Increase your stimulus check amount by 10%

In an unprecedented event, I am posting to my blog twice in the same day. I am doing so because I want to help spread this bit of information before it gets any later in the week.

With all the hubbub over the economic stimulus checks that most of us in the United States will be receiving beginning this week, the most underreported news about them is that many retailers are offering additional dollars if you spend those checks at their stores.

Sears is the big one. Give them your check and they'll give you Sears gift cards for 110% your check's value.

I hear Kmart, Lands' End, Kroger (and related supermarkets), Staples and Radio Shack have similar offers.

Wisebread posted about this yesterday afternoon, and I hope their comments will fill up with additional information. If you know of any other offers, please do post them here and/or at Wisebread.

I myself am technically in the market for both a dishwasher and a clothes dryer, but I spent a lot of money recently so I think my check is going to have to go to credit card payments, out of necessity. The dishwasher and dryer aren't dead yet anyway, so I keep pushing that back. Now, if The Container Store were offering money for checks, I'd take them up on it. I have a major purchase coming up there in the next couple months. (Metro Shelving...I've been asking for Container Store gift cards since Christmas, to no avail.)

Another month, another calendar desktop wallpaper

It's the end of April, so that means it's time for me to visit Smashing Magazine to choose from their gallery of monthly desktop wallpapers for a May calendar. Wallpapers are contributed by many artists from all over the world and are available in many sizes, with and without calendar artwork.

Of course, I'm in it for the calendar artwork. Otherwise I'd just use a rotation of pictures of my dogs for my wallpaper.

For May, I have decided to use this one:


My April selection is still in use:


And back in March, the first month that they offered a calendar on one of their desktop wallpapers, I used this:


I myself require a darker background (the light ones, they burrrrn!) and that the calendar be on the right half of the picture, because my desktop icons are all on the left side. (The bottom of the screen works, too, a la March.)

I encourage you to use one of these beautiful finds. Or create your own and submit it for June!

You can stop writing your META keywords now, folks.

A United States court has declared, within a ruling regarding trademark infringement (Standard Process, Inc. v. Banks), that META keywords do not influence search results:

Court Declares META Keywords Dead
U.S. Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don't Matter
Court Says Keyword Metatags Don't Matter--Standard Process v. Banks

Dr. Banks apparently (amongst other things, it seems), used some of Standard Process Inc.'s trademarked terms within his own META keywords. The court felt that the trademarks used in the META keywords were immaterial since META keywords aren't even used to influence search results anymore.

This remark by the court seems to overturn an earlier ruling—just this month—declaring that the use of trademarks in META tags can constitute infringement:

US Court Rules Trademarks In Meta Tags Can Constitute Infringement

Regardless, scrap your META keywords. Your keywords belong in your site's copy.

Goodbye, parsley. I always loved you.

I can not grow parsley.

I have tried before, many times.

I will not try again.

Strawberries vs. chicken fingers: the cost of calories

The cost of healthy food is a pretty hot topic lately. Even ignoring current economic issues (which is hard to do: it's tough to pick up a newspaper without reading about how the cost of ingredients and gas are making food prices skyrocket), fresh foods are simply more expensive than processed foods. If you stick to buying the healthiest stuff at your supermarket: fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, cheese, meats, that is, the stuff that the store displays on its outside walls, your grocery bill will be higher than if you select your items from within the aisles.

This is a much more involved issue than most people realize. Much of it goes back to the farm bill and subsidization to corn farmers. If you google for a moment you'll find articles in sources ranging from random bloggers like myself to the New York Times that focus on how Americans are so obese because a bag of chips (whose ingredients are heavy on corn) is so much less expensive, dollar-per-calorie, than healthier foods like fresh produce.

On a shallow level, I absolutely agree with that argument. People like my dad will say that chips are expensive. "$4 for a bag of snack food! How is that cheap?" But compare the number of calories in that $4 bag of chips (often over 1000) to the number of calories you'll get if you spend $4 on pears (200-400, depending on the season) and it's really obvious that the argument is valid.

But on a deeper level we should see that the argument, presented as I did above, isn't comparing apples to apples. The choice that lower-income families face isn't (or shouldn't be) pears vs. chips. There are numerous other aisles in the supermarket containing cheap pastas, beans, and other more convenient foods. People trying to save their earnings while staying healthy sure aren't taking a bunch of asparagus in one hand and a box of Oreos in the other hand and thinking, "Well, asparagus is far more nutritious, but dollar-per-calorie, I'm gonna have to go with the Oreos...." The contents of prepared pastas and boxed rice dishes aren't as pure as those in fresh produce, but there really is enough good stuff available to raise any growing boy without making him one of America's obese children.

And with that in mind, I am going to begin a series of articles comparing the cost of calories in different foods. My recent healthy eating kick has really opened my eyes to how expensive it is to live on foods like spinach, and I find myself looking back fondly at the days when I came closer to living on Banquet frozen foods, perpetually available at Jewel for $1 each. (Recently the discount went even deeper, to $0.88 each. Convenience food nirvana, let me tell you.)

This idea recently hit me hard when I was surprised by the nutritional information I entered for a couple of my meals (on fitday.com). Those two meals were: One pound of fresh strawberries (more like a big snack than a meal) and Banquet Chicken Fingers.

VS

Strawberries:
I buy strawberries when they are on sale. The sale is usually two pounds for the price of one (or, when the season is really high, four pounds for the price of two). Regardless, a half-price strawberry is a good find, if you can eat them fast enough. So one day I brought a pound-sized carton of strawberries with me to work. I ate the whole thing in one sitting. A pound of strawberries is more filling than I thought it would be. Fruits and vegetables are not very filling for me as a rule, which is one reason I've avoided them over the years. But strawberries did not disappoint. After being positive I screwed the pooch by eating the whole thing at once, I looked up the nutritional content of strawberries on nutritiondata.com and was surprised and somewhat alarmed to learn that one pound of strawberries contains only 144 calories. That pound of strawberries effectively cost me $2.50, so this large snack cost me $0.0174 per calorie. That's about one and three-fourths pennies.

Banquet Chicken Fingers:
Even during my current health food kick, I still consume a frozen meal about every other day. I prepare almost all of my food one way or another (as opposed to picking up food at a deli or McDonald's) so in order to eat all day long I have to resort to convenience foods at least once a day. For me, convenience foods mostly mean frozen meals, boxed pastas, and nutrition bars. Healthy Choice is my favorite frozen food brand but Banquet is the cheapest, so I stock both. (I should note that both brands are owned by ConAgra, so there is no violence in my freezer between the two related, not strictly competing, brands.) And when I grab a frozen meal out of the freezer, my mental calculator dishes up a caloric content between 300 and 400 calories, because that's what they tend to be. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I looked at the nutritional information on the package and learned that Banquet's Chicken Fingers boast a whopping 550 calories per serving. 550 calories! For $1! (I don't remember if I got this particular box for 88 cents, but that was a once-in-a-lifetime event so I'm going with the $1 figure.) The math tells me that this meal cost $0.002 per calorie. That's two-tenths of one cent. That is one cheap calorie.

The calorie deathmatch data:

Strawberries, one pound Calories: 144 Price: $2.50 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.0174 (1.74 cents)

Banquet Chicken Fingers meal Calories: 550 Price: $1 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.002 (1/5 of one cent)

To summarize: Banquet Chicken Fingers calories are so much cheaper than strawberry calories that you can buy 8.7 times the number of Chicken Finger calories as strawberry calories for the same amount of money.

Want it even more simply?

Spending the same amount of money*, you could live on strawberries for about one day, while you could live on Banquet Chicken Fingers for nearly nine days.
*In this case, that amount would be about $35, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Get it? Talking about fractions of pennies might not be as clear, but the above statement should hit you. The strawberry calorie, she is an expensive one.

This, my first article in the calorie deathmatch series, isn't necessarily comparing apples to apples either. But I think it's at least a little bit more relevant than comparing fresh produce to corn chips.

Adjusting my calorie goal

I am sometimes too impressionable. I read something or hear somebody say something and I label it "gospel" and file it in a place of importance and easy access in my mind's filing cabinet.

For instance:

Denise Austin said that I can safely reduce my daily caloric intake to 1200 calories and quickly lose weight without hurting my body. During the year I lived in Savannah, Georgia, I spent a lot of time in my living room with Denise Austin. For various reasons I had gained a ton of weight the year before (well, not quite a ton ... 1.5% of a ton, to be precise) so I spent this year in relative seclusion attempting to get healthy. Some days I jogged around Forsyth Park, but on the really stifling humid Savannah days I stayed in my living room and turned on the TV to do aerobics with Denise. It was a nice time. So I made many efforts to follow her advice.

Somewhere I read that while trying to get pregnant, Angelina Jolie's nutritionist advised her to up her daily caloric intake from 1200 to 1500 calories. Of course all beautiful celebrities diet their entire lives; their paychecks depend on it. (Often I wish mine did.) So I figured, if Angelina can maintain those breasts while consuming only 1200 calories a day, I can certainly do so and remain healthy.

I've heard that 1200 calorie rule bandied about in numerous places, from numerous sources. I have no doubt that it's a fine goal. I have little doubt that it's harmless and that you'll drop weight fast with that kind of calorie intake, and I can prove it. So striving for 1200 calories a day when dieting is what I've always done. I simply thought it must be the right thing to do. It was my gospel.

So when I signed up at FitDay to log my diet and exercise, I set up some daily goals for myself. The one I pay most attention to is daily caloric intake, and the goal I set for myself was 1200-1500 calories. I wanted to give myself a little buffer zone, as I knew it would be tough to get into the habit of consuming only 1200 calories. So 1200-1500 seemed reasonable, but I really wanted to keep it closer to 1200 when possible.

I tried, oh how I tried. I did very well for a while, too. I reached my first fitness goal of losing my first 4 pounds, and life was good. Until bedtime, that is. Any time after 6pm, actually, because by that time I had already consumed my 1200 calories, and the most I could do after that was have maybe a nutrition bar and a piece of fruit, that is, if I was satisfied with going all the way to 1500 calories for the day, and regardless, I went to bed hungry. Every night. And it's hard for me to sleep when I'm hungry.

What ended up happening was that I rebelled and ended up gaining the weight back. I was miserable. So about a week ago I decided to try making a change.

My new goal for daily caloric intake is 1400-1600 calories. Now, instead of 1500 calories being "OK, but at the high end of where I want to be," it's right in the middle of where I'm aiming. It's my bullseye. And if I want, I can even have 100 more calories after that!

It's still restrictive, as diets are by definition. But it's possible. Often lately I've been landing somewhere between 1400-1500 calories after dinner, and then if I'm hungry before bed my favorite snack is Orville Redenbacher's 94% fat free popcorn in a 100-calorie mini bag. I actually bought the box of mini bags by accident, but it turns out that the serving size is just right.

I'm learning that there is nothing wrong with adjusting my goals. More to the point, I'm learning that to adjust a goal is not to fail at the goal. There is a little trial and error involved in just about everything we do, and the important thing is that we improve along the way. So here I am, full of more calories than before, but at least now I can sleep.

How do you keep a blog going?

The whole idea of beginning and maintaining this blog was scary from the start. I went through a couple periods over the past 6 months where I had absolutely nothing billable to work on, and when I wasn't keeping myself busy watching Law & Order reruns on TNT (and USA, NBC, WPWR, and occasionally Bravo) I was thinking about what else I could do on the internet to generate income. Those hazy Turner Network Television-induced thoughts are partially responsible for Mad Mad Life.

So when I get into busier times, such as when I'm working for agencies on site, working for other clients at home, and busy with springtime activities (spring house cleaning, spring yard cleaning, and of course, the vegetable garden), it is difficult to figure out when to budget in blogging time.

When this blogging plan hatched, it wasn't time that I thought would be the problem: I thought ideas would be the problem. It turns out that figuring out an intelligent way to present my ideas is somewhat challenging, but the more pressing problem is budgeting time. Right now, for instance, I have about five small ideas that I want to go ahead and publish, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with deciding how much time to devote to each. How much I should flesh them out. Which one should I publish first? I have entered a phase of immobility that I need to snap out of.

So I'm going to just get writing. Meanwhile, tell me how you budget your blogging time. Do you have a special time during the day when you sit down to write? Or do you just fire up the blog software when you are taking a break from something else and an idea hits you?

Mad driving lesson

Sometimes we can all use some advice, or a refresher course, even for activities that we engage in every day. In that vein, behold some driving tips that might help improve the daily commute for everybody on the road.

1) Use your brake pedal appropriately. Particularly to the cream colored convertible PT Cruiser this morning: when you are driving on a straight roadway free of traffic lights, stop signs, and armadillo crossings, there is no need to keep tapping the brake pedal. Remember that you should be using only one foot to control both the gas pedal and the brake. If you are applying your foot to the gas pedal you may simply reduce the pressure on the pedal in order to stop accelerating. There is no need to feverishly alternate between pedals as you accelerate. And while stopped at a stop light, use of the brake is appropriate while use of the gas pedal is not. There is no need to alternate between a stopped state and an inching-forward state twenty times before the light turns green.

2) Do you meet the requirements for driving in a single-lane express lane? A certain amount of responsibility comes with the decision to enter the single express lane. Keep in mind that every driver who follows you in that lane is stuck behind you and can not change lanes to pass your restless-driving-leg-syndrome ass as your speed varies erratically. I can think of no legitimate reason for you and the ten cars following you (that I could see from my position) to keep alternating speed between 40 and 60 miles per hour. Next time you decide to enter the single express lane, please watch your speedometer closely so that you don't infuriate your fellow commuters. You may also engage the cruise control. Or simply stick to the local lanes.

3) Be aware of merge lanes. If you are traveling straight in your lane, it is absolutely your right to stay your course. No other drivers have the right to change into your lane, thereby cutting you off, or causing you to swerve, etc. I am a champion of lane ownership. But I also urge you to be aware of what is going on in the lanes around you. For instance, some highways feature merge lanes that allow perhaps 50 feet for cars entering the highway to change into the rightmost driving lane before being forced off the roadway and into a ditch. The responsibility to merge safely into the rightmost driving lane does lie with the driver who is merging. But, if the rightmost driving lane is occupied with a stream of vehicles, each driving up on the ass of the vehicle in front of it, merging becomes simply impossible. So when you see a lane of merging vehicles up ahead, the helpful thing would be to either allow some room in between yourself and the car ahead of you, or to change into another lane if possible. You are not required to do this. It is not ultimately your responsibility, just as it is not ultimately your responsibility to help someone who has fallen down, who is being robbed, or who is on fire. I'll give you that. But also keep in mind that if I am attempting to merge into your lane and it comes down to the decision whether to careen off the highway into a ditch or to merge into your lane with you still in it, well, your safety may very well be on the line as well. So, please, think of the mergers.

4) And to the guy driving the black early-90s model Lexus: I hope you finally got to make that left turn. The use of the directional is perhaps one of the most underrated, underused first lines of both communication and defense on the road, but you really don't have to signal a turn quite that early. I tailed you for, what, a mile or two on the highway without you ever changing lanes, so I can only assume you were signaling for a turn you planned to make after exiting onto a street. Thank you for the early warning, honestly; I wish more people used their turn signal. But it does become less useful when it is used to such an extreme.

Diabetes 1, Grandma 0

Today my grandmother loses her leg to diabetes.

Gammy was diagnosed with diabetes when I was still pretty young; by "pretty young" I'm estimating I was a pre-teenager. I remember plenty of years when Gammy was perfectly healthy and ate whatever she wanted. Even after she was diagnosed, most of the time she seemed just fine. Meal time was challenging because Gammy always had a taste for sweets. "Just a sliver of cake for dessert. Just a sliver!" That's what she'd say, but I knew she always wanted more.

Through those pre-teen years, Gammy took my cousin and me to the outlet malls when we visited and we'd walk for miles, it seemed. We tried on clothes for hours. That is the last time I remember enjoying shopping. Trips to the mall are an eye-roller for me now, but at least I have fond memories of such trips with Gammy.

In recent years things haven't been the same. Changes in living situations have made it more difficult for my cousin and me to spend time with our grandparents. (I should mention that our grandfather, Papa, has played a huge role in our lives as well, but this post is about Gammy.) And in recent years, Gammy and Papa's health has been on the decline. It's been a slow downhill, with few specifics I can report. Gammy still wants that sliver of cake for dessert, but her appetite is too meager for her to finish it. In the past couple months, their health has deteriorated to the point where both Gammy and Papa had to be moved to a nursing home. And years of diabetes, plus long hours in bed, has brought Gammy to the operating table today. At noon, Gammy is having her right leg amputated.

It's more symbolic than anything else, as her future doesn't involve any trips to the mall regardless. But it wrecks the psyche. I always knew that I'd never go shopping with Gammy again for many reasons, but this seals it. Of course I could wheel her through the mall and have fun while doing it, but that's missing the point. It reminds me that it was never going to happen again anyway. And it's a win for diabetes, isn't it?

Diabetes resources:
WebMD Diabetes: Support & Resources
CDC Diabetes: The Elder Years
CDC Diabetes: Disabling Disease to Double by 2050
National Center for Health Statistics: Diabetes
National Diabetes Statistics
National Institute on Aging: Diabetes in Older People

A simple victory

I am pretty non-confrontational by nature. In fact, I have a very hard time with any kind of confrontation. Even if I know I'm right, it's difficult for me to confront someone about an issue. In fact, it might be more difficult when I know I'm right. I'm not a braggart and I'm not a jerk, so pushing my ideas that I know to be correct into someone else's face feels wildly uncomfortable for me. It's as if I feel that since I know myself to be right, my rival will surely realize it within due time with or without my badgering. Because they can't be that stupid. I mean, right?

Well, that's where I start to think that my thinking has gone wrong. Because I don't actually have that much faith in people and I'm well aware of it. So if I'm averse to telling someone my opinion, and I know it's not because I believe in the person's goodness or intelligence, it must be because, let's face it: I have low self esteem. I may even be sure I'm right, and on a good day I may even be sure I know how to present the facts, but I can't shake the knowledge that my rival does not have to believe me. I can still be sent away, laughed at, branded a non-team player (I know I'm not a team player), or stupid (I know I'm usually one of the smartest people in the room), and there's nothing I can do about that. It doesn't take beauty or intelligence to be popular, something it took me a long time to learn.

So yesterday something interesting happened. I received a promotional e-mail that I had signed up to receive long ago. I wasn't personally interested in the product or the company; I actually did some freelance work on their web site. I seem to recall signing up to be on their mailing list just out of a sense of dedication to knowing as much about the company as I could. I did it a couple years ago. The company had hired an agency who contracted work out to me, so nobody at the company would know who I am.

The company doesn't send out e-mails often; I'd say maybe one per quarter. So the last time I did work on the site was about two years ago, and I allowed the e-mails to keep coming for a while after that since I never knew if the agency would have me work on the site again. Sometime in the past year, however, as part of an overall effort to reduce the volume of e-mail I receive, I decided to use their opt-out instructions and unsubscribe.

Unsubscribing didn't work. The "unsubscribe" e-mail request bounced back to me immediately.

If I recall correctly, I ignored it the first time. I decided I could deal with it again next time it came. And so a few months later an e-mail arrived, I unsubscribed, and the e-mail bounced back to me again. So I located the contact e-mail address on their web site and sent them a letter informing them that their unsubscribe instructions don't seem to be working. That was that for a while.

Yesterday I received another of their e-mails. I thought, "Maybe since I alerted the company to the problem last time, their opt-out instructions work now." So I tried it, and fuck if the goddamned e-mail didn't bounce back to me immediately.

I wasn't angry before, as their e-mails are so infrequent that it's hardly a hassle to press the "delete" button. And besides, this company has essentially fed me in the past. But all of a sudden I just got plain annoyed as hell.

I once again located their contact e-mail address and wrote, "Your unsubscribe instructions in the e-mail are *still* not working. I'm pretty sure there are some FCC regulations against that." I didn't really expect anything to come of the e-mail and didn't know how far I'd take it, and I could easily tell Gmail that their messages are spam anyway. But you know, it felt like the most concise thing I could say that would get my point across.

I received a personal e-mail reply from someone in the company the same day stating that I have been removed from their mailing list, and apologizing for any inconvenience.

This is a small victory in a small matter against a rival I didn't even care to conquer. And immediately I felt sick about what I had done. I had essentially threatened this company, and I didn't even intend to back up my threats. I felt bad for the guy who had to field my e-mail and remove me from the list, and I felt bad that I will forever think of this episode when I think of that company and its web site. I mean honestly, they would have eventually figured out that their unsubscribe instructions don't work and would have fixed the problem, right? And here I had to go and point out a simple error in the form of a threat.

BAM! That was where I hit myself upside the head with my cereal spoon. My stupid, subservient logic, my lazy, passive-aggressive nature, my attitude (or lack thereof) that has kept me from advancing to corner offices my entire adult life is just wrong, wrong, wrong, and now I realize that it has to stop. This little e-mail exchange, of course, is something I should let drop out of my mind right away. Like a disagreement between friends that gets resolved. Like a fight with a spouse, a blowup with your boss. All my life I've tended to fear losing something (or someone) if I treat it badly just one time. I think that has carried over into my problem with confrontation. Like if I blow it, I've lost much more than just the one battle. But I think I have it backwards. If I avoid the battle, I automatically lose. It is of course not all about winning vs. losing, but I think it is about, if you can stomach it, making the world a better place for yourself and those around you. And that's what each battle is about.

So if nothing else, I've succeeded in getting myself off the company's mailing list. And as a bonus, perhaps they're fixing their unsubscribe system so nobody else ever has to go through this. Those people will be happier, and the company will provide better customer service, which might make the company more successful. This small victory of mine might reach farther than I can imagine, improving countless lives. And I have nothing, NOTHING to feel bad about.

As long as that guy really removed me from their list.

Is this a good way to conserve?

I am a regular at FatWallet.com. FatWallet.com is a site that helps consumers save money when they shop online, save money by getting items at discounted prices or for free, and in general, save money. My personal M.O. is to sign up for free stuff: samples of existing products, trials of new products. Every time I can save a couple bucks on a bar of soap is indeed a couple bucks earned, no?

So this morning's free temptress is this free shopping tote from Earthbound Farm. The deal is: take a quiz, and get a free shopping tote! It's emblazoned with Earthbound Farm's logo and tagline, but it's cute, so what the heck. I already use shopping totes at my grocery store, but I only own two, so I began to take the quiz for the free tote that could potentially decrease my paper/plastic bag consumption even more.

But then I realized that these things cost only $1 at my grocery store. Is it really a better idea to have the tote packaged and mailed to me than it is to just pay the $1 next time I'm shopping? Is that any way to conserve? I guarantee the free tote packaging will result in a whole bunch of trash. Even if it's recyclable, the packaging manufacturing and recycling processes will waste resources. On the other hand, picking one up at the grocery store will cost me $1, but will save the planet all these other costs.

I'm foregoing this particular free item. Of course the next free sample of wrinkle cream that I sign up for will also waste resources, but as the product isn't *intended* to conserve, well, it won't feel like such a waste.