Make Your Nut

I am 36 today. I guess it’s as good a time as any to take stock.

I will have been married for twelve years as of next month, and it still feels as fresh as Day One.

I have two degrees, and I have no idea where either diploma went, although I intend to reorder the bigger one through my alma mater’s registrar.

I am a happy diabetic, having been diagnosed early enough to learn to eat better and avoid complications.

I have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and amazing neighbors, a better living situation than I ever would have expected when I was growing up in the hood. No gunshots.

I have the new Britney Spears CD, given to me first thing this morning.

I have seen Jimmy Paige and Robert Plant in concert, as well as the Grateful Dead before Jerry kicked, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

The money is good, not great. Could always use more. I suspect this will be a repeating item in future lists.

Debt load is too high. It is my aspiration that this not be a repeating item every year.

The job is a job. Pays very well in relation to what I do, again could always pay more. Office politics are currently at Level Orange, and I’m stuck in the middle of it, though not directly involved, thank goodness.

I no longer drive crappy cars. When we rent a car, it makes me miss my own vehicle.

I have been to Italy, France, and Germany if you count the airport in Frankfurt. I have been to the Caribbean but don’t remember much of it because I was 8 years old.

I have fired a .44 Magnum and a nine millimeter handgun.

For years, the big players in the consumer electronics industry have sought to be the first to market with a set-top device that would be the “center of the home entertainment experience”. A while ago, I wrote about the partnership between Tivo and Amazon to bring Amazon Unbox videos to Tivo subscribers, and this has been very useful for us (watched the entire first half of Battlestar Galactica Season 4 via digital download, now catching up on Chuck). The only catch to the Tivo/Amazon arrangement is that you’re paying both a subscription fee to Tivo and also paying for whatever content you’re buying from Amazon.

Two months ago, in May, a company named Roku debuted its Netflix Player, which attaches to your television, and, provided you have a Netflix membership, will stream movies and television shows that are available under Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ catalog. The Roku Netflix Player looks like a first generation device, just a blocky black box, and costs $99. The videos are streamed at no additional cost other than your Netflix subscription fee (as low as $5 a month), so while you’re shelling out $99 for the box, that’s the end of your costs. The only problem with that approach was that you had to pay for a dedicated box, which takes up room in your media center, and it will only ever do a single thing.

There was a lot of interest in the Roku box because, unlike the Amazon Unbox videos, Netflix provided access to a whole lot of television shows and movies for free for its members. Mind you, it’s not the entire catalog of stuff that’s available for rent on Netflix - you won’t see the newest releases available for Watch Instantly, but a lot of older movies are available, as well as newer television episodes like The Office and Weeds. Particularly for shows like Weeds, which is only available on Showtime, it’s a great deal to be able to watch it for free instead of paying Comcast an extra $40 a month for premium cable.

Now though, only two months later, Microsoft has announced that it is partnering with Netflix to bring the Watch Instantly feature to the Xbox 360. Like the Roku box, you have to be a Netflix subscriber, but the important thing is that you’re getting free streaming video content at no additional cost.

It’s the kind of convergence that I’ve been waiting for, because it extends the utility of the Xbox so that it’s closer than ever to becoming the “center of the home entertainment experience”. It also means big trouble for the Roku box, since the early adopters that would have bought their $99 box probably already have an Xbox 360. In fact, the Roku box is such a niche product, and Microsoft is such a big company, that it’s likely that people won’t even realize that Roku was first to market with a streaming Netflix device.

Even though it’s been almost two years since we’ve moved into this house, I am still surprised by how different it feels from those many years of renting an apartment. When we rented, we never really knew the people who lived above us, or across the sidewalk from our front door.

Now, things are completely different. Maybe it’s because we are in a new development, and maybe it’s because, on the whole, our community has many residents who share a common demographic (young married couples with no children). All I know is, I have never felt a greater sense of place than I have living where we are right now.

When I first started planning for this party of ours, I had intended to buy or rent some folding chairs and tables, and possibly a lawn canopy for shade and protection from potential rain. We’ve never had so many people attending, and it’s important that people be able to cop a chair and hang out if they so chose. I hadn’t even gotten around to researching where to rent these items when one of our neighbors offered their folding tables, recently purchased for their own party, and a brand new lawn canopy. We had previously lent them a bunch of our folding chairs, and now we not only have those returned to us, but we’ve also borrowed a bunch of their chairs as well. In other words, seating is taken care of, and a big chunk of money that I thought I would have to spend has been spared.

It’s been the same story in nearly all elements of our party planning - our friends and neighbors have been stepping up and offering to pitch in all sorts of things. Whereas last year was our first big summer barbecue bash in the new house, with a small guest list, this year’s gig really illustrates how much our bonds have developed just in the past twelve months.

I’ll bring this somewhat meandering ramble of an entry (not enough caffeine this morning, can’t focus on writing good, can barely fit inside the building) to a close with the story of how we spent our Saturday night. On Saturday, at around 8:30pm, we got a call from our neighbor, who was in a project-y mood and was wondering if we wanted to split the cost of window casings with him. We said sure, and we went off to Home Depot to pick them up after measuring our stuff.

We got to Home Depot about thirty minutes before they closed, and found the casings. The suckers were cheap as dirt - $39 for a bundle that’s enough to case ALL of your windows. After splitting the cost (we needed casings for the downstairs, he was doing more than we were) it ended up costing us $10 for three window’s worth of casings, one being a double-wide. We had the Home Depot guy cut the 14 foot bundle down into 8ft and 6ft pieces to fit them into the vehicle and headed back home.

So, the next couple of hours were spent mostly watching my neighbor cut and install these window casings on our downstairs windows - it’s not really a two-person job, so there wasn’t much for me to contribute. I learned a lot about the process that night, enough to be able to do it for myself on our upstairs windows. We opened a bottle (or two) of wine, had some beers, ate pimento cheese, and put up window casings.

I don’t really know why I told this story here, other than to just have it written down so I can look back and remember it later.

Remember when I returned my dead Xbox 360 to Costco back in April, and got store credit for the original purchase price? I still have some left, but this week will see the end of it.

It’s amazing that the stuff that we bought has lasted as long as it did. We spent about $60 of our Costco credit on chicken and a pork loin, and immediately divided it up and froze all of it. The chicken, which came in large portions subdivided into 2-breast or 4-thigh servings, took up most of our freezer space, but made it incredibly easy to plan for meals. The pork loin, at around $16, is a great buy - it’s a long cylinder that is easily divided into three portions, and one becomes a roast, one gets sliced into cutlets, and the third becomes stew. Subtract the number of times when we end up grabbing something to eat on the road, or going out with friends, and it’s taken us nearly three months to go through our initial food purchase. Along with the food, the credit has also enabled us to pick up loads of paper products, a new garden hose, and a better cordless phone system.

Sadly, this week will see the end of our Costco store credit. As readers of The Best Food Blog Ever will know (and, as I just remembered, I’ve mentioned it here as well), we’re coming up on our big barbecue bash that we hold every year, and this year’s pork butt and spareribs (all 60 pounds of it) will be taken care of by Costco. This had been my plan ever since getting the store credit, and it’s nice to see it come to fruition. This leaves us with room in the budget for other party items, and the craziest part of all of it is that, even though we’re probably going to top 50 people, our out of pocket cost will be largely the same as it was last year when we only got 10 invitees.

It’s turning into a tradition that I should rant about how much money we blew on gas while on vacation. It’s bad because we normally drive a hybrid, so I’m not used to the lower mileage of a non-hybrid rental, and this year it’s worse because gas prices are so high.

To put it all into perspective, the amount that we paid for gas for the rental in Charleston was equal to fully half of the cost of the rental itself. And we didn’t even fully use the car until Saturday.

On Wednesday, we arrived in Charleston and picked up our car, which turned out to be a PT Cruiser. Terrible, terrible car. Bad design choices, some of them apparently for the sake of being different. We drove into Charleston and parked the car, and, since Charleston is a very walkable town, didn’t really use the car Thursday and Friday, other than a trip to the beach about 25 minutes away.

On Saturday, we drove 2 1/2 hours north and did not put more than a mile on the car until we returned to Charleston to fly out on Monday. The total round trip was around 300 miles.

So, for around 350 miles of usage, we bought about one and a half tanks of gas. Now, mind you, the gas prices in the South are a little better than up here, so they were running around $3.83 a gallon for regular unleaded. Still, those one and a half tanks of gas ran us around $90, which stings even more because our usual $45 fillup gets us near to 500 miles on a tank.

I may have said, at one point, that buying a hybrid car wasn’t an economic decision, because the higher fuel efficiency would never surpass the higher purchase price of the vehicle over, say, a non-hybrid version of the same car. But, now that gas prices are solidly over $4 a gallon, that statement may no longer be true.

We’ll be off on a trip starting this Wednesday, and this is the first time that we’re going to be flying since most of the airlines started charging fees for checking baggage. At first, it was only one airline, charging a fee for the second checked piece of luggage. Soon after, it cascaded and now it’s most airlines charging for the first piece of luggage.

We checked this morning, and we may or may not be forced to pay $15 for checking our bag (depends on how the airline handles code-sharing, one carrier doesn’t yet charge a fee, but the carrier whose airliner we will be physically boarding does).

I don’t understand why the airlines are going through the seemingly more complicated path of charging a baggage check fee when, in reality, they could simply incorporate the $15 fee into the cost of the tickets as an increased fuel surcharge. Because, when you think about it, this is really the reason why they have to bring in more money.

Doing it this way would also be more likely to engender some form of empathy from the travelers, who, with respect to the baggage check fee, are just bitter and resentful because it looks like a completely arbitrary additional cost. But, if you presented the fee in terms of the costs of fuel to fly the airliner from point A to point B, divided by the number of passengers on the flight (which undoubtedly would work out to well over $15 per passenger), then people would be much more amenable to paying it.

Tomorrow is the day that I am scheduled to receive a new PC at work. They do a tech refresh about every four years, and I’ll be happy to finally give up the 256Mb piece of crap that I’ve been tied to for something that can actually do more than one thing at a time.

As a result of the upgrade, I’ve been cleaning off the hard drive of the soon-to-be old machine, and also tidying up my desk so that the PC tech doesn’t get eaten alive by dust bunnies when he comes by. After throwing away piles and piles of old paperwork that no longer has any relevance to the modern world, I came across a stack of post-it notes.

As it turns out, these post-it notes chronicled my various research efforts into getting preapproved for a mortgage, back in spring of 2006. In addition to various names, phone numbers, and scribblings of rates and whatnot, is this one quote that I had transcribed from a conversation with a mortgage broker:

“Can get rid of PMI in a year or so with appreciation of the property”

Um, yeah, right, that would have worked out real well. Mind you, this was only two years ago, and as of two years ago, the real estate market was still in a state where brokers (and mostly everyone else) genuinely thought that a property purchased with less than 10% down would appreciate so quickly as to overtake 20% in equity within a year of settlement. As we’ve seen, for some areas of the country, what really happened was the exact opposite of what people thought was going to happen.

I debated whether I should post this to Make Your Nut or The Best Food Blog Ever, but having come across a search for “party for 100 on a budget” that led the seeker to this site, I ultimately decided to put this here.

Every summer, in the weekend that falls between my birthday and my wife’s, we throw a huge smoked barbecue extravaganza. We’ve been doing it since before we even moved into a house, and it’s amazing to think that we even pulled off, one year, hosting seventeen people stuffed into a 800 square foot apartment. It was amazingly amazing last year, because it was the first time we were able to do it in the new house and we didn’t have to really worry all that much about maximum capacity.

So, this year brings us the Big Pig Gig 2008, and we’re a few days less than a month away from the big date. As the years go by, more and more people find out about it and we get a bigger turnout each time, and this year looks to be biggest ever as a result of some new factors. Allow me to elaborate.

We have a husband-and-wife couple that have their own band, and we catch their local gigs every so often when we can. At last summer’s big barbecue, they met another one of our friends who, as a result of that fateful evening, is now their drummer. When the wife got final word on the date of our barbecue, she actually rebooked one of their gigs for a later date so that she wouldn’t miss the barbecue - now that’s dedication. One thing led to another, and now it turns out they are PLAYING at the barbecue.

So, we have a band. Gonna stick ‘em in the basement, which we need to spiff up (lights, posters, drag some couches down there) prior to the party. It’s never been done before, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Then, another husband-and-wife couple, Tim and Steph of Brew.Cook.Pair.Joy, volunteered to brew a special batch of beer for the party, and who were we to say no? For the cost of materials, this was definitely a deal that could not be refused. They brewed all of the beer for their wedding back in April, and are some of the most focused people that I have come across with respect to their passion.

So, we have beer.

The annual barbecue has engendered so much goodwill, in fact, that every year it gets a little easier to throw. We’ve got so many people inquiring as to what they can bring, what we need to borrow, and what they can do for us that it becomes almost criminal that all we are doing is making space available and smoking 60 pounds of meat.

As I’ve said before, every so often people come by Make Your Nut because they search on terms such as “big party on a budget” or some other similar phrase, and I find that these kinds of hits show up more often in the summertime. I have to tell you, budgeting for summertime fests, for me, is not as hard as throwing more formal dinner parties at other times of the year.

The most important thing to remember, for any of these types of things, is not to overextend yourself. For us, I love smoking barbecue, and I enjoy making it and people enjoy eating it - it’s my area of focus, it’s what I do best and what I will contribute to our party, along with a dessert or two and the general design of how the day and evening will go. It comes easy to us because we’re good at it. Don’t do things that you aren’t good at, and generally you will find others who are more than willing to do what they’re good at. Embrace the collaborative effort.

People love to bring stuff to parties, and you should let them because they are happy to do so. I mean, there is a wrong way to go about it, and that’s to cruise-director everyone into roles that they’re not happy with and not qualified to handle, but if you let people bring their favorite dish, or let them know what you’re making so that they can coordinate appropriately, you’ll find that you’ll never run the risk of running out of food.

And it’s not necessarily about food, either. As I’ve said above, we’ve got folks who’ve asked if they can contribute music, and folks who are using the barbecue to show off their beer. Just yesterday some friends in the neighborhood gave me the okay to borrow their folding tables, which we can set up outside in the backyard, to extend the basement music stage into an indoor/outdoor affair.

More updates as the date approaches. Food-focused entries will probably be hosted over at the Best Food Blog Ever.

It seems to happen every year at around this time. We start out with every intent to see a movie, and then another one that we want to see comes out, followed by another one, and before you know it the movie that we wanted to see is no longer playing.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, though, in the grand scheme of things.

Given the present cost of movie tickets, and the rapid availability of new movie releases on the home market, I’m no longer a fan of catching anything but the biggest blockbusters in the theater. Big, critically-acclaimed blockbusters, and anything with a twist ending.

Before I get to the economics of it all, I’ll start with the “getting older and grumpier” section of today’s entry. Back in the day, which wasn’t too long ago, people knew how to act right when they went to the movies. It’s not a complicated formula beyond the grasp of everyday people - you get your ticket, get your snacks, find a seat before the movie starts, and sit quietly for two hours.

Today, going to the movie theater involves dealing with a whole host of issues that are refreshingly absent from my living room. I’m always stuck sitting either directly behind or in front of the person who needs to carry on a full-on conversation with the person next to them, or on the phone, because they’re bored with the movie. Or, I’m a few seats away from the people who decided it was a good idea to bring their infant to an R rated film. Ultimately, the kid gets bored or scared, stands up in the aisle, and starts talking or otherwise demands appeasement, which never gets delivered, oh, in the hallway outside the theater, but right there - because the parents don’t want to leave the theater and miss part of the show. Parents and guardians, indeed.

And I get all of this for $9.50 a ticket. Yes, here’s where we start the economic part of today’s entry.

So, the cost for the two of us plus snacks runs about $25. For $25, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a near-flawless moviegoing experience, with the only variable being the quality of the movie itself. If the movie has good reviews across the board, though, I want to be fully entertained, without distractions, for two hours for $25. I can safely say, and you all can chime in here, that in today’s modern world this is no longer possible. It gets even pricier if you’re taking an entire family out to the movies, so you’re looking at possibly dropping over $60 for two hours of distraction-filled entertainment for a mom, dad, and two kids.

Let’s turn to the economics in full. Even the biggest summer movies will last in the theaters for what, eight weeks at best? Bad or obscure movies will disappear even sooner than that, and we can all count on seeing new releases available for home rental much more quickly these days because that’s where the long-term profit lies.

Here’s an example. We missed the new Harold and Kumar movie when it was out a few weeks ago, despite really wanting to see it. As it turns out, as I have just Googled now, the DVD is going to be available on July 29. This, for a movie that was released on April 25, roughly three months ago.

We could put the movie on our Netflix queue, which means we would get to watch it and not pay any more than our $12 monthly subscription cost, and probably tack on quite a few others that we’ve missed and still be within that same pricing structure. We could rent it using Amazon Unbox, and pay $3.99. If we had an Apple TV, we could rent it off of iTunes and watch it for $3.99, or even in HD for a dollar more. Or, if I really were in love with the movie, I could just go out and buy the DVD and own the movie for $15 or less. I could even go to one of those red boxes in the supermarket and rent it overnight for a dollar.

My point is this - why would anyone pay so much money for all of the hassle and inconveniences associated with seeing a movie in the theater when, for so much less money, you could have such a better experience watching it at home?

For the price of two movie tickets, and the license to sit in a theater seat for two hours, you could own two movies and watch them whenever you wanted. For $60, you could pay for a Netflix subscription for five months, or rent twelve movies online.

Or, as the case may be, I could get with nothing.

I discovered, just today, that whenever we receive an incoming call on our Vonage box, my wireless network goes down. We don’t even have to answer the phone - even if it is just ringing, something is happening that is suppressing the wireless network signal coming out of the router. Once the ringing stops, or we hang up on a phone call, the wireless network comes back in about two or three minutes.

This presents me with a dilemma. We were among the first subscribers to Vonage, so our Vonage box is one of the original Motorola black boxes, before they came out with their shiny Linksys-branded routers. So, our Vonage equipment is old. The cordless phone that we have, likewise, is old. We didn’t have the wireless networking issue until only a few months ago, and none of our equipment has changed. Deductive reasoning tells me that one of these components is degrading, either the Vonage box or the cordless phone.

I’ve done my requisite Googling and found a few people with the same problem. In some cases, older 2.4Ghz cordless phone systems cause interference with the wireless signal (this can happen with microwaves, too) and so, if this is the case, my solution would be to go get a new cordless phone that operates on a different spectrum. In other cases, routers get old and start dropping packets, and perhaps the situation is that when a Vonage call comes in, the router can’t handle the additional load and drops the wireless signal.

If I guess wrong, and upgrade the wrong component, then my wireless signal dropping issue will continue and I will have bought new equipment for nothing.

Oh, and did I mention that I actually have two routers? I have a wireless router daisy-chained to a non-wireless router, so it could be a problem with one or the other.

I am hesitant to upgrade routers because I don’t want to make a lateral move from a G router to another G router, but the N routers are still in draft, or pre-N, mode because the N standard hasn’t been finalized. Plus, the N routers are all pricey.

On the third hand, we really don’t even use the house line that much, so the issue of the wireless signal dropping out only rears its ugly head once in a while and doesn’t really interfere with anything of vital importance.

I’ll probably do nothing about it at this point and wait a bit. Maybe I can catch a good deal on a new phone system, or routers will finally standardize on the new protocol and start to come down in price.