Alright, so maybe it's more than a hobby lately, but I've really been enjoying my time baking. As I write this blog, I have some delicious wheat bread rising in the kithcen. I had made some last week, and it was amazing. If you've experienced anything that has been home-made, doesn't it maike you wonder why people don't make their own breads, pastries, candiesm, etc. etc,. etc.? Especially when you take the bread right out of the oven, it's soft, warm... ugh, I can't wait.
It's really a shame that cooking and baking in America is, for the most part, a lost art. We easily give up the home-made goods for something a little more preserved and processed in order to save a bit of time. We have machines do the work, and in the process, we are missing almost an entire page in the history of man. Sounds sappy, maybe, but it's true. There is no meaning behind buying a loaf of Sara Lee. There is no aroma to be remembered fifty years down the road when your children are talking about their home experiences.
Also, I cut my finger in the process of making the loaves that are rising (don't worry, no blood is in the bread). Ended up cutting my finger on a hidden knife when trying to reach for a spatula. Ah the war stories of a baker.
|
Lately, for say, the past two weeks, I've been dressing more business like. I've been really getting into it. It makes me feel a little more respectable and it is actually a bit more comfortable than street clothes, in my opinion. Dressing nice is something I've been wanting to do for a while, but really couldn't find any good motivation to. With the new job and location, I figured it would be a good time to start.
I've got a few dress shirts from over the past few years that I wear. I'm a tall guy, with abnormally long arms. I'm also pretty thin compared to most. Seems every shirt I have or have tried on does not fit quite right. It's like they are designed in a way that says I need to gain 30lbs. This also includes most fitted shirts. The back of these shirts puff out like a boat sail. I can't necessarily get a smaller size, either, since the smaller shirts don't have the correct arm length.
How is it, that I am more or less a healthy size and nothing fits? This may be laughable, but I actually did some Googling on the subject of how to find a decent fitted dress shirt, and most places I came across would forward a concern that America in whole is a bigger country than it was 50 years ago. The average American shirt size is a bit larger than it used to be and is also tailored baggier as more men find that comfortable. It only makes sense to tailor shirts based on an average demographic, but it leaves me with few options.
From what I read, these are a few routes I could go: I could get my shirts tailored at $8-10 a pop, or I could buy $80 Italian dress shirts. Both sound much less appealing than throwing $20 on the table for a shirt at JC Penny. I should have been alive in the earlier half of the 20th century, I guess.
|
Since my family moved back to Willmar eight years ago, I've been exposed to the wonderful life of maintaining a hobby farm. Sure, at the time it was quite bittersweet, I was in my teen years, so of course I was at times a little resentful having to do a decent amount of the chores with the sole payback of being able to eat a healthy proportion of eggs and poultry. Unlike most kids, however, I oftenly enjoyed the time I had with the animals as well as watching them grow to become tasty tasty meat. Alas, I am now twenty-two, my parents no longer live in the boonies and I seemed to have rooted myself, along with my wife, in middle of town. No more farm fresh eggs or poultry for this guy.
A year ago, just to make sure, I double-checked our city's laws on keeping livestock, poultry and other farm animals within the city. I was a little suprised to see that our town isn't necessarily against raising chickens in town, per-say, for as long as they find favor in you. Meaning you must apply for a permit (cha-ching) and pass their inspection (cha-ching)[1]. I haven't applied for this yet. 100% of me wants to, though I feel my fate is totally at the hands of whoever issues the permit and whoever is going to be inspecting my property. I'm quite positive, based on the fact that I haven't seen anyone else raise poultry in town, that I will be denied. I could be wrong, however.
So what respawns my interest in raising chicken in town today? This has been an on going idea of mine since a pro-Urban Chicken group started in Duluth back in November. They share similar views on the subject with me: Chickens are cleaner than most other pets, they aren't loud, they are natural, they are far less suseptable to salmonella and other diseases carried by birds and they prove to aid a self-sufficient lifestyle (as well as fits some interpretations of "Going Green"). Cities such as Seattle and New York allow Urban Chickens, so why can't a city the size of Willmar do so as well?
[1] Municode Willmar, Mn Sec. 4-1. Keeping of livestock, fowl or swine.
|
Here is another great example of Organic/Go Green activists gone wrong. The Eglu made by Omlet USA. My friend Carl showed me this bizarre housing for chickens a couple weeks ago. I thought I'd share my take on it.
First of all, I'm just going to throw this out there, the Eglu is a grand total of $665.00, shipped with love, straight from Omlet USA. Don't get me wrong, click around demo on their website about it, it's a real slick chicken house. It's easy to clean and retrieve eggs... But I absolutely cannot get over the steep price. Convieniently, you can also buy chickens, which if you do, they suggest you buy their 50lb bag of Organic feed. My jaw dropped when I saw the additional price tag on these. I added three chickens, since that should tide a small family over for the week and have a few left over for neighbors. I come to find that they are charging $10.00 per chicken!!!!! Holy Mackerel!!! If you must know, the 50lb bag of feed was a whopping $50, not to mention the additional 50lb shipping charge. Grand total for chicken operation: a staggering $811.00.
 If you don't find that steep for roughly 18-21 eggs a week, then I'd like for you to sit through a short math lesson. The night before, I bought 18 eggs for 2.08. Rounded up, that is $0.12 an egg. Definitely more than I'd like to spend on store eggs, but that's besides the point. Lets say I totally love eggs (and I do) and end up buying 18 eggs a week for a year, with no egg price fluctuation, for 52 weeks, I am going to spend $108.16 on eggs in a year.
$108.16 is my number. Now lets do the math on Eglu. Up front, you are spending 811.00 on the whole kit and caboodle, chickens and all. It'll take roughly 4-5 months for a chicken to start laying eggs (if they were purchased as chicks.) and will have about a year of prime egg laying in them before they get the axe. So while waiting for them to become of age, you will probably end up buying $40 worth of eggs from the store. Also, you will need another bag or two of feed for the year (we'll say you wised up and started buying 50lb bags from a farm store for $12 each). 811.00 (eglu) + $40.00 (eggs) + $24.00 (chicken feed) equals a whopping $875 for a Chicken operation. This equals roughly $.93 an egg or $11.16 a dozen. This is a modest guesstimate.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the fun, enjoyment and satisfaction of running your own egg operation. I have raised chickens before and I am going to give it a shot again this spring. However, there are much more cost effective ways of doing so, and it requires a little handy-work and time compared to the Eglu. I am betting I will be able to house 3-4 chickens for about $50. From there, I will be paying $1.25 for the same chickens eglu offers and I will be buying feed for $12.00 a bag.
I believe this is what happens to the customers of Omlet USA. They are the same people that fall for the organic trap as well as the Go Green trap. It's something you buy to prevent eating the fertilized sludge in the grocery store and something you buy to reduce the use of containers and reduce consumption of oh so precious petroleum. The eglu is a status symbol to let people know that you are more conscientious about mother earth than anyone else. It's flashy, sterile, green, organic, attractive and eye catching so that people will notice it. If raising chickens was truly the primary objective, these people would allow themselves to realise they can run the same egg operation for as little as $100 total. Unfortunately, the cheaper route will not be noticed nearly as much and it wouldn't be cute enough to house their farm animals.
That's my beef... or egg.
|
HEY EVERYONE!! Have I got a cash and gas saving tip for you that will make the oil industry curdle in anger!!! This, folks, is the carbon-neutralizing, tight-dollar secret that Conoco, Philips and Gore do not want you to hear. No, the answer is not hydrogen, it isn't bio-fuel, it definitely isn't Ethanol... Prepare to have your socks blown right off!
The key to winning the war against skyrocketing gas prices, air pollution and costly corn-flakes is this: A "To Do" list! With the power of the "To Do" list, you can do many of the following, possibly in the same trip, once a week! You will be able to:
- Fill a full tank of gas to last you a whole week (or more!).
- Collect the groceries necessary to survive on beautiful and tasty home-cooked meals!
- Run all letters and packages all at once to the nearest post office / parcel receptacle!
- Get a car wash (If even needed, since you will be driving so much less frequently, due to your newly-found organizational skill)!
- Rent, Borrow, or if needed, buy all entertainment you deem necessary for the week!
- Jet to the bank to cash your check and note how much extra money you may have in savings (if you aren't doing this online already)!
And what better time to do all these than right after the work-day is complete? You are in the neighborhood, so you might as well!
In all seriousness, though, is it really necessary to be making two or three trips a day to pick up only a couple things at a time? It only seems to be the typical consumerist nature in our current "I need it now" culture to just up and hop in the car at moments notice with no real plan of action, except for the fact that they need one item or have one agenda to complete. I don't know how or when this happened, but I feel too often, gas becomes some sort of mystical energy that powers your car. "Well it's a necessity," seems to over rule any and all logical rationing of how you are utilising the seven gallons of gas left in your car. Do you have a plan for the $24.50 in your gas tank or does the 'necessity' reasoning over rule?
Look at it like this. Say you are sitting at home and you decide you want to pick up a sandwich at Subway for $3.00. You live four miles away and you own a car that gets ~23 miles to the gallon. you paid $3.19 a gallon for gas. In order to get a Spicy Italian sandwich for $2.99 + tax, you are going to end up spending at least $1.10 round trip in gas if there is no traffic or complications. For a grand total for the sandwich alone, you just paid around $4.30.
On the flip-side, say you had the foresight to be able to say, "Hey, I am probably going to want a tasty sandwich in the next week." and chose to buy the materials needed to make the sandwich while you were picking up other food and necessities at the local grocery store. You would most indeed not have $1.10 in gas tied exclusively to a sandwich purchase (unless if you only eat sandwiches, in which case, more power to you). Now I doubt on most occasion you are going to drive more than one mile to eat every meal. However, if you take into account that people generally eat both lunch and supper around 350 - 365 days a year. This is over 700 meals a year per person. A lot of eating and a lot of driving if you don't plan accordingly.
In the end, this is all really just speculation, but if you run the numbers on your own trips you make, you'd be suprised exactly how much gas and money you consume in a week. So with that said, it isn't necessarily just the big companies faults that buying a tank of gas feels like a burden, it is also our own if we don't watch how we manage it.
|
|