Reverse SNAP Challenge, Day 6

Six days down, one to go on our Reverse SNAP Challenge. Here's what we had to eat on Day 6:

Amy's breakfast (toast and cocoa): 27 cents
Brian's breakfast (cereal with add-ins and juice, PLUS half a cup of extra cereal): $1.16
Lunch: Leftover couscous salad, leftover pasta, and the remainder of the pint of blueberries we started yesterday. Total: 62 cents.
Amy's afternoon snack (popcorn and egg cream): 39 cents
Dinner: quesadillas and salsa. We used one can of tomatoes (69 cents at Aldi), 1 red onion (31 cents at H-Mart), a tiny bit of jalapeno pepper we had stored in the freezer (estimated value 5 cents), 4 cloves of garlic (estimated value 10 cents), home-cooked black beans equivalent to about 1/3 pound dry (33 cents), 1.5 tablespoons of lime juice (estimated value 10 cents, based on a price I found on Google Shopping), 4 ounces arugula from the garden (free), about 3/4 of a half-pound block of Monterey Jack cheese from Aldi ($1.50), and six flour tortillas ($1.19 for a package of 10 at Aldi, so that's 71.5 cents). Total: $3.80
Dessert: Ice cream soda for Amy (22 cents); for Brian, 3/4 cup of GORPCC, meaning 1/4 cup each of organic raisins from Trader Joe's ($2.99 a pound = 75 cents a cup, so about 19 cents), peanuts from Aldi ($2.39 a pound = 15 cents an ounce, which is about 1/4 cup), and chocolate chips from Aldi ($1.59 per bag and about 23 tablespoons to a bag, so about 27.5 cents). Total: 83.5 cents.
Additional snacks throughout the day: 3/4 cup Life cereal (10.5 cents) with 1/2 cup milk (10 cents); water with a splash of orange juice (about 1 ounce, or 3 cents); 1 ounce string cheese (29 cents); 2 graham crackers (11 cents). Total: 63.5 cents.
TOTAL FOR TUESDAY: $7.71
TOTAL FOR DAYS 1-6: $47.34, or $7.89 per day. One day left, $15.66 left in our budget, and plenty of leftovers in our fridge; we've totally got this. Heck, I could go out to Starbucks this afternoon and not blow the budget. (But I won't.)

We had a friend over for board games after dinner, and I told him that we were doing this challenge and why we were doing it differently from the standard way. I noted that I think the standard SNAP challenge is designed to make it as difficult as possible, because most of the people taking the challenge have a particular political agenda; they're trying to show that it's really difficult to get by on food aid and that, therefore, the benefit needs to be increased (or at the very least not cut any further). If you look at the webpage for the SNAP Challenge, you can see that the questions they ask about the challenge are all based on the assumption that getting by on this amount of food is very difficult: "What choices did you have to make about the types of food you could afford, where you shopped, or the nutritional quality and variety of food? What have you cut out of your routine to stay on budget (e.g. COFFEE)? Are you worried about your groceries running out before the end of the Challenge?"

Anyway, I expressed my concern that the people who sponsor these challenges aren't going to be interested in my experience. I even said that I feared the Democratic party might "revoke my member card" for publicly stating, and showing, that for us it was not only possible but very easy to eat a healthy diet on a food-stamp budget. The friend in question is probably somewhere to the left of the salad fork on the political place setting himself, but his response was something along the lines of, "I don't think dismissing awkward facts is a productive approach." So I'm heading into the last day of my challenge with renewed hope that my experience actually will be a useful contribution to the conversation about food aid. Perhaps instead of just wringing our hands over how difficult it is to feed a family on the amount of money SNAP provides, we can start talking more about what can be done to feed a family on this budget, and even feed them well.

Reverse SNAP Challenge, Day 5

We're coming into the home stretch on our Reverse Snap Challenge. By Day 5, most of the food we ate had already been sampled earlier in the week, so I didn't have to do the calculations over again. However, I did need to modify a few of them to account for the increased price of fresh milk over powdered (about 1.25 cents per cup). I also discovered that I'd used the wrong price for rye flour when calculating the price of Brian's homemade rye bread, so I went back and revised the numbers for Days 1-4  Here's our menu for Monday:

Amy's breakfast (toast and cocoa): 27 cents
Brian's breakfast (cereal with add-ins and juice): $1.07

Lunch: the rest of the leftover spinach casserole from Day 1, some of the leftover pasta from Day 4, about 3/4 cup of 99-cents-a-pint blueberries from Aldi (we finished off one pint of them on Day 4, but they were so cheap that we bought two more), and a glass of seltzer (about half a can) with a splash of orange juice (about 2 ounces). Total: 51.6 cents.

Amy's afternoon snack: popcorn and an egg cream (39.3 cents), plus two graham crackers (10.7 cents) and 1 ounce string cheese (29 cents). Total: 79 cents.

Dinner: a couscous salad made with a bunch of veggies from our garden. This is our first big harvest for the year: 1 medium zucchini (and one baby one that fell off the vine), two medium cucumbers, two scallions, and a small bunch of parsley. Brian modified the couscous salad recipe from The Clueless Vegetarian, substituting the zucchini for the two green peppers the recipe called for, and it came out pretty well. The other ingredients were about 6 ounces of whole wheat couscous ($2.56 a pound at the Amish market, so 96 cents), two cups of home-cooked beans (equivalent to about 1/4 pound of dry beans, or 25 cents), the juice of one lemon (50 cents at the H-Mart), 6 tablespoons of olive oil (35 cents), and about a teaspoon of cumin (I found the weight of ground cumin here, but I didn't know the price, so I used the price for coriander—$17.17 per pound—as a wild approximation and got a price of 7.5 cents). Total: $2.14, and as usual, we have plenty of leftovers.

Dessert: Same as yesterday—ice cream with chocolate syrup for Brian, ice cream soda for me. Total: 60 cents.

Additional snack: 2 graham crackers (10.7 cents) and 1 cup milk (20 cents). Total: 30.7 cents.

TOTAL COST FOR MONDAY: $5.69, well under the limit for today.

TOTAL FOR DAYS 1-5: $39.63, or about 63 percent of our $63 budget for the week.

One pattern that's becoming quite clear is that we spend a lot less on days when we use a lot of garden produce. We came in under $6 on both Monday and Friday—Friday because the bulk of our dinner was made up of garden veggies, and Monday because dinner was a potluck that we bought our way into with a pie made from home-grown rhubarb. This suggests that, if we add in the supermarket cost of our garden produce, our total for the week might end up well over $63—but it also goes to show that our garden really is saving us money, especially now that it's well established and we're not putting so much money into it every year.

Reverse SNAP Challenge, Day 4

By the end of Day 3 of our Reverse SNAP Challenge, we'd used up the half a loaf of rye bread we had left over when we started. Brian baked two new loaves of rye bread using the same recipe, the cost of which I worked out back on Day 1, and stuck one in the fridge for immediate use and one in the freezer. So the loaf of bread we're currently working on is worth 94 cents, and I'll count it all as part of our budget for Day 4 rather than try to work out what percentage of it we ate at each meal.

We also discovered on Day 4 that we had four raisin cookies left over in the cookie jar, hidden under the big chocolate bar. Holding onto them until the challenge was over didn't seem like a good move, so I worked out the cost of the recipe he used to make them. He says he made only a half-batch of the cookies, using 1 1/4 cups of flour, 1 cup of rolled oats, 3/4 cup of organic sugar, 6 tablespoons of butter, 1 free-range egg, 1/2 teaspoon each of baking soda, cinnamon, and salt, 1/4 teaspoon each of baking powder and cloves—and one pound of raisins. (Brian doesn't make oatmeal-raisin cookies; he makes raisin-oatmeal cookies.) The cost of this half-batch, with its overload of raisins, came to $4.60, and Brian says it made 46 cookies, so the cookies were worth exactly 10 cents each.

Also, on Sunday we opened a gallon of skim milk we picked up at Aldi for $3.19. This works out to 20 cents a cup, or 1.25 cents more per cup than the powdered milk we'd been drinking before. Thus, I bumped up the cost of my breakfast and Brian's breakfast by a penny or two, and I'll adjust the cost of future afternoon snacks as well.

The rest of our eating for Day 4:
New loaf of bread: 94 cents
Amy's breakfast (toast and cocoa): 27 cents
Brian's breakfast (cereal with add-ins and juice): $1.07
Lunch: leftover spinach casserole, leftover sausage, rye bread, 1 pint of blueberries from Aldi (99 cents), 3 raisin cookies (30 cents), 1/2 cup milk (10 cents), 1 ounce string cheese (29 cents), 1 cup lemonade made with half a lemon (20 cents) and three tablespoons of organic sugar (16.4 cents). Total: $2.14.
Dinner: pasta with eggplant, a modified version of this recipe from Real Simple. We used half a pound of penne (about 50 cents), 1.6 pounds of Chinese eggplant from H-Mart ($1.56), two plum tomatoes from H-Mart (74 cents), 1/4 cup of basil stored in the freezer from last year's crop (free, but I'll tally it up with our other garden veggies at the end), 1/4 cup of olive oil (23.3 cents), 2 cloves of garlic (not purchased recently, so I'll just have to approximate it at 5 cents), and half a pound of mozzarella cheese (bought on sale for $1.99 a pound, making it $1 worth). Total cost: $3.34, and we had leftovers.
Dessert: for Brian, 3/4 cup ice cream (bought on sale at $2.39 for 6 cups, so about 30 cents) with 1 tablespoon chocolate syrup (1/32 of a $2.49 bottle, or about 8 cents); for Amy, an ice cream soda (1 tsp. sugar, 1 1/2 tsp. organic cocoa, 1 packet sweetener, 1/4 cup of the Aldi milk, 1/4 cup ice cream, 2/3 can of seltzer, and 2 tablespoons of whipped cream, for a total of 22 cents). Total: 60 cents.
Additional snacks throughout the day: 1 square each of Trader Joe's chocolate (22 cents) and Hershey's Special Dark (14 cents), 1 ounce string cheese (29 cents), 1/2 cup milk (10 cents), and the last of the pie rolls left over from Friday.
TOTAL COST FOR SUNDAY: $9.11, just barely over our $9 limit for the day
TOTAL FOR DAYS 1-4: $33.94

So, in the first four days of the challenge, we've used a little over half of our $63 budget for the week—plus we have most of a loaf of bread and a good quart of leftover pasta for lunches. I'd say we are in good shape to finish this challenge within our budget quite easily. Three days to go!

Reverse SNAP Challenge, Days 2 and 3

As I predicted, the second day of my Reverse Snap Challenge was a lot easier than the first. The leftovers we ate were already accounted for in my summary for Day 1, and most of the other foods we ate were the same as those we'd had the day before, so their costs were already calculated. The only recipe I had to do the math for was the rhubarb pie we brought to the potluck we attended in the evening. And although we ate a truly amazing and delicious variety of food at the potluck, we didn't need to keep track of every bite of it, since the food we ate was, as I reckoned it, bought and paid for fair and square with the food we brought. (And a good thing too, since there's no way we could possibly have done the math on that many different dishes, even if we'd had all the recipes.)

The rhubarb pie was also a very simple dish to calculate. It had only six ingredients—seven if you count water. The pound of rhubarb was from our garden, and thus cost nothing, though I'll reckon up what it would have cost to buy along with all the other garden produce at the end of the challenge. Aside from that, it had 1 1/2 cups or organic sugar ($1.31), 2 tablespoons of corn starch (10.6 cents), 2 1/2 cups of flour (37.3 cents), 1 teaspoon of salt (about a penny), and 13 2/3 tablespoons of butter (85.2 cents). In addition, Brian used about three tablespoons of cinnamon sugar to turn the leftover piecrust dough into little cookies he calls "pie rolls," which we ate as part of our lunch on Friday. Since the cinnamon is finely ground, I assumed that it weighed about 8 ounces per cup, the same as baking powder, and that a teaspoon of it thus weighed 1/48 of a pound. Three teaspoons of organic cinnamon thus cost 61.4 cents, making it one of the more expensive ingredients in the whole recipe, and three more tablespoons of sugar cost 16.4 cents. Total cost for the pie and pie rolls: about $3.43.

Our actual menu for Friday:
My usual breakfast (toast and cocoa): 26.5 cents
Brian's usual breakfast (cereal and juice): $1.05
Lunch: leftover spinach casserole, 1 organic banana (21.7 cents), 4 ounces of the Trader Joe's cherries (74.9 cents), the last muffin left over from our previous batch, 1/2 cup of milk (9.4 cents), and pie rolls. Total: $1.06.
Rhubarb pie for potluck: $3.43
TOTAL COST FOR FRIDAY: $5.81, well under our limit of $9 per day.

Saturday's menu:
My usual breakfast (toast and cocoa): 26.5 cents
Brian's usual breakfast (cereal and juice): $1.05

Lunch: leftover spinach casserole, 1 organic banana (21.7 cents), the last 3 ounces of the Trader Joe's cherries (56.2 cents), 1 ounce string cheese  (bought on sale at ShopRite, $3.49 for 12 ounces, so 29 cents), and two graham crackers (10.7 cents). Total: $1.18.

My usual afternoon snack (popcorn and egg cream): 38 cents

Additional snack: 1 square of Trader Joe's chocolate (1/9 of a $1.99 bar) and 1 ounce organic raisins ($2.99 a pound at Trader Joe's). Total: 31 cents.

Dinner: 6 ounces of green beans from our garden, with a couple of teaspoons of olive oil ($11.79 for 3 liters at ShopRite) and some salt; 1/2 pound of Polish sausage from the Amish market ($6 a pound); leftover rye bread; 4 ears of sweet corn from H Mart (4 for a dollar). Everything was cooked over charcoal and was delicious, and the cost was only $4.04, with one sausage link left over.

Dessert: S'mores cooked over the coals. We used 3 1/2 graham crackers, 5 squares of dark chocolate (not the good stuff, just 1/3 of a Hershey Special Dark bar I picked up at the Stop & Shop for $1.85), and 6 kosher marshmallows that I got on sale at the Stop & Shop right after Passover ($2 for a bag of 30). Total: $1.20.

1 cup of coffee (brewed from 2 tablespoons of IKEA Mellanrost, bought last January at $3.49 a bag) with 2 tablespoons of So Delicious coconut creamer ($2 a pint on sale at the Whole Earth Center) and 2 tablespoons of whipped cream ($2.79 a can at ShopRite). Total: 34 cents.

TOTAL COST FOR SATURDAY: $8.77, just under our $9 limit for the day.

This means that our total food cost for the first three days of the challenge comes to $24.73, or $8.24 per day, which is just within the limits of our $9 daily budget. Admittedly, we would have been over the limit if we'd had to pay for the produce we used from our garden—but then, if we'd had to pay for it, we probably would have bought something cheaper instead. So at this point, we're on target, even without any changes in our eating habits. Three days down, four to go.

Reverse SNAP Challenge, Day 1

We've only been on the Reverse Snap Challenge for one day, and already it's apparent that my version of the challenge is a lot more difficult than the standard version in one way: bookkeeping.

The thing I didn't like about the standard version of the challenge is that you had to set aside all the food in your fridge and pantry and eat only food you bought with your SNAP budget. I thought this was inefficient, because it doesn't allow you to buy in bulk or stockpile items on sale, and possibly even wasteful, because you might have to throw out leftovers. What I didn't consider is that it's also much, much easier to keep track of. You don't have to record exactly how much of everything you eat throughout the day; all you have to do is record what you bought and how much it cost, and then eat nothing else. With my version of the challenge, by contrast, any food you have in the house is fair game—and therefore you have to calculate the price of everything.

I quickly realized that if I recorded every single recipe we used to make every single thing we ate, and the prices of all the ingredients that went into it, these blog entries were going to become incredibly tedious to read. So instead, I'm just going to do the math myself and give you the totals. And rather than calculating the dollar cost of each individual meal, I'm just going to figure out the cost of each dish we prepared, and then show you how it got eaten up over the course of the week. So, to start with, here are the leftovers we had in the fridge on Thursday morning when we started the challenge:

1. Half a loaf of homemade rye bread. The white flour in it was bought at ShopRite ($1.99 for 5 pounds), and most of the other ingredients came from the Whole Earth Center and were priced by the pound, so all I had to do to calculate their cost was find the weight of each ingredient. Fortunately, Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) had already done most of the work for me in her article, "Calculating the Cost of Baking," and I'd jotted down her measurements for reference in my grocery price book. The only thing I actually had to weigh was the caraway seeds. Using these figures, I worked out that the price of the whole recipe (two loaves) was $1.76, so the half a loaf we had left was worth 47 cents. (You see what a hassle this would be if I showed you all the calculations for everything?)
2. Six small sourdough muffins, made from an old family recipe of Brian's. There were some ingredients in these, such as baking powder, that we hadn't bought recently, so I had to rely on my price book to work out their cost. The whole batch (16 muffins) came to $1.32, so the six we had left were worth about 50 cents.
3. Three mushroom veggie burgers, made from this recipe that we picked up at the local Stop & Shop. We substituted organic white mushrooms for the ludicrously expensive portabello mushrooms, and we used dry black beans that we had cooked up in the pressure cooker. We also didn't have any quick oats, so we just used rolled oats and let the mixture soak a bit longer. It came out a bit crumbly, so quick oats would probably have worked better, but it tasted fine. The vegetable soup mix we used in this was a packet we'd had sitting in our pantry for ages, but the price label on the box said $1.49, so I assume the half a box we used was worth 75 cents. The whole recipe (9 patties) cost $2.08, so the three patties we had left were worth abut 69 cents.
4. Two small baked potatoes (about 3 ounces each), from a 10-pound bag that cost $3.99 at Aldi. Total: 15 cents.

Total cost of the leftovers in the fridge: $1.78. Although we did not eat all of this on Thursday, I'll count it all as part of Thursday's food budget, just to get it out of the way.

There are also certain foods that we eat nearly every day, so I worked out the cost of those as well.

• Brian obligingly measured out his breakfast cereal and determined that his usual breakfast is two cups of Aldi raisin bran ($1.75 a pound), 1 ounce of oats (also from Aldi, 83.2 cents a pound), 1/2 tablespoon of flaxseeds ($2 a pound at the Whole Earth Center), a cup and a quarter of milk (from powder, sold in a 20-quart box at ShopRite for $15) and 3/4 cup of orange juice (last bought on sale at the ShopRite, $1.99 for a 59-ounce bottle). Total cost: $1.05.
• My breakfast cocoa contains 1 teaspoon of sugar (organic, $1.75 a pound at Trader Joe's), 1 1/2 teaspoons of cocoa (Fair Trade and organic, bought in bulk from Dean's Beans for $11 a pound including shipping), half a packet of aspartame sweetener (from Aldi; I had to use an old price for this since I didn't have the receipt handy), a dash of salt, a cup of milk (from powder), and a few drops of our homemade vanilla extract (which I'd already calculated to cost about 50 cents per ounce). Altogether, this comes to roughly 25 cents. It's part of a complete breakfast that also includes two slices of toast (from the loaf of bread I priced out above) with a teaspoon of Blue Bonnet spread (about 1.5 cents).
• My usual afternoon snack is a bowl of popcorn (about 1/4 cup of kernels, popped in the microwave) with a light mist of olive oil (about half a teaspoon) and a sprinkling of salt, and an egg cream (1 teaspoon sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons cocoa, 1 packet of sweetener, 1/2 cup of milk, and 2/3 can of seltzer). Total cost: 38 cents.

So, with that out of the way, here's what we actually ate on Thursday:

• Brian's usual breakfast (cereal and juice): $1.05
• My usual breakfast (toast and cocoa): 26.5 cents, plus a portion of our loaf of bread
• Brian's lunch: 2 mushroom veggie burgers (left over), 4 sourdough muffins (ditto), 1 organic banana from the Whole Earth Center ($1.30 for half a dozen, so 21.7 cents) and 3 ounces of cherries ($5.99 for a 2-pound container at Trader Joe's, so 56 cents). Total: 78 cents, not counting the cost of leftovers.
• My lunch: 1 veggie patty, 1 bun (89 cents for a package of 8 at Aldi, so 11 cents), 2 lettuce leaves from the garden (free, but I'll calculate the value of the garden veggies we ate at the end of the week), 1/4 tsp. brown mustard (from Aldi), 1/4 organic cantaloupe (this was supposed to be 99 cents a pound, but the clerk rang it up at the wrong price and we didn't catch the error, so we ended up paying twice that), and half a square of organic chocolate from Trader Joe's (about 1/16 of a $1.99 bar). Total: $1.22, not counting the cost of leftovers.
• My usual afternoon snack: 38 cents.
• Dinner: a casserole made from 1 cup of rice, 1/2 pound of frozen spinach, 1/4 pound of cheddar cheese, 1/2 onion, 4 eggs, 3/4 cup milk, 2 Tbsp. butter, 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp salt, and a pinch each of dried thyme and marjoram. Once again, I don't have the price of all these ingredients, so I had to rely on the price book for some of it. I figure it's about $3.30 for the whole casserole; we ate less than half of it, but I figure we'll eat the rest over the course of the week, so I'll count the whole thing. Brian also had one of the leftover potatoes.
• Dessert: Brian had 3/4 cup of ice cream (Stop & Shop mint chocolate chip, $2.49 for 6 cups) with chocolate syrup and whipped cream; I had an ice cream soda, which was basically the same as my afternoon egg cream with the addition of 1/4 cup of ice cream and a spritz of whipped cream. Total: 87 cents.
• Additional snacks throughout the day: 4 graham crackers (from a box bought at Aldi for $1.39), 1/4 cup of raisins, 1 muffin (leftover), and 1/2 cup of Life cereal (bought on sale at Pathmark for $1.25 per 13-ounce box). Total: 48 cents.

TOTAL COST FOR THURSDAY: $10.15. As you can see, this is over our $9 budget for the day; however, since it counts all the leftovers we already had in the fridge (not all of which were eaten that day), plus the additional leftovers that we created, it should balance out over the course of the week.

Stay tuned for the next exciting, or at least not too incredibly tedious, episode of THE REVERSE SNAP CHALLENGE, in which you'll hear Amy say: "How long ago did we buy this bottle of chocolate syrup?"

The $531 grudge

It's now been a year since we made the decision to dump Verizon as our phone provider and ended up with cable TV as part of the bargain. Basically, it turned out that for the first year, at least, we could get a special deal on "triple play" service—Internet, VOIP, and TV—that would make it cheaper than paying for phone and Internet separately. So we figured we'd just drop the TV service after one year and switch to phone and Internet only, which we assumed would be cheaper at that point.

Well, turns out that assumption was a bit hasty. Yesterday we got a letter from Optimum saying that our current one-year promotion was running out, but they could "automatically place us in a new twelve month promotion that's well below our regular rates." Under the new 12-month deal, our TV and Internet service would stay the same price, but our phone service would jump up by $15, raising the total cost of all three services to around $95.25. Hmm. Was this a better deal than phone and Internet separately? Would we save more money by keeping the TV service or dropping it?

I tried to answer this question by searching through the pricing plans on Optimum's website, but it turns out there's no straight answer there to the question, "What do you charge?" Their special promotional prices are splashed all over the site—$79.99 a month for Triple Play service, $49.90 for Internet and phone—but these rates, if you read the fine print, are available only to new customers and are good for only one year. And even in the fine print, all it says about what happens at the end of that year is that your price per month will go up to "the regular rate." What that rate is, they simply won't tell you.

So, to get a straight answer to my question, I had to contact customer service. Fortunately, I was able to do this via online chat rather than a phone call, so I wasn't subjected to hold music while waiting. After getting through to the billing department, I put my question to them: What would it cost us to drop our TV service and go to just Internet and phone? Based on our experience when we first signed up for service, Brian had predicted that at this point, they would come up with a better deal in an effort to persuade us to keep the TV service. But apparently, the better deal was the one they'd already offered us in their letter, because the rep promptly came back with, "That would then void the promotion pricing - so it would be $94.90 (before tax)." In other words, we'd have to pay slightly more each month to drop our TV service than we would to keep it.

At this point, it looked like the $95-a-month deal was the best we could get. But just for the sake of comparison, I went to Verizon's website to find out how much they it would cost us to go back to them. I quickly determined that switching just the phone back to Verizon would make no sense at all; we'd pay $60 a month for their standard phone service, plus another $60 a month to Optimum for the Internet service. However, if we were willing to switch both phone and Internet over to Verizon, it would actually cost us less than we'd pay for the phone alone. After punching in a few numbers and tweaking a few options, I came up with a final price of $51 a month for the first year. Which means that sticking with Optimum would cost us $44.25 a month, or $531 a year. Was our grudge against Verizon really worth that much to us?

I put this question to Brian, and he pointed out to me that while Verizon might say they could give us phone and Internet service for $51 a month, our past experience proved that this just wasn't true. No matter what promises they might make, we know for a fact that they simply don't have the infrastructure in place to follow through on them. As Brian put it, "I'll listen to Verizon the day I see them stringing new cable on our street.  Maybe.  Until then, any promotion they offer us is a lie."

So, for the foreseeable future, at least, it looks like we'll be sticking with Optimum. The only other alternative is Verizon, and Verizon, as we've seen, is no alternative at all. It may seem like we're paying an extra $531 a year just to hold a grudge, but really, that's just the difference in price between a phone and Internet connection that work and ones that might work or might not.

Chillin' ecofrugal style

July has arrived, and it brought the heat with it. As I type this, it's 91 degrees outside, with a heat index of 104. Our house doesn't have central AC, just a couple of room-sized units (one mounted through the wall and one in a window) that are fairly noisy and power-hungry, so I tend to save those for emergencies and cool off in other ways if I can. In case anyone else is in the same boat, I thought I'd share some of the tricks I've tried for keeping cool without AC and how well they worked.

Trick #1: Bring in cool air. When I got up this morning, the temperature in the house was a balmy 84 degrees. However, a quick peek at the local weather report showed that it was only 77 degrees outside, so every bit of our inside air that we could swap for outdoor air would make the place cooler. We set up our big fan in the kitchen window, blowing outward, and then opened up lots of windows to draw outside air in. The best part of this strategy is that, while it takes a bit of time for the air exchange to actually lower the indoor temperature, the added air movement makes us feel cooler immediately.

Trick #2: Shut out hot air. The only problem with the first trick I listed is that you have to keep an eye on the outdoor temperature. Once it gets hotter outside than it is inside, you need to shut off the fan and close all the windows to hold in the cooler air, just as you do with the AC on. Doing this seems counterintuitive, because even as the outside temperature climbs, the breeze through the windows still feels cool, and so it seems like shutting up the windows will just makes the house feel warmer. But this blogger at the Vancouver Sun tried it, and he found that the indoor temperature really does stay a couple of degrees lower when the windows are shut. So now I shut the windows as soon as we reach the break-even point. The house may feel stuffy inside, but the temperature stays lower, and I can switch on a fan to provide a bit of a breeze. Which brings me to my next cooling strategy:

Trick #3: Use fans. As Michael Bluejay succinctly explains on his cooling page, a fan doesn't cool a room (except when it's pulling in air a la Trick #1); instead, it cools you directly by blowing away the bubble of warm air that forms around your body. So a fan will do most good when it's focused right on you. I have my tiny desk fan (with its whimsical trimming of expired gift cards) sitting right at my left elbow, and I switch it on whenever I'm seated at the computer. Thus, although the thermostat says it's 88 degrees in the room, my personal temperature is—well, I assume it's around 98.6 degrees, but the point is that I feel quite comfortable. When I move to the kitchen, I switch on the ceiling fan in there, and at night, we keep a table fan pointed at our bed (in addition to the window fan that draws in cooler air from outside).

Trick #4: Lower the shades. Once the windows are closed and no longer needed to bring in cold air, there's not much point in leaving the shades fully open. Lowering them most of the way lets in just enough daylight to see by, but keeps out the full blast of radiant sunshine that can heat the room even if the windows are shut. Personally, I'd prefer to have awnings, so that we could keep the windows shaded even when they were open, but they're probably not worth the money when just pulling down the blinds can do the same job for most of the day.

Trick #5: Get my exercise early. Most days, I like to take a long walk after lunch to give myself a break from work in the middle of the day. However, if I'd done that today, the heat index would have been over 100 by the time I set foot outside. So instead I got my walk in early, around 9am, when the temperature was just over 80 and the heat index around 90. By keeping to the shady areas as much as possible, I managed to get in some activity without arriving home looking and feeling like a boiled lobster.

Trick #6: Drink cold drinks. This one is a little contentious, as some people claim that hot drinks are actually more effective than cold ones for cooling you off. I know from The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, for instance, that hot tea is often drunk in Botswana for this reason, and Mma Ramotswe and her coworkers actually shudder to hear that Americans put ice in their tea during the summertime. News items, too, will often blithely claim that studies prove hot drinks really are cooling. However, if you dig a little deeper, as this article in Smithsonian magazine does, you'll find that what the study actually shows is that hot drinks can be cooling in the right circumstances. The heat of the tea triggers your body's cooling mechanisms, causing you to sweat more. So if your sweat can evaporate—as it can in the dry climate of Botswana—you will cool off. However, here in central New Jersey, where the relative humidity is currently at 52 percent, a cool drink will be more refreshing. (And besides, what good is having the secret of making your own Frappuccinos if you don't use it?)

Trick #7: Apply a cold cloth. I haven't had to resort to this yet this year, but during last year's heat wave I found it quite helpful to soak a cloth in cold water and drape it around my neck. It would probably be still more effective in a dry climate, where the added moisture could evaporate, but even in humid New Jersey, applying ice-cold water right on those big blood vessels in the neck is bound to draw some heat out of the body.

With this combination of strategies, I haven't had to switch on the AC yet this summer. I'm not saying I expect to make it all the way through the dog days without using it at all, but if this summer is typical (and it could hardly be worse than last year's), we shouldn't have to use it more than once or twice. Summer cooling still accounts for a good chunk of our total power usage; last summer, from June through August, we used 873 kWh and spent about $162 (not counting the surcharge we pay for renewable energy). That's a lot more than the 506 kWh we used during the winter months—but it's still a lot less than the $395 the average American household spent. So if nothing else, our cooling tips are doing a reasonably good job of keeping our bills from overheating.