Hoarding lightbulbs

Ms. Packratty has a serious issue with the push to force people to use compact fluorescent bulbs. There's a light quality - to her they are sort of the processed cheese food of light bulbs - but they also contain mercury. And people are not going to recycle them, they are going to throw them in the trash.

So anyway, she's been stuffing light bulbs by the box into the tall space at the top of the linen closet and today, when she was picking up some wood putty and sandpaper for the coming stair finishing festivities, her local Home Depot had a special. Boxes of 4 60 watt bulbs for 25 cents a BOX. Ms. Packratty bought $5 worth - 80 bulbs. They are some weird offbrand, but Ms. P suspects she will nonetheless get more than 6.25 cents worth of use out of each of them.

And speaking of energy, Ms. Packratty had commented on a friend's Facebook that she was desirous of purchasing a bottom freezer fridge unit as she is tall and tired of bending over to see the contents of the fridge and having to kneel on the floor when the fridge needs a thorough cleaning. Another friend of her friend posted a reply pompously informing her that a bottom freezer was less efficient than a top freezer and that Consumer Reports blah blah blah. So when Ms. Packratty was in the Home Depot, she compared the energy estimates on a GE bottom freezer fridge of 22 CF and one for a top freezer of 21.8 (close enough, in other words). The big energy savings that Ms. Packratty should sacrifice her back and knees for? FIVE dollars a YEAR. Five hundred pennies 41.6 CENTS a month. Yes, indeedy. That's advice from Consumer Reports on the par with their ridiculous advice on dog and cat food, in which they posited that corn and starch-laden cheap foods were a better value than meat protein based foods. Which is when CR basically lost most of their credibility with Ms. Packratty.

Speaking of consumer issues - have you ever felt like screaming at the television over an advertisement? This morning, Ms. Packratty was running around preparing for work when an ad appeared on the television. In the ad, this purported mother was talking about how her child - who appeared to be four or five years old - would not eat - "anything green" or this or that, "until it finally began to affect her growth" when "mom" consulted the doctor, who "told" her to feed the kid a canned vitamin-enhanced milkshake called Pediasure. Excuse me? What is happening to parents? Do they not have the sense to deal with their own children? Letting a child pull something like that over eating to the extent they were worried about their health is insane. Absolutely, totally insane. And any doctor who would prescribe fortified milkshakes as an alternative to real food for an otherwise healthy child ought to be defrocked.

Someone Ms. Packratty knows was confronted with a grandchild who was using eating as a way to control his parents. The Wise Grandmother invited the parents to leave the grandchild with her at the beach and for the parents to go off and have a vacation of their own. The first time grandson declined what was offered at a meal as well as the proffered leftovers from a prior meal and demanded something not on the menu, the Wise Grandmother looked calmly at the Picky Grandson and said "You must be ill, if you can't eat this nice whatever. Let's get you into bed for the afternoon." So while other children were with their Wise Grandfather at the beach and tennis court, the Picky Grandson spent the afternoon in bed. At dinner, the PG again declined the offered dinner or a chicken sandwich and demanded a hamburger and french fries. The Wise Grandmother again looked at him and said "That isn't what we have tonight. If you can't eat the ham or a chicken sandwich, you must still be feeling ill. Off to bed with you." And the PG spent the evening in bed while the other grandchildren had ice cream, played Monopoly and went to the movies at the Beach Club.

The next morning, the PG threw a temper tantrum at breakfast, refusing scrambled eggs, oatmeal or Cherrios and demanding some chocolate flavored cereal. The WG put him right back in bed and so it went for another entire day. On the evening of the second day, the PG actually ate some of his boiled shrimp, but refused salad, rice and the other parts of the dinner, so he got no dessert and had to go to bed early. But lo and behold, on the next morning, the PG came out of the young boys' bunkroom at the beach house early and found his Grandfather making some oatmeal and marched up and said "Grandpa, may I please have some oatmeal with brown sugar?" And that was that. Ever after, all his mother or father had to do if he started playing food games was to put him to bed because a boy who won't eat "must be feeling ill". You can't cater to those sorts of games with children. Pediasure - for a perfectly healthy child? The problem there isn't the child's nutrition, but a lack of calcium in the parental spines.

And now, if you will excuse her, Ms. Packratty really is going to the dogs. She needs to head out of here and go tend the pooches and collect her overnight bag.