00 a month over what I had originally thought was reasonable. But that original figure did not take into account the pandemic. Food costs did rise around here. Meat rose, at times sharply. I'm glad we don't eat a lot of it. At different times of the year, eggs, milk, and some produce all rose. So maybe our final result was par for the course compared with other friends.

I will note there was one (one!) eating out expense in December, 2020. I had infusion later in the day than normal in December. My infusion day, not counting travel, runs about five and a half hours from the moment I check in; travel adds another hour plus to the day. So coming home late in the afternoon, tired, worn out, and hungry. (I don't eat at infusion; since the Covid restrictions went into effect, it is more challenging for me to deal with eating and drinking.) There is a KFC right at the highway interchange just as we turn onto the last stretch of highway to Delaware. I'd already told Warren: turn in there. It was a superb way to spend $11.35.

I'm still mulling over what approach to take in 2021. Set a new goal? Just go with the flow? Something else?  I think it is very important coming into this year to watch the grocery figure as I will explain in a post I hope to have by next week. 

But this is enough for now. The 2020 spending on food is in the books. Let's see what 2021 brings.

Last Comment on 2020

 Oh, I have posts to come: December food expenses, looking back at 2020, looking ahead to 2021, but I couldn't let 2020 slide away without one last photo for a most mixed up, godawful, WTF year ever.

If and when I am out walking and see a coin on the ground, I pick it up. This year, I picked up a total of 61¢, all but 7¢ of which was picked up BEFORE mid-March. There are several reasons for that date, the top one being that change disappeared from stores and people stopped carrying coins around. However, in the last three weeks, I found two pennies and one nickel.

The nickel sums up 2020 better than any quote or any meme. Is this how we all feel about 2020 or what? 

Here's to 2021, everyone. May it treat us all more kindly than 2020. 

A Different Holiday Season

Who didn't have a different holiday season this year? 

Okay, Hanukkah was pretty much the same. Eight nights of lighting candles is always something I look forward to, and this year I used that time to read and reflect. I put my menorahs on a small table in our front window, watching out, as JewBelong reminds us, for the curtains and for anti-Semites. So far, so good. 

 The last night I didn't get the candles lit until late (because I had Poetry Group earlier), so they burned long into the evening. I own three menorahs and light them all, so there was a lot of light:

The last night

Christmas was a whole different experience this year. Normally, December is a rush of holiday concerts and performances for Warren, but in the pandemic world, live music is on hold indefinitely. That alone made December feel different. For example, we typically put off buying a Christmas tree until after the last performance (which would have been December 21 at the earliest); this year, we bought one out of sequence in part because there was no sequence and in part because, in Ohio at least, there were localized runs on trees, with various vendors selling out. We did get a tree. It stayed on our porch for several days until a windstorm made that a losing proposition, then it stood unadorned and unlit in our living room until, well, about the 21st. 

It wasn't for lack of enthusiasm; it was for lack of time and...time. Among other things, Warren was producing the first live (as in prerecorded concert) by the Symphony for the Symphony's Holiday Concert. (There had been an earlier prerecorded concert, produced and shot by the Farm Bureau for the annual Benefit in the Barn fundraiser; this one was solely a Symphony production.) Until it went live on Facebook on December 20, it consumed a lot of energy and time in this household. Want to see it? Here it is:

Actually, we had two trees this year. The first was a pine tree, the one I just wrote about. The second was a sculpture that we had bought back in January, in one of our Mayo cross country jaunts (the last of 2020, unbeknownst to us at the time). It sat outside all summer, but came in for the winter and Warren thought it would make a great tree. 

It did. And yes, that is a trout in the upper circle on the right. 

A tradition Warren and I started our very first Christmas is buying a special "us" ornament. We label these and keep them in a separate box. Over the years, we started buying an ornament from somewhere we had traveled that year as our "us"ornament, then expanded that to buying "us" ornaments from all of our trips in any year. So, for example, here is our 2012 ornament from Whitefish Point when we went to Lake Superior that year:

But guess what? We scrubbed all of our 2020 travel plans because of the pandemic. Other than the trip to Rochester for Mayo and Warren's Midwinter Conference in NY, both in January pre-pandemic, we went nowhere. 

Nowhere. Not Minneapolis (for the 2020 League of American Orchestras conference, which went virtual), not Rockland, Maine (to see our friends David and Vince in their retirement home), not to Indianapolis (for PASIC 2020, which went virtual) and, the hardest of all, not to Portland/Vancouver to be with our family out there. 

Not a single place. And although in the early years we bought an ornament unrelated to travel (that started in 2010), neither of us were going into a store just days before Christmas. And it wouldn't be the same, frankly.

I'm the one who solved the 2020 dilemma, shortly after Warren set up the second "tree." We still had the price tag from that sculpture, and, well, that was a 2020 trip:

(For the record, we paid $50.00, not $75.00, for our piece. I would also note that the sculptor is Tom Nelson, no relation.)

For such a screwy year, it is a perfectly heartfelt reminder of what 2020 held. 

We didn't hang a lot of ornaments this year. Our "us" ones, some others that held special meaning or just felt "right," three wood flowers that Mona, my grandchildren's beloved Nana, had each of them paint and then sent to me earlier this year:

Orlando's efforts

And one more. 

A very special one. 

Earlier this year, my good friend David (the one in Maine) announced that there would be "21 Days of Just David," and he would send me something by mail for 21 days. Sometimes it was a postcard. Sometimes it was a bumpersticker. Sometimes it was a heartfelt letter. Sometimes it was dirt. (There's a story behind that too.) One of the packages arrived much later (he had warned me) and turned out to be an ornament of Frodo Baggins as played by Elijah Wood in the movies "The Lord of the Rings." 

Seriously. David had found someone on line in Canada who turned these out:

Why? David, Vince, and I together watched each of the three "Lord of the Rings" movies when each was released and all of us made fun of the agonizing faces Wood made as Frodo. That was 12+ hours of Frodo agonizing over every single breath he took, mind you. It became a running joke over the years between us. Here, for example, is David being Frodo as he does dishes:

Frodo/David agonizing over the dishes

You get the point. 

Of course the Frodo ornament had to go on the tree. I went running upstairs to my study to grab him and bring him down. 

There is a quote from the final movie on the back of this ornament and I teased David that the first sentence (minus the "Sam") would be my response to inane questions for the remainder of 2020:

May 2021 be brighter for us all. 

Observations (Albeit Late) About November Spending

 

I know, we are deep into December. I have had November numbers available since, well, since the end of November. But the last three weeks have held more so much on all fronts that posting about November held on the food front has been beyond me.

So here is a very belated report.

November was a disaster if I look at my 2020 goal of holding food/household spending to $180.00 a month. An absolute disaster. (Note: Many, many goals of 2020 went by the wayside this year. I'll be writing about that later this month.) In fact, November was such a disaster on the money front that it has made me rethink how to approach our food spending heading into 2021 (again, a topic for later this month or early January). 

So how much of a disaster? $300.64 on food; $44.71 in household items (toilet paper, detergent). Grand total? $345.53.

I can't even begin to account for all of that. Some of it was stocking up. Some of it was buying baking supplies. Our garden did finally come to an end after snow, but we didn't buy whopping amounts of lettuce to make up for that loss. None of it, alas, was lobster, rack of lamb, caviar, or other such items. 

Year-to-date: $2559.06. Monthly average for 2020: $233.64. 

As I noted last month, even with a month like November, both our November spending and our year-to-date averages still come in lower than the USDA "thrifty plan" for a two-adult household in our age bracket. I won't wring my hands over November's dollars but, as I noted, it is food for thought, no pun intended.

This Week

 This entry will be short.

It has been a long, hard week. My mother—our mother, counting my two brothers—died Sunday after a long, weary, draining (on her, on my father, on all of us) struggle with dementia. 

Add to that a workload, both at Court and in the volunteer arena, that has skyrocketed courtesy of the pandemic. The stories I am hearing range from matter-of-fact to heartbreaking and are only going to get worse as the pandemic and its economic fallout deepen. My two coworkers in the mediation department are also swamped, which is why I held mediation for two and a half hours the morning of my mother's afternoon graveside service. 

I am exhausted. Today in trying to schedule a mediation while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues at Court and at our high school, I stopped and said, "What day is this? What day are we looking at?" One of the participants kindly said, "It's Friday the 4th, April." Thank you.

One small note and then I will close. While working today, I heard a knock at the front door. When I went to look outside, a delivery person was holding a flower arrangement in her hands. "April Nelson?" Yes. She set the container down on the porch and left.

The arrangement was a vase of yellow roses, my mother's favorite flower. My dad had a spray of them on her casket at the service. I knew it had to come from someone who knew my mom well. I was right; it was from a lifelong friend, Mary Lou, whose daughter Cindy has been my friend my entire life.

And that is a wonderful note to end this long week on. 

Observations About October Money

As I predicted in my post about our September food spending, October's expenditures were indeed higher. We ended up spending $226.83 on food last month, with an additional $12.83 spent in household items. That brought our October total to $239.66 and our year-to-date average to $221.35.

There were some food purchases in October that were worth the extra pennies. We bought bacon—regionally raised and locally cured by a farm family now in its 4th generation of small scale, high quality pork production—and at $9.99/pound, it was worth every tasty, savory, hickory-smoked bite. That was a little over $21.00 of our food purchases there. And there was another $24.00 at a local orchard: culled apples to peel and freeze for apple pies and locally pressed apple cider that was the best apple cider I have had in decades. It was a luxury at almost double the going cost of commercial cider and one that we savored over three weeks, stretching out that deliciousness for as long as we could.

The cost of local food is one of those knotty issues that, gratefully, we are privileged enough to be able to sidestep. The locally grown food is far superior to what I can buy in a grocery. The dollars go directly to the grower—the orchardists in the one case, the pork producers in the other—so the money stays in the community. But if we were hurting financially with a severely limited income or job losses, the bacon and the cider and apples would be far beyond our reach. If we were not in dire straits but still on a tighter budget, I would have to choose between supporting our local agricultural community or being able to buy cheaper food. 

On the home front, our garden is done for 2020. A hard frost a few days caught the remaining cherry tomatoes, which were not ripening very much outside and would not ripen inside. The Bibb lettuce that flowered earlier in the summer reseeded itself and came up, providing us with some October/early November salads, but it was soured a little by the frost and is showing signs of wear and tear. I still had four cherry tomatoes, not very flavorful, and after putting them on a salad earlier this week, I bid goodbye to tomatoes until next June. 

Another knock to my conscience was seeing a recent reference to the USDA's monthly food reports. Call me a nerd, but I am fascinated what the official word is about food costs. The USDA presents four plans: thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. The fine print at the bottom of each report spells out the foundations for the reports, including that "all meals and snacks are prepared at home." Other than exceptions for living in Hawaii and Alaska, where food costs bear little resemblance to the other 48 states, there are no other differentiations, such as dietary restrictions. 

Under the September 2020 report, the most current one, the thrifty monthly plan for two adults ages 51-70 is $381.90. Right now Warren and I are cruising well under that level. I'm okay with that.

I will share that for the first time in MONTHS, we had not one but two (TWO!) eating out (well, carry-out) experiences. The first was when we bought the bacon at Mom Wilson's, the local source of the best bacon ever. They also sell pulled pork sandwiches and we bought one to take home, splurging on the $8.00 "combo," which netted us chips and a huge dill pickle. Splitting it, we celebrated our 12th anniversary earlier this month. The second came when driving home after my infusion last week. Infusion days start with breakfast at about 5:30 a.m. and end with my getting back home and eating lunch around 1:30 p.m. When Warren picked me up to head home, he mentioned that the power was out when he left. All I could think of was I was tired, I was groggy from my meds, and I wanted food. Warm food. Tasty food. $15.12 later, we pulled out of White Castle with a bag of sliders, onion chips, and milkshakes. Money well spent on a long, hard day.

Eating the White Castle food brought back an old memory of the Minority Law Students Association (MLSA) at the law school I attended 40 years ago. The MLSA was holding a potluck gathering to kick off the year and I was there with my then husband, who belonged to the MLSA. Students were encouraged to bring a favorite ethnic dish from their family. We brought a Cuban dish. Some of the Filipino students brought rice dishes. An African-American student from Chicago walked in with a grocery sack and commandeered the stove and a frying pan. Chopped onions and little square hamburger patties went into the pan, while he set out small buns and a jar of dill pickle slices on the counter. By the time he placed the buns on top of the patties and put a lid on the pan to steam them, everyone had gathered around trying to guess his contribution. "White Castle!," I shouted and the student whirled around with a grin on his face. He pointed he spatula at me and said, one Midwesterner to another, "The best, right?"

Yes, they were. And sometimes still are.

On to November.

Observations about September Money

I see that in writing about my August food expenditures, I did not even make predictions about September. 

As it turns out, September food dollars came in under the $180.00/month I set so optimistically back in the start of this year. How much under? A lot. Total dollars spent were $151.38, all on food. I think this is the first month ever we have not made any expenditures for common household items. 

Year-to-date average? $219.32. I've done the math. There is no way we will average $180.00 a month for the year with only three months remaining. As I have observed before, the pandemic threw monkey wrenches in our grocery buying that I could not have predicted. 

I will add that we had an eating out expenditure in September, the first in months! Two scoops of Graeter's ice cream (a regional ice cream chain). I had lemon sorbet; I don't remember what Warren ordered. Why ice cream out of the blue? Because I needed dry ice to ship blood (don't even ask and no, I did not ship blood after all was said and done) and every Graeter's sells dry ice for $1.75 a pound. Since we had to be there to buy the dry ice, why not treat ourselves as well? 

That lemon sorbet was absolutely delicious.

The garden continues to putter along. I predicted last month that we would likely have zucchini until the first hard frost. Nope. Most of the plants started dying of old age in mid-September and I yanked all but one out. That one had a few potential zucchini at the time. I picked one (and gave it to an out of town friend) and left the other, which never developed into anything more than a twisted and skimpy squash, so I let it go. We have about 35 quarts of sliced zucchini in the freezer, and several packets of grated for baking, so with all we ate or baked fresh or gave away, I can't complain about the zucchini being done for the year. I am still picking tomatoes, albeit at a very slow rate. They are reluctant to ripen in the waning sun, preferring instead to go soft. 

The last zucchini

I am also restocked in both cinnamon and canned pumpkin, whatever that shortage was about. 

Even though we are early in October, I see that the food dollars will likely be higher. We did a major restocking at Aldi a few days ago, and with the limited other purchases we have already made, we are closing in fast on the September figure, let alone the $180.00 goal. 

Let's see what the month brings. 

Observations About August Money: Up Again

Blame it on the maple syrup.

We're not big maple syrup consumers. We only use it on pancakes, and maybe, maybe, I make pancakes once every five or six weeks. 

Maybe.

The large jug of Ohio maple syrup that a good friend gave me for my birthday three or four years ago lasted a long time. But all good things come to an end, and that includes maple syrup. After years of pure maple syrup, I was not going back to "pancake syrup with real maple flavoring." 

One jug of maple syrup: $17.00. 

August in Ohio is when sweet corn hits the market or, in our case, the parking lot. A friend from my high school years (we were in 4-H together almost a half century ago) posted on Facebook two weeks ago that they had just picked 40 dozen ears of sweet corn and would be selling it out of the the truck at a small shopping plaza that morning.

Three dozen ears: $12.00.

Two weeks later, just Monday in fact, she posted that they had just picked the grandchildren's corn. 

Another three dozen ears: another $12.00.

So right there is $41.00 of food purchases which are either extremely seasonal (the corn) or extremely rare (maple syrup). The corn amortized over a year comes to $2.00 a month. The maple syrup, amortized over two years, comes to 71¢ a month. (It's even cheaper over three years!) I can live with that kind of extravagance. 

By the time I add up all the food purchases ($235.60) and add in the household items ($18.06), we spent a whopping $253.66 in August. Some of those food dollars included some larger ticket items (olive oil, coconut oil), which, like the maple syrup, will not need replaced for  several months, but it is what it is. 

For the year, we are averaging $227.81 a month. 

Not what I had hoped for after a low-spend July, but pretty much what I have predicted for Covid-19 shopping. One high month (only one, I hope), one low month, repeat. It is interesting to see what gaps appear at the market. Canned pumpkin is almost nonexistent. So, apparently, are canned beets according to my good friend Margo, but given that I have made zero purchases of canned beets in my life, that one doesn't impact me. Ground cinnamon is hard to find at times. Fruit has stayed high, even summer melons. (I'm hoping the fall apple harvest will help bring down those prices.) On the other hand, there will be LOTS of zucchini and corn to eat all winter long in this household. Looking at my garden, I predict the zucchini will go on merrily until we get a hard frost. 

A few years back, a reader commented, somewhat kindly, somewhat tongue in cheek, that maybe I was a tad obsessed about tracking my food purchases and maybe I just needed to lighten up. Clearly I ignored that advice as I have gone on tracking our purchases ever since. Loooking ahead to 2021, when I will be retiring, not drawing social security right away, and living on a greatly reduced monthly income, watching these food dollars will become critical. So I do not regret the tracking. 

I'm not even making predictions for September...

A Longer Commentary on August

Yesterday's post was not a teaser. Truly. It was the best I could do after almost an hour of staring at a blank screen. 

Last night Warren and I talked about many things, as we so often do: how his day went, how my day went, Court issues, Symphony issues, what the weekend holds. You get the idea. (Yes, our offices are only about five yards apart, but there are days where we can spin off into our programs and meetings, not reemerging until supper.) 

For the curious, the weekend looks a lot like the week, except that I do not turn to Court work at all, and Warren tries to minimize Symphony work. Warren works in his shop; I do laundry and read. Our at-home weekends never fail to disappoint my close friend Cindy, who often starts her Monday email to me with asking me about my weekend, this past week asked "Did you do anything FUN over the weekend?" Keeping within our Covid-19 restrictions in this state, she buys feed, buys groceries, shops at Goodwill, and sometimes eats out during her weekends. When I pointed out that I am still pretty much on medical lockdown, she emailed back that I "must be" getting restless by now and ready to GO DO SOMETHING.

Not really. The one thing I really wanted to do—travel west to my family and then northeast to friends in Maine—got scrubbed months ago. Those trips aren't coming back this year and I have made peace with that. But otherwise, while I would like matters to be different, I am more than satisfied with my stay-at-home life. I have not been in my office at Court for over five months; all of us have had to learn new ways to do our old jobs. Life rolls on. 

As I mentioned yesterday, August has held some hard times. A close friend/colleague had a serious medical crisis erupt in her family and that hurt both professionally, because we had to work around her absence and the uncertainty of her return, and personally, because we are such good friends. The major medical crisis started to resolve positively when she found herself in ER. None of this was Covid-19, for which all of us are grateful. Other close friends are dealing with the death of a beloved dog. Someone else near and dear to my heart is struggling with major depression. There are some family stressors (larger family, not me and Warren) going on. In none of these situations can I show up and hug the person, which is what I want to do. I can only talk on the phone or text or send wishes into the air for them.

August has been heavy at times.

But the rest has been good. Today was the livestream funeral mass of a longtime friend and colleague who died back in the winter; watching that brought back wonderful memories even while I cried. I had a wonderful, uplifting long phone call with a young friend who is headed back to college for a career change and our talk reminded me of the joy and power of direction. Our Legal Clinic continues to operate virtually; I am the volunteer who assigns the attorneys so I have firsthand knowledge of who we are serving and how our attorneys are providing these people hope and advice and direction. The Symphony participated in its 6th Benefit in the Barn, tackling hunger and food insecurity in our county and one adjoining county. Go here to watch it; that's Warren speaking in the beginning.  Between the Clinic and the Symphony, I am reminded how I am always humbled with the strength of our community. 

And our Poetry Group started meeting again, by Zoom. That was a good thing, because Emily had been sulking. We meet again this Sunday and I can't wait.

Emily D. sulking 

And then there was a surprise this month: a stunning, amazing, never-saw-it-coming-ever surprise. About a week ago I received an email from a name I did not recognize, titled "Uncle Ski." 

Uncle Ski was my uncle, an engaging, wonderful man who died seven years ago. I blogged about him after his death; you can read my words here. So the title on the email was so specific that I thought it was not spam or a phishing attempt, and opened it.

It was a lovely email from someone, a man named Sam, who read my blog post all these years later and reached out to me directly. After thanking me for my words, Sam wrote "I really appreciated reading it because it gave me some perspective on myself."  Then he dropped the bombshell: "Your Uncle Ski was my grandfather." 

I had to catch my breath. I'm still catching it.

Sam and I have exchanged several emails. My stepcousin once removed (his mother was my Uncle Ski's daughter) is a writer and blogger. Imagine that. You can find his blog at All the Biscuits in Georgia. He just saw his oldest son ship off to his first Navy deployment, a fact that would have made Uncle Ski, who served his whole life in the Navy, immensely proud. I have given Sam my dad's phone number and encouraged him to call him; my dad, when I told him what had happened, marveled at the connection, then said, "Oh, I have a lot of stories to tell him about his grandfather." 

You could hear the anticipation in his voice.

Observations about July Money: Maybe We're Getting the Hang of It

So after speculating about our shopping patterns in May and June, and reading comments about pandemic shopping on this blog and elsewhere about what other bloggers were noticing in their own households, I am relieved to report that our July grocery expenditures were $156.61 for food and $19.23 for household items (including name brand parchment paper because no stores have anything but that these days).

The grand total was $175.84, which is the first time since April we have come in under the monthly goal of $180.00. 

Since April. 

We seemed to have finally fallen into a pattern of stocking up the basics as they run low, and filling in here and there when something unexpectedly comes up short. We were doing that before (or so I thought), but it seems there were such gaps in the basics that stocking up to a level we felt comfortable with, even a modest one, took more dollars than we had realized. 

It doesn't hurt that the garden is running full steam these days.  

And maybe there's not a lot more to say on this topic for our July grocery expenses. As the pandemic continues to surround us and we continue to shelter at home, I am grateful for the privilege of having food to eat and a roof to provide that shelter. To borrow from Matchless by Gregory Maguire, "they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world, that is called plenty." 

Some Updates

July is winding its way down and I thought it would be a good time to update some previous posts.

Volume #5 of my commonplace books

That commonplace book I started two weeks ago? The first quote went in on July 16. Francesca Wade, author of the book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, had this beautiful observation about cities, although her comment could apply to many communities:

Cities are composed of roads and buildings, but also of myths and memories: stories which bring the brick and asphalt to life and bind the present to the past.

 

The book was superb, incidentally.

Sourdough doughnuts

I continue to live in a sourdough world, as I first noted in April. Every weekend I feed the starter; every weekend I come up with a different use for the discard. This weekend I made sourdough doughnuts, a repeat from an earlier weekend. I'm still working on the glaze (I want something that hardens better) and I bought a new cooking thermometer because I doubt the veracity of the one I have been using, but they are pretty tasty all the same. 

Some of them went to the family of four who are neighbors on one side, some of them went to the elderly neigbor on the other side, and we ate the rest. Pete (the elderly neighbor) texted to say they were very good; Alice (who is almost 5) came springing across the lawn to say (from a safe distance): "Thank you for the doughnuts, April. They are DELICIOUS!" 

Alice expressing her doughnut delight

On the garden front, after a slow cautious start and then my announcing the first tomato and first zucchini, we have sailed past (way past) keeping track of the harvest. I am slicing and freezing, baking and eating, and will be making tomato sauce in a crock-pot (and then freezing it) for the first time ever. 

Some of the tomatoes. Some. 

And some of the zucchini. Some.

We harvested the cabbage, which went from tiny starts to behemoths. One we know tipped the scales at 5 pounds, 10 ounces, because our neighbors (Alice's parents) weighed the one we gave them. Another huge one went to Warren's daughter, Elizabeth, for ham and cabbage soup, and we kept the two "smaller" ones.

Three of the four. Note the tomatoes photobombing the shot.

We continue to shelter in place, with both of us still working from home. It suits us both well most of the days. Warren and I have had workday lunches together more in the last 4+ mounths than the last twelve years...and for the last nine of those years we have worked within two blocks of each other's offices! 

Stay tuned. August is closing in fast. 

Observations about June Money and Pandemic Groceries in General

Back in early June, looking at our May groceries expenditures, I made the optimistic observations that our June expenditures would "drop off precipitously." 

Pardon me while I roll on the floor in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. 

Okay, let me add this clarification: our June expenditures would have come in below the $180.00 monthly target (at $169.18) had we not done a stock-up shopping through Aldi on June 25. Cost of that (all food, no household items)? $115.37. Total June expenditures? $284.55, of which $25.00 represented household items and the rest food. 

Year-to-date monthly average? $232.17.

Yeah.

So what was that end-of-the-month Aldi purchase all about? It was about the latest pandemic numbers nationwide and in Ohio, and our realization that we probably need to hunker back down in our household with as little going to stores, even including getting groceries delivered, as possible. Warren and I did a survey of our freezer, cabinets, and pantry, made a "stocking up again" shopping list, and, $115.37 later, considered ourselves stocked. (Well, except for the July 1 complete-stocking-up at Kroger. So now we consider ourselves stocked.)  

Musing on pandemic grocery shopping, that may be the way this year goes. I wrote as much in May, but was more optimistic in predicting the pattern would be alternating lean month, heavy spending month. Instead, looking at my year-to-date figures, the pattern seems to be two heavy spending months, followed by a lean month. 

I want to make a prediction for July, but my crystal ball, faulty at its best, has indeed gone dark. It should be a lean month per my last paragraph, but at only three days into it, who knows? 

On the bright side, the Hej garden has taken off with a flourish and there are blossoms on the zucchini as I discovered when we went to water it this morning. No ripe tomatoes yet, but we're getting close. All the lettuce in the planters has bolted and withered as the summer heat comes on, but the Bibb lettuce is still going strong, and we are eating fresh salads daily while that fortune lasts. 

Onward through July. 

The Hej garden two weeks 

The Hej garden this morning 

Zucchini blossom

Still green

The Bibb lettuce bed 

A Farewell

So here it is June 30, and one half of 2020 is over in another nine hours as I start to type this.

And where are we? Heck, forget "we." Where am I?

I have now been home since March 12, or 110 days. 110 days. I have been working throughout that entire time, so there has been no financial disruption, but 110 days since I last set foot in my office is mind-boggling. In some ways, this reminds me of 15 years ago, when I was preparing for and then undergoing tandem stem cell transplants; I spent a lot of time at home and not in my office (which I would give up later that summer). A difference is that in 2005, what I went through was  personal, and in 2020 we are all going through a deadly pandemic.

Another difference is that in 2005,  I was the one who chose to step away and close my law practice. I chose. I was in control. I have no illusions as to control in this pandemic. There is none. I don't know when I will be allowed to return to my office, even if I were to go in after hours, wearing a mask, not touching anything except the door handles. (Looking at the failure in this country to control COVID-19, I sometimes wonder if instead of "when," I should be writing "if.")

And down the hallway at Symphony Annex North? Warren and his colleagues around the world are watching orchestra after orchestra postpone or scrap their seasons. Each daily briefing from the League of American Orchestras brings another wave of announcements. Major orchestras are furloughing their salaried musicians, furloughing their staff, reexamining how to proceed safely and sensibly in this new world. Warren, his Music Director, and other partners are discussing daily the possible trajectories for our upcoming season. 

In the midst of all this upheaval, I learned that about 20 months ago, Jerry Luedders died. 

Now, if I am just learning that Jerry died, clearly this is not someone I was in close touch with over the years. He and I last communicated by email maybe five, maybe ten years ago after I had stumbled across some reference that made me suddenly think "so where is Jerry these days?" and track him down. We had a friendly "glad to touch base" exchange and that was it. 

I learned he died in a similar fashion. While editing grant material for Warren, the material referenced a saxophone instructor and I suddenly thought of Jerry and went looking for him online. 

And that's when and how I found Jerry had died.

Jerry was the incoming Director of the School of Music at Lewis and Clark College in the fall of 1977, when I was there for the last three quarters of my undergraduate degree. We met because he was directing the Wind Ensemble (band) that fall while the director was on leave, and I joined the ensemble for one quarter because I realized that this would be my last chance ever to play tuba. As it turns out, I was the only tubaist on campus, so he was glad to have me We hit it off immediately as two newcomers, as two outsiders, as two strangers who connected over those other two commonalities. He had just come from Minnesota, I had just arrived from Chicago, and we were at a small, pristine, preppy college before the word "preppy" had even come into vogue. 

Jerry was witty, and deeply knowledgeable about music, and a gifted conductor. He was also a world-class classical saxophonist (which is not an oxymoron). He was openly gay at a time when many people were still in the the closet and his off campus wear ran the gamut from "business casual" to "Let-me-remind-you-who-I-am-and-proud-of-it" leathers. He threw parties at his house high in the Portland Hills, he tooled up and down the hills of Terwilliger Boulevard in a Volvo PV 544, and it was not unheard of for me to be walking on campus and hear him shouting my name. My favorite time was when he ran up behind me yelling "April, you are such a slob!" and grabbed me in a hug. (It was one of the many days I wore a mechanic's shirt, battered jeans, and worn out shoes. Compared to Jerry and most of my fellow students, I was a slob. I would have passed easily and fit in better at Reed College across the river, but Reed had a 6-quarter graduation requirement for transferees, and I didn't want to spend another year in college.)  In the spring of that year, my last quarter, he begged me to come join the orchestra's low brass section for a performance of the overture of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 

How could I say no? That turned out to be the last time I played tuba, and I am forever grateful it was with Jerry on the podium.

I have taken to walking a local labyrinth many mornings (you can read my reflections on that here) and there are days where I think of those dear to me who have died and gone before me. I often murmur a name, followed by "blessed be their memory," a variation of a common Jewish statement of mourning. 

Jerry Luedders, blessed be your memory. 

Jerry Luedders, 1943-2018

Observations About May Money

This pandemic and our grocery spending (because that is about the ONLY spending I am doing these days) continue to be...what? Fascinating? Mind boggling? Head scratching? All of these?

Yeah, all of these. 

After sailing through April with food expenditures well below the monthly $180.00 target I had set months ago, May costs went back up over that. May food costs were $218.52; household (non-food) expenditures were $23.43. The grand total? $242.36. 

That brings our monthly average year-to-date to $221.69.

And, once again, we did not eat out. Ohio has started reopening, and restaurants that can accommodate the mandatory distances are opening, but I have not yet been cleared by my oncologist to go beyond the boundaries of my home for all practical purposes. 

In preparing to write this post, especially in light of last month's revelations about my "twitch," I looked back at the three (yes, three) receipts for groceries in May. Some (a significant portion) of the expenditures consisted of stocking up on food items we routinely use such as coconut oil (my current jar is down to about a week's left), olive oil, and decaf instant coffee (I make chocolate mochas with it at home; I cannot drink caffeinated coffee). Those three items alone came to $14.77. Butter was on sale at Kroger and we spent $6.00 to get three pounds of unsalted as I was running low on it from the stocking up I did last December. (I use the unsalted in baking and there has been a lot of baking lately. A. Lot.) 

And let's talk about the steep rise in the cost of meat. Fortunately, we are not huge meat eaters. I cringe for family and friends who are. Around here, meat is more expensive and, of course, scarcer. So when I looked to order chicken thighs, the store's first response was it had none. By the time we picked up the order the next day, thighs were available, at a higher cost because these were boneless and skinless (the only type available).

So I get why the May expenses were higher. I also suspect that June will drop off precipitously as we eat our way through the items on hand. And maybe this will be the 2020 pattern: high, low, high, low. The good news going forward is that now that I am aware of my twitch, I am much more conscientious about what we order. Placing the second online order in May was stressful as I wrestled with making sure the items were needs and not twitches. (Once I placed the order, the stress dissolved.) When I am allowed back in a grocery, I hope to carry that awareness with me. 

On the gardening front, we are still weeks away from tomatoes. Many of the tomato plants are setting blooms and I am hoping that I will have one by month's end. Time will tell. The zucchini is not cooperating in germinating; I will be replanting that entire garden. (I now have a second garden, courtesy of our backyard neighbors, who have a great plot they never use. Basically, I am sharecropping zucchini this year.) Lettuce is coming along slowly; maybe in a few more weeks we will have lettuce. 

These were hard times before the Minneapolis killing tore even deeper fissures into our country. Our Legal Clinic, which is serving clients remotely, is already seeing its numbers rising and we know the tsunami of evictions and debt-related matters is on its way. I am dealing with personal issues as well, ranging from my health to accepting that I will not be able to travel to the Pacific Northwest this year. As the likelihood of the NW family contingent coming here is also nil, this will be first year since 2013 I have not seen Ramona and company in person. I get it, but it is still a disappointment. So the fact that I managed Tuesday to knock the entire stack of our everyday bowls off the shelf onto the counter and kitchen floor, shattering every last one, seemed somehow a fitting note.

Here's to a better June. 

Observations About April Money

When I wrote about our March food and household expenditures, I noted that we spent larger than normal amounts of money that month and the month before, most of it being related to stocking up on basics and staples. I also breathed the hope that our April spending would be much less.

Well, here it is May Day, although given our weather in Ohio, you'd swear we were in March still, and I have the numbers at hand because guess what? Our spending on food has decreased greatly so I only have a few numbers to add instead of a sheet full of them. And, looking at the decrease in spending, clearly we are looking at what we have around the house rather than jumping in the car to go to the grocery store to get something else (more about that later).

Our April food purchases? $144.56. Household items added up to $6.10, the bulk of that being trash liners for our household, a box which will last into 2021. Total? $150.66. That starts to yank the average YTD down from $238+ to $216+. I might get it down to $180.00/month average yet. We did not eat out (takeout) at all.

The food costs include two large shoppings at Aldi, one in person early in the month by Warren and one online for home delivery later in the month, one key food item when Warren had to get something for his shop at Walmart (What key food item? Kosher salt, a must have and something Aldi does not carry), and, finally, $5.00 to the Symphony for the Hershey's chocolate bars (from February's downtown Chocolate Walk) that I knew were there. The early Aldi shopping included two hams from Aldi at the pre-Easter price of 89¢ a pound. Those are now residing in the freezer and will come into play later on this year.

The most interesting revelation about April spending has been the changes I see in me. Even without the spending spurts in February and March, I now realize exactly what I mentioned above: I have a huge tendency to jump to the grocery store rather than ask myself "so what do we have here?"  Now that I am unable to go to the store and we are both very reluctant to have Warren in a store (because I am in such a high risk group), I find myself being far more thoughtful about food preparation. To borrow from blogger friend Laurie at The Clean Green Homestead, I am using what's on hand.

One item on hand now is sourdough starter, which I use weekly. (Well, I feed it weekly and then use the discard, but that's what sourdough starters are all about: feeding and discarding.) There are a variety of things you can bake with the discard, but my favorite to date has been sourdough brownies.

Sourdough starter (the bubbles show it is active)

But going back to realizing how much I just went to the grocery without thinking: this revelation about my twitchy impulse (to borrow from Anthony Ongaro, the one minimalist I enjoy, really like) caught me off guard. I famously do not shop. Ever. Malls? Nope. Online? Nope. Amazon Prime? Ha. I don't even buy books (very much) anymore. But apparently I was totally open to the call of the grocery store. And while it is likely another month or more before my oncologist lets me even stand near a grocery store, let alone set foot in one, this is a truth about me (that twitch to shop) that I need to be aware of when I finally do enter a grocery.

Despite my optimism in early April about gardening soon, the weather here has stayed colder than I expected for this time of year. We are still having occasional frosts. So there are no beds planted, other than the sprouted onions I planted for the first time ever, most of which seem to have settled in and are growing. I hope the gardening front is entirely different by May's end.

And until then, we'll enjoy the brownies.

Winding Down Another Week in Another World

It has over six weeks since I was in my office at Juvenile Court, six weeks since I was last in a grocery store (well, any store), and almost six weeks since my oncologist put me on lockdown.

It is almost six weeks since Warren closed the Symphony office and moved the base of operations to our home.

And the verdict is?

I'm fine.

We're fine.

The second floor of our house is now home to the Symphony North Annex and one of three satellite offices of the Delaware County Juvenile Court Mediation Department. Warren puts in far longer hours than I do, both because I am only a part-time employee and because even though the Symphony, like every other Symphony in this country (and most in the world at this point), is locked down, there is still work, not the least of which is writing grants and trying to imagine what live music will look like going forward. Never one to waste a good crisis, Warren is making plans and alternative plans for the Symphony's future.

So what does life in a time of shelter-at-home pandemic look like for us?

Well, it's quieter, certainly. I mean that literally. The streets are quieter because car traffic in our town of approximately 40,000 is a sliver of what it was in the beginning of March. Our downtown, our main routes, and even US 23, which slices through just east of downtown and only three blocks from our house, have far fewer vehicles on them. As a result, the birds are now providing a soundtrack to daily life which, for a change, is the main sound, not just background sound.

But life is also figuratively quieter. I don't have to balance work, chores, social obligations, community commitments, whatever. My only for-certain calendar events are our weekly Court Zoom meeting and my oncology appointment with infusion every four weeks. A very occasional webinar might get noted on my calendar, but that is the exception, not the rule. A number of my friends have commented (in letters, in emails, in social media) how much slower life is and how much more satisfying the days often are because the layer of busyness we all live with is removed. (This enforced time of quiet, of less doing, is also providing me observations about my health that are both insightful and troublesome, but that is a topic for another day.)

So, besides working, what else does one do in these strange times? If you are Warren and me, you move by hand and hard work the perennials that you plopped down in the vegetable garden in the fall to winter over before putting them in a flowerbed. These were end-of-season markdowns at a local nursery.

Which season?

Fall 2014, but who's counting?

Warren dug the holes by hand because it is not possible to rent a rototiller from our hardware store right now. I helped lug the dug-up plants around, helped replant them, but all those holes, not to mention digging the flowers up? That was Warren.

Our vegetable garden space (above) has easily doubled. Those perennials—lilies, coneflowers, butterfly weed—had thrived, but were out of hand and took up about 2/3rds of the space. I am looking forward to seeing what we make of the expanded vegetable garden, but that time is still a few weeks away.

This is the new bed, now in the back of our yard.

We will put down a heavy layer of mulch to kill off the grass. This bed makes me smile every single time I look at it. It is my favorite garden for its raggedy spirit and for all the love that went into every one of those holes.

I walked out this morning to check on it and found everything in order. The coneflowers especially have settled in and are thriving.

And so are we.

Observations About March Money

Well, can I call them or what?

When I wrote about this household's February spending, back in mid-March, I predicted that March would be worse. In February, we spent $231 and change on food and household staples, and that was as the COVID-19 issues were just starting to swirl around us in Ohio.

Since my post on March 14, all things related to COVID-19 have only intensified here as our Governor and Director of Health, the who-would-have-thought-it? amazing duo of Mike DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton have taken steps to make sure Ohioans flatten the curve. Warren and I had already bought a lot of staples by mid-March; our last grocery trip that month was March 20, which Warren conducted alone because I was not allowed in stores (or anywhere else) per my oncologist. [Note: I am still not. And I do not expect that to change when I see Tim next Tuesday for infusion.]

March totals? $281.97 in groceries (food items), $23.83 in common household goods. Grand total? $305.80.  Year-to-date average? $238.47, or about $59 a month over my 2020 goal, set back in pre-COVID-19 times, of $180 a month.

Now that is a curve it will be hard to flatten. Oh, our spending will go down, but I'm not sure I can drag that monthly average back down to $180.00. If my math is right, we'd have to hold monthly spending at $160.00 for the rest of the year. Doable? Sure. Will we do it? Remains to be seen.

But it is what it is. We are eating out of the pantry and freezer, we have had only one grocery trip in April (and will likely have one more later in the month), and life goes on.

In a note that makes me smile, our eating out expenses in March were a little higher than you would expect for two people who don't eat out much in a state that is all but shut down. Our total was $31.25. That amount covered meeting a friend for tea in very early March, a quick, late evening meal, also in early March, following a music presentation by Warren in Marion (20 miles north), Warren buying a sandwich for takeout in downtown Delaware when the Symphony office was still open to show support for local restaurants, and a takeout lunch with another local restaurant at month's end to celebrate an important anniversary for us. (Why did we get takeout? It had to be Mexican to tie in with the anniversary.) Eating out this month will probably be...zero.

In the meantime, the weather is finally showing signs that spring is no more than a wild story.  We will be starting our garden soon and, assuming all goes well, we should be eating out of it by early June (at least the lettuces, maybe, I hope, please).

So keep on washing your hands and staying safe. I know we are.

Channeling Grandma

I rinsed out the just emptied spice container and got ready to toss it. (As a 5, it is not a recyclable plastic in our town.) My Grandma Skatzes stopped me.

Not literally, of course. Grandma has been dead 42 years this month. But like many people who make a deep impact on my heart, she is still with me.

As a child in a multi-generational household, I spent many hours listening to my Grandma's stories. Many of her stories were about the Great Depression and how she and her family and, indeed, the whole community, got through those years.  She made sure her family was fed and clothed, and she did everything she could, on the precious few pennies she had to work with, to make sure neighbors did not do without either.

I have carried her stories with me for six decades. As an American history major in college, my greatest disappointment was I was never at a campus where a class on the 1930s was offered. My thesis was on Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, and the treaty talks he held with tribes in that area of the world. It was a good, solid thesis, but what I really would have loved to write about would have been something along the lines of "Living Through the Great Depression: The American Homefront."

Over a decade before World War II brought the slogan to every home, Grandma lived by "Use it up, Wear it Out, Make it do or do without." That is what stayed my hand with the spice container. The uncertainty of what is ahead as we as a community, state, nation, and world go through this pandemic causes me to reassess what I need, what I do not need, and, yes, hang onto a few things that normally would have hit the trash or the recycling.

Or the yard waste pile, for that matter. Two months or so ago, while lazily talking out loud about this year's garden, I announced to Warren that I was going to dig out the sage plant that continues to winter over and produce each year. We don't use a lot of sage in this house and it takes up a lot of space, even with being cut back each spring.

The sage after being its pardon 

So when I started out to work in the garden this Saturday past, I was resolved to dig it up and be done with it. Then I looked again and thought of Grandma. And...ended up cutting it back but keeping it.

As it turns out, you can make pesto with sage. Really? I will be planting a large basil patch again for traditional basil pesto, but the thought of adding another type of pesto to my repertoire (and the freezer) delights me.

Thinking of you, Grandma.