The End of the Jewelry Jinx?

I have had a streak of bad luck with jewelry: losing it, breaking it, and other mishaps—quite aside from having an accumulation of costume jewelry purchased to match outfits I no longer own!

The first real disaster I recall took place in 2008. Our daughter and her husband were living in England, and we visited there in March. She had devised an ambitious itinerary for us, including visits to London to sample some galleries, walk along the Thames, and conclude with a performance of Wicked; to Edinburgh by train (with a stopover in York); to Dover to tour the castle; back to London for Westminster Abbey and the British Museum; to Windsor and Eton; and, on the penultimate day of our visit, Stonehenge and Oxford. My travelogue records:

The morning dawned sunny, but clouds soon began to gather. Our planned 9:00 departure time slipped to 10:00, and when we arrived at Stonehenge a little before noon, it was raining noticeably, and it didn’t cheer us to hear that an hour earlier it had been “beautiful.”

I suspect that Stonehenge would have been a disappointment no matter when we went, but this was really the worst possible experience:

As we left the sheltered parking lot and crossed the road to the open plain, the rain and especially the wind picked up considerably. In fact, [my husband] commented that he had been out of doors during Hurricane Katrina and hadn’t been assailed as we were there on Salisbury plain. Between the rain and the gale-force winds, I found it impossible to enjoy or appreciate the monument. The wind made an umbrella useless—more a nuisance and a hindrance than a help—and even if it hadn’t kept turning inside out, the noise of the umbrella being buffeted by the wind made it even more impossible to hear the audio guide, which had to be inserted inside my knit cap to be heard.

From Stonehenge we went on to Oxford and saw the sights, attended choral evensong in Christ Church Cathedral, and had supper at the Eagle & Child pub (popularly known as the Bird & Baby), famous for being a hangout of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other Inklings. It was on this day that the disaster occurred:

The only real downside to the day was that I discovered (while we were sitting in Christ Church Cathedral) that I had lost an earring from one of my favorite pairs, undoubtedly when I was struggling with the audio guide at Stonehenge. I’d had the momentary thought that I should remove the earring in order to hear better; in retrospect, I wished I had acted on that thought.

I had bought these earrings for $4.00 (!) at the Chinese pavilion at Epcot in 1992 and loved wearing them with my many dark red dresses. I have never been able to find a comparable pair or even any suitable replacement.

Obviously, my mistake was in wearing earrings under a hat. But it seems I hadn’t learned my lesson because in 2015, I wore a favorite pair of poinsettia earrings in a Christmas parade, wearing a Santa hat. When I got home, I found I was missing one of the earrings.

I was eventually able to find a comparable pair online. They had clips rather than posts, but I bought them anyway, pulled the clip off the back of one, and glued on a post. The substitute earring doesn’t sit quite the same, though, so I’ve never been satisfied with them.

The latest loss was surprisingly devastating. I had bought this new purse:

It is a very capacious bag, with more pockets, both open and zipper, than I know what to do with, including one zipper pocket inside. The problem was that the two sides were identical: there was no front or back. In order to keep track of what things were in what pockets, I really needed to know which side was which, so I hit on the idea of pinning some sort of brooch to one side that would become the designated front.

My first thought was to stick on a cheap lapel pin I’d recently received (Rotary annual theme pin), but I couldn’t find it, so I excavated my jewelry box and found an amazing silver brooch that I had no memory of. It was in the form of a scimitar and scabbard. The scabbard was filigree, and the removable scimitar was attached by a fine chain. If you google for “silver scimitar brooch,” you will find that this is a very common vintage item, and this one is similar to mine.

The reason I know this is that, several days after pinning the brooch on the “front” of the bag, I realized it was missing. I backtracked to all the places I’d been—gym, library, Walmart—but had little hope that it would have turned up. At Walmart I was told plainly that anything that small would doubtless have just been swept up. It annoyed me that I didn’t even have a photo of it, and the only reason I had a reasonably clear memory of what it looked like was that I had polished it before pinning it on.

I mourned the loss quite heavily. This seemed unreasonable since it was an item I hadn’t even known I had (I assume a gift or legacy from one of my grandmothers), but it was so cool, and I had found it so clever, that it was hard to adopt an attitude of “Easy come, easy go.”

This all happened in early October. On December 5, as my husband and I were returning from the Christmas tree farm, he happened to look down as he went through the screen door to the back porch. There, in a crevice in the concrete floor, was a surprise!

Not surprisingly, it was pretty mashed and bent and scratched, having undoubtedly been stepped on numerous times (it had probably been covered by the doormat, which would explain why it hadn’t been seen before).

I’ve been able to repair it slightly, but we are hopeful that a friend who has a hobby of silversmithing may be able to do a better job, the object being to make it possible to completely insert the scimitar in the scabbard again.

It’s not an entirely happy ending, but I’m just so pleased to have it back so that at least my memory of its beauty is restored!

Stepping Out

When I was in rehab after my hip replacement surgeries, I was encouraged to take long strides to help stretch out my hips. Sound advice but not always easy to implement. For a start, the maximum length of my stride is limited by my short legs. Moreover, I have observed that the body is not inclined to take long strides or move very fast when going only short distances. In our cramped and cluttered house, it’s impossible to take more than a few steps in any direction, especially with a walker (and there are some places a walker won’t go at all), so my attempted long strides were confined to an outdoor walk—after I gave up on using a cane, which I had decided did more harm than good since I never could get the hang of it and kept tripping over it.

In the Before Times, I had set a benchmark time of 13 minutes to go from my house around the northern loop of my 2.1-mile circuit and back to the end of my street (a distance of 0.72 mile). As my hips became more and more useless, it began to take 14, 15, 16—as much as 20—minutes to walk that distance. Pretty discouraging.

But I’m making progress. Now, 15 months after my second surgery, I routinely hit that benchmark in 12 minutes or less. Better still, instead of flagging toward the end of my walk as I used to do, I now find I generally put on more speed on the second mile. There’s no way I’ll ever achieve on the street the 4 mph that I make on the treadmill (15 mpm), but I’m satisfied with 16 mpm, and I am definitely making great strides.

Apple Watch Follies

In my last post, I mentioned that I have a new Apple Watch. There is a long story about that. Apparently I had at some point idly commented that I’d like to have an Apple Watch. This was probably a result of being dissatisfied with my Garmin sport watch, which sometimes takes half a mile or more (or my two-mile walk) to find a satellite and start recording the distance, making it more or less useless for tracking anything but my usual route (the length of which is well known). I hadn’t really expected to get the watch, but a few days before my birthday, my husband said that, although he would have liked it to be a surprise, when presented with all the watch and band options, he had decided he should probably let me choose.

He recommended the Apple Watch SE (second generation) as the one that seemed to have all the features I might want, at the best price. I agreed. I opted for the smaller size (40mm) and the silver aluminum case and, after some deliberation, the Silver Milanese Loop band. If he had ordered it right away, it would have come on my birthday, but we’d spent quite a lot of time poring over the Apple websites and then made a pretty much pointless trip to Best Buy (some 45 minutes away) to look at what they had in stock—which was essentially nothing, all nailed down so well you couldn’t tell much about them—and by the time we got home Barney was so tired that he dozed off and didn’t get the order in.

This proved to be providential because one of the things he had found online was the aforementioned 365-page manual. When I started reading it, I learned that the watch has to be paired with an iPhone running iOS 16. My iPhone 7 (which I loved) was stuck at 15.7.8. Well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.

I had a pretty sleepless night, popping up to check on whether it might be possible to get some older version of the watch that would pair with my phone. The answer seemed to be “Not really.” I slept in the next morning, and when I got up, I gave Barney the further bad news. But he had been up a lot earlier and had hit on an alternative plan: he would give me a new iPhone for my birthday, and then he would have Christmas covered because he could give me the watch then!

This was getting pretty far out of hand, but he seemed committed and had already established that both the IPhone SE and the iPhone 13 mini were about the size of my iPhone 7 (I didn’t want anything bigger). We ended up deciding on the iPhone 13 mini as having perhaps more staying power than the SE. (Ironically, it was discontinued just a week after my birthday!)

Thanks to Labor Day, there was no way I’d get the phone on my birthday, but I came home from Rotary the next day looking forward to it. When I came in, there was a parcel on the dining room table—no surprise, but what was a surprise was that the box was long and thin, which seemed like an odd shape for a phone. Sure enough, when I opened it, it was the watch and band.

What could have gone wrong? Barney confirmed that he had definitely ordered the phone, leading me to believe there had been some mix-up, but later, as I was eating lunch, he brought out another box—the phone! You can see why I say the watch was an insanely extravagant gift.

Using it has been a learning experience with comical adventures. I mentioned in my last post its inability to shut up when I’m sleeping. But other behaviors have been equally annoying and mystifying.

Soon after getting the watch, I ran into the library to pick up a hold book, leaving my purse in the car. On my way out, I stopped to chat with a friend, and my watch popped up a notification. I didn’t have my glasses with me, so I had no idea what it was on about, but I borrowed the friend’s readers and saw that it was telling me that my “device” had been left behind. Sure enough, my phone was in the car. This is a reasonably handy feature, and I became inured to dismissing the notification when I went out for a walk and left the phone at home. (The watch, to its credit, always starts tracking mileage immediately, so the Garmin has been deprecated.) What I couldn’t understand, however, was the “Device Left Behind” notifications I got every time I left home, even though my phone was just inches away.

This situation went on for a couple of weeks until one day I picked up the phone and saw that it had the same notification. I investigated further and ascertained that apparently the “device” the watch was pining for was my old iPhone 7, at home, without a SIM but still working on Wi-Fi. This possibility had occurred to me, but I had dismissed it because, if the old iPhone couldn’t pair with the watch, it didn’t make sense for this feature to be working, but apparently it can. Since the old phone is probably never going to leave the house again, I turned off “Find My Phone” on it, and I haven’t had the problem since.

I mentioned in my last post that the watch is useless for tracking “Flights Climbed” when you climb stairs for exercise. At some point, I found that there are many more types of “workout” than those I’d originally found, and one of them is “Stairs,” but I found this was no more accurate than “Stair Climber” for tracking flights. For my fitness classes, I’d had to choose the type of workout that seemed closest to their description, “Pilates” for one and “Functional Strength Training” for my weightlifting class. When I discovered there was another workout called “Traditional Strength Training,” with an icon of a person lifting a barbell, this seemed more appropriate, so I switched to that for my “Just Pump” class yesterday.

Big mistake, I guess. Some of our exercises are done lying flat on a bench, and apparently the watch thought I was slacking off: it asked me whether I wanted to end the workout! That was bad enough, but its next trick took the cake. We were in a long routine of curls, presses, and deadlifts, and the watch started making a funny sound and tapping my wrist repeatedly. Nothing I did would make it stop, and again I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t see what it was telling me. I persevered as long as I could, but finally I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I put the barbell down, put on my glasses, and looked at the watch, to see this:

This is not exactly what the screen looked like. It actually offered several options, including “I fell, but I’m OK” and “I didn’t fall.” Naturally, I chose the latter. According to the Apple Watch manual:

With Fall Detection enabled, if Apple Watch detects a hard fall, it can help connect you to emergency services and send a message to your emergency contacts. If Apple Watch detects a hard fall and that you have been immobile for about a minute, it will tap your wrist, sound an alarm, and then attempt to call emergency services.

To call emergency services, your Apple Watch or nearby iPhone needs a cellular connection, or needs to have Wi-Fi calling turned on and Wi-Fi coverage available.

If cellular and Wi-Fi coverage are not available, and your iPhone 14 or iPhone 14 Pro or later is near your Apple Watch, Fall Detection will use your iPhone to send the notification using Emergency SOS via satellite, where Emergency SOS via satellite is available.

I have no idea whom or what it would have tried to call or why it thought I had been immobile for a minute, but at least if it happens again, I’ll know what to do. After class, I shared my amusement with the other class members, who, as usual had had equally bizarre experiences with their FitBits and other similar devices. Perhaps these smart watches aren’t as smart as they think they are!

The Comfort of a Trouble Shared

They say that “a trouble shared is a trouble halved” and that “misery loves company.” I live a relatively trouble-free life; most of my miseries involve technology, and the last couple of weeks have proved to me how comforting it is to know that I am not suffering alone.

I recently acquired an Apple Watch (an insanely generous birthday gift from my husband). I’m still learning how to use it, and there are features I will probably never use or possibly never even discover (there’s a 365-page manual), but most of what I have discovered is truly amazing. Being able to get texts and even phone calls on my watch is better than having a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio, and it’s even more astounding (even a little alarming) when my watch and both old and new iPhones (all within feet of each other because I’m sitting at my desk) all ring at the same time!

The app I am currently still fine-tuning is Activity, which allows you to set goals in three areas—Move, Exercise, and Stand—and try to meet them each day. Progress is displayed in the form of concentric rings.

The Move goal is stated in terms of calories, the Exercise goal in minutes, and the Stand goal in number of times you’ve stood and moved for at least one minute per hour. That last goal is pretty easy to meet because the watch reminds you it is “Time to Stand” if you’re falling behind. On days when I go to the gym or exercise classes, I have no trouble meeting the Exercise goal, and I have ended up reducing it so that my two-mile “Walk Outside” activity meets the goal as well. The watch tracks most activity pretty well: both distance and time for outside walks seems accurate. But the distance for inside walks (on a treadmill) is about 11% low, and the watch is seriously bad at counting flights of stairs climbed. I live in a two-story house and am up and down all day (often because I’ve forgotten what I went up/down for and have to go again), but the number is risible. And the watch doesn’t even try to track flights when I climb stairs for exercise, so I’ve had to tell it I’m using a stair climber. Still it’s interesting to compete with myself this way.

Another feature of the watch that had intrigued me, however, was sleep tracking. After a week or so of wearing the watch to bed, I decided I wasn’t confident in its report (not to mention that it was telling me stuff I didn’t want to hear—apparently I get hardly any Deep Sleep at all), so I’ve started leaving the watch on the charger overnight. But one of the factors in my decision was that, even though I had designated 9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. as my sleep period—and enabled Sleep Focus, which is supposed to prevent any interruptions—the watch would wake me up in the middle of the night (sometimes more than once) with stand reminders! And even if I do get up, this activity doesn’t count toward my Stand goal, presumably because it takes place when I’m nominally asleep.

This makes no sense at all, of course, so I figured I must be doing something wrong. But when I googled the problem, I found a whole community of watch users (in an Apple forum) complaining about exactly the same thing. So it’s not just me, and I can stop worrying about it!

Similarly, when I recently renewed my subscription to the Kaspersky antivirus program, it entailed an upgrade from Kaspersky Internet Security to Kaspersky Plus. Kaspersky has an annoying habit of “forgetting” to block banner ads, so I have to open the program, turn that feature off and then back on again, then refresh the page where I want to block ads. One day I went to open Kaspersky from the icon in the Systray, and it wasn’t there. When I tried to start the program from the Start menu, it went into Neverland, using enough CPU to prevent anything else on the computer from working properly, and never actually loading. After several tries, it was back to Dr. Google, which recommended reinstalling the program, which I did.

But now a new problem has developed: when I start Windows, Kaspersky loads as expected, but instead of minimizing to the Systray, it opens the application window in the middle of the screen—and not even immediately but usually after I’ve started opening other applications, so it’s very distracting. It’s just one click to close it, of course, but this is not the way it’s supposed to work.

Back to Google. Again I found dissatisfied—even irate—users complaining about this very thing. Several of them mentioned that this was new (and obviously unwanted) behavior in Kaspersky Plus. One of them had even contacted Kaspersky support and been advised to set the program not to load on startup, which of course would be insane. Once again, however, I was reassured that the problem was not mine alone. I’m still annoyed, but at least I don’t blame myself.

Mindful Giving

A few weeks ago I received my usual wall calendar for the coming year from The Nature Conservancy. With it was the above certificate. It was not the first time I had received such a certificate, and, as in the previous instance, I viewed it with humor and dismay and not at all the perhaps intended feeling of guilt. This was the culmination of a longstanding pattern. In March 2000, I wrote to my daughter:

I mailed a package this morning containing [a book] and some mail that has come for you, wrapped up in a tote bag I got from the Nature Conservancy. It is a handy size, but I already have several totes that size, so I thought perhaps you could use it. I was really put out that they had sent it even though I had carefully NOT sent back the solicitation that said, “If you send us money we’ll send you this tote as a special premium” and instead had responded to the one that was supposed to be in response to the guilt-inducing free calendar they’d already sent! I’m going to have to stop giving them money, and I guess I owe it to them to write and explain why: that I think they’re spending too much of what I send on gifts, newsletters, and the wasted expense of too-frequent fund-raising mailings.

I’m not sure whether I ever wrote them, but in November 2020 I wrote to my daughter:

Every year I get a nice calendar (which I use) and datebook (which I don’t) from the Nature Conservancy, along with the obligatory return address labels. This year’s package also included this certificate, in recognition of my contribution. Years ago I used to send small amounts to a lot of worthy causes, aware that my donations probably didn’t even cover their printing and mailing costs. More recently, I’ve whittled down the list and don’t donate less than $100 to anyone.

Every year when I get the Nature Conservancy calendar, I think, “How long has it been since I gave them any money? It must have been years—and probably only a very small amount even then.” So this year I researched it and found these donations:

1991 $10
1996 $10
2000 $25
2001 $25 twice (once in January and once in December)

This is hardly the pattern of a major donor! I haven’t looked at Charity Navigator, but it seems to me their fundraising costs must far outweigh their collections—though perhaps the nice calendar guilts a lot of people into donating—just not me any more!

When I got the certificate this year, I decided that I would look at Charity Navigator. I found that The Nature Conservancy has a score of 88%, giving it a rating of three stars. It gets 7.5 out of 10 points for fundraising efficiency, spending $0.13 to earn a dollar. Its fundraising expense ratio is 12.80%, again scoring 7.5.

In comparison, The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, the organization to which I give the most, has a score of 100% and four stars. Its fundraising efficiency and expense are $0.06 and 5.80%. There was a time, when interest rates on investment were high, when TRF used only the interest on its investments to cover operational expense: all donations went 100% to program expense. A less favorable financial market has made this impossible, but it is still an incredibly well-run organization. It can be argued that much of its constituency is built in (Rotary members), and much of the fundraising is done through routine communications—email and reminders in Rotary magazine, to which all members subscribe through their dues. But it is still an organization in which I put a huge amount of faith, not only in how my money is handled but also in how it is being used for “doing good in the world,” including promoting peace.

This comparison, though, got me interested in the other targets of my benevolence. Two (local) organizations to which I give the largest sums, Impact 100 Baldwin County and the Friends of the Fairhope Library, are not rated by Charity Navigator (nor is our local chapter of the Salvation Army), but I know that my $1,000 annual dues to Impact 100 goes 100% to its projects (administrative expenses are paid with additional donations from members and businesses, and it has no paid staff), and I suspect the same is largely true of the Friends, which also has an all-volunteer board. But I was pleased to see that Wikimedia Foundation scores 99% and ShelterBox USA (a Rotary Partner) 93%. Farther down the scale are George Washington’s Mount Vernon (90%) and Heifer International (86%). Although Heifer is rated even lower than The Nature Conservancy, it is an organization whose goals and methods I strongly believe in (they are very similar to Rotary’s), and the low ratings for fundraising efficiency ($0.20; 5 points) and fundraising expense (19.60%; 5 points) really surprise me, as I don’t feel I’m inundated by solicitations—but maybe that’s because I just know that I have already given or am going to give, so I ignore them. Both Mount Vernon and Heifer International have very informative magazines sent to donors, but they don’t go in for tote bags and other unsolicited gifts.

In any case, no matter how much I appreciate the calendar I get from The Nature Conservancy every year, I will not be giving them any more donations because I still feel they’re wasting my money on fundraising (I’m actually still using yet another tote bag they sent me), and the fact that they send me an entirely spurious Certificate of Recognition doesn’t speak well for their recordkeeping, either!

Missing the Target

For the past several weeks, my husband and I have been watching a television series called Person of Interest, which is, according to Wikipedia, “an American science fiction crime drama television series that aired on CBS from September 22, 2011, to June 21, 2016, with its five seasons consisting of 103 episodes.” We’ve just finished the second season (45 total episodes) and are still intrigued. The premise is definitely science-fictiony, and there’s a good bit of violence, though mostly bad guys trying to thwart the good guys and being thwarted instead.

We’re watching the series on Freevee, a FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channel owned by Amazon, so of course there are commercials. My husband and I are in our late 70s, with grown children who have long since flown the nest and no pets. We own our home and two relatively ancient cars (one of which we hardly use, so we are not in the market for new ones), are in rude good health and pretty good shape. We have the insurance we need and are pretty settled in our habits, so we’re not especially good targets for any kind of advertising. My husband is so oblivious to commercials that it is pointless to comment on one that we’ve supposedly both just viewed, but I have been noticing the commercials in this particular program and trying to figure out the target demographic.

Judging from the number of Huggies commercials (“We got you, baby!”), the target market is a young couple with very young children. The husband is in the market for a new pickup (Chevy Silverado), and the wife might be interested in a Kia or Acura or—if she’s in it for the thrill, a Nissan. They have a dog, which they may feed traditional Purina Dog Chow, but if they’re a little more upmarket, they may be tempted by Blue Buffalo or The Farmer’s Dog, both of which promise to be more healthful. The Farmer’s Dog, which delivers “Human-grade meat and veggies in simple recipes, made for dogs,” is new on the market, I suspect, hence the avalanche of commercials—two or three in every episode.

This young couple are health-conscious for themselves as well. No generic vitamins for them: they will seek out “natural” supplements from Garden of Life, Life Extension, Mary Ruth’s Organics, or Nature’s Way. And they may buy baby and beauty products from The Honest Company. When they cook, they will want the exotic Asian ingredients offered by Himalayan Chef, and when they cook out, they may be interested in McCormick’s Grill Mates barbecue seasoning. If all else fails, they will “turn ‘nothing’ into ‘something’” using Hellman’s or Best Foods mayonnaise. They’ll finish off their meal with gelato from Talenti.

If this young couple have a preteen daughter, they may be susceptible to Dove’s plugs for its Self-esteem Project (Real Cost of Beauty), but they themselves are not immune to suggestions that they can improve their lives by becoming a “wanted man” (wearing Azzaro’s Wanted Eau de Parfum) or fighting acne with CeraVe. And, though they are still young, they are concerned about preserving their looks. A good start is sunscreen, though probably they don’t have to spend the big bucks demanded for La Roche Posay Anthelios Ultra Light Sunscreen SPF 60. La Roche, by the way, makes the most of its 15 seconds by using a fast talker. If the wife has had difficulty finding a foundation to match her skin tone, she may be interested in L’Oréal True Match foundation, which offers 47 shades, but if she is concerned about preserving youthful skin, she may be tempted by Cover Girl Simply Ageless Wrinkle-Defying Foundation, or, if it’s too late to defy wrinkles, she can alleviate them with Vichy Minéral 89 Hyaluronic Serum, a treatment that amusingly describes itself as being “For you, him, her, they [sic]—for all.” Let’s not forget hair care, either. For that there is Redken Acidic Bonding Concentrate.

Some of the commercials do seem targeted to older adults: Viking Cruises appeal mostly to retirees, for example. Other travel-related commercials are for Booking.com and Airbnb. And the commercials for Advil Dual Action (a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen) do feature older adults who have overdone some sport or exercise. Tums are probably also more often used by older adults, but Ensure Max Protein may be an outlier: more and more younger people are starting to look for high-protein supplements—perhaps not as lowbrow as Ensure, however.

Some commercials do appeal to a wider audience. In addition to Liberty Mutual and Allstate, insurance is represented by GEICO, which plugs both motorcycle insurance and RV insurance. A new Star Trek movie and a new season of Outlander on STARZ are good news for many.

Perhaps the most universal commercials are for beverages and candy. Our putative young couple apparently don’t drink beer, but they’re suckers for Vitamin Water, SmartWater, and Simply juices and mixers. I learned that all of these are Coca-Cola products, though there were no Coke commercials when I watched.

The most astounding commercials, however, were for two Hershey products: KitKat and Reese’s. While my back was turned, these have exploded. The Reese’s product page lists 247 products. When I last looked, there were Reese’s peanut butter cups and Reese’s Pieces; now there are myriad varieties of size, packaging, seasonal variations (Easter eggs and bunnies, pink hearts, snowmen and Santas) and spinoffs such as frozen treats. The traditional peanut butter cups come in thin, miniature, and king-sized variants, as well as “chocolate lovers” and “creamy” options. And there are actual jars of Reese’s brand peanut butter! The two products being advertised on Person of Interest were Reese’s Big Cups and Take 5. Hershey’s site also lists 83 KitKat products. Again there are many variations of flavor, size, and packaging. But what struck me about the commercial was that the tagline has changed to “Have a break. Have a KitKat.” I miss the old jingle “Gimme a break! Gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that KitKat bar!” It turns out that jingle was actually never supposed to be used—bet you didn’t know that!

Honon Steak Revisited Again

In April 2017, I wrote about the mystery of “Honon Steak” (“An Iowa Treat“). Several weeks later, in “Honon Steak Revisited,” I reported what my researches (and helpful sources) had revealed about this strange specialty, which seemed to have surfaced in Iowa in the second decade of the twentieth century. The name is still a bit of a mystery, but the recipe is simple enough: round steak, pounded thin, dredged in flour, browned on both sides, and then oven-braised for three hours.

The other night, for some reason, I thought about honon (or Honon) steak and wanted to refer to these blog posts. I knew from experience that a Google search would turn up the two posts as the top two search results, so I was surprised when, instead, I got the usual “Did you mean…?” and “Including results for hunan steak.” When I refined the search, I got much the same, the first result being “Fiery Honan Beef.”

Giving up on Google, I decided to search my WalkThoughts site, but that search generated no results. Surprised and frustrated, I found the original posts on my hard drive; with the post titles, I found the posts easily, and as soon as I started reading, I realized my mistake: the mystery dish is “honon steak,” and I had been searching for “honan steak.”

My mistake was serendipitous, however, because one of the hits I found that wasn’t related to Hunan cuisine was an article in the August 1919 issue of Woman’s Home Companion titled “Quick and Easy Meals.” The subtitle promised that “They can be prepared in half an hour or so.” The meals included menus for four “Refreshing Breakfasts for Hot Mornings,” five “Appetizing Luncheons or Suppers,” and “Four Delicious Summer Dinners.” As can be seen from the image below, one of the Delicious Summer Dinners included “Honan Steak with Onions.”

From the instructions provided (see below) I suspect that this version of the steak, cooked only a few minutes, would not be as tender as the version cooked for three hours, but I haven’t tried either version.

Fashions in recipes certainly change. I was intrigued by one of the breakfast dishes: “Toasted Hamburg Sandwich.” You might expect this to involve ground beef, and in fact it calls for “chopped beef” (perhaps already cooked), but the result seems to be a sort of French toast containing hamburger!

We can also conclude from this recipe that sliced bread was not available, and in fact, according to Wikipedia, the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, was the first bakery to sell sliced loaves, using the bread-slicing machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa. This was in 1928. If you ever wondered “What was the greatest thing before sliced bread,” you may be amused to learn that the sliced bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.”

The interest aroused by the breakfast recipes doesn’t stop there, however. Note that Recipe IV includes “Corn Meal and Hominy Cooked in Fireless Cooker.” What? Google obliges with an exhaustive USDA article as well as a more accessible blog post that explains that “It was a simple concept. Food was put into a specially designed kettle with a minimum amount of liquid and brought to a boil, and the kettle was then put away in a well-insulated container where the heat of the liquid finished cooking the food.” The post adds that “Fireless cookery emerged in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century, and judging from the number of makers and the frequency of advertisements that followed, it seems to have caught on for a while.” So this would have been the latest rage in 1919, the crockpot of its time.

The Economy of “Shrinkflation”

The other day I read an article that originally aired on NPR, “What tracking one Walmart store’s prices for years taught us about the economy.” It looked back at a “market basket” survey done in mid-2019 (originally to assess the impact of “tariffs the White House imposed in 2018 on imports from China, Mexico and Canada — as well as China’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made products”). Staffers attempted to match the 2019 market basket with current (2022) purchases. In some cases, they were unable to exactly match the items: often, Walmart had substituted a cheaper brand, and the original was not available. But the article called out two price increases as examples of “shrinkflation,” where a manufacturer attempts to disguise a price increase by reducing the size or quantity of an item.

One that especially caught my eye was Dove soap. In 2019, a package of ten 4-oz. bars cost $10.88. The equivalent package in 2022 was eight 3.75-oz bars for $10.97. The unit price of a bar thus increased from $1.09 to $1.37, but the price per ounce increased from $0.27 to $0.37. Interestingly, after being unable to find my Lever 2000 soap at Walmart, I finally gave up and ordered it from Amazon—two packages of eight 4-oz. bars for $19.43—a unit price of $1.21 per bar and $0.30 per ounce. I won’t attempt to compare the quality or desirability of Lever 2000 vs. Dove, but as far as I know, I have been buying the same size and quantity of Lever 2000 for many years. Perhaps the recent absence from Walmart portends a price increase, and perhaps I am fortunate to have stocked up.

But what really struck me about the Dove price increase was this: How does this make sense economically? When you consider all the factors that go into making and selling a bar of soap, the cost of the ingredients must be infinitesimal compared to advertising and promotion, package design, production and packaging equipment, and staff to do all of these things. When the size of the bar is changed, not to mention the number of bars in a package, I assume that many pieces of production and packaging equipment must be retooled. A new package must be designed and produced. All of this must be very expensive.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid that much attention to the price of soap (aside from a general feeling that everything I buy nowadays is overpriced compared to the days when a loaf of bread was 25¢), and I don’t think I would have noticed even a large price increase on the original package of ten 4-oz. bars, nor would I be likely to buy some other brand. Indeed, if you had asked me, I would have said there was not likely a cheaper equivalent; unlike many other bath and body products, I would not have thought that there was a store-brand bar soap option at Walmart. A search, however, reveals that there actually is an Equate Beauty Bar that “compares to Dove White.” It is priced at $6.56 for eight 4-oz. bars or (elsewhere) $6.74 for six four-ounce bars. In either case, I don’t think Dove can compete with that price no matter what changes it makes. Incidentally, Walmart also advertises twelve 4-oz. bars of Lever 2000 for $6.94 (“price when purchased online”). That’s $0.57 per bar/$0.14 per ounce, so maybe I didn’t get such a great bargain from Amazon after all!

An Early-Covid Artifact

To give it its due, our health insurance company (United Healthcare) makes valiant efforts to encourage wellness. They’re constantly calling to make sure we’re doing okay, offering home visits and phone consultations that we decline because we are quite healthy. And from time to time we are surprised by care packages from UHC. During cold and flu season they’ve sent thermometers and lip balm and packets of Emergen-C. Fairly early during the pandemic, they sent a kit that contained a fairly well-fitting cloth mask and a plastic widget for opening doors, pressing buttons, etc.

But the most amusing gift, certainly well-intentioned but now rather risible, was an at-home Covid test. We’re practically drowning in Covid tests. Although we have been fortunate to have had almost no occasion to use them, I keep graciously accepting those offered by the federal government, so the linen closet where we also stockpile medications, bandages, and the like is overflowing. The other day I decided to get them all out and check expiration dates, expecting to be able to discard those that had expired. After checking the FDA site where you can check extended expiration dates, I found that they’re actually all still good, so I returned six iHealth and two BinaxNOW boxes (16 tests in all) to the closet.

At the same time, I got out the much bulkier box we’d received from UHC’s Well At Home. This EverlyWell test retails for $109, and it is a PCR test, so I shouldn’t be making fun of it, but the comparison to the convenient home antigen tests is striking. To begin with, you have to get permission to use it:

The instructions are very thorough, beginning with the contents:

Here are those actual contents.

These are the collection instructions, beginning with watching a video and planning your shipment in advance:

In case you have neglected to follow these instructions, there’s an Important Reminder:

Next come the detailed return instructions:

The instruction to disinfect the mailer (even though you’ve washed your hands) reflects the then-current assumption that the Covid virus might remain on surfaces.

Finally, there is information on what happens after you submit the sample:

The outside packaging (in very, very tiny print) warns: “Must be 18+ to complete a test. We work with a physician network to ensure that your test is reviewed and approved by an independent board-certified physician in your state and that your results are reviewed by a physician before you review them. Check everlywell.com/states to check which states this test is valid in.” This is what you can find at that link:

Everlywell tests are currently available to residents in 49 U.S. states. With the exception of the COVID-19 Test Home Collection Kit DTC and COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, we currently do not offer tests to residents of New York state. This is due to the state’s regulations around testing. Samples must be collected and returned from eligible states. We hope to eventually offer all of our tests in all 50 states.

So we could have used this even if we were in New York. Whew! If we’d needed to use this test, I’m sure we would have been grateful to have it, even if there was only one test between the two of us. [I recall now that I was offered the opportunity to get this package (which also includes a dose of Tamiflu); by the time my husband applied, it was too late.] Still, by comparison to the simplicity of the home antigen tests, this seems very complicated!

The Mystery of Curtis Sittenfeld

Various characters populate my dreams. Sometimes they have names—just last night a “Mrs. Faghetti” was attempting to make off with the luscious pastries given to me by an admirer—but more often they are friends and family—my husband, my son and daughter (usually at a younger age), my long-dead parents—recognizable only because I know that’s who they are.

Sometimes they are recognizable personalities. The other day, one of the cast was the spit and image of actor Noah Emmerich; I don’t recall what part he played, however. Other times they have the recognizable names of celebrities.

For the most part, all these identifications vanish upon waking. A week or so ago, I had a dream in which several of the characters were well-known personalities, and I marveled at this, but of course when I woke up, I’d lost them all. Except one. For some reason, I remembered the name “Curtis Sittenfeld” and wrote it down on the pad on my nightstand so I’d remember it in the morning.

I had no idea who Curtis Sittenfeld might be—perhaps a character in a novel or TV show, I speculated. But when I googled the name the next morning, I learned that she (she! That was a surprise!) is a writer, author of six novels, none of which I have read. Most are not recent, so I would not have read a review, and I have not seen a review of the new one, Romantic Comedy, to be published in April.

So where did this name come from? I mentioned this mystery to a friend, who pointed out that everything we see and hear is stored in the brain somewhere (I’m not sure this is factually true), but since I can’t imagine any way I would have run across this name, I’m still at a complete loss.