Adventures in credit card land

Just about the time I think I've figured out how to manage my money (I've never been good at balancing a checkbook), something like this happens:

When I decided to remodel the kitchen last year, I got my sister Margaret Joan and her hubby to agree to be my "contractors" and get everything to happen for me. They did, and I still haven't repaid them for their efforts, I'm sure.

To simplify the task of making purchases that didn't require floating a loan, I got MJ added to my Chase freedom card. For reasons I'll never grasp, that card has the lowest limit I've ever had on a credit card; I think my very first Visa and Discover limits were twice as high as that one—even though Chase holds my mortgage and all my business income, they still give me a minuscule limit on my Freedom card. Go figure.

So after the remodeling was over, I decided it was just about as well for MJto keep hers in case I ever need her to bail me out of who-knows-what or make emergency purchases for me. (If I wind up on the road more since I've quit my teaching gig, that possibility could be real...) 

For some reason, a few weeks ago I had a passing thought about the card and checked in with her to be sure she still had it. She assured me she had given it back, which was kind of weird because I'd just cleaned out my sock-and-unused-credit-card drawer and I hadn't seen it. Oh, well; as long as nobody was running it up behind my back, no big deal. I could have chopped it up and thrown it away, for all I remembered. (The Cymbalta commercial says, "Depression hurts; Cymbalta can help." I don't know if it "hurts," but I can assure you it sucks!)

So last month I started getting messages from MJ about having used my card by accident and wanting to be sure I knew I'd get my money back. Huh? I thought she didn't *have* my card!

I have no idea how MJ realized what had happened, but somehow she had confused the Chase Freedom card on her account with the Chase Freedom card on my account, and she and hubby had happily shopped their way all the way from Texas to at least Canada on my card. (Come on; you'd have done the same thing: when was the last time you checked your credit card to see which account it was on? Never, and you know it!) 

I have no idea why I didn't pick up on the call(s) from Chase to find out whether I was shopping in Canada--maybe they came in one of those rare times when Number One Son actually answers my phone for me—but I was completely oblivious to this until MJ started frantically trying to confess what she had done. I thought I was going to have to bind and gag her until I had a chance to download the statement and let her know how much she had spent, but she sent a check to cover it almost as soon as I got it downloaded. Once she paid me, she calmed down, I calmed down, life was rosy again.

Until this weekend, when I forgot to melt anything for supper and NOS came home from work not feeling up to cooking anyway, so we decided it was a good night for Subway...the only fast-food joint in the neighborhood that won't take my Discover card. (Neither will Chipotle, but I don't ever need to go there; Subway is near the house and Chipotle is halfway across town.)

I got our sandwich all bagged up and forked over my Freedom card only to have it rejected. Rejected, I tell you! MJ had made it all the way to Canada merrily buying meals and gas and groceries on it, and I can't buy a sandwich at the Subway a mile from my house! What the-----???

The nice chick at the register punched in the numbers by hand, and the machine assured her it didn't recognize/couldn't take my card, and I dragged out my debit card so I could get out of the store. Way too weird.

Just on the off chance that the problem was the Subway machine on the fritz, I stuck the freedom card in a gas pump Sunday and got right through the part where you have to enter your zip code before it told me I couldn't use that card. Gas pumps take Discover, though, so I was still in business. And Discover calls me if I use my card too far out of my neighborhood!

So last night I called Chase to see what was up. I expected to go through a routine of proving who I am before they'll talk to me, but it seemed like the lady I talked with last night was going through an especially challenging routine: when was I born, in what state was my social security card issued, what was my grandmother's blood type--you know the gig. In retrospect, I can't remember a single question MJ couldn't have answered if she'd been on the line, but Chase was sure they were keeping me safe!

After we established that Chase didn't even have my cell phone number (hence the reason I hadn't gotten the calls; I was traveling), I explained to the lady that my sister had been able to use my card to grocery shop in Canada, but I hadn't even been able to buy a sandwich in m own neighborhood, to which she said, "Oh, yes, at a Subway for $8.43." Do what? 

Not having talked to MJ, I can't be sure what happened on her end, but somehow she clearly figured out that the card she was using wasn't hers, and she had been in touch with Chase about it. I'll never understand the mentality of the banking community, but when they found out MJ had happily been running up charges on my card in Canada—and then apparently calling them up and confessing to it!—the fine folks at Chase had decided to put a hold on it to keep me from using it in Texas!

It's all fixed now and the lady assures me I can start using my card again (and you can see how important that is to me, since MJ and same went to Canada a month ago and I just figured out my card had been put on hold!), MJ and hubby apparently finished off their trip on their own card, and I've got their money in the bank to pay off mine. 

But I'll still never understand the mysteries of using credit cards!

Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah!

That's four: I finished Monday's crossword puzzle from just the "across" clues. It's been a while since 3, so this one feels good!

Thanksgiving weekend paean

whose works these are i think i know
i'll never get their names straight, though.
each little darling's such a dear—
i wish i didn't grade so slow!

i know their hearts are full of fear
as if their grades are something drear
or writing class were going to make
some awful difference in a year

in spite of all, still i take
the time to mark each dull mistake
although i really hope to keep
my focus in the meaning's wake

the load is onerous and deep
reams of paper in a heap
yet i have no time to weep—
just piles to grade before i sleep...

That's three!

I did the New York Times crossword puzzle again from just the "across" clues.

I'll admit that it takes me a pretty long time to do that, and I had to guess tonight on "Tuckahoe, New York" (a neighborhood near Yonkers), but I did it!

I may be too simply amused....

Best.Birthday.Ever.

Today is my birthday. In spite of the spate of  birthday greetings I got through Facebook urging me to spend it surrounded by friends and family, I spent a lovely, quiet day mostly alone at home, except for an adventure to my office to drop off the most recent pile of graded papers,the grocery store to restock the larder, and a movie just because.

I didn't mind because I don't mind being alone and because my "real" birthday celebration was a couple of weeks ago, when I got to spend a weekend with Darling Daughter and Prince Charming in Los Angeles, where life was their usual whirlwind of adventure—including a surprise opportunity to work out at the Richard Simmons Slimmons studio in Beverly Hills (Richard Simmons is a hoot in person) and a planned opportunity to see the beautiful stage lighting DD had done as her swan song from the school she just left as she moves on to her newest incarnation. On Saturday, while DD was running the lights at that evening's iteration of the show, PC and I took off to see a Cloud Atlas, and I was more than a little tickled when we bumped into a friend of his and PC introduced me as his mother-in-law. I think the day is coming!

As much fun as that was (and it was a fine adventure), it still falls short of the whirlwind ride she took me on a year ago, which has to go down somewhere as the best. birthday. ever.

DD had planned it that way. I've always gotten a kick out of having a "binary" birthday (11/11), but last year was triply special because it was 11/11/11. I don't think she could have done a thing to make it better.

I flew to Los Angeles on a Thursday, determined to leave work behind for the weekend, so I immersed myself in a good book that took me completely away from work. I landed a little after dark, just in time for DD and PC to park my bags at their place and whisk me off to a party on a rooftop in downtown LA. The party was hosted by friends from one of DD's consulting jobs, and one of them had a roll of tickets she peeled off happily for refills on drinks and food. The view from the rooftop was amazing (well, except maybe for the 50-something dude who had stripped to the nude on his way to the pool...), the laughter was hearty, and the evening was off to a fine start.

We left the party early to go to a play that starred a young man DD had known in college. Called Nine Circles after Dante's nine circles of hell, the play was about a young soldier accused of murdering civilians in Iraq. Each of the circles was another scene from the soldier's life, showing the horrors and the stress of war. Maybe because I'm the mother of a soldier who served in Iraq and maybe because I was born on Veteran's Day and have always had a soft spot for our military, I found the play amazing and powerful.

I love the "little theater" setting that had us sitting just a few feet from the actors, and I was thrilled afterward to get to meet both the playwright (cool since I write but have no real talent for the creative kind) and the actor, who turned out to be also one of the leads in a popular tv series called Suits. Hanging around with my kids means I get to just hang around with the cast and crew after shows, and that's a whole different experience from just walking in and walking out.

Friday morning DD tossed me into the car and took off for the local bagel shop, tantalizing me with far too many choices for a natural-born bread lover. She helped me make a choice that was sure to add lard to my butt and scooted me out for the morning's adventures.

First on the agenda was a visit to her school's morning practice for their upcoming production of Steel Magnolias, where DD was acting director and she needed the girls to hear an authentic Texas accent (mine). If I'd realized my job better, I'd have just talked to the girls about what it means to live with kidney problems; I've had my share of infections because of a congenital malformation, and I knew a family that had four members on dialysis while I was in college. That would have tied in perfectly with the theme of the play and would probably have given the girls more useful exposure to my Texas accent than what I did, which mostly was to urge them to relax a little: no self-respecting Texan pronounces "what" with an "a" sound that anybody else in the world would recognize as anything but a "u"!

After play practice, we made a run by the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney California Arts Theater, where she and PC both do consulting projects) to check on one of DD's projects there, and then made a stop at the Los Angeles Museum of Fashion. I imagine the museum would be great fun on a normal day, but like so many other places on November 11, this time the museum was closed. Not a problem for my daughter, though: she's best friends with one of the docents, who had to be at work anyway, and when security let her know we were there, she buzzed us right through. So instead of the "standard" tour-group visit, we got a private tour with lots of good back stories and fascinating information about how the museum works.

By the time we got through the museum, I was feeling somewhere well past spoiled, but the best of the day was yet to come: DD had managed to wangle us free tickets to the LA performance of Cirque d'Soleil. We arrived early enough for dinner at a lovely little Italian restaurant near the theater, then went in to a stunning performance; I can't imagine being brave enough to do half those stunts, much less having the coordination or energy for them. Almost as amazing was the behind-the-scenes tour, when DD's friend from high school showed us the works and told us about the histories of the actors (including the young woman who seems to dance on the head of a pin, a stunt she's done right through multiple pregnancies). Who'd have thought I'd get to go backstage and be greeted by a construction crew manager who greeted me as "mom"?

On Saturday, DD was due back at her school for an open house, and she parked me in the costume shop with yards of fabric she was to make into scrims for yet another lighting project. Her assignment this time was to light a party that was going to include dancers on a bridge across the second floor of the "party house." My job was mostly to measure out lengths of fabric and figure out how to attach them to dowel rods so they could be hung from the ceiling and then raised (or dropped?) at some appropriate time. I'm good with a pair of scissors and a can of spray adhesive, so we got something that would work before time to hang them, but I remembered why my trajectory hasn't gone too much toward theater arts.

After DD finished with her responsibilities and determined that I was sufficiently covered in spray adhesive, she hauled me across town (I never know where I am there) to a sort of scary-looking building that appeared to be closed where she insisted I had an appointment to get my eyebrows done. We had talked for some time about the practicality of having them tattooed on because my hair is too blond for them to show up without lots of help, and eyebrow pencils and powders just rub off a few hours after putting them on.

I'm not one to stop long enough to update hair or makeup during the day, so tattooed eyebrows seemed like the way to go, and DD had decided that would be her birthday gift to me. (After all, her total expense for the weekend so far had mostly been the bagels and the Italian dinner!) I was thrilled at the idea and delighted to discover how painless the procedure was. One of the brows needed a bit of touch-up later, but the tattoo artist was completely understanding about my travel plans and happily fixed it up next time I ventured west.

I could never have expected my daughter to pull out a jewelry box, too, then, because the eyebrows were supposed to be the birthday gift. She assured me the box didn't hold a birthday gift: the ring inside says "mom" because she had expected me to finished my PhD around Mother's Day, and she thought the ring would be a good combination Mother's Day/graduation gift. My research had gotten snagged in the spring and my defense had been delayed until October (not completely unintentionally on 10/10), so she had held onto the ring until the degree was finished because she had been sworn to secrecy about it. The fact that she had both an eyebrow appointment and a graduation gift for me the same weekend was purely coincidence, she assured me. What a happy coincidence it was!

As we often do when I'm on the west coast, we made a perfunctory visit to the grocery store, and that night DD had set us up to cook together, an activity we both have enjoyed since she was a little kid. The theme for the evening was "etouffe," which would have been easier if either of us had ever attempted it before or if we had known which of several alternative recipes we had found was anywhere close to what PC had in mind when he had suggested it. He was off at work for the afternoon and not in a place where we could just ask him, so we futzed around with an assortment of recipes until we came up with something we thought was tasty. We had forgotten the first rule of cooking for twentysomething males, of course: as long as it's edible, it's going to be fine.

We had time to feed PC and get the dishes mostly out of the way before  a string of friends showed up for an evening of games and laughter—not really a birthday party, but a lovely way to end a lovely weekend.

My plane left fairly early on Sunday, so DD hustled me out of the house and off to the airport in plenty of time to keep me from my usual nerves about missing a flight (which, in retrospect, seems sort of silly since lately I've had more flights delayed than leave on time), and the flight back to Houston was as pleasant as the flight out. In fact, once I got to my hometown connection, the desk agents found a seat available on an earlier flight than I expected, and I wound up getting home an hour or so early.

And thoroughly thrilled by the best. birthday. ever.

Arf! Arf! Arf!

Alpha Bitch can be really annoying when she cranks up the barking, but today I think I punished her unfairly.

I was thinking last week that I almost wish I could get my money back on my can of "bark stopper," because  Number One Son and I have only used it three times since we got it: once to get AB to stop barking, once to get her to let go of the ball for playing fetch, and once just to see if it would get Tank's attention. It worked so well that we haven't used it since, so we still have what I consider a big can of whoop-ass that we don't seem to need. On the other hand, when three puffs of air worked so well, I certainly can't bring myself to ask for my money back!

This morning I may have shot it off out of line. I woke up before daylight only because we were having a downpour and the sun was completely gone, so I curled up in bed with a crossword puzzle for a while before I dragged myself down the hall to my laptop, where I planned to spend the day editing a dissertation. The weather was still dreary enough not to bother NOS upstairs, so I was just enjoying the quiet.

A little after 9, I thought I saw something go down the street, and almost immediately, AB started to bark. I told her a couple of times to be quiet, got up and checked the front of the house for anything she might bark at (which, in her case, could range from burglars to bunnies), and assured her she needed to shut up. When she didn't—and she wasn't heading obediently to either her kennel or my lounge chair—I found the spray and tapped it.

She stopped barking immediately, but she didn't shut up. When she wants attention, she often sort of "sings" to us in a way that reminds me of little kids saying "gimme, gimme, gimme!" It's not nearly as annoying as the barking, but when it doesn't stop, it gets close.

I thought I had finally convinced her to settle down a little because she got very quiet, and then I heard something I really didn't expect: a man's voice saying, "Didn't you even hear me?"

I nearly dropped my teeth: the man was my soldier son, who was supposed to have been flying in from his Army post in Georgia to spend a couple of weeks at home before his unit ships to Afghanistan next month. At least, that's what I had assumed when he told me a couple of weeks ago that the Army had changed his release dates so that he wasn't going to be able to ride his new Harley home. (I was just about as glad: he's old enough to make his own decisions and I'm sure he's a careful driver, but cross-country on a motorcycle is just somehow scary to me. On the other hand, the Army is about to ship him to Afghanistan.)

Come to find out, he had been released from duty a little early on Friday afternoon, then taken several miles away for a going-away function that kept him from heading home until about 3 yesterday afternoon. He had hopped on his bike and headed west, driving all evening, all night, and all morning from eastern Georgia to central Texas. He had pulled into the driving too far for me to see his bike from the front window, opened the garage door, and stepped inside to peel off the riding clothes that had gotten drenched on the 5-hour ride across Texas.

By the time I found that out, it was way too late to take back that air puff I had used to scare AB, who was really only doing her best to protect me.

Next time I'll have to check more carefully before I pull that trigger!

With all due respect to Garrison Keillor...

To say that the family I grew up in was "dirt poor" might for a long time have been giving us credit for riches we didn't have. My sisters recall our mother receiving bills she couldn't pay and crying as she tore them up and threw them away. From what I gather, she might as well have; tucking them safely into the little desk where she always did the family's business would not have changed the fact that she didn't have the money to pay them and she didn't know where she would get it.

A huge part of the problem was that my parents had moved to our little town a couple of years before I was born so Daddy and one of his brothers could start a new glass business—in direct (and probably unfortunate) competition with another glass company that got its start at just about the same time. The other business is still in operation, but even now the town isn't overrun with glass companies.

As is true with most young businesses, Daddy's struggled for the first few years, and while Daddy took care of the business of running the business, it fell to Mother to run the house. With her growing young family (I was the fourth of five children; the oldest was 7 when I was born), she must have been a Trojan to hold up as well as she did.

Because of either my young age or my natural inability to perceive what's going on around me, I was spared Mother's pain; all I knew was that I had a roof over my head (with a big tree and a sandbox in the back yard), clothes to wear to school and church, and food on the table.

In retrospect, I'm amazed that I never remember being really hungry; I look back through Mother's old recipe book and see that she fed the seven of us (and it seems to me we had eight pairs of feet under our table as often as we had seven) on meatloaf that started with a pound of hamburger but somehow usually had enough leftovers for Daddy's sandwich in the next day's lunch. I loved the smell of the pot roast that simmered on Sunday mornings while we all trooped off to Sunday school and church and yielded enough food for Sunday lunch and homemade soup on Monday.

If Daddy had to be away at dinnertime, we could usually count on Mother's tuna casserole, which she always passed off as the go-to meal because Daddy didn't like it. For the life of me, I can't remember ever hearing Mother say she liked it, and now I wonder whether we ate tuna casserole when Daddy was gone because Daddy didn't like it or because Mother knew she could stretch her food dollars a little farther by feeding us canned tuna and rice when Daddy wasn't home.

I'm sure we all had our favorite meals and our favorite memories of food when we were kids (who couldn't like homemade ice cream on the front lawn on summer Sunday afternoons when the cousins came from The City?), but when we're all together, the one thing we seem to miss the most may be Daddy's biscuits. I have no idea how or why he had the job of making biscuits, but I don't remember Mother ever doing it, either while he was alive or after he died, although I never lived with her after he died. My memories are all and always of "Daddy's biscuits."

Daddy often made biscuits when we had "breakfast for supper," which I thought was wonderful because Daddy almost never made his biscuits for breakfast, so eggs and bacon and biscuits for supper suited me just fine. Looking back, I have an idea that we had breakfast for supper when the only meat in the house was a few residual strips of bacon and eggs were cheap enough to give us some nourishment.

And we had biscuits for supper when Nana came. Nana—who never drove a car in her life—lived far enough away that she took the train to come to see us, and from my earliest memory, we had to drive to a little burg about 30 miles away to pick her up because passenger service didn't come to our town. I suppose she boarded the train after she got off work in the evenings because my memories are always of picking her up at night, and driving home and eating. (Nana must have been starving!) My "standard" memory is that the "meal" centered on Daddy's biscuits. I guess we sometimes had eggs with them, and I think we usually had bacon, but mostly I remember biscuits and gravy or biscuits and honey.

And Daddy made biscuits on camping trips. With our large family, all slaves to habit, Mother and Daddy learned early on that the best way to get away from home was to take us camping. Daddy loved to cook on camp outs, not just the "macho" grilling that other dads were doing but also the pineapple-upside-down cakes he cooked  in a hole in the ground and later in a Dutch oven because for years we celebrated his and my sister's birthdays on camping trips. One year I remember that he was planning an apple pie but found that his new pie tin was way too large for the single can of apples we had, so he dumped in a can of peaches and we had great fun with "pea-ple" pie. So it's no surprise that he also made biscuits.

When my siblings gather and talk turns to memories, one of our fondest is always Daddy's biscuits. I really don't know whether his biscuits were very much different from anybody else's or whether they had another kind of magic: for one thing, it says something very special to a kid to know her Daddy cares enough about her to make the biscuits; for another, those times when Daddy made the biscuits almost always had something "special" associated with them, like visits from Nana; for a third, we may not have realized how really desperately hungry we were when the larder was bare enough that we were reduced to biscuits. But you can almost feel the hush when talk turns to memories of Daddy and his biscuits.

Apparently neither of my sisters ever asked for the recipe (and if my brothers did, they never admitted it), so I may be the only one who ever tied him down long enough to try to learn his secret. I was somewhere in junior high school, and I had convinced him that I should learn to make the biscuits for our family camp outs. By that time, the three older kids were all out of the nest, and Daddy had bought a ski boat. We had observed that the best time for skiing was early morning, before the wind started to rise and ruffle up the surface of the lake.

Daddy was willing to get up and drive the boat for me and the younger brother, and we loved to ski, but all three of us were famished by the time we got back. Mother refused to cook breakfast for us: she didn't go in the boat with us, she never knew when we'd be in, and she was on vacation, too. I wasn't crazy about cooking bacon and eggs on a kerosene stove, and I don't think Daddy was crazy about having me do it, but he was willing to teach me how to start the charcoal for our big Dutch oven and cook the biscuits. Only I had to have the recipe.

Now, a man who came up with a peaple pie because he hadn't planned ahead for a big enough pie plate is not the sort of man to use standard measures. So I stood one evening at his elbow and watched him assemble the main ingredients for the biscuits and explain to me the amounts: one sifter of flour, a dime of salt, a quarter of baking powder, a dollop of shortening, and an ant bed of powdered milk.

I've heard all sort of cooks arguing the merits of whole milk vs buttermilk vs skim milk for the finest possible pan of biscuits, but Garrison Keillor's tales of Lake Woebegone and his sponsorship by Powdermilk Biscuits  has always rung truest to me because that's how Daddy taught me to make them. I'm sure Keillor thought Powermilk Biscuits was a wonderful joke; I've always thought the joke was on him.

I'm not sure why Daddy dumped in the powdered milk, but I have a couple of theories. For one, he was teaching me to make biscuits for our camp outs, and with powdered milk, we could mix up all the dry ingredients and take them to camp in a canister so we could just measure out a bit of "mix" and add shortening and water. For another, we always had powdered milk in the house because it was another trick Mother used to try to save money: Mr. Dobbins, the milkman, would drop off a couple of gallons of milk regularly for her brood, and mother would pour half a gallon at a time into her big enamel pitcher with half a gallon of "instant" milk. And maybe Daddy was just stretching those milk dollars a little bit farther by using the powdered milk in his biscuits.

We have a recipe from a cousin that looks a lot like Daddy's recipe, and I suspect they both came from his mother—except that the cousin's recipe uses ordinary whole milk and recognizable measurements. When I made Daddy let me measure everything, it looked a lot like 2 c. flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbs baking powder, about 1/3 c of shortening, and 1/3 c of powdered milk. Daddy always measured out the flour in the sifter that Mother kept in the flour canister, and I wonder now whether sifting it affected the texture of the biscuits; certainly, I haven't sifted flour for anything in years, and I don't know if it would make the difference now that maybe it did back then.

He "measured" the salt and baking powder in the palm of his hand, and he swirled a wooden spoon around the edge of the shortening can to "measure" the shortening. I never saw him "cut" the shortening into the dry ingredients with anything fancy; he just chopped at it a bit with his wooden spoon. He made a well about the size of a teacup (my cousin's recommendation of 3/4 c is probably about right) in the middle of the dry ingredients and filled it with lukewarm water. He worked it all together a bit with his wooden spoon and then his hands, dumping it onto the floured counter to pat it out for cutting. If he miscalculated and got the dough too wet, we were likely to have "drop" biscuits; if he was up for adventure, he'd stir in a bit of grated cheese.

I have the recipe all recorded in my own recipe book, and it says to cook at 400°, a bit cooler than my cousin's recommended 450°. I really can't say which is more accurate; I know that I used two coffee cans of charcoal on the bottom of our 12-in. Dutch oven and one on the top, however hot that turns out to be. They're done in about 10 minutes.

Now I'm starting to wonder if part of the reason I never baked biscuits much is that they never seemed right without his touch—or maybe it was the powdered milk!

And Garrison Keillor probably thought he was making that all up....