Getting low on anvils.

Drawing up the ol' shopping list for the week and realized that we're in need of some of the things that would encourage a trip to the ol' warehouse club -- paper towels, TP, coffee, and so on.

Good price on anvils!

I kind of enjoy my bimonthly-ish trips to the warehouse store. It's no good for the regular supermarket run; I read years ago that the club stores have about 400 different items, whereas your supermarket has thousands. Much better choices of meats and produce. But once you drag your humongous packs of facial tissues or dog biscuits home, you don't have to worry about buying them for a while. And you save money... or do you?

It doesn't feel that way when I pay the annual fee, which is about $55; it doesn't feel that way when I drag my loaded cart up to the checkout and fly past $300 (usually that high if I've bought toner for the damn printer). And of course, as the movie Wall-E wanted us to know, buying in bulk will destroy the entire planet. (If you haven't heard of Wall-E, it's a small art house science fiction film by some anti-capitalist outfit called Disney.) More practically, or at least more immediately, not everything in the warehouse store is actually cheaper than in a typical market.

My real concern is waste. Not food waste; while some economists and environmentalists are concerned about food waste from people buying enormous loads of meat and such from the club store, that's not something I typically do. I rely on the club for the less-perishable goods. Besides, the way I eat, there's little food waste in this house. In my experience, houses with children are houses where a lot of food winds up in the garbage, because parents shop in the produce section with great intentions and kids wind up snacking on buttered saltines or scooping Jif right out of the jar. No, the waste I mean is behavioral -- the way I act when I know I have a huge supply of something.

I just have a feeling that bringing home a skid of paper towels makes me overly cavalier about their use. Wash hands? Why use that towel hanging by the kitchen sink when there's a more hygienic roll of paper towels right there? Taking a shower? Here, dry off with a roll. We've got tons of it! We're rollin' in it! Hyuk hyuk.

It's the kind of attitude that makes us imagine rich people lighting $1,000 cigars with $100 bills. Why not? It's fun! There's just so many of them!

This goes completely against my upbringing. My family had not gotten over the Great Depression by the time I came along decades later. It was like it had all just happened, and was just waiting to happen all over us again. Waste not, want not would have been our family slogan, if we'd had one. (Despite that I was a spoiled kid -- a very, very guilt-ridden spoiled kid.)

But back to the wasteful habits of bulk shoppers: Has anyone studied this? I haven't found any studies, only krexing about food going to waste. I want to know about the wasteful habits for nonperishables bought in bulk. We have two big dogs and believe in self-preservation through good hygiene, but if I know I only have one roll of paper towels left I'm going to be cautious with it. Not so if I have a package of a dozen.

As much as I dislike mindless anti-consumerism, which is as fractious as mindless consumerism is dumb, I would suggest some clever economist with a means of getting grants look into this. You could start right here. When we buy anvils at the warehouse club, we go through them awfully fast. When we buy them individually at the anvil store, they seem to last longer.

Heavy metal.

Here it is Tuesday and I'm just recovering from the weekend. Yessirree Bob, there was some heavy metal to be moved, and I'm the one that moved it.

What happened? Well, I mentioned after Christmas that Santa, bless that jolly old elf, had given me a new set of bakeware as a present. And the box was still sitting in the living room. Why? Because the house is a disorganized wreck, that's why, and there was nowhere to put the new stuff.

I'm not blaming anyone but myself for this, by the way, certainly not when it comes to cookware. I do most of the cooking and pretty much all the baking around here, and I have a bad habit of chucking things into closets and cabinets willy-nilly when I'm done with them. My wife organizes, and over time I disorganize, leading to chaos. I'm like a one-man entropy.

She was NOT going to straighten up the closet again, the one off the kitchen where were keep the bulk of the cookware, as she did four or five years ago. And as you can imagine, with ol' Jack Entropy here, it had gotten to be a total wreck in that time. So I decided that, hell or high water, that closet was getting straightened, cleaned, and the old junk pitched last weekend. And I did so. And it involved moving a lot of metal. And any metal is heavy if you have enough of it.

It's always a hassle to do this kind of project because you quickly run out of places to stash the stuff as you remove it from the closet -- if you had other places to stash it all, you wouldn't need the closet. Soon staggering piles of metal and whatnot were nearby, along with rolls of trash bags, cleaning tools and supplies, paper goods, and whatever other crap had been shoved in there when company was coming. It was awful.

I did toss some old pans -- cheap muffin tins from Walmart that rusted on the first use, black bakeware that required fiddling with time and temperature on every recipe, tools that had been superseded or had parts missing -- and among the non-cooking tools I separated the wheat from the chaff, and moved some other items to more appropriate storage areas in the house, like my poor beleaguered cellar (you're next, cellar). Then I found a nice, safe place for the things that were going into that closet. Now, if I can only keep it that way, the closet will be a shining example of smart organization. Yeah, Jack Entropy's on the job.

My other heavy metal experience was shaving with a fresh disposable razor on Sunday. Ooooh, such a nice smooth shave it was too. How clean my skin was! How sleek! How ... bloody my neck was! Crap. Looked like I'd had a run-in with Sweeney Todd. A safety razor isn't supposed to strip the skin that way -- you may have noticed "safety" is right there in the name. It shouldn't just mean "safer than shaving with a chain saw." It probably wouldn't have been like a scene from Halloween if I didn't have such paper-dry winter skin, though.

Next weekend I think I'll focus on plastics or cardboard and leave the metals alone. Something lightweight sounds good. And stick to the electric razor for a few more days.

Fake news? Maybe...

Well, I'll give you one guess what I was doing when this inspiration struck.

Mary or Martha?

I guess a lot of us who follow Christ -- or try to; sometimes I look around and wonder where I am and how I lost the trail -- think about whether we are Mary or Martha. It's a tricky question.

You may know the story, from the tenth chapter of Luke:

Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

It's a frustrating story for Martha types -- Martha does all the work while Mary just chills out, and Mary comes out smellin' like a rose. What the heck?

This is another one of those stories in which Jesus reminds us -- not with pride, just with facts -- that he is different from the rest of us. Mary is not just listening to some schlub here, the equivalent of watching some dumb TV show. We can't believe that that would be a "better part." She is listening to Jesus Himself, an incomparable privilege restricted at that moment, among all people on earth, to whatever persons happened to be in that room.

I'm not going to disagree with Jesus; I find that usually doesn't work out too well for me. My point today is, are we the hardworking hostess Martha or the contemplative, loving Mary? I think most of us are both, more one at some times, more the other at other times, and whichever we are we feel a counter-pull to be the other.

Most faithful moms I know love the idea of meditation and seeking communion with God, but they feel like Martha - - pulled seven ways by kids and chores and work and everything. A friend of mine described her prayer life this way: "Hail Mary, full of grace, JACK PUT THAT DOWN!" The psalmist writes "Be still, and know that I am God." And Mom is saying "HOW?"

Do dads feel that way? Of course they do, but these days, where religious faith is scoffed at by men who think of themselves as rugged engineering types, such devotion as Mary shows is considered soft and weak. That would not have been true for Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, the one who was so famously brought back from the dead in chapter 11 of John.

We know Lazarus was a special guy. His sisters loved him. Jesus loved him; the death of Lazarus is the only cause of Jesus's weeping in the Bible; we don't even see him cry for John the Baptist, brutally killed, who was a cousin of Jesus and the man Jesus said was greatest of men born of woman.

Anyway, Lazarus doesn't appear in this story, but that doesn't make him a do-nothing, even though at the time women would be doing all the domestic chores. Martha doesn't come yelling, "Hey! Bub! Do you think Lazarus means Lazyass? Get your butt in here and help!" Maybe Lazarus got a pass on this one because he was the man, or maybe he was out a-choppin' wood and a-killin' the fatted calf. We don't know.

Were I there, I would probably be the second, not so useful brother. Moe. The one who tries to focus on Jesus and falls into a noisy sleep, or tries to help Martha and burns the spelt. My way of thinking goes like this: I want Jesus to take the wheel, and then I want to go take a nap in the backseat. That never seems to work out well for me either.

Spread the word.

Yesterday the Great Lileks posted the new Miracle Whip label on his site, part of his weekly review of product packaging, and I discovered that Kraft had buckled on their fiendish plot to destroy a mighty brand. As you see on the photo of the jar I ran out and bought, they have returned to the so-called "Gold Standard Recipe." In other words, the recipe they screwed up in 2006 to save money, as mentioned by your humble servant here.

Whip, it good!

On the Lileks site I said that I was thrilled that they have at last admitted to New Coking us with the product, and caught some heat from my fellow Bleatniks, many of whom are mayonnaise purists, or haters of both mayo and the Whip. But it's not even me that is a big Miracle Whip fan, it's my wife. I think it makes a great potato salad. She likes it on sandwiches too, and other foods. But she hated the subtle but disturbing changes they made twelve long, sad years ago.

Why did they go back to the old recipe? I suppose sales have been hurting. But at least you have one happy customer now, Mr. Kraft; my wife had a sandwich with Miracle Whip for lunch on Friday and pronounced it good.

The condiment market has become awfully strange. French's, known for mustard, introduced ketchup. Heinz, known for ketchup, introduced mayonnaise and the bizarre mayochup Frankencondiment. Hellmann's, known for mayo, introduced a weird honey-sweetened ketchup. It's all gone crazy out there. And all this time we're told that Millennials, who are on record as ruining everything, only care about sriracha, salsa, pico de gallo, stuff made from avocados, and น้ำปลา (nam pla). Apparently they have gone so low as to insist there is such as thing as "identity condiments."  Who knows who's dipping what anymore? Do we need to know? Do we want to know? TMI?

All I wanted was a decent potato salad, all right? Is that too much to ask?

Wind.

Winter would not be half so hard if not for the wind.

It wasn't even that cold yesterday, not by the thermometer. Just under the freezing mark. You dress for that. You put on clothes for thirty degrees, even when you hear the wind raging in the window glass. Then you get outside and realized you should have worn another layer, or three. And heavy, heavy shoes. Bubble Wrap all around your outside as insulation -- and as a safety factor for when the wind sends you bounding down the street. The wind does not play nice.

You walk into the street and with but the tiniest hint of warning, whoosh -- the wind is roaring. A frosty cinder block to the head. It wants all the air and will take it right out of you. You crawl back up to the door and wonder why you have no breath in your body, what with all this air about. It's because the wind took yours straight out of your lungs.

Even inside, the wind wants you to know that you are not safe. Every time you forget about it for a second, it slams against the windows and rattles them in their frames. Sometimes it sounds like soft explosions, banks of them, like a broadside of marshmallows fired at the house by pixie pirates. Sometimes it sounds like the wind won't rest until your house of straw or wood is flying in its dismembered pieces over a distant horizon.

I repeat: Winter would be far more bearable if not for these frigid blasts, and that's a fact. Snow and ice are dangerous and inconvenient, the short days are gloomy, but the wind just hurts. However kempt you were when you left the house, you look like one of the crazier, hairier Muppets when you get where you're going.

People get knocked down by this kind of icy wind. Not me, since gravity and I are quite close, but I know lightweights who have to grab lampposts when it gets bad. A friend of mine says she used to encourage her tiny mother to carry rolls of quarters in her pockets on windy days for extra ballast. It can be helpful in spring and summer and even fall, but unless you're becalmed at sea, the wind is not something you enjoy in the winter.

Frozen spikes to the face -- that's been the last couple of days. They say that the pain of living reminds you that you're still alive, but I'm not so sure.

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Satan's beating wings cause the wind that freezes the ninth circle of Hell. And that was written by a man who (I think) never left sunny Italy. He knew something.

Life and times of shazbat.