Savvy Saving Bytes

When I was a little kid my parents were in charge of all the food that went down my little gullet. As all parents are. But judging from galloping obesity rates in the USA (we are now officially THE fattest country in the market-economy world), too many parents are snoozing at the wheel when it comes to feeding their children food that won’t turn them into little hippos. Hippo isn’t a pretty word to describe a child, but Thursday I had errands near a large medical center on 14th street and I swear it was like I had barged into some crazy neighborhood conference of grossly obese woman. Rumbling along like torpid hippos, one after another passed me, accompanied by children well on their way to hippo-dom.

So to my Mom and Dad, I say a big thank you for all those years serving my sisters and I meals without desserts. Showing up only rarely, maybe once a month, our occasional desserts were mostly small helpings of pudding, Jell-O or melon and I’m glad to say I carried this non-dessert habit with me into adulthood.

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When my teen-age nieces came from Virginia to visit me in New York City, their mother suspected their exuberant energy would quickly leave me in a puff of exhausted dust. Guess what. At the end of our first day hitting the sights and trooping up and down the city, the two totally wrung-out teens collapsed on my couch like old rag dolls. Suburban chicks who travel pretty much everywhere by car, they were not used to walking any kind of distance for any length of time.

According to an Economix article, the life expectancy in New York City is now 1.5 years higher than the rest of the nation. And one of the primary reasons for that could well be all our walking. New Yorkers love to walk. We walk to work, to shop, to eat, to entertainment, to everything. With mostly flat terrain, wide sidewalks, ample shade trees and a vibrant street life, the city is a walker’s paradise. And we are fast walkers, so forgive us, tourists, when your creeping, laid back pace tempts us to bop you out of our hurried way. We have places to go, appointments to keep.

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If you’ve never heard of water cremation, as I hadn’t until I read about it in the Economist this weekend, it’s a process of dunking a dead body in a heated solution of water and potassium hydroxide.  Voila — a few short hours later the body dissolves into an inorganic liquid, which, if you are a hard-line conservationist, can be further utilized as a fertilizer.  This process, also known as “alkaline hydrolysis” is already happening in Australia where Aquamation Industries opened its water cremation doors last month.  But fear not, America, the procedure is coming to Florida where an enterprising British company, Resomation, will be setting up for business by the end of the year.

An even more radical Swedish approach for green body disposal is on the funeral horizon. After being freeze-dried in liquid nitrogen, a corpse is vibrated till it dissolves into a fine powder. Further processing removes the water and mercury (from dental fillings) and the conservation rolls on when the final residue is transformed into mulch. Promessa, the Swedish company that developed this concept, claims that franchises for the process are now in place in South Korea and Britain.

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The doctor pushed the hypodermic needle deeper into the epidural space along my spinal chord. It was my fourth epidural — a steroid injection to relieve (supposedly) lower back pain — but getting the gigantic needle IN was the problem and this one was the worst of the bunch. I was pulverizing the nurse’s hand gripping mine against the pain when I felt myself passing out…Nope, not a fun morning.

This first started about seven years ago when lower back pain came calling. Cause?  Two bulging spinal disks, but they were not bulging enough to make me a candidate for surgery. And so began two years of endless appointments with pain specialists, anesthesiologists (my epidural buddies), physical therapists and test machines of every stripe. They added up to a stack of medical bills stretching to the stratosphere. Most were paid by my insurance, thank you, though I had to cough up plenty too.

As if this weren’t enough drama, I suddenly started having hip pain on top of the back pain. Terrific. For this new annoyance, all tests came back negative. Sleeping suddenly became an iffy proposition. There was no position in bed that didn’t hurt, so I coped by constantly rolling from one position to another, a whirling dervish in the night.

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Before the recent dive in the Chinese microcap market, I made a decent profit trading small (but profitable) Bulletin Board Chinese stocks. Tinkerbell style bookkeeping occurred in a few of these stocks (a given in the BB game) and I got smacked accordingly, but in the end made out okay. This past week that market appears to be coming to life again.

As I contemplate jumping onto that roller-coaster ride again, some events in China have been bothering me lately.  Undeterred after being caught adulterating milk with melamine, a toxic chemical that increased their profits and killed Chinese babies, some of the guilty milk companies actually REPEATED their melamine poisoning once the initial outcry died down. The next troublesome event was the collapse of Chinese schools in the 2008 earthquake that killed thousands of students, yet left neighboring buildings still standing. Unlike those solidly constructed buildings, it turns out China’s shoddily constructed schools had never been designed to withstand quakes at the high end of the Richter Scale. Next comes a tidbit I just recently came across. Researchers found that a whopping 31% of Chinese scientific papers submitted to a national scientific journal in the last two years contained plagiarized material. That’s a LOT of cheating. Because the Chinese government advances careers based strictly on the number of papers published, the pressure to produce these papers is enormous, though it’s pretty much agreed no one reads them.

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Why confine expressions of gratitude to Big Turkey Day? Here are some well expressed quotes on thankfulness for every season, day and hour of the year:

• “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” –Thornton Wilder
• “When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep? No—here’s to the pilot that weathered the storm.” -–George Canning
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”–-William Arthur Ward
• “Ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude.”-–Sallust
• “Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” -–Samuel Johnson
• “Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.” -–Jean Jacques Rousseau
• “A man’s indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.”-–Ruth Benedict
• “God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say thank you?” –William A. Ward

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When I worked at a publishing house, extravagant, gift food packages flooded editor’s offices during the Christmas Season, but the biggest hit with the staff was always a tin of home-made cookies baked by an author who was also a divine baker.

Scoring points for effort and thoughtfulness, freshly baked cookies make super holiday gifts that are also easy on the budget and appeal to all palates. Who doesn’t love a cookie?

As interest in American cuisine has expanded and become more adventuresome, so has our taste in Christmas cookies. The delectable, nostalgic classics of our youth — the sugar cookies and gingerbread men — still reign supreme. But health-niks have lately been developing a hankering for lighter, healthful fare. And let’s not forget that new kid on the block – gluten free treats.

For homemakers with jobs and hectic schedules, there’s also a market for simpler cookie recipes with faster preparation time (no-bake rum or bourbon balls anyone?) These easy, no-bake recipes will also appeal to the baking challenged like myself.

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If you’re a male, yes — your handsomeness may well speed you along the hiring path. But if you’re a good-looking female — watch out. The green eye of jealousy could be waiting to trip you up and send your resume to Nowhere-Land.

These findings are based on a study conducted by economists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel who sent 5,312 résumés to over 2,600 employers with advertised job openings. Two virtually identical résumés were mailed, one including a photo of the (supposed) applicant and the other, with no attached photo. Sometimes that photo was a good-looking man or woman and sometimes, a plainer-looking man or woman. (Sending photos with résumés is common in Israel and while not typical here, the practice is slowly picking up steam).

Which applicants were later contacted for job interviews? Of the males, 19.9 percent with accompanying photos of handsome faces received callback responses. Only 13.7 percent of the guys with plain looking photos were contacted. But for the men who sent in no photos  — a mere 9.2 percent received callbacks.

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Today money is of no importance as I sit here and make a list of my dream Christmas gifts – presents I would love to find waiting for me under the tree Christmas morning.

• First up: A special gift card from Apple that I could use at any Apple store in the world to buy any computer my Mac-loving-heart coveted for the rest of my happy life (because this gift card would make me mucho happy forever).
• An airline ticket in my name that would fly me free anywhere, anytime. First class, natch, so I would never again have to squeeze into economy class  and suffer cramped arms, trampled legs, broken backs and belongings mashed flat in over-stuffed, overhead bins.
• An enormous king size bed all comfy adjustable like a hospital bed, except visually a whole lot classier with some smart new design (a big challenge for Santa I know).
• To go with that bed the fluffiest down quilt in North America as freshly fragrant as the sheets dried outside in the sunny, open air when I was a child.
• A luxurious long mink coat to keep me toasty warm against the biting icy winds of Manhattan’s winter canyons with a thick collar to wrap around my frozen ears — a garment that no animals would have to die to produce (ain’t fantasy grand?).
• A lifetime dispensation from ever having to clean my apartment or house or anything ever again because nothing is more boring or a bigger loop of wasted time and effort.
• Ditto on never having to shop ever again. If I need anything — food, new shoes, printer ink, oil paints — poof! I’d snap my fingers and new objects would appear to my exacting taste.
• A new apartment with –oh lordy — an ELEVATOR. For kicks I just spent a few moments calculating how many times I have climbed (and crawled) up and down my four flights and it’s strictly world record time, gang. This mythical apartment would also have tons of empty space and book cases so I’d never again have overflowing stacks of books, CDs, movies, papers and this and that toppling in every direction and clattering to the floor.

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In 1985 Ulises Valdez couldn’t have started much lower on the totem pole. From a small Mexican village, he was only sixteen and spoke no English when he jumped the border into California and signed on as a field hand at a vineyard management company. It was a fortuitous match. Immediately feeling at home cultivating grapes, he learned the business quickly. So Quickly that a year later he approached the owner with a bold and daring proposition — the kind of proposition that could only come from an ambitious visionary with the ability to design and construct the trajectory of his own destiny.

The seventeen year old teenager informed his employer he would be happy to work for a full season without a penny in exchange for being made a partner in the business. By that time he had already been declared a legal temporary resident (leading the way to his eventual citizenship), so once he was officially proclaimed part-owner of Florence Vineyard Management, he was now free to begin acquiring long term vineyard leases to develop the vineyards and sell the ripened grapes to their winery clients. Clearly the ability to negotiate contracts with seasoned adults wise in the ways of business and wine is not a typical ability found in the seventeen year old set. But pull it off Valdez did until 2003 when he bought out his partner’s share in the business and changed its’ name to Valdez & Sons Vineyard Management Inc. With this name, he set the stage for the future time his sons would be old enough to join him in the business.

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