April Money Review

Ouch.

Let me say that a little bit louder.

OUCH.

The month of April, which comes to an end in about five more hours, hit the bank account hard, hard, hard.

Let's start with the grocery purchases first. Grocery purchases (edible) for April? $206.52. Household items? $17.99. Grand total? $224.51.

We're aiming for $175.00 a month annually. We blithely sailed past that—right around April 16 by the looks of my notes.

Now, there is about $24.00 worth of hams in that figure. Aldi was running an amazing sale leading up to Easter. Their hams were all on sale, ranging from 55¢ a pound to about $1.29; we bought two of the 55¢/pound ones and a slightly ritzier ham at 85¢/pound. Those came to about $20.00 total; there will be a lot of meals, not to mention some pretty amazing soups with the ham bones later this year.  There was some extra spending, anticipating a guest's needs, which added a little extra (a pound of coffee, for example).  And there were two boxes of matzohs, because it was Passover the last full week of April, and those were a staggering $3.99 apiece. (I don't often observe Passover and as you will read in a later blog, I blew it this year as well, but clearly it had been awhile since I'd bought matzohs because I almost let out a shriek when I saw the price.)

Okay, so strip out the matzohs, the hams (yeah, I know, a little incongruity with the food item immediately preceding), and the coffee and we're down to about $188.00 for April, which is much, much better. And way closer to $175.00. But still OUCH.

The April amount shoots our annual monthly average year-to-date to $174.62, so we are just hanging at the $175.00 a month average. Just.

Despite how much our grocery spending veered upward, our eating out came in at $66.39, considerably better than last month, despite being out of town early in the month, despite our both having birthdays in the month (we ate out for Warren's; we ate leftovers very late on mine due to an unfortunate combination of meetings), and despite our having the perfect storm with the final concert of the season and my absolutely heaviest two weeks of school attendance mediations leading up to that concert. There were several nights when we toyed with the idea of grabbing something fast and easy, but with one exception (which had other ramifications, to be blogged about along with the matzohs), we did not do it.

Warren and I also hosted at our home a reception for our final concert. Those costs are tallied separately. The reception was great. It had laughter, it had warmth, it had great conversations, it had wonderful guests artists, and it had a lot of food. I had budgeted $75.00 for it, but went over because I anticipated a far larger turnout and wanted enough food. However, a number of guests who had said they would be there were exhausted or feeling under the weather that night (one couple left the concert at intermission, in fact) and went home instead. So I bought too much food, probably.

The reception came to $151.63, about double what I had planned. $25.65 went to the purchase of three bottles of prosecco (I had two bottles left over from the fall reception). Several guests showed up with wine, all of which got consumed, and that was great, but now I have five (5!) bottles of prosecco stored in the cupboard. (We don't drink alcohol. Warren by principle/beliefs and me by health issues. Just saying.)

Things I learned about future receptions, watching what got consumed and what didn't. Biggest hits? Sliced cheeses, crackers, wine (but not prosecco), olives, the shredded lime-garlic turkey (a variation of a Cuban dish; I used up all of our Thanksgiving turkey in the freezer) and the mini eclairs and cream puffs (bought frozen from Aldi). Medium interest? Cut vegetables, seltzer water and flavored sparkling waters, homemade gluten free chocolate cookies, and an avocado spread I also bought at Aldi. Least interest? Fresh cut strawberries (now in the freezer), clementines (in their peels), and hummus.

An observation: almost everything came from Aldi, so had I not done my shopping there, the cost of the reception would have been considerably higher.

Some of the leftover food went home with others. The rest of it went into our freezer or refrigerator or pantry. None of it went to waste.

And, truthfully, the evening was so sparkling, from the stunning final concert to the height of the party to the last guest out the door, that it was worth every penny. Warren and I were both beat to pieces by the end of the "day" (a 22 hour day that started early Saturday and ended in the wee hours of Sunday) that we put away the perishables and left everything else—everything—until Sunday late morning. And although we still had three days left to the month, that was the end of April for all food expense purposes!

Here's to May!

Gratitude

Years ago, when I was in the therapy that I attribute with saving my life, my therapist Doug said that one of his goals was to work with me on not marrying or having a relationship with the same sort of man I tended to gravitate to, none of whom were good for me in the long run.

Doug would so pleased with my marriage to Warren in so very many ways. Being with Warren broke the cycle of abuse on all fronts and gave me, for the first time in my life, a stable, sheltering, supportive, encouraging relationship.

I still marvel at us.

In the last two days there have been two moments that drove home the love and support we share. The first was yesterday at supper. Warren, with a suppressed grin in his voice, shared with me the results of the Symphony's Ohio Arts Council review (to which one can listen in by phone) for operations funding (as compared to special projects). As he shared the strong, stunning, positive comments from the reviewers—observations about thinking outside the box, community engagement, diversifying the programming, the groundbreaking therapeutic drumming program, his leadership role and planning for succession, the Getty and NEA grants he has procured for the group—I found myself in tears. These reviewers put into words the strength and passion Warren brings to the Symphony and underscored how significant his tenure as Executive Director has been in helping move the organization from being a small, somewhat average arts group to being a recognized regional force and has moved Warren from anonymity to being known at the state level.

Warren then capped the OAC notes off with notes from his discussion with Nick Pozek at the League of American Orchestras earlier that day. Nick reached out to Warren to start a major session with Futures Fund grantees (of which our Symphony is one) at the annual LAO convention this June by—wait for it—leading the group through a drumming exercise and discussing how the drumming program is used for social good (my emphasis).

My tears? That my hardworking husband who I have championed for years, long before we became a couple, is recognized by his peers and colleagues not only at a state but also a national level for his innovations, his passions, his dedication to not just our orchestra but to this community.

Tears of pride.

The second set of tears fell this morning. Passover starts tonight at sundown. I will not be participating in a seder, the ritual meal, for lots of reasons, many of which tie to my health limitations. We live in a decidedly non-Jewish town and going to and from Columbus for a full evening is beyond me. I told Warren over breakfast that had I planned better, I would have gotten in touch with the Chaplain's Office at the local college and offered a seder in our home to however many Jewish students wanted to attend (the college does not have very much programming for Jewish students and often arranges for them to head to Columbus for major holidays).

As we talked, I thought back to the hurdles thrown up in my long-term marriage to practicing Judaism, the opposition to sharing it with my sons, and I shook my head. My voice breaking, I said that I missed seder, that it wasn't a two-person activity (in my opinion), and, well, I just felt sad.

Warren looked at me and asked in the gentlest voice possible, "Is there anything I can do to help you feel better tonight?"

That is when the tears fell, and they are crowding my eyes as I type this. Warren is from a very different religious background, we are on the cusp of the major concert week of the season (the finale concert), and both of us are running on fumes much of the time right now, Warren more so than me. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to nod and ask me what the day held. Instead, he reached over, literally and figuratively, to see what if anything he could do for me for Passover.

Tears of gratitude.

I told Warren that next year, assuming I am still around (always a tricky assumption), I will contact the college early and we will host a seder.

One ends a seder, after retelling the story of Passover and sharing a meal, with the words "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Jerusalem, hell. Next year in Delaware, with my Warren beside me, with tears of gratitude in my eyes.

I'll Always Have Paris

The news this week has, of course, been dominated by the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

I have never been to Paris. My only trip to Europe was 40 years ago this summer, and France was not on the itinerary. And, honestly, Paris was never high on my "I must see this" list. All the same, the day the edifice burnt, I kept the CNN camera nonstop video running in the corner of my computer screen, enlarging it from time to time to watch the building glow red and the flames reach silently upwards.

I told Warren that night that all I could think of was Samuel Dodsworth, my favorite Sinclair Lewis character, found in his novel Dodsworth. There is a wonderful scene when Dodsworth has a rare afternoon to himself in Paris (his shallow, shrill, and social climbing wife is off at a fitting and a sitting) and decides to go see Notre Dame, thinking rebelliously, "I think I'll sneak off and see if I really like it! You can't tell! I might!" So he takes a taxi to the cathedral, then crosses the river to sit in a cafe and looks at it without "Fran's quivers of appreciation." I'll let Lewis take it from there:

He admitted the cathedral's gray domination. There was strength there; strength and endurance and wisdom. The flying buttresses soared like wings. The whole cathedral expanded before his eyes; the work of human hands seemed to tower larger than the sky.

Dodsworth crosses the bridge and enters the cathedral:

[The lack of cushioned pews] made the cathedral seemed bare and a little unfriendly; but aside a vast pillar, eternal as mountains or the sea, he found a chair, tipped a verger, forgot his irritation...and lost himself in impenetrable thoughts. [He] stared at the Rose Window, but he was seeing what it meant, not what it said. He saw life as something greater and more exciting than food and a little sleep...he felt that he could adventure into this Past about him—and possibly adventure into the far more elusive Present.

At this point in my life, I will never get to Paris. I doubt I will get to Europe again, for no reason other than my traveling capacity has been circumscribed by the myeloma which co-inhabits my body and demands a seat at the table. And that's okay, for I'll aways have Paris, thanks to Samuel Dodsworth.

Bad Math

In my most recent Myeloma Beacon column, I wrote about the type of math I increasingly use when calculating energy and stamina against activities. I mused: "Which is greater: the energy expended driving to and having dinner with friends who live 35 miles away, or the energy expended by having those same friends for dinner with me preparing most of the meal, including baking dessert? Solve for x, with x being how exhausted and/or ill I will be the following day."

That equation has nothing on the one I did last Friday night: "If 3 teaspoons equals 1 tablespoon, how much salt have you added if you misread the recipe (which you have made hundreds of times) as 4 tablespoons instead of teaspoons?"

Answer: 3 times too much.

I was making two large batches (two pounds of blacks beans in each pot) of Cuban black bean soup. Truly, I have made hundreds of batches of black bean soup over the last almost four decades. Hundreds. So why this time did I read the salt amount in tablespoons instead of teaspoons? It wasn't that I was distracted by multitasking; I had finished an earlier phone call with my brother during which I set the recipe aside, knowing I would need to concentrate on the seasoning. It wasn't that I blithely assumed I could estimate the salt needed and tossed it in with abandon. No, I have no excuse for calculating "oh, 4 tablespoons equal 1/4 cup, let me pour a quarter cup of salt into each pot." It was only after I poured the second quarter cup of salt into the second pot that the gravity of what I had done hit me. And at that point it was a done deal.

There is not a whole lot you can do when you oversalt a recipe by a factor of three. My first reaction (after four-letter words raced through my head) was to rush to Aldi to purchase a bag of potatoes, remembering an old World War One story about some wartime singer sent to entertain the troops helping peel hundreds of potatoes to reduce salt in an oversalted cauldron of soup. My second reaction (after purchasing the aforementioned potatoes and popping a few in each pot) was to Google how to counteract too much salt in the soup. The potato story was untrue. Add water. Add something sharp (like vinegar) to counteract the flavor. Throw it out and start all over.

You know how this ends.

Even the Mathemagician couldn't save this one (illustration by Jules Feiffer)

Two massive batches of black bean soup, down the disposal the next morning. Because the vinegar (which the recipes calls for anyway), the extra water, and the potatoes did absolutely nothing to cut the saltiness of the mixture.

From a dollar standpoint, that was about $7.50 or so down the drain. (I have a pretty good idea of the cost because the next morning we returned to Aldi to buy more beans and a few other ingredients.) From a personal standpoint, it was an embarrassment beyond cost. I'm good at math. I'm good at cooking. What the hell happened?

As I thought about the soup disaster, a favorite scene from The Phantom Tollbooth kept coming to mind. The Mathemagician serves Milo and his companions subtraction stew when they arrive in Digitopolis. They are baffled as to why they feel hungrier the more they eat, until the Dodecahedron explains it to them:

     "And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?"

     "FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of." 

I made two fresh batches and trust me, they are what they should be. As I began to type this in the early hours of the morning, I could smell the pungent aroma of the soup threaded through the house. At breakfast, we diced and fried the potatoes with which I had tried to salvage the original soup. They were none the worse for wear for their stint in the salty batches.

While Milo and his companions are in Digitopolis, the Mathemagician demonstrates stunning feats of (simple) math, using his magic staff, which the Humbug observes is "only a big pencil." The Mathemagician agrees, then adds, "but once you learn to use it, there is no end to what you can do."

True enough. But even the Mathemagician could not have saved that soup.

March Money Review

End of March, end of the first quarter of 2019. Where do we stand?

In March, we spent $163.98 on groceries (food items) and another $13.38 on household items. That brought the monthly total to $177.36, just nudging over the $175.00 monthly mark I am aiming for in 2019. Okay, I confess: some of that "extra" expense was buying a large salmon filet, marked down, at Aldi. With the discount, the salmon came to a little over $13.00. So if I hadn't bought the salmon, our monthly totals would have sailed in under $175.00.

It was totally worth it. Chopped into thirds and frozen, that salmon will bring a huge smile to my face somewhere later in the year. More than once, in fact!

Our eating out expenses were $98.34, darn close to $100.00. We had several meals out, including after last Sunday's concert, when we were both so tired we could barely function. Warren, of course, had put in 15-hour days leading up and including the day of the concert, in which he also played. With the exception of the opening fanfare (each concert this season opens with a different 40 second fanfare commissioned by the Symphony for its 40th anniversary), the remainder of the concert was Verdi's Requiem, which is stunning, moving, massive in length, and takes a lot of timpani playing. So we ate out after we came home and changed enough to get comfortable (Warren was not heading out in his tux). And, in the spirit of transparency, about $18.00 of that is attributable to my having coffee "out" with friends.

I look at the eating out figure and have conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I don't like dropping money on eating out, period. It's not where I want to spend my/our dollars. On the other hand, well, maybe there is no other hand. No, that's not true. One meal was breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall diner in a nearby community and there was the satisfaction on knowing those dollars were going right back into the local community. In fact, when I look at where we spent our money eating out, all but one expenditure—a $2.00 McDonald's milkshake Warren bought following dress rehearsal (and a 15 hour day)—were made at a locally owned small business. While I have no delusions about keeping the local economy going with our $96.00 heavy spending, I also know that every bit helps.

I also speculate the eating out figure may stay higher this year than I want, not because we are profligate, but because there are going to be times due to Warren's schedule and my health when grabbing something to go is going to top making something. I don't know. I know that I am starting to struggle, and I don't use that word lightly, with energy and capacity. We'll see.

For now, though, we have the first quarter behind us, and spring is coming. My dad and I have talked gardening; I'll grow tomatoes if he grows zucchini (our garden isn't so large that I want to give up space for zucchini). We are just now finishing off all the zucchini I sliced and froze in 2018, so I am excited to restock the freezer this summer. I scored four free (FREE) long planters in excellent condition in which I am hoping to grow lettuces this year so, at least during the summer, we will eat salad for pennies.

I can almost taste that first tomato.