Category: Uncategorized

Oh, I’m not giving up blogging– that’s not it at all. I’ve just decided to merge this blog with my unofficial blog and have it all together at stevendkrause.com Update your links and go check out the new space!

I was in the Food (W)hole today, picking up a few things after a satisfying (well, for me) workout at the rec center, when I spotted what seemed to me to be a just brilliant shopping idea. I saw a woman with a laptop open and sitting in that seat where the baby would ride. She was online (the Food [W]hole has free wifi) and in the midst of a chat session, but it just seems obvious to me that this would be a fantastic way to shop for groceries/plan a menu. Log in, check out some recipes, and plan your shopping accordingly. Potentially pretty cool, huh?

I will probably have to get ready to help Annette pack here in a bit (we get on a plane for home tomorrow morning), but since I’m sitting in front of the computer anyway, I thought I’d write a post about the year that was, more or less, at least according to my unofficial blog:

• There was some assembly required.
• We had a successful Mardi Gras festival– we’ll probably have another one this year.
• Annette, Annette, and Gunter in NYC.
• The Landlord, which is a very funny Will Farrell movie. Maybe the best comedy I saw this year.
• Sweden has a party in its pants!
• Dearborn cop dying from pot brownies, a very funny clip.
• Will, science olympian. This was a great event which Annette and I are going to help out with this year.
• Sophie makes her world premiere with my FlipVideo camera.
• Strange Fruit in Ann Arbor.
• Like clockwork, the Ypsi July 4 parade.
• A fair amount of golf, with at least one good, albeit dubious, score.
• Traverse City with the extended Krause family, though I didn’t blog about it much.
• Great Wolf Lodge for Will’s 10th.
• RenFest, the movie.
• Annette’s book came out and we partied into the night with stuffed peppers (and other things).
• As this, this, and this post indicate, I got sucked into camping. It was a lot of fun actually, and I hope it’s something we do a couple times this coming summer.
• The Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan show.
• The problem of reusable shopping bags solved by Ikea.
• well, we had fun at least…
• The usual Halloween hijinks insued.
• Bud Light Clamato in Virginia on the Thanksgiving roadtrip.
• Pepper Nuts, the movie.

Well, you’ve seen the latest stuff from the holidaze if you’re looking now. Wow, that took longer than I thought. I’d better help pack. See ya next year.

A couple weeks ago, I finally came around to the idea that I ought to use some reusable shopping bags for groceries and such. Part of it is the environmental issues everyone already knows about– a zillion plastic and/or paper bags filling up landfills, etc., etc., etc. But part of it is just to help declutter the house a bit and ditch all the plastic bags that get stuffed under the sink or paper bags in the garage or whatever.

But here’s the thing: Whole Foods was selling lovely canvas bags, but for eight bucks each, and it is essentially an advertisement for Whole Foods. So I went seeking alternatives, and surprisingly, I pretty much struck out. I tried places like Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, other grocery stores, a hardware store, etc. Nothing. Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough, but if places like the Food (W)hole want people to use reusable bags, they need to price them better.

Anyway, the solution I came up with was Ikea: I bought two of their giant and reusable bags for 59 cents apiece. They are gigantic, made out of a durable plastic, and the roll/fold up into a small-ish ball. I had shopping success with them yesterday; we’ll see how it goes from here.

I haven’t checked this out yet, but I stumbled across a service called Catalog Choice, which promises a way to eliminate all of those catalogs that show up uninvited at the house, especially around the holidays. Annette and I have both ordered a few things over the years, I think primarily from Signals, and it seems like once you order from one of these things, you get 100 different catalogs from weird and bizarre places where you would never order anything. If I could stop this crap showing up in my mailbox in the first place, it would be a good thing.

It appears it’s been a while since I’ve posted to the ol’ unofficial blog. I have been posting on my official blog and over at EMUTalk.org, and I also have been trying to write as much as I can on my sabbatical project. So far, so good.

But Annette and I have also been doing a fair amount of “home improvement” around here too, more than we have done in years. The first big project was painting the front of the house, which I did solo. Well, that’s not completely true; Will painted the window flowerboxes with much protest. But the rest of it was me, and I’m reasonably pleased with how it turned out. I’m going to start on the sides of the house next week I think (weather permitting), but this weekend, Annette and I have to prep to for the dude who is coming on Tuesday to put down some new vinyl flooring down in the kitchen. This means we’ve got to move everything out of there, and we figure we might as well use it as a chance to paint a but in there. And down the line, I think we’ll redo some stuff in the bathroom downstairs, touch up some things in other places, etc., etc.

The original plan was to fix up the house so we can move. But I’m pretty sure that we’re going to be victims of the real estate bubble bursting and we’ll be here for at least the foreseeable future. So now we’re fixing stuff for ourselves mostly, and that’s been relatively satisfying. Though time consuming, too.

Anyway, fingers crossed for the flooring.

… I might make these for Halloween: jars of witch stuff.

Via boing-boing, and found here.

Way back in the day, when I was in college 20 years ago, textbooks were expensive (relatively speaking, of course), but it was still reasonably common for me and my peers to keep the books we used for classes. That might have been more normal for me as an English major than it was for people who majored in things like chemistry, since most of my “textbooks” were paperback novels and books of poetry and stuff like that. I certainly never paid over $50 for a textbook.

Nowadays of course, it is common– too common, if you ask me– for students to sell their books back to the book store at the end of the term. Inevitably, the return most students get is not enough but better than nothing. Again, English major-types are still better off than science oriented majors, where it’s pretty easy to find new textbooks priced at $150+. That’s too expensive of course, but I did once have a textbook sales rep tell me that for publishers, these uber-expensive books are actually a “break even” proposition because of all the detailed color printing in these books. Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, now for those who cannot afford to own comes the opportunity to rent from BookRenter.com, which I found via DigitalKoans. It is what it is: basically, there are various options where students can rent their books. I didn’t look through the site long enough to see what was or wasn’t available and it’s clearly a new enterprise– in fact, they are inviting current students to design their college culture page.

There’s an analogy with home ownership, of course: years ago, people bought into the market at prices that were expensive at the time but which seems cheap now. A few years ago, people who wanted to be home owners ended up paying more both in terms of actual dollars and as a percentage of their income/overall expenses. And now, renting is presented as a viable option for those who can’t afford to own.

Given that when students sell their books back they tend to get pennies on the dollar, renting is probably a pretty reasonable choice. But I wonder if the next thing we’re going to see is some sort of “collapse” of the textbook industry along the lines of what we’re seeing now with real estate? Will things like open source textbooks, electronic textbooks, and now textbook rental disrupt the business model of the industry and causes prices to drop?

From a cool art/photo blog I put in my RSS feed recently, the Wooster Collective: “Eine Goes Big in London.”