Thurs... err... Friday This n That

I totally brainfarted yesterday.  As in, I can't believe I missed Thursday and now it's Friday.  :shrug:

Hubs was doing this thing where he'd compare old pictures of various coastal places today versus way back when.  Take the Statue of Liberty, for instance.  Now... Then... count the bricks on the seawall from water level to the top.  Same same.  I did the beaches at Normandy.  Same same.  He found a site that was saying that this was no way to dispute the rising-sea-level' claim because the two pictures probably weren't taken at the same tidal point or some such crap.  My point was and is that we have documented 'experts' saying in the 1970s that certain places would be underwater by now and there is no tangible, objective, visual evidence of the water level even being higher.  Don't believe me, go look for pics yourself.  

Who ya gonna believe?  An expert or your own eyes?  ;o)

You may remember I got my brakes done a while back.  Well, something was hinky with the back set of new brakes.  It started out with a little thump and I took the car back over there and the dude told me it would stop after a while.  Well, it didn't.  It got worse.  I told Hubs, but apparently I didn't tell him hard enough.  Fast forward to Tuesday and Hubs hopped into the passenger seat while I drove us to go vote.  And he was all like WHOA, that's sounds bad.  Umm... yah.  We got home from voting and I went to work.  While I was at work, he called the mechanic and worked it out to bring my car in the next day.  He dropped me off at work and picked me up afterwards.  The damn brakes weren't set right.  The head mechanic apologized profusely.  Now it's fixed and my car doesn't make any untoward noises any longer.  Yay.  And the 6-7 weeks of noise didn't damage my new brakes.  Also yay.

Gas is down to $3.75/gal here.  I saw something on FB saying anyone who was grateful for a slight reduction in gas prices was an idiot because they went up so much that this little drop was nothing.  I beg to differ.  It's like when someone holds your head underwater for a length of time.  When they finally let you take a breath, you're grateful, even though you know they're going to shove your face back in the water again shortly.  And they know it.  

I took a trip down my last Walmart receipt.  It was not a pleasant trip.  The prices are totally jacked.  Take, for instance, vitamins.  Used to pay like $3-something for a small bottle of off-brand mens 50+ multi.  They didn't have any small bottles, so I got the larger one.  $12 and half or so.  And this was NOT four time more pills.  It was two times, so what, the small bottle is like $6-7 now?  Blerg.

I can't think of one thing that's better under this administration.  Seriously.  If you voted for this, slap yourself for me, will ya?

And on that note, that's probably enough out of me.  It's not time to get ready for work yet, but I've flapped my proverbial gums enough this morning.  What's on your this n that radar?  How's life in general?  I feel like we don't get to chat much anymore, so have at it.  

Chaos Diaries

It's been a long time since I did a Chaos Diaries post, but I figured this fit.

I went to Wallyworld yesterday.  It was a fuckin' zoo.  And the price of damn near everything had jumped since my last visit.

Furnace filters... the kind I usually buy at $8+ are now $11+.  (I got a lesser filter for $4+.)

Burger...  90% lean is up to about $5.60 a pound.  

TP... a 12 pack of the Great Value is over $11.

Printer cartridges... the smallest single black is over $21 now.

Suet... the 8-pack of good stuff is almost $10, up from just under $7  (I bought 4 cheap singles at $1.22 each - they used to be 98c.)

To ameliorate the cost of those more expensive things I HAD to buy, I went cheap on some other stuff, but man.  I still walked out with less and paid more.

Going cheap, I bought chicken thighs instead of breasts.  And a whole chicken to roast.  I found pork roast on sale!  Got a huge one that I can cut into easily 5 meals.  They were out of pork burger, which I've been buying because beef is so damn expensive.  I need to buy a meat grinder, I guess.

They were also out of a lot of stuff.  The antacids I usually buy?  Nope.  Picked up a big jug of a different flavor.  (And the price of THAT was up.)  The tissues were almost gone.  I'm buying the cheap stuff because the name brand is pricey, and I got two of the last four boxes.  So many empty spots on the shelves that the cashier said a friend had remarked 'the grocery stores need to go to a grocery store'.

On the upside, I was nice to an assistant manager who was looking particularly harried and she opened a lane just for me.  Another gal checked me out and then went on her merry way.  Sometimes it's the little things.

So, I leave the Big W and go to the feed store.  They're out of whole corn.  Again.  Still $2 higher than I was buying it a year ago.  I ended up getting chopped corn for $9.55 a bag.  (10c more than whole.)  I also bought a bag of birdseed.  The 25 lb bag of cheap seed was nearly as much as a 50 lb bag of sunflower seeds used to be.  

I'm sure you're all facing the same stuff.  I'm just venting.  Or commiserating.  And I'm longing for a couple years ago before the Chaos started, before we got our new feckless leader, when things were looking up and the price of everything was going down.  

Which reminds me... gas was $3.06 a gallon yesterday.  Up from $2.99 last week.  Up Up Up from the $1.78 I was paying prior to inauguration day last year.  Hubs just said it's gonna keep going up for a while here yet.  So hang onto your asses.

But it's not President Sniffy's fault.

Meat Don't Grow on Trees

Okay, I'm going to foray into something that isn't necessarily my bag.  It's a post Hubs should write*, but he doesn't do social media, so here goes...

Right now, live cattle is about $1.40 a pound on the commodities markets.  Now, that's a whole cow.  On a 1200 pound cow ($1680), you get about 500 pounds of meat you can get at the store.  About half of that is made into burger.  Which leaves the other half for roasts and steaks, etc.  

Now, of course, you're not going to see as low a price as a $1.40 a pound for the meat.  There are butchering costs - about 80c to a dollar a pound - and packaging and transportation. There's overhead for the seller and they have to make some kind of profit, otherwise what's the point?  

According to Hubs, twenty years ago, live cattle (or fat cattle) were 60-80c a pound.  But hey, everything's gone up, right?  Not as much as you'd think.  April of 2020 live cattle was 83c.  You know, pre-'rona and pre-Biden.  By July, it was up to 92c a pound.  A year ago (or 12/24/20), they were selling for $1.08 a pound.  

Going by their sale paper (effective 12/15-12/28), the local grocery store is selling ribeye steaks for $12.99 a pound.  Lobster is also $12.99 a pound.  Let that soak in for a moment.  Where I'm from, only rich people ate lobster, but the average joe could still afford a ribeye every once in a while.  Lobster was expensive because they don't grow on trees, ya know.  You can't just go down the road and get a lobster.  They have to be caught in the ocean and then shipped, etc.  They aren't standing in a field in middle America - or pretty much any other state.  (Florida, for instance, has a ton of cows.)  Hell, if the world suddenly went to hell and we were full blown dystopian nightmare, I could walk less than a half mile and bag myself a cow.

Now, over at the local store, you can still get 95% lean burger at a fairly reasonable price... if you buy in the 'family pack', which is too big for people with small families or small freezers.  Then it's $4.99 a pound.  But even the 80% is $3.99 a pound in the big pack.  Get the mix pack of pork and beef, it's $2.99.  

Speaking of pork, pork ribeyes are on sale for $2.99 a pound.  And that's not a family pack price.  Which brings me to a question... why the hell is pork so much cheaper?  You have basically the same supply chain issues to deal with - butchering, packaging, transportation, overhead, etc.  Pigs are smaller, so you have to deal with more pigs for the same amount of meat as you'd get off a cow.  

For comparison, lean hogs (the pig equivalent of live cattle) are 80c a pound right now.  A year ago they were 68c.  A 12c jump as opposed to the 32c jump cows took.  (Over the moon.  The little dog ain't laughing now, baby.)

I'm not sure exactly what to make of all this.  All I know is everything's gone up since last year's election.  Oh, it had gone up a little since the Kung Flu kicked the nation's ass, with help I might add, but not nearly as much as since President Feckless took office.  It's just that Hubs and I were talking about it and I thought y'all might be interested.  

*Hubs is a very good and eloquent writer.  Of course, he is, I married him, didn't I?  He just doesn't often do it for other people.  If I could show you the letter he wrote to a friend for Christmas, you'd know.  I asked, he looked at me like I'd grown a third arm out the middle of my forehead. I tried to talk him into blogging it himself, but no.  Sorry.  

Moron Pricing

Ahem... More on Pricing?  Either one works, prices are up and we have morons to blame for it.

Anyway, I went to Wallyworld yesterday.  Here are a few things I noted:

85% lean burger is now almost the price 90% was for the same size package.  I know this because they didn't have any 90% lean, so I bought the 85%.  I didn't bother checking the price for the 90%.  I also didn't bother looking at other cuts because of reasons.  Like I said, the grocery store had outrageous prices for beef in their 'sale' paper last week.  I joked with the greeter gal at Wallyworld about accidentally hitting a cow - they wander into the road often around here - and asking if I could take the meat home.

All the lunch meats have gone up about a dollar a pound at the deli.  Hell, bologna is over $4 a pound now.  I got deli-sliced ham and chicken.  They were both over $7/lb.

Xtra laundry detergent is a dollar more than it was last time I bought some.  Still the cheapest brand, but gah.

I picked up a pair of shoes for Hubs.  The same brand and style he's worn for years.  Used to pay just under $20.  They were just under $25 yesterday.

A 12 pack of GV toilet paper is up to $10.72 now.  Last year, it was like $6.79 or something.

A 4 lb bag of sugar is now over $2.  And didn't they used to sell sugar in 5 pound bags?

Gas at the Wallyworld pumps = $3.05/gal.

I wish I had saved a receipt from a year ago.  It seems like everything was so much cheaper.  

But if you mention how prices are higher because of the current administration, you get fact checked.  Like it's all just some kind of strange coincidence.  Umm... no.  It's a cause and effect thing.  And it's not going to get any better until something changes.  Unfortunately, we're in for another three years of this.  

To borrow a line from Atlas Shrugged: 'Brother, you asked for it.'

Thursday This n That

 I'll start out this morning with something I just posted to FB:

"Went into town yesterday.  The gas station closest to here was $2.99/gal but the pumps were occupied, so I figured I'd get gas in town.  The station in town was $3.19/gal and I hoped like hell they hadn't raised the price at the other station by the time I went home.  Lucky me, they hadn't and one of the pumps was unoccupied.  I shudder to think what the price will be by the next time I need gasoline.  At the beginning of the year, I could fill my tank for $25.  Now, if I want to fill my tank it costs almost $42.  For the record, I drive a Chevy Cavalier that gets awesome gas mileage.  I don't even want to think about filling the Jeep right now.  Thanks for nothin', Creepy Joe and all who voted for him.  =op"

Also, for the record, I don't fill my tank anymore.  

I can't imagine what my brother, the road warrior, has to pay for gas to do his job.  I know I was putting 150 miles on my car a day when I was doing the job.  And I had the smaller territory.  

We got the sale paper for the local grocery store yesterday.  Boneless ribeye?  $18.99/lb.  T-bone? $12.99/lb.  You can still get burger for $4.99 a pound there but only if you buy in the 'family value pack' which, if I remember right, is like ten pounds of burger.  I don't have room in my freezer for that.  Derp.  Wallyworld is a little better.  The 90% lean I buy was like $11 for a 2.5lb pack or $4.40/lb the last time I was over there.  But that was like a month ago.  I wonder what it'll be when I go tomorrow.  Blerg.

The other day, I watched Demolition Man again.  If you haven't seen it, watch it.  It's kind of silly and stupid, but it's also prophetic.  I especially appreciate this bit.  

Do actors ever actually watch the movies they're in?  Do they pay any attention to the plot or the theme or what's being said in the movies they act in?  I'm not sure Sandra Bullock paid any attention during Demolition Man.  And I don't see how any of the actors in the Harry Potter movies can behave the way they do if they'd paid attention to the movies/books themselves.  If Delores Umbridge isn't a cautionary tale about taking away people's rights under the guise of safety and protection, I don't know what is.

A little soundbite keeps running through my head: You are the villain in someone else's story.  Not sure where I heard it or read it or if that's even the right quote from it.  I guess it's all about perspective.  I still haven't heard from those people we helped all of September and part of August.  I think somehow I became the villain in her story.  Considering how she told me the stories of other villains in her life, I can well imagine the story she's telling now.  :shrug:  

Anyway, it's probably time to do something with my day.  Or maybe it's just time to grab another cup of coffee and continue to vegetate online.  What's up with you?