09:02 – I’m beginning to believe that one really can find anything on the Internet. Yesterday, for some reason, I thought about a woman whose name I couldn’t remember, if indeed I’d ever known it. All I remembered was that about 30 or 35 years ago she’d done a series of commercials for No Nonsense pantyhose and that I’d also seen her playing a nurse in one episode of MASH. It took me about 30 seconds to find out that her name is Susan Blanchard. Here’s one of those commercials on YouTube.

08:08 – As expected, Colin had a pretty rough evening, with all the fireworks. Around 4:20 p.m. Barbara left to meet her sister and friends for dinner. Colin and I had PB&J sandwiches and potato chips for dinner, and started watching Heartland re-runs. There wasn’t much noise while it was still full light out. I took Colin for a walk down the street around 9:00 p.m. It wasn’t full dark yet, and there was a fair amount of popping and a couple of booms around the neighborhood. Colin was nervous, but he kept walking. Around 9:30, the heavier stuff started. I turned up the volume on the TV to smother some of the noise. Colin lay on the sofa next to me, panting and with his ears down flat.

By the time Barbara got home around 11:15, we’d made it through 7 episodes of Heartland, along with half of the Christmas special. That took us to the halfway point in series four.

Oh, yeah. Long-term food storage note: I made two PB&J sandwiches, one with the last of a jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly that passed its best-by date two years ago, and the second with a jar Barbara had just purchased. The two were indistinguishable. And I’d bet money that the same would have been true had the old jar been ten years past its best-by date.

The dirty little secret that food manufacturers won’t admit to is that their best-by dates, particularly for canned/jarred foods, are completely arbitrary. They set them as short as they think they can get away with because they want to encourage people to throw out perfectly good food and buy more. I’ve been watching this happen for decades, and the expiration dates keep getting shorter. For a lot of products, if you compare the best-by date on a can purchased today versus a can of the same product purchased 20 or 30 years ago, you’ll find that supposed shelf life is half or less now what it was then. It’s a racket, and the upshot is that over the years Americans have discarded millions of tons of perfectly good food.

As you celebrate Independence Day today, please take a moment to think about the men and women of our armed forces, past and present, who have willingly risked, and all too often lost, everything to defend our freedom. I worry about America, but there can be nothing very wrong with a country that continues to produce men and women like them.

The coast apparently got nailed pretty badly, but we’ve seen no effects at all from the hurricane. No rain, no wind, not even any clouds. We’re not doing anything special for the holiday. Barbara is doing stuff in the yard and later maybe some kit stuff. She’s meeting her sister and a friend for dinner and then going to watch the fireworks. Colin and I will watch Heartland reruns until Barbara returns. He’s terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks, so I’ll keep the sound turned up and let him cower on the sofa beside me until Barbara gets home.

08:02 – Barbara and I are binge-watching series four of Downton Abbey on Amazon streaming. We’ll finish the final three episodes tonight. We generally keep two or three series in progress. Once we finish Downton Abbey, we’ll be down to just Dawson’s Creek on Netflix streaming. We’re about halfway through that, so we’ll add something else, probably The Wire on Amazon streaming.

09:52 – I think Amazon is screwing with me. They “reward” frequent customers by increasing the prices they charge, apparently on the assumption that satisfied customers won’t bother to compare prices. Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that Amazon is getting less and less competitive, so I’ve cut back on purchases from them. I used to check their dynamic pricing changes by getting prices on something while I wasn’t logged in and then logging in to compare the original prices with the logged-in prices. There was sometimes no difference, but quite often the logged-in prices were higher, sometimes significantly so. And even when they aren’t, Amazon often isn’t competitive with other vendors. That “free shipping” they offer with Prime turns out not to be so free, and even their non-Prime prices are often considerably higher than those of alternative vendors.

For example, I just checked this morning to see how much Amazon was charging for Keystone Meats All Natural Ground Beef, 28 Ounce. Amazon wanted $10.77 per can, whether or not I was logged in. So I went over to the Keystone Meats website, where I found that they were selling a case of 12 cans for $80. Even with $20.62 shipping that comes to only $8.39 per can, so Amazon is charging about a 28% premium.

09:32 – We visited Sam’s Club yesterday with Frances and Al, who are members of both Costco and Sam’s. On items that both carry, the prices were very similar, a bit higher or lower, but nothing that would make it worth driving across the street. In this case, literally. The two are within about a quarter mile (400 meters) of each other.

From the appearance of the customers and the cars out in the lot, the two obviously have different customer demographics, albeit with a fair amount of overlap. Costco is mostly middle-class to upper-middle-class customers, while Sam’s is mostly middle-class to lower-middle-class. I did notice that Sam’s staff seemed a lot friendlier than typical WalMart staff, although not nearly as friendly as Costco staff.

At any rate, we ended up filling a shopping cart with mostly canned goods–cases of Campbell’s creamy and chunky soups, canned meats and vegetables, Chef Boyardee, and so on. Barbara also picked up some frozen stuff and a couple gallons of orange juice. The total was only $264, so it wasn’t a big run.

If Frances is willing to take us, we may try visiting the other Sam’s Club in town, which is much closer to us. But I think Barbara and I are agreed that we probably won’t bother joining. We get most of what we need at Costco, and Frances said we were welcome to meet them at Sam’s any time we wanted to do a run there.

11:24 – The guy just showed up to replace our garage doors. The existing ones are uninsulated single-layer steel, and have been there since not long after we moved into this house in 1987. The new ones are also steel, but two-layer with a layer of R10 insulation between them.

We got two quotes, the first from Costco and the second from the company that replaced one of the openers a couple years ago. The two quotes were within $50 of each other, straddling $1,700 including tax. The Costco contractor was going to replace the tracks. The second guy said he could replace the tracks if we wanted but the existing ones were perfectly good, and in fact were better than new tracks, which are made of lighter-gauge steel. The second contractor also showed us the difference between the hardware they used and the hardware the Costco contractor would use. The second guy’s hinges and rollers were significantly better, and the opener they planned to install was also heavier duty. So we went with the second contractor for $50 or so more.

Supposedly it’ll take three or four hours for the installation. Colin is outraged at what he hears going on down there, and I suspect I won’t get much done until late this afternoon.